Brain Clouds

Nosing around

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:39:00 +0000

The North Country is pretty easy on the eyes these days: lilacs, apple blossoms, trillium, new leaves, tender grass, lots of sun. We take the world in first through the eyes, so much so that the interrogative "See?" is synonymous with "Do you understand?" Nature may have shorted humans in other ways, but a big chunk of our big brain is dedicated to sight. If we were dogs, we'd be gaze hounds. But the brain is an onion--peel away the primate and find the mammal, peel away that and find the reptile, deep within the secret core of us. That part of the brain is only interested in the eyes if they show a fast-moving object, prompting us to hotfoot across the intersection, or shriek at the 3D horror movie dagger. The lambent pastels of spring are wasted on it.

The ancient brain "sees" instead through the nose, which wraps mysteriously around the limbic chemical pumps of our emotions, triggering cascades of long lost memory and association. Compare the impact of watching someone outside the window mow the lawn with the experience of walking out into the sharp-scented grassy air. It recalls to mind every warm day since you were a child. Last weekend, I had the happy occasion to be in the rare book room of the Strand Bookstore in New York City with my daughter Elena. She turned to me and said "It smells like your Dad." I took a deep breath to "see" what she meant and there it was: all the generations the old books in the stacks had steeped in pipe smoke in the libraries of bookish men, still seeping back out decades later into the environmentally-regulated air. His dimming face comes sharp in the mind's eye once more. I see him turning the pages even now. The smell of aftershave.

"Friend me" not

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:52:00 +0000

While I have been fascinated to follow the development of social networks on the web, I have never warmed up to them in practice. The very name sounds oxymoronic--social sounds, well--sociable--and network sounds like work. So I might visit a FaceBook page for information, but I have not built one of my own, and rarely interact with the pages of others. My cell phone is not web connected and sits mostly idle--a text message has never passed its tiny little keypad. For a while I tracked old running buddies via Classmates, but with both ends needing to be paying customers to actually communicate, my skinflint genes kicked in and I let it lapse. The alternate reality site Second Life now moves on without me. I tried to create an avatar there that looked like me, but everything came out way more young and buff than sad reality, and I had no desire to present myself as a blue punk vampire with a face full of steel, or to build a zero-gravity domicile constructed entirely of virtual cornflakes.

So my social life operates in a way a cave man would recognize. I go to where people live and sit within earshot of quiet conversation. I share food, news, blarney and opinion in kitchens and coffeeshops. I like my music live and will pay for the privilege. I embrace my inner throwback. There is no end to the axes I enjoy the grinding of, and I guess social networking is one. Don't friend me, I'll friend you.

Until telepathy

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:22:00 +0000

Poetry Month has come and gone again, and while I rarely take time out to talk like a pirate on National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I have taken time in the last month to give a few poetry readings and to attend a few readings, to buy and to sell a few books of poetry--and to read them--as opposed to stacking them on my nightstand. It's a curious business, much out of fashion, an eccentricity in myself that I rarely examine.

So it was with great interest that I listened to Jeffrey Brown's interview with poet Robert Hass on last night's PBS News Hour. His collection Time and Materials won this year's poetry Pulitzer--yes, there actually is one. The great lit major bull session questions--Why poetry? What is it good for?--are things he has examined in some depth. There is a line in his poem "The Problem of Describing Trees:"

There are limits to saying, in language, what the tree did.

This prompted Brown to question: "Why the need to describe trees?" Hass parried with a quote from environmentalist Ed Wilson: "Every species lives within its own sensory world." We can't say what the tree actually did; we can only say what we saw. The exercise is not to describe the tree, but to record "our memory of the gift of life," to say "here is what it was like for me to be alive." Or to quote another poet, Brett Duffany, "Until telepathy, poetry."

Two cent lunch

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:26:00 +0000

I've lost track of how many lunches I have consumed, oblivious at my desk, sandwich in left hand to free my right for the mouse. Lunch is mostly fuel in a working life: nuked leftovers, a pound of takeout swathed in petrochemicals, drive-thru cardiac incidents. It wasn't always so; somewhere I lost the knack for leisure, the rest and playfulness and companionship that once divided the day.

