Return of the ringbearers (and the flower girl)

Along with their Mom, I met me weary little Weir travelers at SFO this afternoon, and we headed straight downtown to Men's Wearhouse, where the boys got fitted for tuxedos for their roles in the upcoming wedding, now a week away.



The clerks, two girls, got a kick out of the boys. Aidan is an inch taller than the shorter one, who said she is 5'3". Dylan's probably around 4'10" but his long, bushy, curly red hair makes him look taller than he actually is.



Our little flower girl got silver heels to go with her impossibly white dress; I'm sorry but I did not get a good photo of her today.



The nicest thing about our big, sprawling extended family is that pretty much everyone close to any of us individually ends up inside the circle. A circle of Weirs, which, if life were a river, might present a daunting prospect. But we also are an independent lot, given to bouts of instability or extreme activism...insanity is a word that comes to mind.

***

Tonight, I read through a list of those who have recently left their jobs at the San Francisco Chronicle, most, it is presumed, either laid off, or having euphemistically "taken the buyout." It's a list of who's who at Fifth & Mission, or at least who's been who there for decades. It's difficult to appreciate the extent of the newspaper industry collapse until you can put it in personal terms.

The names and faces of the victims are listed here, at Blog of remembrance . But, whatever you may have thought of the Chronicle, which in my case was not much, it is now a hall of echoes and a room of shadows.

The old days are gone and they won't be back again. Many of these reporters and editors have reached an age they will effectively retire now. A few may brave the wilds of the Internet, where I've ben wandering this past decade or so.

Of course, as each old world dies, a new one is born. Stay tuned, in coming weeks, as I sketch my concept of what the world needs now, from those of us who consider ourselves journalists.

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Warm Night's Party

The wedding season has begun; guests are arriving from all over the world. Yesterday was shopping, cooking and partying day -- the weather was perfect, hot all day and warm all night.



As usual, I cooked enough for a battalion, when a brigade is what showed up. Not to worry: Lots of leftovers for lots of mouths.



The garden was just bursting with ripeness; everything blooms in this weather.



Young people, in the 20s and 30s, laugh so much more than oldsters in our 50s and 60s. We smile at them, their beauty and vitality, but the truth is something is usually hurting in us, often more than one thing.

Those in the 40s alternate their moods, caught, as they are, in their inevitable mid-life crises.



The stock market is soaring. Apple closed the week just about a quarter-point under $138. With real estate stalling, I guess all that money people have has to be parked somewhere.



I want to be a farmer...



...to grow things.



...and to be a more active part of the web of life.

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Creativity's Modest Origins

We live in an era when "creatives" are segregated from ordinary people, thought of as either crazy, gifted, or valuable but also a pain in the ass.



Before, I go where I want to go with this thought, I must eat, or at least discuss eating, Japanese style. These are quail eggs: Yum!



This is Oshinko, pickled cucumber: Yum!



This my little rose growing out front.



This is the sweet basil I've been raising; it's getting to the harvesting stage.

***

Now, to the main point:

LONDON (AFP) — Underwear underpins the spread of Western culture, with discarded underpants ranking alongside the invention of printing in the spread of literacy, according to a medieval historian.

Delegates at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, northern England, were told that social migration from rural to urban areas in the 13th century brought with it changes in attire.

Whereas rough and ready peasants thought little of wearing nothing under their smocks, the practice became frowned upon in the burgeoning towns and cities, leading to a run on undergarments.

And when the underwear was worn out, it provided a steady supply of material used by papermakers to make books.

"The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags," Marco Mostert, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and one of the conference organizers, said this week.

"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books.

"In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased -- which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making."

The invention of the movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century is generally credited with spreading learning.

But Mostert said that although literacy did not become widespread until the 19th century, it was more common in the Middle Ages than many believe because of cheap paper made from rags.

© 2007 AFP
Copyright © 2003-2007 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.

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Present at the birth

Perhaps the hardest things for any of us to realize when we are witnessing them in real time is the emergence of what historians will eventually conclude were revolutionary moments.

