Salt Lake Tribune endorses Obama

There's not much more to say about this.  The Salt Lake Tribune was originally The Mormon Tribune when it was founded in 1870.  Today it's still the primary daily newspaper in Salt Lake City.  Here's the endorsement.

If you don't want to take the time to read the entirety of the endorsement, you should at least read the two concluding paragraphs:

In considering which candidate to endorse, The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that Romney would exhibit the same talents for organization, pragmatic problem solving and inspired leadership that he displayed here more than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.

Therefore, our endorsement must go to the incumbent, a competent leader who, against tough odds, has guided the country through catastrophe and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing toward a brighter day. The president has earned a second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not deserve a first.

The Features

Tonight I went to see a band called The Features at a bar called Zanzabar in Louisville, Kentucky. It's the second time I've seen them at that venue. In fact, it's the second time I've seen them there this year.

Tonight's show has inspired me to post something that I wrote about the previous show that I saw in April. Here you go:

I watch the drummer when I'm at a show. It gives me a split-second heads-up on beat changes and other rhythmic oddities that I can incorporate into the conscious or unconscious dancing that I'm doing all the time.

The drummer for The Features exudes a quiet competence. He has a haircut that belongs to the hippest guy in IT or that marketing intern you need to watch out for. It's a haircut you can wear to work and get promoted, but it's cool. His shirt is tucked in.

I've seen The Features before so I know he's up to the task, but somehow I wasn't ready for what an awesome drummer he is.

The first couple of songs are unfamiliar. Evidently I can look forward to a new album. The drums seem workaday at first, and I'm aware of the drummer, but I don't know that I'm really paying Attention.

Then, just as it becomes clear that a sizable portion of the crowd - or at least the group packed up front - is here to see The Features (who are, it turns out, the opening act and not the headliner after all) the drummer loosens up. The beats are coming from his core and being effortlessly expressed through his various limbs and into the drumkit, but that's evidently not enough to satisfy his soul. He has flair that you can see in the curved tracks that his sticks are carving in the air. And he's doing some serious shoulder shimmy. AND there's a wiggle below his waist as he grooves on his stool, playing extra beats that, sadly, we cannot hear.

After a while it becomes clear why the drummer was allocated two water pitchers - one of them full - after the rest of the band had filled their cups before starting the set. Near the end of the set he's near the end of the second pitcher. I'm not sure how long the other has been empty. He grabs the curtain hanging at the back of the stage - it's heavy felt - and uses it to wipe the sweat from his brow. I've seldom been so drenched with sweat that wiping it off on a heavy felt curtain - a dusty heavy felt curtain - seems like a good idea, but obviously for him this is one of those times.

It was an awesome show, and on this occasion it was all about the drums.

I'm probably biased because of my drummer-focus. I mean, the singer is excellent, too. Screaming awesome, memorable lyrics beloved by the crowd-pack. On note and passionate and raw. And the keyboardist is, well, key to The Features' sound, and where would any band be without the bassist?

But the drummer . . . .

It's not often I want to be the drummer. In my most secret fantasies of fame I am the guy in front, getting all the attention and the credit, with none of the responsibility of being a human metronome. I mean, it's a lot of pressure being the drummer, keeping the beat, laying the foundation. It may be toward the back of the stage and out of the limelight, but still, it's on-stage and everyone will hear the result of each beat on each skin or cymbal or snare and if you can't keep the beat then get out of the kitchen.

The Features' drummer doesn't feel any pressure, though. He's just having a good time.

Going to the Rally to Restor Sanity (and / or Fear)

I will be attending the Rally To Restore Sanity. Of course now that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have officially combined their events it is technically The Rally To Restore Sanity and / or Fear, but I'm going for the sanity. I want to call the rally by its full name because I'm a stickler for detail, but I don't want to give people the wrong impression of my motives.

Maybe I can make the Fear parenthetical, as in: "I'm going to the Rally to Restore Sanity (and / or Fear)."

Maybe I can shut up about the name of the event and get on with this blog entry which is about this central question: Is the Stewart / Colbert Rally a political event, or is it a comedy event? According to most news agencies the answer is that it is a political event, or at least must be treated as one. For this reason employees of news agencies are being directed NOT to rally to restore sanity (nor march to keep fear alive).

Most news organizations have policies against their employees participating in rallies, marches, petitions, etc. Their employees cannot run for offices or contribute to political campaigns. Examples of news organizations with policies of this nature include, but are not limited to, ABC News , the Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, the New York Times, NPR, Politico, and the Washington Post. The policies of these organizations make it clear that these strictures are necessary in order to preserve the organizations' status as neutral observers, and to prevent their impartiality from being questioned.

NPR has a nice column online about their policy. The Huffington Post has a related column in which they quote the policies of various news organizations.

If you can bring yourself to read the Huffington Post column you'll notice a few things.

1 - NBC specified that the rules for MSNBC staff are different, or have been in the past.

2 - The Wall Street Journal's policy is a little vague compared to most of the others. The Journal expects its employees to "exercise good judgment."

3 - Fox News did not reveal their policy. Fox News always values fair and balanced reporting, of course.

Regarding this last: How could they reveal their policy without revealing that they've probably broken it? Employees of Fox News haven't just participated in rallies, they've hosted them! That's what The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are actively satirizing. As you probably know, Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally is the inspiration for the Stewart / Colbert rally.

Maybe Fox News would like to retroactively reclassify the Beck rally as a comedy event.

Regardless of the origin, it seems the Rally to Restore Sanity (and / or Fear) has taken on a life of its own. It's going to be a huge event. Woodstock huge. Not that it's really going to be like Woodstock. For one thing the rally will be three hours long instead of three days long, and hopefully it won't open with a three hour set from Richie Havens. Seriously. I like singing about freedom as much as anybody, but if I'm taking trains, planes and boats to get to and around DC then the event better be better than that.

This one's for the geeks

Okay, as often happens to me, my mind has become recently stuck on something that is completely useless to me. Here's where I get it all out.

What is today's attention-consuming question? It is this: What movies should Disney be making out of Marvel comics characters?

I was thinking about this the other day and the answer was obvious: Luke Cage.

So obvious, in fact, that they're already doing it. Luke Cage: The Movie is due out in 2011.

Luke Cage, you see, is Marvel's best black character, hands down.

Marvel's Black Panther, although he has a great name, is the king of his own ridiculously-technologically-advanced nation in vaguest Africa. It's possible that not every African-American youth would sympathize with the character sufficiently to shell out ten bucks to see a movie about the guy.