Not that I was ever a cafe caballero, lingering over latte and pondering Proust. What I miss is--somebody help me--the elementary school cafeteria. The simplest of fare--brown bag, white bread, gooey peanut butter, purple jelly--milk in a glass bottle, carrot sticks in wax paper, raisins in a cardboard box. And the company of two hundred other yammering children. One guy at my table would eat his sandwich down to the shape of a flipped "bird," for the benefit of his recess rivals. Another would squish the whole thing into his mouth at once, roll it into a glutinous ball and display it on extended tongue. I forget why. Carrot sticks can double as Dracula fangs. A California raisins box, once empty, makes a dandy kazoo. The uses of a milk straw are too numerous to mention, and the lunch bag itself can be inflated and exploded immediately behind a girl carrying a full tray of spaghetti and meatballs.

It's the greening grass that brings it all to mind, and the memory of milk--two cents for a half-pint bottle, stoppered with a cardboard tab. One day each year it would become transformed from funky white liquid into pure ambrosia, when the local dairyman switched from hay to pasture. You could see the Holstein it came from out the cafeteria window. If you had a good arm, you could hit it with a dried chip from the edge of the schoolyard.

Achieving liftoff

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:56:00 +0000

Yesterday was it--the day Spring became a reality instead of a theoretical possibility. Everyone has their own gauge. For some it's the first robin, but as far as I'm concerned, the early bird gets frostbite. For some it's the first snowdrops--but they get ahead of themselves, too. I look for the first sunny day in the 60s, and the first blue heron. Yesterday--double whammy.

If the heron has come back, you know it wasn't some flighty decision--they can, after all, barely fly. They seem to be a "proof of concept" design on the part of nature, rather than an actual production model. Watching them lumber up from the shallows is like watching a grainy newsreel of Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk. They graze the water with each downbeat, like a seaplane powered by oars. Both the principles of lift and the grace of God appear to be necessary to accomplish launch.

Just so my spirits. The blue body of winter is almost too massive for my wingspan to support. But give me sufficient open water, a little solar power assist, and up I go--eventually.

Where did the future go?

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:47:00 +0000

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.

from An Introduction to Information Science

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:53:00 +0000

To fathom the workings of the material universe, theoretical physicists have developed elaborate structures of strings, quarks, forces and dimensions, spreading out from a generative big bang, maybe 15 billion years ago. Researchers in cybernetics are beginning to postulate similar structures to explain the development of the dataverse or cyberspace, which exploded into being about 441 quadrillion nanoseconds ago, around 1994.

Left: Radio Bob deploys bogon detection apparatus.

Instead of particles possessed of mass, cyberspace is thought to be composed of particles of information. And instead of charge, they have polar qualities of validity and bogosity. The irreducible units of information are known as the bogon and the cluon. The presence of bogons can be felt most strongly in the vicinity of intense bogon emission sources, such as political figures and sales executives. The development of the worldwide web was accompanied by a huge outflux of bogons, as evidenced by early websites such as "The Hamster Dance," and by the formation of the dot.com bubble. Cluons propogate at a slower rate, trailing the wavefront of the "bogon bang" by as much as two years. The spreadsheets of venture capitalists became a rich source of cluons that helped to stabilize the rapidly deflating, but still superheated mass. While the interplay of cluons and bogons explain much of the observable dataverse, researchers are still seeking evidence for a supermassive neutral information particle, tentatively dubbed the "npron."

As in the physical universe, particles are not uniformly distributed in cyberspace. For example, there is a peak in the field strength of the local bogon flux each year, shortly after the vernal equinox. For an excellent exegesis of recent research, see the Wikipedia entry on quantum bogodynamics.

All things being equal

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:52:00 +0000

Day and night have come back into balance, as they do twice each year, but no one who has spent a winter in the North Country actually expects spring to begin just because the calendar says so. Still, each new inch that falls after the equinox is a cause for special grievance, particularly when the winter has lived up to the tall tales we like to tell new residents. I'd been keeping an eye on the massive overhang of ice that shadowed the north side of the living room, and sure enough, it let go yesterday, taking out a second storm window. I lost the first when trying to preempt the fall by whacking the build-up loose with a steel pipe. All things being equal, this time I just moved the easy chair a little farther into the room away from ground zero. I'd hate to be decapitated while watching The Daily Show.

