A Life in Passing

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Winston-Salem is not a large city. Even so it is like every other city in the world, welcoming any number of people who are looking for someplace new or who are simply passing through.  Through the wonders of Google I stumbled upon the story of one such person:

Their eyes met and she smiled as she passed Martin Tucker at an intersection in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The photographer and documentary filmmaker had been downtown setting up a photo exhibit at a local gallery.

"I don't know what it was about her," he said. "She looked dynamic in some way. She looked like she had a story."

Tucker chased down Patulla, who couldn't catch the northbound train until the next day> He wanted to meet up the next day, bring his cameras and audio recorder.

"Well," she replied, "I'm a hobo."

The next day, the two met and talked about religion, politics and relationships. No topic was off limits and she spoke openly, almost too openly, Tucker thought.

In the early evening, Tucker could tell she was antsy to catch her train. She signed a photo release form and was gone, leaving behind only an e-mail address. In hindsight, Tucker wished he had gone with her to the tracks, but he thought he had a complete story…

Tucker produced a 22-minute documentary, "Patty: This is My Normal," based off their afternoon together. The show premiered at a November film festival and will show at another in April.

Tucker read about her death a month later in a Texas newspaper.

He thought he'd told her life's story, but realized then had hadn't.

"I have more questions than I have answers at this point," Tucker said in a recent telephone interview. "This vibrant, 29-year-old woman who seemed like she had everything to live for but decided to check out, was quite a shock. I was crushed. I felt like I had lost a friend."

On any given day you can sit in a car idling at a stoplight on Jonestown Road, Five Corners, Stratford Road or any number of other intersections in Winston-Salem and see them.  They are people who sleep outside, who may be passing through or have settled here for whatever reason, and their stories are likely as tragic as Patulla Williams'. We can only pray that theirs don't end as tragically.

It Began With Kinect

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Our big family Christmas gift (i.e. the gift for the whole family) last year was a new TV for the family room and an Xbox Kinect to attach to it.  I'm not a big gamer, but when the Wii came out I played more games in one week than I'd played in the prior ten years, and I can tell you that Kinect is even better.  There aren't many games for it yet, but that's just a matter of time.  All of that is to tell you why I think the video of a BBC story about Microsoft that I've pasted below (found via bookofjoe) should not be seen as merely a PR stunt for the company that burdened us with Office.  Methinks the next few years are going to bring us gadgets that make an iPad look like an abacus.

Harry Baals

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Honestly, you can't make this stuff up. The city of Ft. Wayne, Indiana is asking people to vote for a name for its new municipal building and the leading vote getter is former mayor Harry Baals.  Yes, the pronunciation is what you probably think it is, although his descendents changed the pronunciation to sound like something you do with hay.  Anyhoo, I have great admiration for the reporter who kept a straight face despite having to repeatedly say "Harry Baals Government Center," although I do wonder if he really needed to say it might be the "butt of jokes."

How To Facebook Video by Local Food Blogger

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You may not know it, but Winston-Salem is home to a food star.  Rebecca Subbiah is a Brit living in our fair town and she has a great food blog called Chow and Chatter.  She's also a wiz at Twitter and Facebook and she's been generous enough to share her Facebook wisdom by making a how-to video.  I think her target audience is other foodies, but her advice pertains really to anyone trying to use Facebook for their business. Oh, and she's my new hero for using her Twitter feed to share a link to this story about beer being good for heart health.  Gotta love when a vice is magically transformed into a virtue.

Greensboro – Where Real Men Disappear Into a Swamp of Sensitivity

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According to Redbox on "date night" more romantic comedies are rented in Greensboro than any other city in the country.  

Renting a higher percentage of romantic comedies from Redbox than any other city, Greensboro has earned the title of the most romantic city in America.

According to the national Redbox Date Night Survey of Redbox renters, Greensboro had the highest percentage of romantic comedies rented in 2010.

The only other city in the southeast that ranked in the company's top 10 is Tuscaloosa, Ala. at #3.

I shudder to think where Greensboro ranks in the sale of mani-pedis for men.

Funerals and Weddings

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I've written here before that I serve on the Lewisville Planning Board.  Generally we spend our time on thrilling conversations concerning things like where to put driveway cuts downtown, but this week we're ramping it up a notch at our public meeting (Wednesday, 7:30 at Town Hall). We have a case that involves three lots downtown that Hayworth Miller is requesting to be rezoned so that they can build a funeral home. I've heard that several of our citizens aren't real pleased with the location for the funeral home, so I expect we'll have a lively crowd tomorrow night.  If you plan on coming to see the festivities bring your own refreshments since there isn't a concession stand at Town Hall.

At our last work session the folks at Hayworth Miller presented some initial drawings and took questions from the Board and one of the questions asked by a fellow member of the Board just about knocked me out of my chair.  He asked, and I'm paraphrasing here, "What other uses are you considering for the facility?" I have to admit that I kind of thought he'd lost it when he asked the question because, I mean, what else would you use a funeral home for?  Ends up he hadn't lost it.  Apparently a new trend in the funeral home business is the use of their chapels for weddings.  I'll let you think about that a minute and see if you enjoy, as much as I did, the thought of so many jokes that just write themselves about a marriage that begins at a funeral home. (Feel free to share them in the comments).