Marvel's Falcon, who does not have a great name, is the Aquaman of the Marvel universe. He flies. He talks to birds. It's not that different from He swims. He talks to fish.

Other attempts to create a black character, such as Night Thrasher, have generally failed.

Somehow, with Luke Cage back in the 70's, Marvel got it right. Luke Cage was an inner city youth who was framed for a crime he didn't commit. Consigned to the American penal system by a skeptical justice system, Cage volunteered for a dangerous experiment in exchange for early parole. The experiment made him very strong and gave him unbreakable skin. Freed, he first capitalizes on his abilities, marketing himself as a Hero for Hire. Later he dedicates himself to cleaning up his neighborhood, at which he succeeds. It's only a few blocks of New York City, but thanks to Luke Cage there are a few blocks of New York City that are completely free of drug dealers and their associated ills.

Here's the thing: If Disney has any vision about really doing something with Marvel's properties then they need to do one simple thing: They need to put the character of Jessica Jones somewhere in this movie.

Jessica Jones is a character who has been retconned into the Marvel universe, in the same way that Forrest Gump was retconned into ours (If you don't know what retcon means, or only know it from Torchwood, then you're reading the wrong blog). She didn't exist until the 21st century, but her exploits theoretically began in the early 80's.

She's a failed super-hero. She received super powers as a teenager in an almost stereotypical origin involving a canister of radioactive waste. She's strong. She can fly. So she dons (in the early 80's) a skimpy, strapless bodystocking and, using the name Jewel and coloring her hair bubblegum pink, fights crime.

For reasons she is hesitant to share, she comes to believe she is not meant to be a super-hero. She quits for a while, but tries again for about a week in the late 80's - comics' Dark Age - as a darker version of herself called Knightress. During that week she meets Luke Cage and gives up, again, the super-hero racket.

She becomes a private detective. She's good at it.

As a private detective she accidentally discovers Captain America's secret identity and has to decide what to do with this information. Alongside Luke Cage, with whom she has had a fling, she does some bodyguard work for Daredevil / Matt Murdock. She is hired by J. Jonah Jameson to discover Spiderman's secret identity. She dates, briefly, Scott Lang who, as Ant-Man, is a member of the Avengers.

She discovers she is pregnant by Luke Cage. The two decide to have the baby together.

This is a big deal. The character of Luke Cage in the 21st century publications of Marvel Comics is defined by the fact that he's going to have, and later has, a daughter. Suddenly he needs to act like a grown up. But here's the thing: Luke doesn't give in to The Man (even when The Man is Tony Stark) just because he needs to provide for his family. Luke Cage becomes a mensch. He's willing to go to jail for what's right, although he'll fight like hell to stay out of jail, rather than submit himself to the American justice system again, if he can avoid it. He doesn't always take the easy way. He does the right thing, as an example for his kid, even when it's the hard thing.

The point is that Luke Cage ends up being a great role model. And it's all for his kid.

Let's get back to business, though. Let's talk about what Disney needs to do. At this point they've developed a couple of Iron Man movies. They're working on Captain America and Luke Cage. They're also working on an Avengers movie. Spiderman, Daredevil, and Wolverine have been done. The Black Widow is appearing now in Iron Man 2.

Eventually, though, Disney is going to want to build some synergies between the current comic books and the movies. The problem is that Disney is trying to build a franchise around the classic Avengers - Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man - at a time when the classic Avengers team has been largely destroyed in the comics.

Currently there are multiple sets of Avengers in the comics, but there are only two sets of Avengers that matter: The Ultimates, and the New Avengers.

At this point I'm going to assume that if you're still reading this then you have some passing familiarity with current comics' lore and know that I'm now talking about two different universes of characters.

There's the mainstream universe, in which the classic Avengers were thoroughly destroyed a few years ago. A new team of more streetwise Avengers, consisting of Captain America, Spiderman, Iron Man, Luke Cage, Daredevil (briefly), Wolverine and Spiderwoman has formed in their place. If you'll look back over that list you'll notice that all but one of those characters has either had a movie come out recently, or has one scheduled to come out next year.

Then there's the Ultimate Universe, in which the Avengers are a supergroup called the Ultimates that has been formed under the command of Nick Fury, who in this universe is modeled after Samuel L. Jackson. That supergroup consists of Fury himself, Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, Ant-Man (sort of) and Hawkeye.

If you've been paying any kind of attention at all then you have noticed that Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury is going to be the catalyst of the Avengers movie.

Basically, Disney is trying to synthesize these universes into some decent movies.

The problem is that the classic Avengers are a bunch of white guys from the middle of the 20th century, and they're really hard to update. Iron Man kind of works. He's basically What If Steve Jobs Made Weapons? How do you update Thor, though? Or Captain America? Or Ant-Man?

The Avengers movie really needs to be about Nick Fury assembling a team of powerful individuals in his one-man war against terror, but ultimately realizing that these are (with the exception of Captain America) the Wrong Guys. He needs soldiers and what he has are heroes. The movie ends with him having assembled his team of Captain America, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, and possibly Thor. They've defeated a bad guy who wanted to rule the world - possibly Kang the Conqueror - but Nick Fury really needs a different team to do dirtier work in the name of America and America alone.

The Luke Cage movie needs to be made alongside the Avengers, but be completely unrelated. It establishes that Luke Cage is willing to get his hands a little dirty in order to do what must be done.

Then there needs to be a second Avengers movie called Avengers: Secret War. This will basically be a faithful adaptation of Marvel's Secret War miniseries from 2004-2005. It's the story of how Nick Fury uses Captain America, Daredevil, the Black Widow (appearing now in Iron Man 2!), Luke Cage, and Wolverine in a preemptive strike against a terrorist rogue nation, then removes from the heroes any memory of their having done so. One year later the Avengers and these Secret Warriors are attacked in retaliation, but unaware of why.

This is what destroys the classic Avengers in the movie universe. It's not Avengers: Disassembled. It's Secret War. Nick Fury is very publicly associated with the Avengers in the movies, as he is in the Ultimate universe. When he undertakes his Secret War then he turns the heroes against him, leading the Avengers to disband. Also the Avengers headquarters are destroyed in the retaliatory strike made by the terrorist rogue nation. Scott Lang, Ant-Man, is killed. If there's a Hawkeye then he's killed too.

The next movie is New Avengers: Breakout. Many of the same Secret Warriors come back together when a massive prison-break occurs. After responding to the prison break and preventing many super-criminals from escaping, Captain America encourages the heroes (himself, Iron Man, Spiderman, Luke Cage, possibly Daredevil, and - replacing Spiderwoman - Black Widow) to stay together in order to round up the few who did escape. These New Avengers aren't working for the government. They're doing what needs to be done, on their own.