What can you do except tough it out? I've never known prayer to make the lilacs bloom one day sooner. The extra light helps a little, but raises expectations doomed to be dashed. There are strawberries in the store, but they are no sweeter (nor softer) than turnips. All things being equal, I'll stick to preserves until the local crop is in. I can already taste it on the tongue of my brain. Spring hopes eternal.

Inside the anthill

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:01:00 +0000

Things get a little crazy around here during fundraiser time. At the moment I have three windows open to edit frequently updated web pages, two photo editor windows, one email application, a calculator, four web browser windows, a Word document, and an IM chat room connecting the various pitch people throughout the station. And I'm having the least crazy day. The news department is roiling like a kicked over anthill trying to keep pace with developments in Albany.

Radio Bob is just back from an epic arctic journey up Blue Mountain to put us back on the air in the southern Adirondacks after a prolonged outage. And everybody else is teleporting themselves up and down the hall trying to keep the wheels from flying off the fundraising cart.

Left: Why we were off: NCPR's "iceproof" receiving antenna on Blue Mt. before and after Radio Bob climbed the sucker and whacked on it with a hammer.

You all, on the other hand, remain calm, patient and dependable--sending in your usual generous support for our operations, along with a little extra to help celebrate our 40th birthday. We've been able to count on you all these years, and believe me--we remember who "brung us." Our heartfelt thanks to all of you who have supported us in this drive, and a special thanks to our volunteers, and to the businesses who have donated the great daily drawing prizes: Old Forge Hardware, Mountain Man Outdoor Supply Company, Red Truck Pottery and Clayworks, and Northern Music and Video. You can still get your name in the hat for tonight's drawing on a set of handmade serving dishes from Red Truck. And tomorrow's winner can live out his or her rock'n'roll fantasy with a Fender guitar from the folks at Northern. Call 1-877-388-6277 or visit us at ncpr.org before the drive ends.

40 is the new 19

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:25:00 +0000

NCPR turns 40 tomorrow. Your fortieth birthday is supposed to be the one you dread--the first stale breath of mortality--but we're pretty excited. And not just because many of us at the station look way back over our shoulders (if our necks can still turn that far) on our own 40 candles. The celebration just happens to coincide with our annual March Membership Drive (Tuesday-Friday). Being ravenous public radio mendicants, we hope you will dig a little deeper this year to help secure our next four decades on the air, or on whatever platforms public broadcasting homesteads by 2048--cyberspace, hyperspace, digital telepathy, or multiverse transdimensional tachyon distribution.

Perhaps the century-old Magliozzi brothers will still be razzing the owners of junker hovercraft, and GK will be the world's oldest as well as tallest radio comedian. You never know. What we do know is that we won't get there without you and your support. To sweeten the deal we have some excellent swag on offer, including a geekly bonanza giveaway for early renewals.

Give early and often, and drop by anytime to see us on the radio.

A Shocking Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:07:00 +0000

To open a conversation, a usual gambit is to ask what's new. The usual answer is "Not a whole lot." Maybe you saw an amusing movie; maybe you tell the one about the werewolf, the throat singer and the pole dancer. You might have been to a concert where they sounded satisfyingly like their record. On the other hand, you might have been lucky enough to share the room with Bobby McFerrin last night in Potsdam.

I had been looking forward to the show, having heard McFerrin years before, but I had also been working since before dawn--I told my wife to punch me if I started to snore. But nobody, no matter how dozy, can sleep through something which is really new--a program comprised totally of vocal improvisation. Anyone who recalls the forty-minute drum solos of 60s rock remembers how badly such a thing can go wrong. For McFerrin and his twelve accomplices to be so on top of each moment for 90 minutes left me flabbergasted, and more awake than I have been at any time since I touched that bare wire with a socket wrench. In a time when the word genius gets applied to anyone halfway competent, I want a new word for what I saw and heard. To be present while a first-rate mind makes up first-rate work completely on the fly--I can only babble about it. Years from now I will still babble about it.

