If You Don’t Explore…

A couple days ago, our esteemed colleague Jaquandor posted a rumination on the decline of science education in this country, hinging his thoughts around a lengthy passage from the book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If that name doesn’t ring a bell for you, it’s possible his face might: Tyson is an astrophysicist who has hosted a number of PBS series in recent years. He’s also a tireless advocate of space exploration, and, in the view of many, the true heir to Carl Sagan in terms of being able to explain complex and exotic scientific ideas to a popular audience. (It is probably not coincidental that Tyson has been tapped to host a new version of Sagan’s landmark TV series Cosmos.) In any event, it’s worth reading Jaquandor’s entire post, and the full passage he quotes from Space Chronicles, but I’d like to reprint the segment of that passage I found particularly resonant:

There was a day when Americans would construct the tallest buildings, the longest suspension bridges, the longest tunnels, the biggest dams. You might say, “Well, those are just bragging rights.” Yes, they were bragging rights. But more important, they embodied a mission statement about working on the frontier – the technological frontier, the engineering frontier, the intellectual frontier – about going places that had not been visited the day before. When that stops, your infrastructure crumbles.

There’s a lot of talk about China these days. So let’s talk more about it. We keep hearing about ancient Chinese remedies and ancient Chinese inventions. But when do you hear about modern Chinese inventions? Here are some of the things that the Chinese achieved between the late sixth and late fifteenth centuries AD: They discovered the solar wind and magnetic declination. They invented matches, chess, and playing cards. They figured out that you can diagnose diabetes by analyzing urine. They invented the first mechanical clock, movable type, paper money, and the segmented-arch bridge. They basically invented the compass and showed that magnetic north is not the same as geographic north – a good thing to know when you’re trying to navigate. They invented phosphorescent paint, gunpowder, flares, and fireworks. They even invented grenades. They were hugely active in international trade over that period, discovering new lands and new peoples.

And then, in the late 1400s, China turned insular. It stopped looking beyond its shores. It stopped exploring beyond its then-current state of knowledge. And the entire enterprise of creativity stopped. That’s why you don’t hear people saying, “Here’s a modern Chinese answer to that problem.” Instead they’re talking about ancient Chinese remedies. There’s a cost when you stop innovating and stop investing and stop exploring. That cost is severe. And it worries me deeply, because if you don’t explore, you recede into irrelevance as other nations figure out the value of exploration.

This is the same basic thing I’ve tried to say so many times myself in my own ham-fisted way as I’ve written about the end of the shuttle program and James Cameron’s dive into the real-world abyss and the general indifference and apathy I perceive in so many of the people I encounter… especially younger people. I believe our species became something more than the rest of the hominids the day one of our kind, a hundred thousand years ago, looked to the horizon and wondered what was over there… and then decided to find out instead of just sticking around the familiar hunting grounds. Our country became what it is, in large part, because Americans embodied that same spirit: People wanted to see what was here to be found, and after we’d seen it and settled it and reshaped it (for better or worse), they then wanted to make it better through invention and discovery. We went to the moon for the same reason, to see what was there with our own eyes (as well as, admittedly, to score the bragging rights before the Russians did, but there were plenty of idealists involved in the Space Race, no matter that they got their funding from Cold War politicians). But somehow, in a shockingly short span of time, Americans seem to have lost interest in doing Big Things; we no longer want to spend the money or take the risks, at least not as a collective society. (It remains to be seen whether private enterprise and a handful of wealthy eccentrics can fill the gap.) We’ve redefined “innovation” to mean smaller cellphones and clever new ways of wasting time on them. A significant percentage of Americans now think science is a threat to their religion, or to their profit margins, or simply to their comfortable ideas about the world. We bicker endlessly about the best way to legislate other people’s morality while the highways crumble and our electric grid collapses. And nobody cares because there’s always a big sale on somewhere, and it’s more fun to go shopping for more cheaply made crap we don’t need than to actually think about anything substantive.

