And I Thought Virginia Foxx Was Bad

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I think the McCain/Palin folks have settled on a tactic for their last push of this election: trot out hard core Republican attack dogs who happen to be brunette women and have them spout crazy accusations with the flimsiest thread of logic to try and damn Obama by association.  First you have Palin accusing Obama of consorting with terrorists and now you have a Congresswoman from Minnesota who frankly comes off looking bat-shit crazy in this interview on MSNBC (also pasted below).  Pay close attention to the robo-call the McCain campaign is running and is played during the interview.  These folks are turning rabid:

This woman makes my Congresswoman, the right honorable Virginia Foxx, look mild by comparison. The Republicans do seem to love their crazy white women.

Hat tip to Ed Cone for the lead.

Democracy in Action in Fayetteville

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We’re in the midst of early voting here in North Carolina and since this is a hotly contested race in the presidential election we’ve actually had both candidates in the state quite a bit over the last of months (Obama) or couple of weeks (McCain).  Anyway, Senator Obama appeared in Fayetteville yesterday and urged people to vote early.  Below is some video shot outside one of the polling places that features a boisterous crowd of McCain/Palin supporters across the street from the polls.  About halfway through you’ll see one man interviewed who takes issue with the fact that extra local polling places were opened on a Sunday in order to handle an expected crush of voters from the rally.  It also seems that he’s taking issue with the Cumberland County board of elections opening up on Sunday in general, which he says was a special accommodation for the Obama folks.  I’ve only read that they opened up extra polling places, not that they opened up on Sunday expressly for the rally.  Still, the GOP is upset that it appears to give unfair advantage to the Democrats, and in fairness if the election board had done the same thing for McCain the Democrats would be up in arms too.  Anyhoo, I think this is going to be a VERY interesting election year although I can’t imagine a group of protesters outside my polling place which also happens to be my church.  BTW, I still think that’s weird. 

Bad Luck Charm

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I think I might be a bad luck charm for my daughter’s soccer team, which might not be so bad if I wasn’t also a coach for the team. You see the girls played one of our “big” games today against one of our sister teams in Twin City Youth Soccer (Challenge) U-15 and I missed it due to helping with the prep for my church’s BBQ (see prior post). Since I’ve been involved with the team we’ve never beaten one of our sister teams…until today. Not only did we beat the Lady Gold 2-1 (we’re the Lady Reds) I hear that the girls played the best as a unit that anyone has seen them play. The last time I missed a game my daughter scored a goal in another win. Heck, the game I missed last season she scored two goals in a win. See a pattern here?

Tomorrow we play the Lady Royals, our other sister team, and I’m thinking I may need to stay home.

Choppin

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Our church, Unity Moravian in Lewisville, had it’s annual fall BBQ today and I volunteered to help chop the pigs. Specifically we chopped over 60 pork shoulders which came to about 900 pounds of pig.

A bunch of guys had to bug out early, but luckily I’d recruited Michael, our 16 year old and his buddy Daniel to help. They had great fun wielding the cleavers

The BBQ officially opened at 4:00 and we didn’t finish chopping until 3:30 so without the boys I don’t know if we’d have been done chopping in time.

There were also a bunch of chickens being cooked and several guys were manning that operation. The guys I don’t envy were the experts who stayed up all night with the pigs. They also stuck around to make sure our part of the op went successfully.

Usually there’s plenty of food left to buy after the event is over so if you’re in the mood for good BBQ just give me a shout and I’ll hook you up.

Converging

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I’m at ConvergeSouth in Greensboro. Good sessions so far. I’ve run into several people I know, including Ed Cone, Smitty and Lenslinger. Right now I’m listening to Anil Dash of Six Apart, the company that hosts this blog. He’s talking about “next year’s social network.” Interesting stuff.

This is a free conference that i’m enjoying. I didn’t register for it so I didn’t expect to have lunch, but it looks like they ran out of food for a lot of the people who did. That’s too bad because it will taint some peoples’ perception even though it’s a free event.

They have 100 kids from Guilford County high schools here. I should have brought my kids; they’d really find some of it interesting.