Hypernation

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:12:00 +0000

Animal wisdom tells us that this is the time of year to lay low, to snooze--round the clock if possible. The thermometer is regularly below zero, the once-mellow meadows resemble the surface of the moon. Frogs are frozen freaking solid within the stony mud. But human contrariness insists that this is the time to get everything done, despite the brevity of bleak winter days. A dozen different projects are ramping up to speed all around the station. Fortieth anniversary events, concert plans, next month's member drive, the website redesign, conferences and collaborations, construction work. It never stops.

It all makes me, I confess, a little sleepy. But it must be the same impulse that got Cro-Magnon man through the last Ice Age: Want to stay warm?--Keep running. Just one more day on the trail and it's mammoth blubber for everybody! Unfortunately, it always seems to be the trail today, and the blubber tomorrow. And so it will go until the lilacs bloom. Until then, keep moving, and drink lots of hot chocolate.

Imaginary vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:38:00 +0000

I had another writing assignment today, to write about an imaginary vacation for tonight's meeting of a local poet's group, but my nose is so firmly to the grindstone at NCPR that I am doing double-duty. Here is my offering, with apologies to our patient listeners in the Adirondacks, and to station engineer Bob Sauter for involuntarily sharing his little getaway.

Radio Bob's Vacation

At home, his voice mail fills with calls
from WXLH, Blue Mountain Lake.
but at Sosua by the Sea, I imagine Radio Bob
is adoze beside an aquamarine pool.

In his pocket, the cell phone vibrates urgently
but he can't tell it from the Magic Fingers
in his suite's king-size bed.

He turns over the tiny paper umbrella
from a tall cool drink, but it does not
remind him of a satellite dish.

On Blue Mountain, the NYSEG crew plods
through drifts; their bootprints lost in the blow.
I imagine Radio Bob is lost in thought, walking
the beach at Sosua by the Sea, his footprints
filling up behind him with surf.

His radio is tuned to the Caribbean World Series,
to reggaeton during the seventh inning stretch; it blast
sall across Latin America without his lifting a finger.
Life is good at Sosua by the Sea.

At home the transmitters fall like dominoes
away to the south. Homes fall silent but for
the drip of icicles on the sill. And Radio Bob
falls silent, contemplating nothing but the sweet breeze.

Obscure passages

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:29:00 +0000

If you have gotten past the homepage at NCPR in the last day or two, you'll have noticed that the new site design is starting to appear. My apologies for the interim confusion, but it is nothing compared to my own. It's ugly down in the crawl spaces of cyberspace. And the basic tools of web design are still primitive. Picture monks in the scriptorium, transcribing obscure passages from Leviticus by tallow lamp. Church Latin has nothing on javascript. What could "for (i=0; i<(args.length-2); i+=3) { test=args[i+2]; val=MM_findObj(args[i]);" mean? All I know for sure is that it is tiny and made of pixels I can barely read. And that you can't get the code wrong without sending people off to fan sites for Romanian calvary collectibles, or injecting heresy into scripture, or creating some other form of disproportionately large trouble. If by mischance you run horribly astray, just keep clicking. Eventually you will come across me in one of the sub-basements, busting my knuckles applying a torque wrench to a gunked-up function. We can help each other find the way back to daylight.

All in

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:31:00 +0000

No one imagined, when it was just an invitation to apply for funding, just how all-consuming the UpNorth Music project would become. 38 full days of recording in eleven communities, more than a hundred individual sessions, at least a thousand hours mixing and producing songs, interviews, broadcast features, podcasts. Designing and rebuilding the production studio, identifying, recruiting and paying artists, finding studio venues, planning a concert tour, mastering a compendium CD set, clearing performance and publication rights--a million details from remote broadcast setup to getting our new logo printed in frosting on a concert reception cake. Enormous big "ups" to production manager Joel Hurd and to project coordinator Jill Breit for all the sweat and blood.