Bear with me. This post is about two subjects that may at first seem unrelated, almost comically so. One is the evolution of language, a subject long close to my heart.

The second is children's media habits, and how we, their parents, can best help them navigate their sped-up, multimedia environment without losing their souls in the process.

I'll start this with two recent reports that caught my eye, the first from Harvard that proclaims that "Most U.S. teens, young adults, don't follow the news closely." Reuters Story.

"(The) Harvard University study finds that 60% of young people pay little attention to daily news. One reason teenagers may pay less attention to news than older Americans is only one in 20 young people rely heavily on a daily newspaper, according to the survey. It also found that radio is an underestimated source of news for Americans of all ages."

Now, this is anecdotal evidence, not scientific, but I have been conducting an informal query of my 11 and 12-year-old sons, to try and determine how aware they are of each day's major stories. What amazes me is that they almost always are aware of the major stories of the day.

In both their mom's house and mine they are exposed to various media -- the daily newspaper, for example (and the New York Times on Sundays), but the only section that seems to catch their attention is the comics, which (forgive me) I have never bothered reading my entire life.

But the part of the Harvard study that may explain why my young boys stay on top of the news is that both their mother and I play NPR in our houses and cars with a great deal of regularity. I believe that many times they pick up news from our local station, KQED, while being driven to school, or while eating breakfast, etc.

The other study I wish to draw attention to was conducted by a former colleague of mine at Stanford, Prof. Donald Roberts, and his team. Don has studied kids and media for a long time -- over 40 years -- and he is recognized as one of the premier experts in this field. I'll never forget the speech he gave one year at graduation when I was a visiting professor at Stanford about how many more media messages reach our kids today than ever reached us when we were young.

He is the lead author on a recent report for the Kaiser Family Foundation, available via Children & Media Report . In the past fives years, according to this report, the percentage of kids with access to the Internet in their homes has exploded from 47% to 74%!

This is simply a continuation of a longer-term trend. Back in 1999, when Prof. Roberts et. al., first studied the media habits of U.S. youth for the KFF, they were shocked to learn that two-thirds of American kids aged 8-18 had televisions in their bedrooms!

In addition, back there in the last year of the last century, the researchers were surprised to learn that children were already using two or more media simultaneously 16% of the time -- in other words, one out of six kids was already a serious multi-tasker.

The new study documents what IMHO is the most important change since the turn of the Millennium: IM. If you don't already do it, please open an account (they're free) at MSN or Yahoo or even via Google's gmail and try this out. The world of IM (instant messaging) has superceded email, which of course superceded snail mail.

What is fascinating is the new language that is emerging. More than a decade ago, I speculated that, thanks to email, capital letters would be disappearing from the English language.

Now, in the age of IM, I realize spelling will be changing as well. My messages exchanged with younger people, including my kids, contain all sorts of shortcuts:

WB (write back)
HRU (how are you?)
GTG (got to go)

This is a small sampling of the new english that is emerging via the web. It is somewhat strange to consider that all of the writing we have done in my time on earth, these past six decades, will be seen as an antiquated form much as that (in our eyes) of Chaucer, the father of English literature.

Maybe, therefore, e.e.cummings will have his last laugh?

gtg

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Summery Summary

So, here's the deal.

My oldest child is getting married in 11 days. She and my second-oldest daughter (along with her 6-month-old son) plus their mother (my first wife) are all staying in a friend's house on Bernal Hill. As it happens, they are directly across the street from the house where my second wife lives. (Our three young kids are in Connecticut, at their grandparents.) My soon-to-be second son-in-law is back in Chile from Africa and flying to San Francisco tomorrow, so the wedding planning is in high gear around here.

My third-oldest child, and oldest son, just celebrated his birthday down where he studies and works at Cal Tech. His girlfriend drove down to be with him on his birthday; she lives up here. He's flying up Friday night to Oakland; his girlfriend will pick him up and then come over to my house, where my recently arrived Japanese friend and I will cook a fish-and-chicken dinner.