That's maybe the first half-hour of the movie. The rest is the New Avengers confronting a conspiracy involving the escaped criminals and the remainder of Nick Fury's organization. The whole thing culminates with Iron Man / Tony Stark taking over the organization in question. The good guys win.

Or do they? On to the next movie in the franchise, Avengers: Civil War. Iron Man / Tony Stark is in favor of all superhumans registering with the government and working for it under his authority. Captain America and Luke Cage see things differently. Things Fall Apart. It is revealed that all appears to be going horribly wrong under the direction of the Black Widow, who turns out to be an alien impostor. In order to make a decent movie we have to simplify the Secret Invasion storyline and have the Avengers get back together with the real Black Widow and a returned Nick Fury on the right side of the fight, united against the aliens. They defeat the threat, but are distrustful of each other and concerned about how their united strength was misused. Although victorious, they disband. Movie ends.

You'll notice I'm leaving Wolverine out of all the New Avengers stuff. He can probably be taken out of any Secret War movie as well. I really want to keep the X-men franchise separate from the Nick Fury / Avengers franchise. For similar reasons Spiderman could also be removed from all things Avengers.

Individual movies pick back up:

A contemporary Captain America movie. Captain America, finally on his own, is a man out of time. A Rip Van Winkle. A patriotic and inspiring Blast From The Past, but not everyone approves of his brand of patriotism. A powerful individual murders Cap's girlfriend in the process of an attempted smear campaign. Cap brings the bad guy to justice. This is all an homage to the first few issues of Jessica Jones' first comic book appearance.

Luke Cage 2. Cage cleans up his neighborhood. On his own. He begins a relationship with Jessica Jones, if he hasn't already. The movie centers around trying to balance responsibility to his family and to his neighborhood. He needs to do the right thing for his family, but he also needs to do the right thing for everyone else in order to be someone his (as yet unborn) daughter can be proud of.

Nick Fury and The Black Widow, Nick helps the Widow try to rebuild the life an impostor was living in her place.

Daredevil 2. Daredevil is outed to the media as Matt Murdock. (In promotional webisodes, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones pretend to be Matt Murdock's bodyguards. Their relationship advances.) Murdock successfully settles out of court when he convinces the media's source to deny the story.

Jessica Jones, pregnant, gets a job at the Daily Bugle, working for J. Jonah Jameson. She investigates a group of kids trying to fill the void left by the disbanded Avengers. These Young Avengers are led by Iron Lad, a kid who claims to be destined to become the time-traveling supervillain Kang the Conqueror. (If Kang hasn't already been used in an Avengers movie then it could be revealed that he's come back too soon and no one has ever heard of Kang the Conqueror. That adds to the confusion.) The deceased Ant-Man's daughter is one of the Young Avengers, as is the African-American Patriot, an shape-shifting alien defector from the recently attempted invasion, and a debutante taking on the mantle of Hawkeye. These Young Avengers are brought into conflict with an elder version of Kang and YOUNGER versions of Iron Man and Captain America and others whom the elder Kang has taken out of time in order to force his younger self to get back on track. This causes instability to the time stream. Jessica discovers she's no longer pregnant as a result of the time-stream changes and freaks out. The young Kang goes back to his own time in order to set things right. When he does, his sentient Armor, JARVIS, changes its name to VISION and joins the team. Jessica, pregnant again, has a story for the Bugle that it probably can't print.

Whew.

Okay, looking back at this ridiculous post I seem to have pitched 10 separate movies. They all, in one way or another, pay homage to the recent and classic history of the characters while not being married to that history.

Jessica Jones can serve as a linchpin that ties everything together. I see her as having a series of live-action, advertising-supported web-based serials in which she intersects with each movie.

This post is all about the Avengers and related properties. It's also about Brian Michael Bendis. He's been the moving force behind all of these characters for the last several years, with the exception of the Young Avengers. It seems to me that since Bendis has revitalized the characters in the comics then some of his plot-lines should be adapted to the films.

There are other Marvel properties that can be adapted to film, of course. I've got some ideas. Mostly I want to keep the Marvel movie universe segmented. The Fantastic Four, the X-men, the Avengers, the Hulk, Spiderman, Power Pack, and the Runaways (just to name a few) should never intersect with each other (although Nick Fury and Jessica Jones can wander through the background as necessary).

Okay geeks-who-made-it-all-the-way-through-the-post. What do you think? Think there's an Avengers movie (or ten) in here somewhere?

There's nothing wrong with Hulu

The big news today is that Hulu failed to come to an agreement with Comedy Central / Viacom. As a result The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are being pulled from the site.

This means that when I miss an episode of The Daily Show then I'll have to surf over to TheDailyShow.com instead of Hulu. Or it means that when I want to look over clips of The Colbert Report's "The Word" segment then I will have to surf to ColbertNation.com's Word page.

And, as a result, Viacom will get more advertising dollars from my viewage than they would have from my viewage on Hulu. Hulu gave them a percentage. Now they get it all. It's a good decision on Viacom's part, especially since they already have the websites up and running and paid for by advertisers.

But there's all this chatter, now, about how Hulu will have to start charging a fee to viewers of their other shows. That may be the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

I will say this: If paying a fee means I don't have to watch any commercials in order to see the shows I watch on Hulu then I'm listening. How much of a fee? That could be interesting.

But if it's a choice between commercial-free with a fee and commercial breaks with no fee then I'll probably still go with commercials and no fee, thanks. Unless we're talking about a lot more commercials than Hulu currently shows during a typical show. If the commercials get to the point where I should actually start using my old VCR to tape shows again then I may do that, instead.

Someday I will possess a DVR, but not yet.

Here's the thing: VCRs and DVRs allow viewers to time-shift their television viewing. They record the show on Thursday night and they watch it on Sunday or something. Fine. But that's not all that these video-recording technologies allow users to do. They also allow users to fast-forward through the commercials.

Hulu doesn't. If a viewer time-shifts his/her viewing on Hulu then that viewer is going to see a commercial at each break in the show. The whole commercial at its intended viewing speed, even. The viewer cannot fast-forward through the commercial. The viewer can, however, rewind within the commercial if s/he really wants to .

To the advertiser this should mean that advertising on Hulu is better than advertising during the broadcast of a show. It's also better for other reasons involving demographics and disposable income.

Advertisers, however, are stupid. They're willing to pay a lot more money in order for people to fast-forward through their commercials.

"But what about real-time viewers?" I hear you ask. I answer: Real-time viewers flip channels during the commercials. Or they run to the kitchen or the bathroom. They try to move clothes from the washer to the dryer during that commercial break for which the advertiser has paid so much.

