The last time I looked the only Craigslist listings you could find that were specific to Winston-Salem were rolled in with the Greensboro section. Well that is no longer true as a Winston-Salem-specific Craigslist was launched earlier this summer. You can find it here.
My cousin Adam Good was the subject of a story that was on the front page of the Saturday (July 22, 2006) Washington Post in an article titled "Secure in His Mannyhood: Evolved or an Anomaly, a Male Nanny Enjoys His Job in VA". There’s even a video with an interview in the online version. (Photo to the left is from the Washington Post article, by Kevin Clark of the Washington Post).
Adam’s a great guy (I’m still tempted to call him a kid) who grew up here in Winston-Salem. To say he’s smart would be the world’s greatest understatement. Before we moved here we stayed at my Aunt Debbie’s (Adam’s mom) house during one visit and we had Adam’s old room. His bookshelves were crammed with books on philosophy, politics, and literature that scared the crap out of me in college and he was reading them in middle school and high school. He graduated with honors from American University and will be pursuing his masters degree in the near future.
It’s wild to think that a family member is being profiled in one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers and is considered representative of a new "trend" called "mannyhood." It cracks me up to no end that he’s being compared to Britney Spears’ "manny." Adam being mentioned along with Britney Spears is extremely funny. Suffice it to say that I seriously doubt that Adam’s music collection contains anything from artists with names like Britney, Avril or Jessica.
And of course it’s entertaining that Adam has to answer the requisite "are you gay?" question (he’s not) as if men aren’t capable of being good child care providers, and I’m sure he gets his fair share of grief from his male friends, but as Adam points out in the article it is no small deal that he’s getting paid good money and he’s living rent free, which is a big deal in DC. Like I said Adam’s one smart dude.
A side note to a prominent blogger here in North Carolina, Billy the Blogging Poet: Adam is also an accomplished poet and a very good musician.
You know how little kids will plug their ears and yell "nah-nah-nah" when you’re telling them something they don’t want to hear? Well apparently the US intelligence czar John Negroponte is doing the same thing. According to this piece on the Harper’s Magazine site he is not granting approval for the CIA to do a new national intelligence estimate for Iraq, and the theory is that he doesn’t want one done because he wants to protect the President from a situation like one he had when the last NIE was released in 2004 and promptly leaked to the New York Times.
If true doesn’t this make Negroponte the czar of anti-intelligence?
There’s an interesting set of statistics on the book industry at the Para Publishing site and as you’d expect some of the prominent bloggers in the publishing industry have picked up on it. The stats that will horrify people like my Mom are these:
Who is Reading Books (and who is not)
- One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest
of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.- 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
- 42% of college graduates never read another book.
- 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
- 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
To be honest I don’t find these surprising. Growing up I was considered pretty weird by my friends because I enjoyed reading and I learned at an early age to not mention how much I enjoyed a book. In fact I can’t think of any conversations we had about books, but we talked a lot about sports, music, movies, video games and music videos (those were the early days of MTV). Now as an adult I notice how few books, outside of coffee table books, I see in other peoples’ homes but how many more music CDs and movie DVDs they own than we do.
My love of reading can be traced to some wisdom that Mom had, namely that any reading was better than no reading so she indulged my early passion for mysteries (Hardy Boys) and adventures (anything besides Hardy Boys). And of course seeing her read on a daily basis had an influence on me as well. Carting her boxes of books around every time we moved definitely had an effect on my back.
Celeste and I are both avid readers and it has had an effect on our kids, most notably our youngest. He earned more Advanced Reader points than any other child in the fourth grade at Lewisville Elementary and I think there was only one kid in the entire school with more points and he didn’t consider it work. He did it for fun. Our older kids also read, albeit not as much as the youngest and I think it has definitely helped them in their ability to communicate in writing. My feeling is that they’ll have to "work" on their writing much less than their peers in the coming years.
Now book reading is not the only form of reading out there and I can think of several people who would never read a book who read voraciously online. My theory is that reading online is done in small, easily digestible chunks so it doesn’t feel like "reading" to them. It isn’t "boring" and each individual piece isn’t time consuming, although if taken in the aggregate I think most people would be surprised how much time they spend reading online.
What’s going to be interesting to watch is what happens over the next 10-20 years. As online video and audio become more common will reading and writing fade into the background? Or is there something unique in how our brains process the written word that will keep it at the forefront of information sharing? And will there still be a place for books in all this? Personally I think so since books provide a time-tested vehicle for sharing large chunks of information and I think there will always be a segment of the population who will enjoy the long narrative of a novel, but I fear it could become a group as small as those who still enjoy chamber music.