Later that night, my first son-in-law arrives. On Saturday, my little guys arrive, i.e., my second oldest son, third-oldest son, and third oldest daughter. (I probably should be using "eldest," but we speak in a rough dialect of English on this continent, as you know.)

Let's see: Where was I?

Oh yes, my ex-cousin-in-law, who recently visited and left some lovely, small antiques from his travels in Central Asia to my keeping, is hoping to return here for the wedding. He is now busily studying Buddhism and will bring several monks with him.

My grandson is probably oblivious to all this fuss, other than as we gather, we all cluster around him to admire his good looks, his curiosity, and his contagious smile. Little James, as he is universally known, is the life of every party he attends.

My Japanese sweetie has a friend who owns a restaurant, and yesterday she called to tell me he had given her a large amount of halibut. She said she would be freezing most of it, but I tried to suggest that she keep some "fresh" so we could eat it when I got home from work.

Cross-linguistic challenges over cell phones being as they are, she misunderstood me and thought I wanted to have "sushi" from this fish. "No, no, we cannot have sushi. These are parts of the fish I don't know whether Americans eat. They are the fish heads, for example, which we Asians like to eat in soup."

Suddenly, I envisioned my house filled with fish heads, they eyes staring glossily out at me, helplessly, hopelessly, and most unappetizingly.

Eventually, we worked out that I just hoped to help cook some fresh fish, and the fish heads were not really the disgusting parts I imagined, but (how to put this delicately?) the lower face and neck, more or less, and skinned, without scales or any surface features.

Feeling better, we went about our tasks. She blanched all the fish, eliminating most of their smell, and then carefully prepared them in different packages for freezing. I did my Editor in Chief thing, then made my way north courtesy of my buddy Mark.

My daughters and their mother have been using my car as they shop for rings and other items, because Plan A failed. Under Plan A, my oldest son had left his car here for them to use this month. But his car died on the Bay Bridge, with them all inside, even Little James. Thanks to Caltrans, they were pushed safely off the bridge, and towed to the mechanic, which is a few blocks from my house.

(It is a side story, but this car used to belong to my ex-girlfriend who obtained it through the efforts of her ex-boyfriend, and sold it to my son when she got her new peppercorn Mini in 2005. All three owners have taken the car for service to the same mechanic, so even as ownership changes, the care remains constant.)

It appears that car needs a clutch.

***

This may be an odd post, but it is mainly my way of working out all the things on my mind. I tend to locate myself in the middle of the arcs involving all the people around me -- at work, at home, and throughout our common cybersphere. As I consider what everyone is doing, who is coming and who is going, and how we all are related (or not) to each other, a kind of mental spreadsheet fills itself in, and I may be able to sleep at night.

Or maybe not. I'm a worrywart from way back, so all this action evokes anxiety as well as joy. Plus I miss my little kids so much that no matter what is going well, and who is around me, I feel incomplete until they return.

Such is the world of "Hotweir." Looks like a thunderstorm is approaching. Wouldn't that be something, just in time for the All Star Game tonight! It never thunderstorms in San Francisco, just like it never snows.

Except when it does.

And, BTW, fish head soup is delicious!

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Cleaning up our collective mess from the '60s

Like many of those who marched in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, I have been thrilled to see a new generation of prosecutors reopen some of the long unsolved crimes of that era, especially the series of attempts to solve murders of African-Americans and their white supporters in the South during that violent era.

Unlike many others, I have also been pleased to see the purported leftists from groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and their fellow travelers held accountable for some of their heinous crimes.

But there is a next step that must be taken, and that, at this writing, remains undone. I was reminded today once again of the unfairness of one particularly unnecessary and brutal killing -- that of Betty Van Patter, in December 1974.

The reminder came in the form of an excellent article in the Los Angeles Times, LAT story, written by David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Cambridge University, author of "Bearing the Cross," a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

He lauded the recent Congressional vote to approve the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which would authorize up to $13.5 million a year in new federal spending for investigations into "cold case" killings like that of Till, a black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after supposedly whistling at a white woman.

