Saved by a Collie

I told a friend a childhood story the other night and she said: "Have you blogged that yet?" Wow I have really infected my friends with this blog. But no I have not told my collie story and I should, so I will.

We grew up with two Blue Merle collies. Kerry was the first and Shane the second. They were each with us about a decade. We got Kerry soon after we moved out of Detroit, so I was just about two at the time. A little over a year later a house was being built across the street from us; the basement had been dug but heavy rains had delayed further work and there was about three feet of standing water in the hole.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon a 3 year old Timothy wandered away and a semi-frantic search was underway when someone spotted the wagging white underside of Kerry's tail through the bushes across the street. They ran over and found me half-in and half-out of the basement hole, a laid out Kerry sprawled across my body with her teeth holding onto my belt. I don't know if I would have drowned, how tall are 3 year olds? Needless to say everyone was happy not to have tested the science of kid and muddy water in a hole.

Those were wonderful dogs, we had cats too of course and as I grew up I became a devoted feline lover but Kerry and Shane hold a special place in my heart, perhaps a bit more special for the collie that may well have saved my life.

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photo: that is a blue merle collie, not one of ours but the closest I could get in an internet search, I wonder if any of my siblings have old photos of those dogs.

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Godwin's Law

I wrote about Godwin's Law way back in January of '07, soon after I had started this here blog. Well it clearly has been too long because I have run into several discussions recently where a good dose of Mr. Godwin's logic would have served all parties well.

Here goes:

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an early principle of Internet dialog or it damn well should be. This sanguine postulation was formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law makes the trenchant observation that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis, Fascists or Hitler approaches one." 


Or to state it less mathematically: some lame ass who can't really think for himself is going to call the other guy a Nazi or a Fascist or even Adolf himself. Sooner or later as the discussion heats up and the flaming begins, someone will pull out this universally overused analogy. Generally the user cannot spell analogy nor pronounce fascist.


Godwin's Law does not dispute whether, in a particular instance, a reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be apt. It is precisely because such a reference or comparison may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued, that overuse of the Hitler/Nazi comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

Although in one of its early forms Godwin's Law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion, electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms and more recently blog comment talk pages. To this I would add any and all group discussions particularly one that involves the potential consumption of large amounts of wine. [Oops, did I give too much away there. Will they know I am writing about them?]

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Imported From Detroit (III)

Ruin Porn brings out some strong responses from both sides of the story. Those who believe that "the city shall rise from the ashes" often feel that those who shoot and publish ruin porn are praying on the city and the citizens at their lowest. The advocates, of course, speak to the art and the documentation of the decline. They aren't anti-renewal but only making visual commentary on the current state of the city. 


The central focus of ruin porn for at least two decades if not more has been Detroit. Sure Cleveland has some crumbling infrastructure and Flint was abandoned by GM as documented by Michael Moore. Anywhere in the country you can get a shot of a decrepit bridge or a dam that will fail in the "next ten years" or so. As a nation we have been woefully negligent of infrastructure and just plain normal maintenance. 


But only in Detroit has ruin porn been taken to the level of high art. And why not, Detroit has been in decline long before the auto industry disappeared. Remember the riots of 1967? White Flight equaled Detroit well before then. The city has been a canvas for decay and abandonment for decades.

The entire range of ruin porn advocates and dissenters is covered with some truly in-depth reporting from Guernica magazine last month in an article titled Detroitism. Not surprisingly there are those who believe Detroit is beginning an urban renaissance; though they don't used that term as it would be harshly contrasted with the Renaissance Center build on Detroit's waterfront in 1977. Others believe that Detroit is in fact that old, grey canary in the mine of industrial collapse of the rust belt. A canary, which by the way, has been lying on the bottom of its cage for decades.


The Guernica article lays out the dichotomy: "Detroit figures as either a nightmare image of the American Dream, where equal opportunity and abundance came to die, or as an updated version of it, where bohemians from expensive coastal cities can the the one-hundred dollar house and community garden of their dreams."


Community gardens indeed, there are serious conversations and even pilot projects to turn vast areas of Detroit into urban farms. Not those vacant lot gardens that dot many urban landscapes but wide fields of urban vegetation to sustain the survivors of the post-industrial wasteland.

There is another article that seeks to attack the purveyors of ruin porn from Vice magazine. It's subtitled: Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff. Nevermind that they use some of the photographs from those lazy journalists to illustrate their story quite effectively, the piece ends with a quote from one of those ruin porn artists they are criticizing: "It's a problem with the culture. I don't know why you'd want to be in China or Russia, because it's happening here. We're in the center of the empire now, and here's where you can see the collapse of the empire starting."


For those who do not fear the photography police finding your ruin porn links. Here are some of the best and most vilified offerings.


Forgotten Detroit is perhaps more of a nostalgia website for those who may actually remember some of these old buildings from their glory days. The photographer is a local and provides interesting historical tidbits.

Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore may be the most well known of the ruin porn books. There is also a streaming PBS piece on his work. This from a positive review:

"Photographer Andrew Moore takes us beyond the individual toll of a failed economy to something more Pompeiian in scope. To an empty city falling in upon itself, in unspeakable tragic beauty. Andrew writes in the book of his own excavations: of a grove of birch trees literally growing from rotting books, of a homeless man frozen head first at the bottom of a flooded elevator shaft, of pheasants with entire city blocks to themselves to roost and nest, of the surreal re-ruralization of what was once America's fourth largest city, now covered in ivy and moss. Moore's spectacular photographs take us to places where the outside has come in and where the inside, quiet and soaring as a cathedral, has become sacred in its desolation."


The other book I must mention is the Ruins of Detroit. A five year collaboration resulted in an at times visually stunning collection of images. This is, if nothing else, the height of ruin porn as seen in the decline of Detroit. From their website:


"Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city's ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire."


And finally, for those who see differently, there is Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City. Here Detroit is seen as a smaller but better city.

"Though the book focuses on Detroit, the challenges outlined here are readily applicable to other, post-industrial cities that are struggling to reimagine themselves in the 21st century. For those interested in cities, particularly in how to turn them around and re-imagine them, there is no better lab than Detroit.

More on the Motor City soon, I have yet to express my own thoughts on the future of Detroit.

Imported from Detroit: Part II
Imported from Detroit: Part I

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M&M Monday - Clothing

You know someone is going to say something about "melts in your mouth not in your hands" . .

. . . but that would clearly be wrong;

because that line obviously goes with this picture.

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A Higher Education

I pose a simple question: What percentage of the population of the United States hold a college degree? The answer will appear below the cyber-fold. I must admit I was surprised by the number. I assume that lots of folks who hold a degree estimate too high, I did a quick unscientific survey of a small group of individuals and found that those who do not have a degree give a slightly lower number but still aim a bit too high.

So you have a clue, your guess is probably too high, so knock off 5% maybe 10% if you have a masters or a doctorate, we know those advanced degrees really schew your perception of reality.

So what was your guess? The answer is that as of 2009, twenty-seven and one-half percent of the adult population holds a college degree.

Here is a very cool interactive map from the Chronicle of Higher Education that shows where these over educated people live. It's a county by county breakdown and here is the really cool part, you can track back from 2009 to 1940. You thought the college numbers were higher today, only 4.6% of the country were college educated in 1940. When I got my B.A. in 1969 the overall number had just reached 10%.

The map also has breakouts by gender, ethnicity and income. Before you leave the map, be sure to set it for 2009 and click the Asian button.

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Circulation of Elites

An academic friend tells the story of being asked about the 'revolution' in Egypt and replying: "It's not a revolution, they aren't changing the government only the names on the masthead." That basically describes the principle known as the Circulation of Elites. Vilfredo Pareto is credited with postulating this theory in the late 1800s. He suggested that political and therefore governmental change is nearly always the result of one elite replacing another. And despite the images on television and the internet it is not clear that Egypt was a popular uprising or simply a popular following of the new elite.

Most of the talk about democracy comes from outside Egypt. It appears what most Egyptians wanted was the removal of a tyrant who had ruled for three decades. Time will tell if any actual governmental or political change will result from the departure of the most recent elite. 

Revolutions, on the other hand, sweep the old regime from power and replace it with a new government. Not always a new form of government and not always a better one for those who were actually in the streets doing the revolting. You could use Cuba as an example to prove either point of view here. But one might better look to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989, where actually governmental change (communist to democratic) did take place and then either did or did not sustain itself depending on your political point of view.

There are those who would argue that bloodless revolution is an oxymoron. Others might look to the old adage 'revolution is the result of a nation pregnant with itself.' Both good solid political arguments, which may or may not speak to what is actually happening in the backrooms throughout the region. What remains to be seen is what actually did happen in Egypt. Was it a revolution? Probably not. Was it a change of elites? Most likely. What will be the eventual outcome? Ah, well there lies the piece for the historians. 

Now what about Bahrain, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Libya and . . .


[It has been pointed out to me by the aforementioned "academic friend" that Ibn Khaldun back in 1377 proposed the theory of the "oscillation of elites," which may be an even more explanatory model as it suggests that elites not only supplant each other but they also recycle (oscillate) and recirculate through the corridors of political power.]

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art - Clay Bennett in The Christian Science Monitor

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Conscious Control of Emotions

Here's the scenario, the scene and the set-up: 


Someone I knew and was voluntarily interacting with had the potential to really mess with my life. History told me this person could easily do something selfish, nasty, even evil. I knew this. When it inevitably happened I reacted as if I knew it were coming . . . because I did - snakes do not change their nature. I had consciously armored myself for this eventuality and dealt with it without emotional upset. I calmly made other plans and moved on.


Then I went to sleep . . . 


We really can learn to control our emotions consciously. We really can't or shouldn't learn to do that with our subconscious. I experienced a night of anxiety, anger and abandonment. It was ever so fascinating because each time I awoke I knew exactly what was going on - my subconscious was processing the selfish betrayal of someone who just isn't worth the price of warm spit to me. That doesn't mean the deep animal brain of my paleolithic ancestors did not want to hack him or her to shreds with a blunt stone axe. But no, I am civilized - I would use a well-honed blade and get the carnage over with quickly.


But no, I am civilized and evolved and I did what properly matured and restrained humanoids do -- triple scoop, hot fudge, no sprinkles.

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