I was looking up something about flowcharts the other day and found this illustration on Wikipedia.
There's a Mr. Fixit in our house, so there would be a lot more yellow diamonds between "no, the bulb is not burned out" and "buy new lamp."
In other household news, I'm ready to stop being the home nurse now.
Sick 20-year-old, sitting by the fire: "Can I have some toast?"
Me: "Yes."
20-year-old continues to sit there, wrapped in a blanket.
Me: "So go make yourself some toast. It will be good for you to move around."
20-year-old zombie-walks slowly across the living room and into the kitchen to the bread drawer, sighing, slowly unwraps the loaf of bread, sighing, stands there still wrapped in the blanket, clutching a slice of bread, looking at the counter in front of her, where there are two appliances, a toaster and a toaster oven, right next to each other.
Now that Laura's better from a probable case of swine flu, it's Anna's turn to come home sick from her school and internship in the Boston area. It's a fairly dramatic version of mononucleosis, the doctor thinks, complete with sore throat swelling almost shut, swollen glands and aching joints, and a swollen liver. The home nursing department is finding its resources a little stretched.
Husband left this morning for Miami then Caracas, Venezuela, the Murder Capital of the World, where Chavez, like Castro in Cuba, is doing much good for his people - according to some of my least favorite Hollywood filmmakers. It's a rather dull layover, since it is unsafe to leave the hotel.
I have a couple more phone calls then will finish conjuring an article for NH mag on ice skating, due Wednesday. Just finished a sidebar on how to make a backyard ice rink. Excellent interview yesterday with a local guy heading with his team to the World Pond Hockey Championship in New Brunswick again this February. Some people really know how to make the most of winter.
The sun is shining today - stormy Ida is good and gone. Happy Monday.
Fats Domino always looks happy when he sings the blues.
I drove north on Route 1A this morning, on my way to the gym to gerbil wheel my way to fitness. This photo was taken south of Petey's Summertime Seafood Restaurant, looking north at the last house on that little peninsula.
There were surfers at Bass and Jenness Beaches and a few intrepid runners on the roads. Marshes were in full flood. Waves were washing over the Rye Harbor breakwater jetties.
The rain is finally fizzling out and temps have climbed to the upper 50's.
There were as many opinions as panelists Thursday when executives from
nine daily New Hampshire newspapers gathered to discuss what the future
of newspapers will be, if one exists at all.
The gist of the article seems to be that they couldn't agree what was wrong or what to do about it. Although if I were them and I had an idea about making my newspaper more popular, lucrative, and competitive, I sure wouldn't tell the other guys.
"This will pass," said Ed Domaingue, vice president of news at The New
Hampshire Union Leader. "We've survived events like this certainly in
prior times and we will go forward. However, at the same time, we're
engaged in shooting ourselves in the head" by giving away content for
free online.
"Fortunately we're bad shots," he added.
Charging for online content would, however, be a good shot in the head.
Here is a sentence that needs a wooden stake driven through its heart:
The specter of more cuts that could leave newsrooms with fewer
reporters to ferret out stories that uphold their role as watchdogs is
a chilling possibility, panelists said.
Or maybe it was meant to give readers the sense that newsrooms are turning into spooky haunted houses with a few ferreting watchdogs on guard.
One (former) editor was quoted: "Newspapers are dying, but the news isn't dying."
Christie argued that nothing is like feeling the actual paper, which is one thing the web can’t offer its consumers.
Actual paper?? If that's the one thing newspapers can offer that the web can't, then there's only one thing I can say...
Part of the problem, as reported in the UNH newspaper, is that young people aren't reading newspapers anymore.
“We can lecture them on why it is important to read the newspapers till
we are blue in the face,” Kincade said. “But they are going to do what
they want to do.”
Kids these days.
When my kids open their laptops, they get most of their
information, entertainment and community connection through social
media and favorite websites. They favor visual communication. Their attention spans are short. They like humor and irreverence. Their sense
of irony is well-developed. And we're all becoming more like them.
What local newspapers have that people want - and can't get just anywhere on the internet for free - is not paper, it's place. Their reporters and photographers are "on location." They have local connections, local knowledge and immediate access.
Sometimes stories happen that the whole world would like to know about, or people with common interests but diverse locations like submariners, or fans of a certain band, or stormwatchers, or people who cannot resist clicking through to Odd News. And when a story goes viral, the site traffic can (I imagine) be lucrative... if the advertising department is thinking globally as well as locally with online ads, and people at the paper know how and where to promote their content. And maybe this can help pay for covering important but less glamorous local news?
Also, there are people who have a sentimental connection to a certain place though they do not live there. Yesterday my husband was reading the Cape Cod Times and said to me, "Hey, a giant ocean sunfish washed up on the beach in Dennis."
Here is a video of it from CapeCast, the official webcast of Cape Cod Times. A bespectacled, buffalo-plaid-jacketed reporter, talking over the wind, cheerfully tells the camera: Time for another episode of 'What's that dead thing on the beach?'
Saturday morning along the Seacoast of New Hampshire. The self-appointed Inspectors of Storms and the conscientious Watchers of the Waves reported for duty all along the coast in their pickup trucks or Subaru Outbacks, with to-go cups of coffee in hand.
The remains of Tropical Storm Ida are dumping heavy rain on us all day, today and tonight. Onshore winds and building seas, plus astronomical high tide bring splashover and coastal flooding. Next high tide is around 9 p.m.
Little River Marsh near the Rt. 1A culvert, North Hampton.
The last of the leaves are blowing off the trees in our front yard today, even the oaks and the river birches. Now is the bare, cold, gray and brown and often white half of the year.
Console me with stuffing and gravy, and multi-color chasing-action mini-lights on the biggest tree we can fit through the front door. The TV we bought last Christmas pays off this month.
Camille Paglia praises Pelosi for proving women can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in politics as men and then cuttingly eviscerates Pelosicare...
As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where
to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the
U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor
and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal
for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive
bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see
that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy
would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us
all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty
dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers
without making due provision for the production of more healthcare
providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de
facto rationing.
Yep.
A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the
most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices:
portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert
business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping
consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare
bill is worth the paper it's printed on when the authors ostentatiously
exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress
want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they
themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish
federal health plan. Hypocrites!
And why are we even
considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is
struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It's as if liberals are
starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or
predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their
utopian fantasies. Republicans, on the other hand, have basically sat
on their asses about healthcare reform for the past 20 years and have
shown little interest in crafting legislative solutions to social
inequities. The usual GOP floater about private medical savings
accounts is a crock -- something that, given the astronomical costs of
major medical crises, would be utterly unworkable for families of even
average household income.
International models of
socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations
that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and
negatives in their system as in ours. So what's the point of this
trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than
claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying
the entire U.S. medical infrastructure. Limited, targeted reforms can
ban gouging and unfair practices and can streamline communications now
wastefully encumbered by red tape. But insurance companies and the
pharmaceutical industry are not the sole cause of mounting healthcare
costs, and constantly demonizing them is a demagogic evasion.
How
dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is
based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal
abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have
expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare,
certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal
commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan
ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind.
Last week's
startling gubernatorial victories by Republicans in Virginia and New
Jersey were routinely dismissed as local aberrations by the liberal
media or inflated as referendums on President Obama by the conservative
media. But voters were clearly revolting against the deranged excess
spending of government at both state and federal levels. So it was as
much a protest against Congress as against the White House.