In my view, all of this is another way of “turning insular,” to use Tyson’s phrasing. We may not be literally isolating ourselves as the Chinese did in the 15th century, but have no doubt, America is turning away from the horizon and shrinking into itself in a very real way. And, like Tyson, I find this deeply worrying. I am not a particularly nationalistic type; I find the flag-waving, “we’re-number-one” stuff distasteful as hell. Not to mention frequently inaccurate. But I grew up believing my country was in the forefront of certain things — engineering feats, technological advancements, space exploration, general scientific research — and while I may wish this country was more like Europe in certain respects (notably a sensible universal healthcare system and more interest in quality of life than working oneself to death), by Crom, I think the US of A ought to remain in the forefront of those things. And we’re not doing it. We’re not doing it because we glorify ignorance and wealth (especially when the two are combined), and we crave fame more than accomplishment, and we fear anything and everything we don’t understand, and quite frankly, we’re not doing it because pro-science people like myself can’t seem to convince enough of our fellow Americans that church is church and school is school, and, while each has its value, they concern themselves with different things and it’s better that they not be intertwined. I only hope we manage to pull our heads out of our collective rear end before this country completely degenerates into a banana republic watched over at night by the lights from the Chinese moon base…

Jul182012

And Now, For No Particular Reason…

…a photograph of Ernest Hemingway that I rather like:

This was taken in 1947 at his home in Cuba, and I just like the whole vibe here. He looks relaxed and healthy and confident, a larger-than-life man at the top of his game.

Incidentally, if you’re into Papa H, a new edition of A Farewell to Arms was published last week containing all 47 alternate endings he tried out and ultimately abandoned, packaged inside the original cover art. Looks like an interesting volume, although to be honest I haven’t read Farewell since high school and don’t recall being terribly moved by it. Perhaps it’s time to revisit it…

Jul172012

The Reality of Tomorrow

A couple weeks ago, I started following a site (not sure if you could call it a blog or a comic strip or what) called Zen Pencils: Cartoon Quotes from Inspirational Folks, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The proprietor, an artist called Gavin Aung Than, illustrates poems, speeches, witticisms, and observations made by admirable people, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Dalai Lama to Carl Sagan and Neil Gaiman. Normally this wouldn’t really be my thing, cynic that I am, but many of Gavin’s concepts are quite wonderful, and they’re all very well executed, without the sticky schmaltz that so often goes along with would-be inspirational stuff. I especially liked today‘s:

Great imagery in general, and the lighting effect on Goddard’s gravestone as the Saturn V raises the goose pimples on my arms. By coincidence — or maybe not — yesterday was the anniversary of Apollo 11’s launch; this coming Friday, the 20th, will mark 43 years since Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, the one we’re still trying to catch up to. Neat stuff…

Jul172012

So, That Previous Entry…

It was a little too much, wasn’t it? That’s what I’m thinking in retrospect, anyhow. My initial purpose in writing it was simply to vent about a situation that annoys the hell out of me every single year, i.e., the necessity to rope off the front of my property for an entire week because the small-time parades of my childhood have turned into a Big Damn Deal, and I’ve come to really dislike Big Damn Deals as I’ve gotten older. But once I got into the thick of it and tapped into my “Wonder Years voiceover voice” and started trying to spin out some deeper interpretation of what this event was all about, well, I think maybe I fell into my own bellybutton. Sorry about that, kids. I should’ve stuck more to the basic point.

I know I shouldn’t be feeling so abashed over this. It’s really not a bad entry, and it’s also not like I’ve never rambled on a little too much, or gotten a little grandiose in my unfounded claims, or published an entry that was only half-baked, before. Hell, I’ve been blogging almost a decade now; they can’t all be gems, can they? But lately, I’ve been been having so much trouble finding the time for this silly hobby — you may have noticed how infrequent my posts have become — that I guess I just want everything to be a home run to make up for the lack of production, you know? I read so many wonderful, insightful, sharp, powerful things out there on the ‘webs, and I want my own stuff to be like that. But very often, perhaps even most of the time, I know I fall short. And it bothers me. Deeply.

There are other frustrations as well. This used to be so easy, and so fun. I could dash off a thousand words on a moment’s notice about nothing at all, and feel satisfied that it was good. Or at least amusing. At least amusing to me. But now… now when I do manage to start writing something here, the words come so slowly and with such effort… it’s like I’ve run out of things to say, or worse, run out of whatever special thing I had inside that allowed me to say them. My mojo, for lack of a better word. And I fear that it might be a permanent loss. I fear it’s a sign I’m getting old, that a window is closing.