Here’s some fun I’m having with Google. I’m searching to see how many times I’ve used certain terms on this blog. For instance how many times have I used "I love" on this blog? Or how about "I hate"? Here’s the results:
Conclusion? I type a lot cleaner than I talk.
There’s a new book out that I’m dying to read called "The Long Tail" (I won’t bore you with the details here) and it is written by a guy named Chris Anderson who has a blog by the same name. It ends up that in the early 80s he was in a punk band in DC and he has a great story about how his band ended up in a kind of "battle of the bands" against REM at the 9:30 Club in 1982. The 9:30 Club was easily the best place to see live music in DC for years (I have no idea what’s going on in DC these days) and REM has always been one of my favorite bands so this story hit home with me.
Spike Jonze was retained to shoot some video of Al Gore for the 2000 campaign and was given access to Mr. Gore and his family. The result was a 13 minute film (scroll down and you’ll find the video window) that never saw the light of day and I honestly can’t understand why. The makers of the film think it could have literally swayed the vote and I think they might be right. Here’s the website that posted the video with some explanatory text. (Found via BoingBoing).
It’s not news that the internet has changed how we get information, but many people who aren’t techies or are over the age of 30 may not know about some mainstream web services out there that allow any person to disseminate his or her perspective of events to the general public. A perfect case in point is the online photo sharing site Flickr which was purchased by Yahoo! a while back and how it is being used by photographers to get out pictures from the war zone in Lebanon.
For those not familiar with Flickr think of it as an online photo album that anyone can use for free and upload pictures that can either be made private or can be shared with the world at large. What made Flickr revolutionary when it first launched is that it allows users to "tag" each photo with descriptive words which means that anyone can search for photos by those tags. So if you want to find photos with the tag ‘lebanon’ you simply visit Flickr and use the search field and type in ‘lebanon’. Here’s a string of Lebanon photos from a user named "arabist", but please be forewarned that there are some graphic photos there so don’t look if you’re squeamish.
Flickr is just one example of how a seemingly simple mass-market service can totally upend a traditional information paradigm. It continues to be fascinating to me to watch how our traditional news and information purveyors adjust to their new environment of an audience that is increasingly attracted by other information sources and of course there’s a lot of debate about what it means to traditional media outlets, but I’m convinced it’s better for us as a society to be able to get as many images, or perspectives if you will, in addition to the traditional filter provided by the traditional media outlets.
Update: Here’s the blog of a BBC journalist in Beirut and it uses another free web service (Blogger, owned by Google) and here’s his Flickr stream.
Celeste and our two oldest kids are at Laurel Ridge this week for summer camp which means that our youngest has had to endure a week alone with me. I had business in DC late last week and early this week so on Thursday we drove up and I dropped Justin with our good friends the Nevins. He spent the night with them on Thursday and then after I was done working on Friday he and I spent the weekend with the Nevins. We went boating on Saturday with Ted (Nevins patriarch), his two boys Eddie and Daniel and Ted’s parents. The picture is of Eddie, me and Justin (hand up) tubing on the Potomac River. We also went to see Pirates of the Caribbean on Friday and just kind of hung out on Sunday, which allowed us to spend some time with Jane (matriarch of the Nevins family) and the Nevins’ girls, Delia and Tess.
On Monday and Tuesday I was working all day in Bethesda, MD so we moved to a hotel in Chevy Chase on Sunday night and my Mom and Bert (her significant other) came up and stayed in the same hotel as me and Justin. They took him to the International Spy Museum and the newly reopened Smithsonian American Art Museum on Monday and shopping on Tuesday. Since Mom loaded him up with books I don’t think he minded the shopping at all. Sunday evening Justin and I ordered room service and then watched a pay-per-view movie and on Monday we had dinner at Clydes with Mom and Bert and then ordered another movie in our room. Justin is now under the impression that business trips are all about figuring out where to eat and then watching movies in your room.
Last night, after having dinner with Mom, Bert, my brother and his family we drove home and listened to the CD of spy movie theme music that Mom bought him at the Spy Museum which was a hoot. We have two days at home before Celeste and the other kids get home so I’ll be bouncing between working and doing some more fun stuff with Justin. This is the first significant amount of time that Justin and I have ever had just the two of us. We’ve always done lots of stuff with his siblings and I’ve coached one of his soccer teams when he was little, but this has been a unique experience and it’s been an absolute blessing for me. He’s a great kid, I’ve always known that, but the one-on-one time has allowed us to do more uninterrupted talking in one week than we probably get in the normal course of one or two months. My new goal is to do something like this with each of the kids as much as possible and I’m hoping that Celeste will get the chance to do it too.
What a great week.
Anyone remember Atari’s Pole Position? Well here’s the commercial Atari aired back in the day and it’s a classic. Love those graphics! Now if I could just find a commercial for Atari Football…chunka, chunka, chunka.