So again I say that advertisers are stupid. They should be willing to pay more for Hulu viewers (the numbers of which are counted exactly by Hulu's computers and software) than they are for broadcast or cable viewers (the numbers of which are estimated using a small sample of homes).

Either that or Hulu is just not charging the advertisers enough.

Yet another blog

I've started yet another blog. It's about my experiences trading stocks. It will be updated each market day, before the US markets open. It can be found here.

Meanwhile I'll retain this one for non-investment pontifications.

Krugman

I just finished reading a profile of Paul Krugman from the March 3rd issue of The New Yorker. It's a long column, but it's worth a read. It may force me to reconsider my investment strategies.

Third Party

I really should be working on my blog for class over at huckcrowley.wordpress.com, especially since I need to post this week's assignment there in the next few hours. However I have something on the brain that has nothing to do with my Communication coursework and I need to get that out of my brain before I can effectively work on something else. The thing that's on my brain is political party affiliation and the lack thereof.

My father is nearly ready to leave the Republican party out of frustration with its insistence on exercising its ability to vote as a single, unified block. I, meanwhile, am nearly ready to leave the Democratic party out of frustration with its inability to vote as a single, unified block. The question for both of us, then, is where do we go? What political party speaks to us?

And the answer, of course, is that we're already affiliated with the parties that most closely represent our views, so there's absolutely no chance of us each switching to the other party.

What about the various third-party parties? Really I don't know enough about them. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know...) there were 4 third-party candidates in the 2008 US Presidential election. Those candidates represented:

The Constitution Party
The Green Party
The Libertarian Party
Independent

There were actually more candidates than the big two and the additional four listed, but these four actually appeared on the ballots in enough states to get 270 electoral votes, so they were legitimate candidates.

Look at that list again. You'll notice that the last party isn't a party. It's just a category of voter: Independent. And that Independent candidate - Ralph "I Used To Be A Good Man" Nader - actually got more votes than any other third party candidate. That's actually pretty impressive. How do you get votes for the office of president without a party apparatus behind you? Heck, how do you get on the ballot?

In Ralph's case the answer to these questions is, in his own case, fanatical devotion to his cause. For his followers the answer is fanatical devotion to Ralph Nader.

Regardless, this is fascinating. Especially when you consider what appears to be the growing power of Unaffiliated Voters. The information below is from a Washington Post article that's over 5 years old, so its behind the curve. Here's a convenient chart that Wikipedia has taken from that article. States are ranked in order of percentage of unaffiliated voters registered:


AK 60.0%

NJ 59.1%

MA 49.8%

CT 44.4%

NH 42.1%

ME 40.8%

IA 38.0%

CO 33.4%

KS 27.2%

NY 26.1%

OR 25.7%

AZ 25.5%

DE 23.4%

CA 22.3%

FL 20.8%

LA 20.7%

NV 19.3%

NC 18.7%

NM 17.7%

NE 16.2%

MD 15.4%

SD 14.4%

WV 11.9%

PA 11.7%

OK 10.5%

WY 10.2%

KY 6.5%

Astute readers will notice that there are only 27 states listed. That's because there are only 27 states that register voters by party. In the other 23 states there is no way of knowing how many independent / unaffiliated voters there are, really.

According to a more recent piece by Marc Ambinder - also in the Washington Post - about 30% of voters nationwide "tell pollsters they don't belong to a party." This means that Independent voters are officially the deciding votes when it comes to Presidential elections.

Do these independent voters agree on anything? Or are they too heterogeneous to define by anything other than their lack of party affiliation?

I don't know Ambinder's source for information, but he says "these non-affiliated voters tend to be less fiscally liberal than the Democratic mean and less socially conservative than the Republican mean." That's interesting. In general, then, we're talking about people who aren't going to be pushed around by wedge issues like the ongoing debates about abortion and gay rights. And we're also talking about people who are at least somewhat realistic when it comes to government spending.

I can get behind that. Basically it's a loose collection of practical people who, at the moment, lack an effective voice to speak for them.

Do they need a party? Do I need a party? These are the questions. By being a silent party that is also, effectively, the deciding party then these voters will pull candidates to a pragmatist center. They may do so very slowly, however, over time. It may take a while for political candidates to Get It.

Would a new party help candidates to Get It faster? Probably, but it might also weaken the unaffiliated voters at the same time. A new party would have to come up with a party platform, and it's very possible that a Practical Party (or whatever) wouldn't be able to come up with a platform that would attract enough voters to make it a viable force in American politics. In fact such a party might only succeed in splitting the vote in a crucial election in a Naderesque manner.

Basically a Practical People's Party probably would help candidates Get It and then become instantly obsolete as the two big parties move to the center. Unless a Practical People's Party possibly proves popular enough to purloin an impressive percentage of people from the presently popular parties. That would be perfect, but then we'd effectively have a one-party system, which might actually be worse than the present two-party system.

It seems then that the best thing for a voter that is disenchanted with his present party to do is to become unaffiliated, thereby effectively becoming a member of the silent, deciding party. Both parties are already trying to figure out why voters are leaving. More voters leaving will hopefully make then try harder.

It's Alive!

My loyal readers haven't had much to read from me as there has been no update to this blog since June. That changes now because one of the requirements of one of my classes is that I maintain a blog and update it weekly.

"Requirements? Classes? What is he on about?" you might be saying to yourselves. Well, there have been some changes since my last post in June. In July I became disemployed for the first time in 8+ years. In August I enrolled at university full-time in an effort to get the bachelor's degree that has eluded me for the 20 years that I have been ostensibly seeking it. I have no specific update regarding September, except to say that September was spent preparing for October. In October I got married (despite my disemployed status, amazingly enough) and my spouse and I enjoyed a wonderful honeymoon in San Francisco. November and December were spent on family holidays and finals. And this brings us to January 2010 which is, as of this writing, the present.

Today is the first day of the Spring 2010 semester at the learning institution I have sporadically attended for over 20 years, but for the first time my goal is within sight, even unaided by any form of telescopic magnification. If all goes according to plan (and why wouldn't it?) I shall graduate in May with a BA in Communication.

One of the requirements for my degree is COMM 303: Introduction to Communication Technologies. I'm taking the class online. It's the first class I've taken online, so we'll see how that goes. Still, it seems appropriate that a class about Communication Technologies be mediated through same. It's called hands-on learning, folks.

As I mentioned in my opening paragraph, one of the requirements (1/6 of my total grade) for the course is that I maintain a blog. Well, I've been maintaining a blog already, if "maintaining" can be understood to mean "posting with decreasing frequency after the election of 2008 and then ceasing altogether upon disemployment."