As pathetic as I’m afraid this is going to sound, I have to admit it: Simple Tricks and Nonsense is the last remaining vestige of the dreams I used to have of being a genuine creative writer, and to feel like I’m now losing even this… well, “frustrating” isn’t a big enough word to cover it. Neither is “shattering” or “terrifying.” What are you left with when the thing you’ve used to define yourself, the one idea that you’ve clung to in your deepest heart-of-hearts, ever since you were 15 years old finally slips away? I really don’t want to find out…

***

Incidentally, I wasn’t exaggerating about the inconsiderate jackasses leaving behind their garbage after the parade. A broken plastic lawn chair has been lying on the property line between my front yard and the senior-citizens’ rec center next door for two weeks now. The groundskeeping crew for the senior center won’t dispose of it, because, apparently, that’s not in their job description. And obviously the owner of said chair just assumes somebody else will take care of it for them. God forbid they should take responsibility for their own crap. And you wonder why I get so pissed off when the placemarkers start going up for that simple little small-town Fourth of July parade?

Jul032012

Get Off My Lawn! (Literally!)

When I was a boy, I thought living on the route of my hometown’s Fourth of July parade was just great. (Why, yes, I did like Frosted Flakes as a boy. Why do you ask?) But then, things were different then.

For one thing, the parades were held in the morning, and on the actual holiday, rather than on the evening of the day before as they are now. In those halcyon days of the mid-1970s, Riverton was just a sunbaked farm town where the local good ol’ boys whiled away their mornings over cups of joe and slow-burning butts at the counter of the local cafe, and there were as many tractors and combines running up and down the main drag as pickups and cars. Back then, our Independence Day revels began at dawn with the sounding of the yellow, barrel-shaped air-raid siren that used to be crouched on top of a telephone pole behind the town hall. Which just happened to be kitty-corner across the street from my house. If you’ve never heard one of those things, take it from me, there isn’t a living creature on this planet that could sleep through their unholy Banshee’s wail. I remember sitting straight up in bed with my heart hammering away inside my rib cage, year after year, and my dad answering the Banshee with an eruption of profanity that would have left human-shaped shadows singed into the walls, atomic-bomb style, if anyone had been unfortunate enough to be standing at the foot of his bed. After a couple minutes of this clamour, the siren would fall silent, and then, while our ears were still ringing, along came the old sound truck. This was a green 1950s-vintage panel truck with four huge, horn-shaped PA speakers mounted on the roof. The driver — I’m sure my parents could tell me the guy’s name, as he was undoubtedly one of those good ol’ boys from the cafe — would be yammering away over the speakers, exhorting everyone in town to get up and come on down to the city park for an old-fashioned pancake breakfast. My dad usually had some very specific ideas about what that guy could do with his pancakes; I don’t recall my parents or me ever going to that community cookout. The three-person Bennion clan always made our own holiday breakfasts.

Then it was time to get ready for the parade. Dad would put our lawn chairs out in front while most of the townsfolk were still wandering toward the park in search of pancakes, but I don’t recall there ever being any particular sense of urgency about it. Nobody would think of squatting on a lawn that didn’t belong to them, at least not without asking permission, or at least not until the parade was underway and everything became fair game. Around nine o’clock or so in the morning, the normally busy road in front of my house would become eerily still. And about 45 minutes later (the parade has always started about a mile from my house and it takes a while for the slow-moving procession to reach the Bennion Compound), the floats and marching bands and horseback companies and fire engines would begin to stream past. Teenaged beauty queens beamed at their neighbors, salt-water taffy and little boxes of Chiclets and Bazooka Joe rained down on the children lining the street, and the same antique cars and novelty acts we saw every bloody year would roll past, and the spectators would wave and clap and smile as if it were the first time. These parades of my hazy, sepia-toned memories comprised our friends, our neighbors, people we knew… they were family, often in a literal sense — it was a small town, after all — but always in a metaphorical one. Back then, the parade was a ritual that seemed to actually mean something; it wasn’t just a way to occupy the kiddies with gathering free candy for an hour (although that was certainly an aspect of it). The parade reinforced a sense of belonging to something: a place, a community, a town. And when it ended, there were old-fashioned, homespun activities all day in the park, cheesy midway games and hamburger grills and plastic wading pools filled with iced watermelon and friendly horseshoe-pitching competitions, all of it leading up to the big finale, the fireworks that would fill the sky just after sundown. Rude awakening aside, Riverton’s Fourth of July used to be a pretty low-key, and yet thoroughly satisfying, affair. It was cornball, yes, but it was also organic and homegrown, and it was good.