Garrow writes, "These better-late-than-never prosecutions are certainly laudable; such horrendous crimes should not go unpunished. But there is a problem. Entirely overlooked in Congress' consideration of the present bill is the way it unthinkingly adopts two of the most widespread but nonetheless false myths about the civil rights movement: that it took place only in the South and that it ended in the late 1960s."

He further notes that "those (Black) Panther apparatchiks who were responsible for the December 1974 disappearance of party bookkeeper Betty Van Patter, an idealistic white leftist who had discovered Panther financial shenanigans and whose battered body was found in San Francisco Bay" remain unpunished.

Thank you, Mr, Garrow, for properly setting the context of Ms. Van Patter's death. She, too, was a civil rights hero, though one very few have yet come to recognize. Bringing those responsible for her death to justice would finally help to heal the untreated wounds of an era when those purportedly working to make things better exploited naive supporters and then arbitrarily eliminated them when they tried to point out that the ends do not always justify the means.

Shame on you, book author still getting lecture invitations on the east coast, and living your hypocritical PC life in New York City. Shame on you, author and former leader of the party living around Atlanta, still breathing fire. One of you ordered Betty's killing and the other of you did the deed.

Our world can never be put right until the two of you are held just as responsible for your murderous deeds as those hateful old white Klansmen who, one by one, are finally being prosecuted in the South.

There are only two options -- justice and injustice. I want to see the day the two of you are dragged in from your comfortable perches and face the consequences of what you did that night when you snuffed out the life of an idealist, a mother, a person who would later have known the joy of being a grandmother.

You are the true racists.

And that is the saddest legacy of the work we all did in the '60s. The people that Betty was trying to help became the very monsters we all wished to defeat. Nothing justifies murder.

Shame on both you, and you know exactly who you are, EB and FF. May you both rot in hell! Or, better yet, in prison for killing Betty Van Patter.

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Morning After Blog

Cowboys and bar-hall girls partied all around me last night as I calmly typed here in the lobby (only spot where I can get wireless.) It was noisy, lots of cheerful chatter, drinking and gambling going on. You could hear the dice slap the table, the shrieks of the winners (and losers), and the constant rushing around of young girls in frilly satin dresses.

Most of the women were middle-aged and wore revealing red dresses with black garters, stockings, scarves and bountiful hairdos.

The men wore cowboy boots and hats, fancy shirts and belts, mustaches and beards.

Floozies and ranchers, drinkers and gamblers. Amidst this scene, I sat alone, in conventional garb, trying to remain inconspicuous. Several revelers insisted on getting to know me, however. Ladies perched down beside me and asked "How can you work in the middle of all this?"

I explained that once you've worked in a crowded newsroom, you learn how to turn out the chaos around you concentrate. Meanwhile, they explained that their event was a surprise 60the birthday party for a local man in the real estate business. Most of those present seemed to be connected with real estate, which is booming in these foothills.

I gathered a bunch of information about prices to file away for future consideration. They offered me drinks -- nope. Water? Nope. Eventually they drifted away and I continued my work.



Do you ever get a hankering for a certain kind of food, just a random passion that demands to be satisfied? This frequently happens to me. Last night, my friend and I found one treat we both were seeking -- a big bowl of spicy calamari. It was listed as an appetizer but it was so good and so filling, we couldn't finish it all. So, I just had spicy calamari for breakfast.

We also had oysters, halibut, and a huge salad; and only the oysters didn't come home with us in a box.



My friends, still sleep-deprived from travel and a bit frail by nature, more or less fell asleep at dinner. She perked up later, and we took a late night walk, just as the party-goers were dispersing, weaving a bit with liquid eyes. It's fun being sober in a sea of drinkers, because you are both of them but far apart from them -- the better for observation.

We walked around the town and looked at the stars, so numerous and visible here in the mountains.

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