I rather thought that I would be posting with more frequency in my disemployed state, but many of the things about which I previously posted became less important in the absence of a regular paycheck. Green energy and electric cars, especially. I still discuss politics and investment strategies ad nauseum, but I have done so recently without resorting to posting my thoughts on these subjects on the series of tubes you see before you.

Anyway, for those of you (I know there's at least one) who have this blog on your RSS feeds: It seems only fair that I give you a heads-up about the renewal of this blog and its new context. According to the syllabus for my class, blog "entries will mostly be responses to web sites or questions given to [me] by the instructor. Good entries will get more credit than bad entries. The entries will be evaluated on how well they are written with both content and form taken into consideration. Good entries may become required reading for other students in the course."

I'm assuming I'm allowed to blog about other matters that occur to me also, but if past performance is indicative of future performance then non-class-related-posts will be few and far between. Besides, if I know my fellow classmates may be reading then I may exercise additional gate-keeping ability on my thoughts and opinions, at least until May.

Regardless of the impetus, this blog is once again active and promises to have (at least) weekly updates for the next four months. Comments are, as ever, welcome.

UPDATE: Or not. Syllabus has been revised since my last post. The blog for the class has to be set up at wordpress, so my blogger / blogspot blog is somehow unacceptable.

V2G might go Postal

Almost a month ago I posted a column about Electric Cars and their possible benefits to the Electric Utilities.

Well, yesterday the Christian Science Monitor posted an article about the possible electrification of the United States Postal Service's fleet of delivery vehicles. This article also mentions the possibility of the vehicles being used for power storage so they can then supply power Vehicle-To-Grid (V2G) when the grid requires it.

Basically, the nature of the way postal vehicles are used - routes of 25 miles or less a day, lots of stops and starts, low speed - would be perfect for electric. And because the vehicles spend significant time when they're guaranteed to be sitting at "home" then there's no problem getting them charged.

And there are some possibilities for V2G uses, but these vehicles really should be out and about during peak electrical demand hours, so that may not be the best use for them. Still, the postal service surely has to keep some spare vehicles around, yes? Any vehicles not in use on a given day can be designated fair game for V2G, I should think.

The postal service has a fleet of over 200,000 vehicles, over 140,000 of which are archetypal Long Life Vehicles - the postal service vans we picture when we think of a postal vehicle.

Currently those vehicles get spectacularly horrid gas mileage because the way they are used - low speed, lots of stops and starts, remember? - is absolutely non-ideal for efficient fuel use. The postal service might actually SAVE money by having an electric vehicle designed specifically to replace their current delivery vans.

Sounds like a job for GM.

The Instinct Diet

For a while I've been worried about my pants. They were shrinking, you see. Getting tighter at the waist. Maybe I was washing them wrong?

I went out and bought new pants, an inch bigger around the waist, but they were slowly getting a bit tighter, too.

Incidentally, as my pants were getting tighter I noticed that I weighed about 5-10% more than I used to. Perhaps the problem was not my washing machine after all.

Devoted readers of this blog - both of you - may remember that I discovered The Daily Beast during the 2008 election. Well, I've continued to read The Daily Beast since then, which is why I happened to read a column from April about the Instinct Diet.

It sounded interesting. I flipped through the book at my local bookstore, and then actually went so far as to purchase the book in question.

During the same time period the book's primary author, Susan B. Roberts, began contributing columns to The Daily Beast.

With book in hand and columns online and - most importantly - with the support of my intended I actually began the Instinct Diet a week ago. So far I've lost 3.5 pounds which, the book says, is about as much as you should possibly expect to lose in a week.

Basically I'm eating a lot more fruits and vegetables and I'm eating a lot less bread and white rice. Shocking, I know.

It's probably slightly more complicated than that, but not by much.

I'm also just eating less, in terms of sheer volume.

Oh, and I have planned snacks each day instead of cravings I satisfy out of a vending machine.

Speaking of which, it's time for my morning snack: An apple and 4 pecan halves.

I'm not a fan of pecans, but I can eat them with other things, it turns out. I don't even have to cover them with chocolate.

Speaking of covering things with chocolate: The Instinct Diet lets you do that, too. Of course, the thing you're covering with chocolate is a small serving of All Bran cereal. And you're covering it with just an ounce of dark chocolate. But served with just a bit of milk (or with some low-fat yogurt and some raspberries) it's surprisingly satisfying.

This is a snack I've indulged in almost daily in the past week, and it does not appear to be inhibiting my progress.

On the flip side, every 3 days I'm supposed to have half a grapefruit. I did this once a week ago, on the first day.

Here's the thing: I really, really don't like grapefruit. Accompanied by a couple of slices of high-fiber bread thinly coated with a meager amount of low-fat cream cheese I was able to choke it down, but I'm going to be substituting some other fruit for the grapefruit, I've decided. So far I've been substituting melon chunks, but that's mostly because we had a lot of melon to work our way through.

I've sent an inquiry to Dr. Roberts through instinctdiet.com requesting recommendations as to alternative fruits. If you're interested I'll let you know her response.

It's an interesting experience. I've never really tried making major changes to my eating habits before. I mean, I've tried to eat less. And I've switched to diet drinks. (These days I pretty much drink tea and water.) But I've never really cut - or mostly cut - sweets out of my diet before. Or pizza.

What makes it possible is that when following the Instinct Diet I'm not focusing on what I'm not eating. I'm following a meal plan. When I'm hungry there's already a specific plan for what I will eat.

That's probably the way a lot of diets work, but this is new for me, so bear with me.

Also, the plan has variation in it. What I'm eating today is not what I ate yesterday, and what I'm going to eat tomorrow is different, still.

(With the possible exception of the chocolate-covered bran snack, which is an extra I can add to the daily plans within reason.)

I'm excited with my progress so far, and I'll keep you - both of you - updated.

More on Utilities and Electric Cars

In my previous post I posited that the electric utilities would be the ones to actually make electric cars go. And that they'll profit from the change, long term, while making the world a bit greener in the process.

The oil companies will lose out, but that's okay. The oil companies' loss is the electric utilities' gain.

There have been some news items in the past week that indicate that more and more utilities are figuring this out.

San Diego Gas and Electric is establishing milestones that will enable them to deliver electricity to electric car drivers. It will take a while, but it appears that SDG&E is in it for the long haul.

Fifteen Michigan utilities are participating in a pilot program with Ford. The utilities get plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) to use in their daily operations. But in order best to use them the utilities need to create charging infrastructure for the vehicles. The utilities and Ford will share information resulting from the project.