That’s how it used to be.

Today, I still live in the same old house, and the parade still passes right in front of it, but practically everything else has changed. Riverton is now just another anonymous suburb, with a population several times the size of what it was during my childhood. And our small-town Independence Day is now such a Big Damn Deal that it has to spread itself across two days instead of one. Now, instead of fun and games provided by the Lion’s Club and the local church wards and the familiar good ol’ boys, there’s a traveling carnival every year at the park, and concession stands selling national-chain fast food, and the fireworks are electronically synchronized and spectacular. Everything about the Fourth is bigger and more professional now, more sophisticated… and somehow it’s less than it was, too. It feels… commercial. Store-bought. It isn’t ours anymore, it’s just something we ordered on Amazon. As for living on the parade route… well, that’s turned into a royal pain in the tuchus. The fun little small-town event that used to bring us closer together has metastasized into an overblown, stress-filled competition in which inconsiderate jackasses will do whatever they can to ensure themselves a seat, because there are now so damn many people living in this town and everyone wants to bring their kids to the parade for that free candy, but the route is still only a mile long, and seats are a precious commodity. People start staking their claims with chairs and coolers and yellow caution tape days before the parade — this year, they made their appearance a full week ahead of timet — and people just leave them there all up and down the road, unwatched eyesores, to mark their territory. The competition doesn’t end there, though; I’ve personally witnessed soccer moms jump out of their SUVs, toss aside someone else’s chairs, and set up their own in the same spot. The whole sad, sorry spectacle makes my stomach turn. It’s just a damn parade, people.

I don’t remember when this whole thing became such a BDD. It’s come on slowly, over the space of a couple decades, like that tired old saw about the frog in the pot of water that’s gradually heating up. I only know that for at least the past decade, I have been obligated to set out my own chairs at the first sign that the land-grab is beginning, or risk having squatters we don’t know and didn’t invite plant their crap in my park strip for seven days. Because they would, without a second’s thought. It isn’t that I mind sharing my frontage with others — hell, given my work and commute schedule, I don’t even get home until the stupid parade is half over, so somebody may as well use the space — but I do mind the way people don’t even bother to ask. They just swoop in and drop their junk and expect you to put up with their placeholders sitting on your property for a week, and then they and their rambunctious little carpet monkeys show up for the party you didn’t want to throw, and they get huffy as hell if you ask them to make room for you and your own invited guests, or request that they not make a hellacious mess with their Subway wrappers and Super Big Gulps and juice boxes. And inevitably when it’s all over, they leave behind a pile of garbage that I have to pick up and put in my bin, because these disrespectful freaking slobs apparently don’t see anything wrong with expecting strangers to clean up after them.

And I guess that’s the difference… in the ’70s, most everybody in town knew each other, or at least knew of each other. There weren’t that many people here, and we interacted with each other pretty regularly, so you couldn’t really get away with being an ass. Today we’re all mostly strangers, isolated in our cul de sacs and our hermetically sealed vehicles, and our hermetically sealed lives that mostly happen far away from the places where we cook and sleep. Nobody really cares anymore about inconveniencing somebody else, because they’re not likely to bump into you at the grocery store, and even if they do, they won’t recognize you. With a population count of nearly 40,000, how could it be otherwise?