Anyhoo, I expect tomorrow night's meeting to be a long and rather interesting one.  If you're a Lewisville citizen and want to say your piece then come on out and join us.

Netflix, How Do I Love Thee?

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We've been Netflix subscribers for years in our household, and I have to say that we came close to cancelling a few times because we'd get in DVDs and forget about them which meant our $20-ish/month plan was sometimes costing us $20 per DVD on average.  But we held on and a few years ago Netflix started offering online viewing of some old movies and TV shows for no additional charge, which was kind of cool but we still didn't use it that much because we aren't the kind of people who will watch "TV" on our computer.  We considered buying something like a Roku to enable us to watch Netflix on TV but we never got around to it.  Then we hit some kind of tipping point and we're now uber-users of the service because we:

  • Have teenagers who will use their laptop to watch shows and movies all the time.
  • Put an Xbox 360 with a Live subscription in our family room at Christmas so we're watching all kinds of stuff there.
  • Have an 18 year old son who bought his own Xbox 360 with Live and uses it to watch all kinds of stuff in between hours spent playing various war games.
  • Have kids who no longer ask to have their movies added to the DVD queue so that mom and dad can watch what they want to watch.  Currently we're having our own "The Pacific" marathon (okay, okay that's really just me but I do make sacrifices like suffering through Mama Mia!).

What's been interesting has been seeing what happens to the streaming quality at different times of day.  Some weekends when I get up early and stream a movie I'll have an HD quality picture because no one else in the neighborhood or in the house is using the high speed internet service (Time Warner Cable), but later in the day the quality degrades dramatically once the bandwidth has to be shared.  And my wife, who does bookkeeping from home, often has to kick our kids off of whatever they're doing, whether it's playing Live or watching a movie, so that she can access her clients' VPNs. All of that leads me to share this interesting tidbit from an article about Netflix's 4Q10 report:

One more interesting tidbit: Netfix says it will publish on Thursday “which ISPs provide the best, most-consistent high speed internet for streaming Netflix.” In other words, if any cable broadband services under-perform, Netflix will let the world know.

I love this idea because it would be nice to know how different ISPs do in comparison to their competition.  Of course that's assuming that there's good ISP competition where you live and that you can do something about it if your ISP stinks, and that's often a bad assumption.

There's also the not-so-insignificant issue that's been brewing for years regarding the impact that Netflix and its ilk are having on the available bandwidth, and the use of this impact by the ISPs to argue for capping bandwidth for their subscribers. (BTW, a couple of years back Greensboro's tech crowd was at the forefront of fighting successfully against Time Warner's proposed bandwidth caps.) I truly hope nothing like this comes to pass because I'm really liking the evolution of this service.  If it keeps going in this direction I can see the ISPs becoming a utility, there to provide the pipe, and the Netflix's and Hulu's of the world being the content providers.  Not that this is really much of a prognostication since Netflix says it already has more than 20 million subscribers, which is more than Showtime or Starz and isn't far behind HBO. I'm thinking we'll see Netflix pass HBO in pretty short order since Netflix lets people choose what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. Yep, my and my 20 million Netflix compatriots' future couch potato-ing is going to be very interesting.

Ferdinand Pecora

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I'm going to admit a fairly decent gap in my education by telling you that I can't recall ever learning about Ferdinand Pecora before today, but when a commenter at Cone's blog asked "So where is this generation's Ferdinand Pecora?" I had to check him out.  Based on what I found at Wikipedia I'd say the commenter is right to ask where our Pecora is:

The Senate committee hearings that Pecora led probed the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that launched a major reform of the American financial system. Pecora, aided byJohn T. Flynn, a journalist, and Max Lowenthal, a lawyer, personally undertook many of the interrogations during the hearings, including such Wall Street personalities as Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, George Whitney (a partner in J.P. Morgan & Co.) and investment bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Otto H. Kahn, Albert H. Wiggin ofChase National Bank, and Charles E. Mitchell of National City Bank (now Citibank). Because of Pecora's work, the hearings soon acquired the popular name the Pecora Commission, and Time magazine featured Pecora on the cover of its June 12, 1933 issue.[1][2]

Pecora's investigation unearthed evidence of irregular practices in the financial markets that benefited the rich at the expense of ordinary investors, including exposure of Morgan’s “preferred list” by which the bank’s influential friends (including Calvin Coolidge, the former president, and Owen J. Roberts, a justice of Supreme Court of the United States) participated in stock offerings at steeply discounted rates. He also revealed that National City sold off bad loans to Latin American countries by packing them into securities and selling them to unsuspecting investors, that Wiggin had shorted Chase shares during the crash, profiting from falling prices, and that Mitchell and top officers at National City had received $2.4 million in interest-free loans from the bank’s coffers.

Spurred by these revelations, the United States Congress enacted the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. With the United States in the grips of the Great Depression, Pecora's investigations highlighted the contrast between the lives of millions of Americans in abject poverty and the lives of such financiers as J.P. Morgan, Jr.; under Pecora's questioning, Morgan and many of his partners admitted that they had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932; they explained their failure to pay taxes by reference to their losses in the stock market's decline.