The last article I'm going to reference in this post has a spokesperson from Southern California Edison stating that they expect electric cars to account for over 10% of their demand by 2020. Considering that our overall demand for electricity has been steadily increasing over time, this is significant.

Utilities Can Make Electric Cars Move

Utilities stand to benefit - more than any other companies or entities - from the advent of electric cars.

Most obviously, all those electric cars will be using electricity. It’s one more appliance for the consumer to plug in, and the more appliances consumers plug in then the more money the electric utilities stand to gain. For this reason alone the electric utilities should be actively encouraging adoption of electric cars.

There’s another reason, though, but it’s more complicated. And it requires the electric cars in question to have V2G technology.

V2G or Vehicle-To-Grid technology allows electric cars plugged into the electrical grid to be used by the utility for load-levelling.

Load-levelling is something the utilities currently do every week, every day, every hour, every minute. They track electricity demand and they make sure that they are able – at all times – to meet and exceed that demand. Because of the demand for more electricity during peak hours, electric utilities have plants that spin up before peak hours begin. These load-levelling plants then go out of service after peak hours are over. Other, baseload plants are running all the time. During the night when electricity use is low these baseload plants are producing more electricity than is being used.

And really, that’s what power companies do all the time – produce more electricity than is being used. Currently there is always always always extra electricity that goes to waste.

V2G cars will usually charge at night, making use of the additional electricity produced by the baseload plants at that time.

During the day, then, any V2G cars still plugged in at home – or plugged in at a V2G parking / charging station – can be used by the utility for load-levelling. The utility can delay or avoid spinning up the load-levelling plants. Instead they can just draw unneeded power from the V2G cars. Current projections are that an owner of a V2G car would make perhaps $2000 a year from the utility for allowing said utility to use his/her car for V2G load-levelling.

In this manner the V2G cars would serve as Grid Energy Storage. That is, a place to store excess electricity which, remember, the utility is currently producing all the time.

Many utilities are looking into building Grid Energy Storage systems for the same purpose discussed above, but if V2G cars can serve this purpose then that’s a project the utilities can scratch, avoiding that capital expenditure.

Instead, that cap ex can be spent working with car and battery manufacturers to create V2G standards that will work for the purposes outlined above, and possibly subsidizing the cost of the car or the battery for the consumer.

Basically, the utilities need to adopt the Better Place model, perhaps even to the extent of retaining ownership of the electric car batteries. The cost of the battery is what makes an electric car expensive, after all. Utilities will need to run a cost-benefit analysis, but it seems to me that there is enough benefit to the utilities (in the form of additional revenue and reduction of load-levelling costs) to offset the cost of the batteries.

This seems like a real win-win, and the beginnings of a smart grid, to boot. It's all very exciting.

Here are links to additional reading on the topic of V2G electric cars.

CBS Interactive's BNET article from 4 May
Christian Science Monitor article from 24 April
Hartford Courant article from 8 April
Discovery Channel article, undated
Additional Discovery article from 2 February

Sovereign Immunity??? Really?

I’m an Obama fan. People who know me – and I know of no one who reads this blog who doesn’t know me directly – are aware of this.

And I’m very happy with what President Obama has done in the 85 days of his first 100 days in office. I have high hopes for the next 2 weeks and the next 4 (and possibly 8) years.

Specifically I’m thrilled that President Obama has:

• Begun the process of shutting down Gitmo as a detention center
• Effectively banned torture by directing that the Army Field Manual be used as the rules for interrogation
• Raised fuel efficiency standards
• Allowed states to raise fuel efficiency standards higher still
• Ended the Global Gag Rule on abortion
• Signed legislation that will insure 4 million previously uninsured children
• Lifted restrictions on stem cell research
• Effectively reinstituted a Reagan-issued Executive Order that sees to the archiving of presidential papers
  

This last item is a step forward (after a Bush 43 step back) in governmental transparency.

Transparency was one of candidate Obama’s big campaign issues. It’s probably something he’s not going to want to bring up for a while, though.

I’ve written previously (in my last few blog entries) about this one area - transparency - in which I am disappointed in President Obama.

Well, it’s gotten worse.

Previously, President Obama’s Department of Justice has continued many of the previous administration’s legal claims to secrecy. The previous administration had a very impressive record of secrecy, so this is not a good thing.

Well, now the Department of Justice has taken things to the next level. Now they’re claiming a right of “sovereign immunity” under the Patriot Act. Basically, they’re claiming that the state has the right to spy on its citizens so long as the state doesn’t release the information gathered in this process to the public.

Say what you will about the second Bush administration – and I’ve said a lot – but they never went quite this far.

In my naiveté I am looking forward to an about-face on this issue from the Obama administration. Until that happens, though, then I’m going to be linking to the various sources of information on this:

Here’s Politico.com’s article
Here’s Salon.com’s.
Here’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s.
And here’s the Atlantic’s.

More State Secrets

Back in February I wrote about my concerns regarding the State Secrets privilege which has been used - and possibly abused - by both the current and the previous presidential administrations. Well, yesterday the Washington Post had a good article on the subject, so I direct your attention to it.

Obama's first signing statement

Well, it's been a month since I last posted anything. I was thinking that today - on the monthiversary of my last post - I really should write SOMETHING, but what?

I was thinking I could offer some uninformed commentary on a recent encounter between the US Navy and the Chinese navy in the South China Sea (which took place in the same area in which a Chinese air force plane clipped a US spy plane in 2001, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing and resulting in their capture by the Chinese government. 9/11 made everyone forget about this.) This incident (and the 2001 incident) both have everything to do with an underground submarine base located on (under) the island of Hainan.

On a lighter note, I was thinking of maybe writing about how much I deeply, deeply hate the ads that Hulu has made for themselves. (Evidently Hulu makes it difficult to link directly to the diatribe I have posted on their site, so if you're interested then go HERE, click the Discussion tab and then look for the thread titled "these ads are not good")

I was forwarded an article today in which one of my favorite authors describes as a "Multi-generational Ponzi scheme" the faulty accounting associated with burning lots of carbon when this action has lots of environmental penalties but utterly inadequate economic penalties, and I'm tempted to put in my two cents on that...

But then President Barack Obama issued his first signing statement. Just like his predecessor had a tendency to do, President Obama has signed a bill into law accompanied with a statement that says, in effect, that he's going to ignore portions of the law in question.

It's basically a line-item-veto by another name.

In December 2007, candidate Obama clearly stated that he would not use signing statements in this fashion.