It's all coming to a head tomorrow with the opening concert in the UpNorth Music Series at St. Lawrence University's Gulick Theater, and with the release of the project highlights in the 3-CD set Music Heard UpNorth. I've been working my way through the set with great delight. It sounds like the North Country--talented, inventive, diverse, quirky. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought I knew the musicians of the region, or at least the best of them. But on each CD in the set, there are at least half a dozen artists I had no idea were out there. Fantastic songwriters, monster instrumentalists, voices to make you cry. When NCPR takes on a project, I'm proud to say we go "all in." And the North Country, I'm proud to say, is full of artists who do the same.

If you can't pick up a copy at the concert tomorrow, Music Heard UpNorth will be available within a few days in stores around the region, and online via cdbaby.com. Or you can contact the station to place orders.

All things made new

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:35:00 +0000

Home renovation on the internet can be as messy and frustrating and time-consuming as in the real world. It's also prone to schedule creep, going over budget, etc. If you've been tuned in, you know that NCPR has moved into its 40th anniversary year, and you may have glimpsed our new logo on station correspondence. But so far you have not seen much at ncpr.org. That's about to change in the next few weeks, as we roll out our first complete website makeover since 2002. Things may be a little squirrely during the transition, with parts of the site being updated and part not. We'll do our best to keep the train on the tracks.

The look is intended to be more clean and contemporary, and more user-friendly to navigate and search. You will find that the menus will be consistent in content and location from the home page on throughout the site. The page itself is larger, taking advantage of the shift toward larger monitors in recent years. And we have taken a close look at how people are using the site to introduce some new pages that bring what people are looking for more front and center.
Take a sneak preview of the new design in progress.

It is a test page for the news section home page of the site. Most of the navigation works, sending you to pages in the old site. Some links to new pages do not work, and some of the destinations will have additional and/or changed content in the new design. But let us know what you think, quick, before I mess everything up. Email dale@ncpr.org.

Speak of the devil

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:17:00 +0000

I was starting to feel a little nostalgic about disaster, listening to the retrospective coverage of Ice Storm '98--right up until everything started to fall apart again. The massive thaw of the last week presented its bill with hurricane force winds. The campus went dark, the network and phones went dead. The website was kerflooey (a technical term). The transmitter was running on generator. Power surges melted my computer. It was a classic case of "speak of the devil."

Fortunately Lucifer didn't hang around quite as long this time. And there were some lessons learned. When the land lines went down, the cell phones came out. When the campus lost power, parts of the network stayed up on generators, as did our transmitter shack. There were workarounds for almost everything, from getting audio to the station to getting cancellations and closings out to the community--laborious maybe, suboptimal, but workable. Without the example of 10 years ago we would have been down to tin cans and a string.

So thanks for sending in your recollections of Ice Storm '98. But maybe in the future, we should just remember in our hearts. Not that I'm superstitious.

Ready or not

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:47:00 +0000

It's been ten years since the Ice Storm (always capitalized) administered its mighty dope-slap to the North Country. If you can remember what healthy woods are supposed to look like, you can still make out the edges of the devastation when entering or leaving the region. It'll be another decade before all the debris has mulched back into duff. But good intentions decompose more quickly. Looking around the house now I see that we still have no heat source that doesn't require electricity, and that the battery stash has long been looted of anything containing an erg of oomph. The candles looked quite romantic burning down to nubs on the dinner table, and the canned goods supply is down to one portion of cream of asparagus soup and some ripe olives.

It may just be that constant vigilance is an oxymoron. Nervous fatigue sets in. How long can you look into every shoe and never find a bomb? How long before we rebuild on the floodplain or the coastline or the flank of the volcano? And if, somehow, we stayed prepared for disaster, would it be for the next one, or for the last one? I can remember when they decommissioned the public fallout shelters and disposed of all the stock. Half the North Country stored old baby clothes and sundry in sturdy brown barrels with a yellow Civil Defense logo on the side. Every science classroom was stocked with an almost-new Geiger counter. And I bet it's not that hard now to find a good price on a used power generator: "1998 Honda 2 KW, low hours, runs like new."

Share your received wisdom (if you have received any) from the Ice Storm of '98. Drop us a line at radio@ncpr.org.