Thankfully I Didn’t Watch

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Last night I made sure I didn’t watch the last presidential debate of 2008.  Ostensibly I had other, better things to do but the reality is that even if I’d had to choose between watching the debate and cleaning the lint out of my navel the navel would have won.  That leaves me with just one question:  Who the hell is Joe the Plumber, and why on Earth were they talking about him?

Just. Shoot. Me.

Reading a Book Equals Getting Kicked in the Groin

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My (sad) quote of the day comes from LifeHacker:

"What the hell, you got a room in your house just filled with books? That’s stupid,"
was one of the many memorable quotes from my first semester teaching in
a school filled with at-risk and impoverished kids. Right now you’re
reading a productivity and technology blog. You’re no stranger to
literacy and you read for enjoyment. All day every day you process
thousands upon thousands of words to make meaning of and enrich your
world. As an educator both at the high school and collegiate level, I’m
confronted again and again with children and adults who are only
semi-literate nearly drowning in a world they can’t process the way you
and I can. Somehow, every year I find myself with hundreds of students
that regard reading a book the same way they regard getting kicked in
the groin. If a student makes it out of their formal schooling only
semi-literate, their passage into adulthood is painfully crippled. All
the social programs in the world won’t be able to stabilize that
person’s life as much as the confidence that being a competent and
literate adult would.

BTW, this quote comes from a LifeHacker post dedicated to Blog Action Day’s theme of poverty.  Their take is to attack poverty with literacy.  They mention programs like Reading is Fundamental and Family of Readers.

I’ve always been interested by the whole read/don’t read divide.  When I was in college I constantly had guys say things to me like, "I can’t believe you read for fun" and look at me like I was some kind of subversive.  While I was in school I came to Winston-Salem to visit some family and my cousin set me up on a date with his girlfriend’s friend.  When we showed up at her house to pick her up I was introduced to her dad and I noticed that he’d just put down Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October.  I mentioned that I’d just finished reading it and really enjoyed it.  The dad’s mouth hit the floor and he was actually nice to me from that point on, but I think his daughter was unimpressed and thought I had to be the biggest dork she’d ever met.

As an adult I’ve often been bemused by people who visit our house and notice all the books we have lying around and whose eyes just kind of bug out.  On the flip side when we visit other people’s homes and I don’t see any books I wonder if they just don’t keep them or if they don’t read at all. Now these aren’t people who are illiterate by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact I’ve yet to meet a family that doesn’t have magazines lying around.  Books are another story all together, though, and I wonder if it’s the time it takes to read a book or simply the fact that they find books unappealing that causes them to not read them.

When I was a kid I read all kinds of crap like the Hardy Boys.  One time I overheard one of my Mom’s friends ask her why she let me read "trash" and she said that she’d rather have me read "trash" and enjoy it, than force me to read "good" books and dread it.  She was right, of course, and I wonder if more people would read books if they were allowed to read what they like as a child and not forced to read "good" books.  Heck, I’ve had adults say to me that they didn’t realize there were "fun" books out there until they got to be an adult and stumbled across a "fun" book in the airport while waiting for a flight.

You might wonder why reading books is important.  It’s important because all of us need to know how to communicate effectively with people and reading books better enables us to do that.  When you’re reading you’re practicing the formulation of ideas and the ways to organize and communicate those ideas.  Without realizing it you become expert at understanding the importance of context and the importance of giving people the information they need in the order that makes it easiest for them to understand.  In short, reading books literally helps you to function more effectively in our information-intensive society.

So the next time someone says, "I only read romance novels" congratulate them and encourage them to read another.  War and Peace ain’t for everyone and as long as they’re reading something they’re a step ahead of most.

Blog Action Day

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One of my daily business reads is Web Worker Daily.  Today they are participating in Blog Action Day (BAD) and their post about their effort is here.  The theme of this year’s Blog Action Day is poverty and the folks at WWD turned their attention to Africa and I thought this excerpt to be very telling:

When it comes to web working, Africa is
one of the last frontiers. In most sub-Saharan African countries,
people tend to use mobile phones more than the Internet for
business-related activities and communications. Factors contributing to
this are high illiteracy rates and linguistic diversity. In addition,
the high cost of bandwidth and lack of infrastructure are a serious
problem. Many African countries also lack workers skilled enough in
information and communication technologies (ICT) for web working to be
a viable option. These factors are obstacles to adoption of the
Internet as a tool for business, but access to computers and the
Internet would contribute greatly to overcoming the obstacles that
hinder their adoption and use in the first place.