I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law. The problem with this administration is that it has attached signing statements to legislation in an effort to change the meaning of the legislation, to avoid enforcing certain provisions of the legislation that the President does not like, and to raise implausible or dubious constitutional objections to the legislation. The fact that President Bush has issued signing statements to challenge over 1100 laws – more than any president in history – is a clear abuse of this prerogative. No one doubts that it is appropriate to use signing statements to protect a president's constitutional prerogatives; unfortunately, the Bush Administration has gone much further than that.

It appears, though, that President Obama has just used a signing statement for this very purpose. Rather than veto a law with provisions that he claims are unconstitutional, President Obama has chosen to sign the law accompanied with a statement saying he's going to ignore some bits.

I voted for Obama. I'm disappointed.

That said, this is the Omnibus spending bill we're talking about. If the president didn't sign it into law then it would force a government shutdown. And since the previous administration had demonstrated the efficacy of a signing statement as a line-item veto then why not use it as one?

I'm glad I'm not the president. I'm glad I don't have to make the decision between 3 bad options:

• Sign the law and enact it as written
• Veto the bill and cause a government shutdown
• Compromise my principles and leave it for the Supreme Court to sort out, possibly years from now.

Obama has done some amazing things in his first two months in office. Too bad he's done this and some other less amazing things, too.

UPDATE: CBS has the best article I've seen so far regarding the signing of the spending bill. Its article also includes the full text of the signing statement that accompanied the new law. For that matter, CBS also has an article covering a memo the Obama administration released on Monday regarding signing statements and their use by the Bush administration.

State Secrets

Obama’s Department of Justice is continuing to support a policy of Bush’s Department of Justice – one that Obama explicitly campaigned against.

It’s all about state secrets.

There is such a thing as a State Secret. I’m all about transparency in government, but I acknowledge that there is information gathered by our intelligence agencies that cannot be immediately shared with the general populace, and that there is information about our government’s capabilities and activities that needs to be kept from our enemies and therefore may need to be kept from the general populace also. The fact is that some stuff is just Need To Know.

But we do need to balance this somehow, which brings us back to transparency in government. It would be very easy for our government, in its quest to protect us or to protect the interests of our country, to undertake a program of truly evil actions in our name. Some level of vigilance has to be exercised in order to prevent this.

Civil courts are often part of this process of vigilance and transparency.

The state secrets privilege was first recognized by the US Supreme Court in 1953. Family of civilians killed as a result of a crashed B-29 bomber sued the government for information as to the cause of the crash. In recognizing the state secrets privilege, the court allowed the government to withhold evidence from the proceedings.

But the proceedings did continue with whatever evidence was admitted.

Evidently in the following 24 years – between 1953 and 1976, inclusive – the government invoked the state secrets privilege 4 times, including the original case.

After 9/11 the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege 23 times.

But wait! There’s more! President Bush’s Department of Justice used the state secrets privilege to have cases entirely thrown out of court. They didn’t just withhold sensitive information.

This is what Obama promised to end. State secrets will continue to exist, and the state secrets privilege may need to be invoked from time to time in the interests of national security, but it should not prevent court cases from proceeding, albeit lacking whatever secret information is withheld.

And yet this policy is what Obama's Department of Justice is inexplicably continuing.

The court case in which this policy is being upheld is one that concerns Extraordinary Rendition – the tendency of our intelligence agencies to transport suspects to fun places like Syria in order to have Syrian intelligence have a go at them, since they use interrogation techniques that we ... do not.

This has evidently been done to innocent people.

And information about the particular case that is slowly making its way through the court system has been reported in the press.

So what remains to be withheld?

There’s only a few possible conclusions I can draw from all this.

• One possibility is that President Obama has gone mad with power.
• Another possibility is that he reserves the right to go mad with power at some point in the next 4 to 8 years.
• And the last possible explanation is that whatever information has not yet come to light about the practice of extraordinary rendition – or related intelligence gathering practices - is amazingly, amazingly horrible.

Between this and Obama’s flip-flop on the FISA legislation, I find that I’m concerned about whatever he knows that I don’t.

I remain an Obama supporter. Fundamentally I believe that Obama is trying to change things for the better. But it appears that he must have become informed of something that our government has done or is doing (in the course of its intelligence gathering) that he has decided must remain unknown, for our safety, and for the safety of our country.

I leave it to the more seasoned conspiracy-theorists out there to go on about Black Sites and Total Information Awareness and whatnot. I personally am hesitant to speculate further about what exactly it is we have done – what it is we are doing – that must remain a state secret. All I can say is that something is being done in the name of our safety, and its something that - in the name of our safety - we evidently can't be allowed to know about.

Important news

I try to stay informed. Really I do. In my quest to be aware of current events I read news when I ought to be doing other things. As a consequence I know about the drought in China that is causing a "National Emergency" there, about the simultaneous floods in Australia and in Fiji and in the Solomon Islands, about the slow disappearance of the Maldives and of Kiribati and their populations' hope to relocate, about Iceland's new Prime Minister who happens to be the first openly gay leader of a nation, about the fact that China bought more cars and trucks in January than the US did and that this is the first time this has ever happened for any month, ever...

But sometimes important news slips through the cracks. News that, evidently, is of great importance to many people. And I missed this one until today:

Jessica Simpson has gained weight.

My reaction to this news is different than most, though. My reaction is Thank God. That woman was just too skinny.

Evidently I am out of step, though. According to the Daily Beast (my preferred news site these days) other media outlets are referring to Simpson as a “fat cow”.

The Daily Beast goes on to talk about the weight-loss industry and what an incredible opportunity this is for Jessica to cash in – provided she can lose the weight. Evidently she could easily get a 7-figure sponsorship from Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem or others if she simply hawks their products in the course of losing the weight. If she stops losing the weight – and definitely if she gains weight – then she’s out. All-gone-money.

Let me take this opportunity to state for the record that if someone wants to pay me upwards of a million dollars to get in shape then I will make that my full-time job.

That stated, I don’t think Jessica should lose the weight. I mean, if there’s millions of dollars involved then sure, go for it Jessica, but if there’s not and it’s all about image then I just gotta say I much prefer the new image.

I haven’t done a full web search for photos, so maybe I’m not seeing what others are seeing. All I’ve seen are these two photos:



And I gotta say, I much prefer the one on the right.

That is all. Thank you for your attention.

UPDATE: In other terribly important news, it turns out that Miley Cyrus is a teenager.

We have to spend on infrastructure

News is trickling out that the stimulus is not going to pass as written, and that a plan to add infrastructure spending to the stimulus did not garner sufficient support.