The ironic thing is that the damn parade isn’t even any good anymore. It’s degenerated into little more than a long line of politicians in convertibles and jacked-up 4x4s with the names of businesses on their sides, and wave after wave of military and law-enforcement vehicles. It’s almost enough to make me want to stay at the office and put in some overtime…

Jul022012

Further Friend Pimpage

Following in the path of the previous entry, I thought I’d quickly note some recent accomplishments by a couple of my other friends:

I’ve known Mike Gillilan since our days tearing tickets and running 35mm film projectors together at good ol’ Movies 7 (later Movies 9, after the addition of a couple more auditoriums), way back in the early ’90s. He was an accomplished photographer even then — he took some of my favorite pics of myself from that time period, several of which I have hanging on the wall of my living room — and now he’s teetering on the razor’s edge of finally going pro. He’s particularly interested in high-performance cars and Le Mans-style racing, and he’s currently a contributor to a motorsports blog called The Daily Derbi. Got all that? Okay, well, last week, Mike posted an image he took of a Honda Fit doing its thing in the Pirelli World Challenge to the Daily Derbi’s Weekend Wallpaper feature (Mike’s regular gig with the Derbi). Not long after that, the official Honda racing team, a.k.a. Honda Performance Development, tweeted a link to Mike’s photo. Way to get noticed, man!
Meanwhile, another friend, Melissa Warner, is part of a musical group called The Royal We (official Facebook page here). With an acoustic sound built on the vocal harmonies of Melissa and bandmate Stacey Board, they’re somewhat reminiscent of Shawn Colvin, and they’ve now got a six-song EP available for download at CD Baby. Go test drive a couple of tracks and see what you think!

That is all for now. Man, I really need to get cracking and do something worth pimping for myself…

Jun272012

I Knew Her When…

Longtime readers (and certainly my Facebook friends and Twitter followers) may have noticed that I sometimes have a tendency to gripe about my job. Occasionally. From time to time. Okay, often. That’s because… well, because it’s what I do. I’m the sort who vents about the things that irritate me, rather than bottling it all up, and lots of things irritate me during the course of your average day. Not to mention what it’s like on not-average days, which seem to come up in my line of employment with distressing frequency, especially during the warmer months, when the livin’ is supposed to be easy — or so we’ve been led to believe — but for some reason always seem to be the most hectic time of the year for me. You know, The Girlfriend and I are currently making our way through the original Twilight Zone, the classic TV series created by Rod Serling that ran from 1959 to ’64 (as opposed to the various revival attempts of more recent years) and I find it grimly amusing that so far in Season One alone, there’ve been two episodes dealing with stressed-out advertising executives who yearn for escape to a simpler, slower-paced, more humane way of life. I don’t know if Serling ever worked in advertising himself, but he definitely understood the environment. I can’t tell you how many days I have when I basically feel just like this:(In case you’re wondering, that animation comes from a really great blog called This Advertising Life, which seeks to convey “the emotions of a working life in advertising as told through gifs.” I don’t know how funny it might be for civilians who don’t work in the industry, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s dead-on-target ROTFL time. Browse through it a little bit and perhaps you’ll begin to understand why I get so frazzled and grumpy.)

Believe it or not, though, I really don’t dislike my job, despite the impression I probably give with all the bitching. I often get insanely frustrated with it, true, but in the big-picture view, there are actually a lot of great things about working where I do, and I know I don’t talk enough about those things. For example, in the almost-seven years I’ve been with this particular agency, I have met an astounding number of smart, creative, interesting, quirky, funny, extremely cool (and frequently very attractive, which is a nice bonus) human beings. I’ve even been fortunate enough to become friends with some of these people, and by “friends” I mean the sort of people who actually welcome you into their homes and introduce you to their children and pets.

One such person is a lovely woman named Diane Olson. Her background is in journalism, but her passion is in the natural world, specifically the things that live in her (and everybody else’s) own backyard. (I’m pretty confident I’m not likely to ever meet anyone who knows more about gardening than Diane.) For 17 years, she combined these aspects of her character to produce a regular column called “Urban Almanac” for Catalyst magazine, Salt Lake’s local alternative monthly. Then, in an completely unexpected bolt from the blue about two years ago, she was approached by a local publishing house about turning that column into a full-length book. It took her much wailing and gnashing of teeth to crank it out while also holding down a demanding agency gig, but somehow she pulled it off, and now, finally, that book is available for everyone reading this to purchase!