Lots to celebrate

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:33:00 +0000

People have a pretty good idea what Christmas and Hanukkah are about, and may know about Kwanzaa or about pagan solstice traditions. New Year's Day, however, seems to have no actual festive content, unless you count the wearing of lampshades. It's like the big signs placed at arbitrary lines on the map: Welcome to New York, the Empire State. The line could be anywhere. But if you are feeling let down by the end of the holiday season, cheer up--the entire year is holiday season. Here are some reasons to celebrate in January.

Among other designations, January is officially Celebration of Life Month, and California Dried Prune Digestive Month, and International Wealth Mentality Month, and National Clean Up Your Computer Month, and National Hot Tea Month, and Oatmeal Month. For those with shorter attention spans, January encompasses the mysteriously named Silent Record Week, as well as Cuckoo Dancing Week, National Handwriting Analysis Week, World Leprosy Week, and National Cowboy Poetry Gathering Week.

Or you can take your festivities one day at a time: the 3rd is Memento Mori (Remember You Die) Day; or Tolkien Day. The 5th is Fruitcake Toss Day, the 12th is Penguin Awareness Day. Not to omit imaginary creatures, the 16th is Appreciate a Dragon Day; also, it's Nothing Day. My list shows the 17th as Judgment Day, but we can hope that that's a typo. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shares the 21st this year with National Hugging Day, and Squirrel Appreciation Day. For those who find the notion of Celebration of Life Month too exhausting, they can just gear up for Celebration of Life Day on the 22nd. Next comes National Pie Day, the 23rd, cruelly followed by Women's Healthy Weight Day, the 24th. Or you just forget about what everyone else is celebrating, and throw a party on Freethinkers Day, January 29th.

In the family again

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:55:00 +0000

All week I have been looking at the home page at NCPR, seeing the holiday themed Photos of the Day, the winter reading list, a gingerbread house slideshow, the holiday specials schedule, etc. Everything you would expect for the holidays, except for the ongoing coverage of a dispute with our public radio neighbor to the south. I had planned to give the matter a rest today, and write some holiday anecdote here, such as an account of my marathon journey across the North Country in belated search of a Christmas tree.

Instead, a real holiday story has just fallen into my lap. As of 1:30 pm, NCPR has reached an agreement in principle with WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, that will settle the conflict to the benefit of all. Read the joint press release outlining the agreement.

Our warmest thanks to all who showed their concern and support. And best wishes to everyone for a joyous holiday season.

In the family

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:41:00 +0000

How you report the news when you have become the news is one of the most ticklish problems in journalistic ethics. A case in point is a story that will air in a few minutes on All Before Five, and again tomorrow (Friday) during the Eight O'Clock Hour. Recently, in a rare FCC "filing window" for applying for broadcast licenses, NCPR applied to upgrade its facility in Lake Placid to a higher-power license. Our public radio neighbor to the south, Northeast Public Radio (WAMC), also made an application that, if successful, would transfer the Lake Placid 91.7 fm frequency from NCPR to them.

The news was first aired in the region this morning on Saranac Lake station WNBZ, in a feature story by Chris Knight who, in addition to his duties at WNBZ, is a frequent freelance reporter for NCPR on Adirondack issues. While NCPR is committed to retaining the frequency on which it has served Lake Placid for over twenty years, we needed to find a way to cover the story in a fair and balanced way that would place the public interest ahead of the institutional interests of the station. Toward that end, the station manager and the news director sought advice from the Poynter Institute, an organization that provides training in journalistic ethics. They recommended that we use an outside editor with no connection to either of the parties to the dispute to oversee NCPR's coverage. Suzanna Capelouto, news director of Georgia Public Broadcasting, agreed to fill that role. The reporting by Chris Knight that you will hear on NCPR tonight and tomorrow was edited by her.

NCPR's position on the dispute and links to other coverage, including Northeast Public Radio.