I'm sorry, didn't a bridge collapse in Minnesota recently because we've not been spending sufficiently on infrastructure?

And people need jobs. When people are unemployed they stop spending, and then the companies whose products aren't being bought and whose services aren't being used have to lay people off. The pool of unemployed grows and the problem worsens.

We need to employ people.

During the New Deal the government employed people through the WPA and other programs, and by doing so the government accomplished - among other things - the following:

"The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters."

Well, we need to repair our existing infrastructure. We always need more hospitals, schools, and teachers. We need to make some fundamental changes to our electrical infrastructure - transmission lines to take wind-power from where it's generated to where it's needed, smart grids to make energy use more efficient and less expensive. Simply put, there's work to be done.

Normally the markets take care of this. Something needs to be done and from the market emerges companies competing to do it.

But the market is broken just now. Companies are cutting back on the spending that would be necessary to enable them to do the jobs we need. Also states and municipalities are cutting back on spending on the necessary infrastructure changes, so even if there were companies to do it, who's going to pay them?

The government has to step in and pay to get things done, and we need to let them. In the process, folks will be employed, and those employed folks will spend money on various goods and services.

Employment good. Unemployment bad. It's simple, really.

Does it have to get worse before we'll allow our government to start addressing the situation in a meaningful manner?

Personally, I think we should pass an infrastructure bill. Not an economic stimulus package. An infrastructure bill. We need the infrastructure upgrades, and people need jobs.

Also, we don't know what a stimulus package is going to do, exactly, but we know what an infrastructure upgrade is, or what it can be, anyway. It can be what it was in the New Deal, and in the process it will provide economic stimulus as a convenient side effect.

I Don't Tweet

I post infrequently to this blog. I posted fairly frequently during the election, I suppose, but I have posted less frequently post-election. I have posted occasionally in the last 10 days to express my considerable approval for the job our president is doing in his first days in office. I expect I will continue to do so. I heart Obama, I suppose.

I also heart Stephen Fry, as attested by a couple of posts in December. (One on the 18th. Another on the 19th) And as someone who enjoys Stephen and his blog and his blessays I was quite happy to see that he has finally posted a new blog entry – not a blessay, this time – on his site. Stephen blogs less frequently than myself, you see, but when he does it’s worth reading.

And I suppose today’s would be worth reading if I tweeted. If I were a Twitter user. Which I am not.

If I were it might have been useful to absorb, fully, Stephen’s suggested ground rules for tweeting / twittering him. He has a number of Twitter followers you see, and he simply cannot keep up with them all, but he shall try and he has presented them with suggestions for how best to tweet in his particular case.

He ends the post saying “Welcome to my twitterworld, I am delighted to have you as a follower. Let’s enjoy ourselves and to hell with those who don’t get it.”

Well, I don’t get it. I will not be a part of Stephen's twitterworld, or anyone’s. So to hell with me.

(Well, maybe Obama’s… That might be cool… I don't know if Obama ever tweeted, though, and if he did I doubt he is permitted to do so now. So...)

I don’t tweet.

I don’t tweet. I haven’t tweeted. I do not intend to tweet. I will not tweet.

On some level the very concept of constantly updating people as to where I am and what I’m doing simply disturbs me.

I think I can safely say that Twitter was inspired by Facebook and its users’ ability to update their status, and their tendency to do so constantly.

Just now I logged into Facebook to see exactly how I worded my last status update. I see that on the 19th I updated it to reflect that I am “indulging in high hopes for the Obama presidency” and I see no need to update that. I still am indulging my high hopes even though many of my hopes have already been met. I have higher hopes, still.

The point: Apparently it’s been 10 days since I updated my facebook status.

...

In the midst of this column I find myself tempted to update my Facebook status, which is annoying, as I am in mid-rant about the frivolousness of the entire enterprise.

Here’s the thing: It might not be frivolous today.

...

We’ve had kind of a big week in Louisville, Kentucky. Many hours of freezing rain has caused trees to become over-weight with ice. This was later compounded with snow, so trees have fallen or dropped branches, snapping power-lines in the process. Some of the power-lines snapped under the weight of the ice and snow without any trees’ helpful assistance. This has resulted in power outages for roughly a third of the population of the city / county.

Louisville had finally recovered from the remnants of Hurricane Ike which had much the same effect back in September. (My neighbor finally got his roof fixed last week...) Of course, Ike knocked out power for nearly three-fourths of the metro area, affecting many more people than are affected now.

So I find, as I look at Facebook, that I am becoming apprised of the status of various folks I know. A few are thankful they have power. Others have uploaded photos of various ice-covered or icicle-laden objects.

Perhaps it would be of some utility to update my status to “is without power at home, but is able to get to work without difficulty from his fiancee’s.” Anyone concerned for my well-being would be instantly updated, with no real effort on their part.

I’d like to see a little effort, though.

During this time of difficulty my parents have called to make sure I’m alright. (They have power, incidentally, but they have one tree leaning on their garage and another that is partly in their neighbors’ driveway.) My intended and I have been updating each other frequently. (She’s safely at work at our state capitol today, although there was a significant delay on the interstate.) Through my parents I am aware that my brother and his family have power and cell phones, although their land-line is out (but the DSL is working – what’s up with that?).

What I’m saying is that I do not feel the need to broadcast my status, or changes to my status, to any group of people. Individuals can learn of my status by contacting me directly, or through traditional social-networking to which the word “online” does not pertain.

Individuals can alternatively simply assume that everything’s fine - that's usually the case - in a detail-free kind of way.

I guess that’s it – the details. So much of current online interaction is about sharing the details of one’s life with everyone who cares to know. I did this effectively - but much less efficiently - in my 20’s through direct social interaction and near-constant use of the phone (and a little email, too) until I finally had a minor epiphany that even my best friends did not require and were perhaps uninterested in the level of detail I was providing.

This was a hard-won revelation, and I find myself unwilling to reverse my relatively newfound position.

For that matter, the older I get the more I appreciate a certain degree of privacy, just for its own sake.

And then there’s the matter of security. If I broadcast the details of my daily routine then characters of a malicious nature would be able to know when my house is empty and therefore easily robbed. They might also know that there’s nothing worth stealing, so it would probably be moot, but still...

It just seems odd, in an age in which many people are very concerned about identity theft and fraud, that many people are now willing to put many details of their life out there for all to see. A traditional con artist could make bank exploiting this. It seems to me like a constant series of unnecessary risks.

I guess I don’t get it. So to hell with me.

Maybe I should update my status to “is going to hell.”...?

That wouldn’t really be an update, though. Surely my Facebook friends already knew that.