Humanitarian and international development
organizations know this, and are making efforts to get the continent
connected with the objective of reducing poverty, as illustrated by
this strategy of the UN Economic Commission for Africa:

Access to Information > Knowledge
and Capacity > Innovation > Productivity > Growth >
Employment > Poverty Reduction

Later in the post the author goes on to describe some initiatives like One Laptop Per Child and Appfrica International that are trying to enable Africans to use IT to better their lives economically.  Very interesting stuff.

According to the BAD site there are over 11,000 sites participating in the initiative.  If you see one that is doing something you think is really interesting let me know in the comments or by email at jon.lowder AT gmail.com.

Felix – Republican, Oscar – Democrat?

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As much as I hate the high political season and all the crap we have to listen to while it’s going on, one positive aspect is that we get to see all kinds of crazy studies done that try to explain the differences between conservatives and liberals.  You know what I mean, the studies that try to explain why conservatives are all anally retentive and wear pajamas to bed while secretly dreaming of themselves playing a part in cheap S&M movies, while on the other hand liberals profess to love everyone but wonder why they have to live cheek to jowell with that smelly immigrant family that just moved in next door. Well, I just stumbled across an article about one such study that explores the households of conservatives and liberals.

The study published in The Journal of Political Psychology doesn’t look at the size of peoples houses, rather it looks at how they keep their house.  In other words they looked at what kind of stuff people have in their houses and what state of order they their stuff in.  Surprise, surprise they found that conservatives are generally neat and orderly while liberals tend to be messier.  Also, they found that liberals keep lots of books and art, while conservatives tend toward calendars, stamps and laundry baskets.

The study also says that conservatives’ living spaces and offices are
well lighted and adorned with flags, especially US flags, and sports
memorabilia.   The article doesn’t mention how the liberals’ offices were lighted or adorned, but I’m imagining lava lamps and posters of Che Guevera.

Not everyone agrees with the findings: 

Political scientist Evan Charney
dismisses links made by the studies between personality and ideology.
"There’s a lot of bad science here," says Charney, a fellow at the
Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University.

Well he’s from Duke so what does he know?

Personally I buy these findings.  I consider myself a centrist and my office and living spaces bear that out.  I’m the poster boy for "pile, don’t file" and I’ve been able to live the last four years without a dresser drawer to my name.  I find that piling my folded clothes on a chair next to my bed makes for effective wardrobe selection in the morning.  I have books and magazines stacked next to my bed and desk, but don’t like it when they’re strewn hither and yon.  Yet I wouldn’t know fine art if it bit me in the ass and my musical tastes would make a critic vomit.  Yep, I’d say this study supports my contention that I’m solidly in the middle.

SCORE Podcasts

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My friend Ruth sent over an item announcing the launch of SCORE podcasts.  From the news item:

SCORE “Counselors to America’s Small Business” announces the new
“Small Business Success Podcast Series” for start-up entrepreneurs and
small business owners. Each month, two new podcasts will be added, one
for http://www.score.org and one for http://www.score.org/women.

Each podcast is available as an audio broadcast online. A SCORE
expert or guest expert will offer tips and advice about a business
issue for approximately seven minutes. Past podcasts will be available
on archive pages at each Web site.

SCORE has released its first two podcasts:

*  Julie Brander, marketing expert with New Haven SCORE, shares ideas on “Marketing Your Biz in a Weak Economy” at www.score.org

*  Peggy Duncan, SCORE blogger and productivity expert with Atlanta
SCORE, talks about how to “Get More Done in Less Time” at
http://www.score.org/women

SCORE is a great program that hooks up entrepreneurs with counselors who are retired business people.  In other words young bucks get to learn from business veterans who have been there and done that.

Oh, and check out Ruth’s company Quantum Events.  If you need someone to create and manage compelling events then Ruth and company are the people you need to speak with.