In their own words

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:59:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was bemoaning the effects of the Hollywood writers' strike on the one-eyed monster in my living room. But as the labor action continues to drag on, and the world has not come to an end, I have had time to consider the possible benefits of being bereft of words. In particular, bereft of words put into the mouth by others. Consider the possibilities of a political speechwriters' strike. Would candidates just do reruns of previous speeches, or would they take the gamble and communicate with constituents in their own words? And what if talking heads had no one to write their talking points? What if the slick hired guns of Madison Ave. walked off the job, leaving products stripped of all pizzazz? Would we just buy last year's model? Would we forget to go shopping altogether? Silence speaks, as any poet could tell you (as long as the poets aren't out on strike.)

Not a good look

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:32:00 +0000

I was walking one day in the crowded esplanade of the Danbury Fair Mall. A women in front of me turned to her companion and said, "I didn’t know we were in Connecticut." I have had that feeling over and over the last few days as I have surveyed scores of websites looking for inspiration to fuel the redesign of the NCPR website. Everything seems to look just like everything else--and I gotta tell you--it isn’t a good look. Crowded, chaotic, hard to navigate, hard to read, and little to make you want to stick around. If the media sites on the web comprised a metropolis, they would be the shantytowns of Rio. This is bad news for me; I was hoping for something to rip off--I mean emulate. NCPR's design, now more than six years old, belongs to the hamster-dance era of website fashion, and I am under the gun to roll out something new and fabulous for our 40th anniversary year, 2008.

Since my eyeballs are bleeding from the strain and my progress to date can be measured in microns, I thought I would get with the 21st Century program and tap into "the wisdom of crowds." Send me your candidates for websites that do what they do well and with a little style. And tell me a little about why you think they work. I'll compile a list of favorites and put it back out on the site, and maybe I'll find a few features that I can file the serial numbers off. Email dale@ncpr.org.

Goldfish and radio

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:45:00 +0000

With the writers' strike going on in TV land, all the time-sensitive programs have folded their tents for the duration, and the new series episodes that were already in the can are running dry. Since I find the network and cable news impossible to stomach without the antacid of The Daily Show ready at hand, that leaves me thumbing down through the reality shows, the game shows, the one-and-a-half star movies, the obscure team sports, infomercials, and reruns from the 70s. I kind of knew it was this bad, but I never realized it was this much--from 2 to 998 and back to the top again. Fortunately the south wall of the living room has a hundred feet of books, and the east wall another hundred feet. Then there are the shelves in the back room, and the stash of books burying my bedside table. Also, of course, the neglected gems of the CD collection, and that friend who will always talk to you when no one else is around--the radio.

If it is absolutely necessary to stare at something from my rump-shaped depression in the sofa, a goldfish bowl placed on top of the TV will do the trick. Goldfish plus radio. You can get two fish and name one of them Ofabia Quist-Arcton, and the other Mandalit del Barco. You can paste an NPR logo on the lower right portion of the bowl. You can drape a gaily embroidered runner over the darkened TV.

Three Bowls

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Hobson) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:04:00 +0000

There had been much talk lately about the so-called "hundred mile diet"--living primarily or completely on foods grown and prepared within 100 miles of where you live. Economy looks very different when one of the factors in the bottom line is "Do I know who grew this? Do I know who made this?"

Lately, my wife and I have been getting a lot of use out of three bowls, survivors of a set of four thrown and fired more than 30 years ago in the house where we lived with our potter friend, Annie. Any vessel would do to keep the soup from our lap, but the feel and the history and the look of these particular bowls add to the savor of anything contained within. The profile is a simple unbroken curve of high-fired stoneware with a milk-white crackled glaze. Each is decorated with a few seemingly offhand brush strokes that suggest a cobalt flower with translucent leaves. And each has an elegant bulb handle, itself a tiny separately-thrown pot, half closed at the top, with its foot smoothly mated to the curve of the body. The notch is a perfect fit for the thumb web when the bowl is cradled in the palm to feel the warmth within. They are not identical as machine ware, but are meticulously consistent, in the way a quality crafter demonstrates focus and integrity.

They were made as gifts for my mother-in-law, and returned to our hutch on her death a few years back. So whenever I use one now, I think of Annie, and I remember my mother-in-law, Betty, as I turn it slowly in my hand to admire. What would we own and what would we pass over, if this was the standard toward which our desires aspired?