A Nature Lover’s Almanac: Kinky Bugs, Stealthy Critters, Prosperous Plants & Celestial Wonders is a nifty little volume of collected science factoids and gardening tips, one for each day of the year, some of which are truly obscure and mind-boggling. For instance, did you know grasshoppers are at their loudest when the air is 95 degrees, and they can’t sing at all below 62? (That’s the entry for August 19th; it’s a small thing, but it fascinates me… I mean, why?) The book is sized like a pocket field guide, with rounded corners so it’ll slide in and out of your pocket easily and a sturdy flat binding, and it’s beautifully illustrated by another Catalyst alum, Adele Flail. If you have any interest at all in nature or in growing things — or even if you just enjoy looking at something fun and breezy over breakfast every morning — I highly recommend it.

Diane told me once it’s been her lifelong dream to write a book and see her name on a shelf at her local library; she’s positively giddy now that it’s happened, and I am very, very happy for her. She’s managed to do what pretty much every copywriter (and certainly this particular proofreader) in the advertising business aspires to do: she’s become a published author. And the least I can do for my friend is congratulate her and give her a plug with whatever modest audience I happen to reach with this forum. If you think you might be interested in A Nature Lover’s Almanac, you can see all the details about it on the publisher’s page here, and you can order it through Amazon.com here.

Oh, one final note: I don’t think Diane will mind if I note that I helped out with the book’s title. The “celestial wonders” part was my suggestion. And yes, I’m pretty proud of that… now what are you waiting around here for? Go buy yourself a copy! (I have two copies myself!)

Jun192012

Tourist Traps of the Future

James Lileks. His Daily Bleat was one of the first blogs I ever encountered, well over 10 years ago — man, that’s hard to process, that I’ve been reading blogs for over a decade — and I’ve been a more-or-less faithful reader ever since. But I have to confess, there have been times when I’ve been tempted to walk away from him for good. While I share his affinity for mid-20th century ephemera, architecture, and culture, he can be so bloody confounding at times. I disagree with his politics, and find him pretty unbearable when he veers into that domain; his frequent schtick of transcribing customer service encounters in minute detail has grown tiresome; his hatred of all things 1970s is tedious (I actually quite liked that decade; it was a good time to be a child); and his curmudgeonly attitude sometimes gets to be a little too much even for me, a fellow member of the august tribe of misanthropic “get off my lawn” types.

But then, just when I’m ready to pull the plug, he goes and writes something like this (he’s referring to last week’s news that the Voyager 1 space probe, launched in the landmark year 1977, is finally crossing the threshold from our solar system into interstellar space):

I’d like to think it’s not the last we’ve seen of it. If we build fast engines and get out there someday, someone will go looking for it. But it would be wrong to bring it home; that’s not its place. It would be a tourist attraction, like the ruins of an old colonial fort from the 17th century. Pass alongside, snap a picture: if you’ll look out the portside windows, we’re passing Voyager 1, which has a record containing the music of Chuck Berry and Beethoven. What haunts me is the idea that it will never be found, the record never be heard, and long after the sun has guttered out, the idea of Beethoven, unrealized, floats in an empty void, an arrangement of code.

As a would-be writer, I envy that paragraph. It’s an idea I wish I’d had, expressed more eloquently than I know I probably would. And as a space buff and a die-hard romantic, it makes me wistful. It’s a vision that I hope comes true. I can see it so clearly in my imagination: hundreds of passengers lining a futuristic version of a modern-day cruise ship’s promenade railing, pressing against floor-to-ceiling viewports that have been uncovered for just this occasion, straining to catch a glimpse of a historical treasure. The anticipation builds. A couple of people point excitedly at spots that turn out to be nothing at all, false sightings. Then the ship’s officers helpfully announce over the speakers where the crowd should look… and there it is, the legendary Flying Dutchman of space… a tiny, fragile-looking thing, pitted and scoured by centuries of exposure to interstellar dust and micrometeorites, glistening faintly like a dragonfly in the glare of the liner’s external floodlights. Its nuclear powercells are going cold, its transmitter no longer calls home, but somehow, improbably, it’s still going — still voyaging — ever outward…

I wish I could be there to see it, to experience a passage like that. Now that would be something to write about…

Jun152012

Of Course, It’s Ironic…

…that I set up dlvr.it today in order to push notifications of new blog entries all over the place when I’m currently doing such a lousy job of actually writing new blog entries. Sigh. In lieu of any actual new content, please enjoy this somewhat-relevant musical trifle:

Jun152012

Test Post

Just trying out dlvr.it. Do not be alarmed.

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