I swear, by all people precious to me, that this is a true story and not a tall tale. I have to say it, because you, the reader, might not believe the account or the accuracy of my memory.
My dad first took me camping when I was seven years old. Where I’m from, camping had nothing to do with RVs or tidy, civilized campgrounds, or at least when I was a kid. My dad, uncle and their crew—about 10 men—headed deep into the woods along the Crown of Maine, or Aroostook, west of an area better known as the St. John Valley.
Lumberjacks long ago had cut the dirt roads the crew traveled. They entered somewhere between Allagash, St. Francis and Dickey, Maine, if I correctly recollect. Travel that year, as it would be others, was arduous. Spring rains typically washed out huge portions of road, over which the brothers and their fellow hunters would build makeshift bridges. Elsewhere, deep mud would capture and hold onto some of the vehicles. The men would pile out to lighten the load for a lightning run over the mud-washed road. Muscle and a hand wench would work free stuck vehicles.
In later years, the men would travel, for as long as eight to 10 hours the first trip of the season, a mere 17 kilometers to an old lumberjack camp my uncle rented from the paper company, I believe International Paper, but I can’t be certain. Rent amounted to $100 a year. The camp, appropriately called “Dodge City” by my uncle and father, would have made a good movie set for an old Western, given how the cabins were arranged, along the dirt road down the center way.
But that year, the men traveled about twice as far, to a civilized camp owned by friend “Buzz” Barry. I never knew Buzz’s first name, but I remember him as being almost Middle Eastern in appearance—quite dark by Maine standards—with black, grey-specked beard. Buzz was a jovial man, with a big smile, hearty laugh and strong, friendly handshake. Buzz worked customs somewhere along the Maine and Canadian border. I always assumed Fort Kent, but can’t say for certain. Even as a little kid, I liked Buzz. Everyone did.
I call Buzz’s camp civilized because it had a sink with running water and sat adjacent to Beau Lake (This Google Map puts the lake in the center. Zoom out for sense of location with respect to Northern Maine and Canada). But bathing meant skinny dipping the lake. Nor was there a toilette, but an outhouse. No power lines reached the wilderness camp, although across the lake in Quebec lights could be seen at night. Coleman lanterns dimly lit the starlit evenings on the Maine side.
Second day at camp, my dad took me bear hunting. We unexpectedly came upon a running black bear as we drove along a grassy path through the woods. My dad managed to shoot the bear from within the vehicle, which was still moving. He was excited by the kill and having me see it. But my reaction disappointed him. I showed zero excitement in his kill. C`mon, I was seven! A little duffer with little comprehension about bears, rifles and killing. My reaction proved to be only the first disappointment. The bear turned out to be a nursing sow, which meant cubs, at least one (in this case two).
My memory is fuzzy on timing, but either later that day or sometime the next, the crew headed out into the woods looking for the forlorn cubs. They hadn’t strayed far from where their mother had been killed. The men chased around one cub, which moved with surprising speed and fear! In later years I would associate the scene with men foolishly chasing chickens around a barnyard. The cub escaped up a tall spruce tree, where it clung sideways like a Kuala and howled for its mother. The bear’s cry would later remind me of Chewbacca from “Star Wars.”
Not long later, my uncle pulled out a rifle and started shooting at the bear. More frightening than the bear—and it’s size, about one meter tall, compared to a seven year old caused great distress—was the sound of the rifle and realization my uncle aimed to kill the animal. But he kept missing. One, two, three, four shots he fired, never once hitting the cub. I stood behind him, silent, shellshocked and hoping he would again miss. He did. Three more times.
Following the seventh shot, there was a tremendous crack and howl of the bear, the pitch changing the way a train sounds to passengers in a car. My uncle had shot off the top of the tree! He hadn’t aimed to kill, but to get the bear on the ground. The men chased the fallen bear, which scurried up a much smaller tree; I don’t recall the kind. But I do remember the men drawing pine needles to see which one of them would go up and throw down the bear. My dad drew the short needle. Funny, I don’t recall being scared as he pulled himself up into the tree behind the bear and struggled to chuck it out. Eventually—after some deep claw wounds to his forearms—my dad detached the cub from the tree. For the second time, in just minutes, the bear fell from a tree. But this time into a tight circle of big hunters.
The next sequence is fuzzy in my memory. Events I remember well, but not timing. A seven year-old’s sense of time isn’t the most reliable. Also, I was too short to see inside the circle of hunters. Somehow the men caught the cub and stuffed it—howling, howling, howling—into a potato sack. They simply didn’t have the equipment to humanely capture a cub, nor would they have been kind anyway. These were hunters, after all. The men drove the cub back to Buzz’s camp, where some of them got together and built a wooden cage. Next day, they returned looking for the other cub, but it was gone.
Now that bear didn’t have much of a disposition. After all, its mother died, hunters chased it, a tree fell beneath it and potato sack covered it. The animal would swipe, claws extended, at anyone approaching the cage. That cub howled day and night, struggling to squeeze through its wooden prison. The camping trip would last another three days, with the hunters loathing the sound of that bear every minute. I half expected someone to take a knife or gun to the cub some night while the other men slept. Instead, all equally endured the torturous howls.
Later I learned that my uncle and dad took the cub to an animal farm in Houlton, Maine. They were promised $150 for the animal.
They never received it.
[Note: Originally posted on the Joe Wilcox blog in November 2005. Reposted with updated links, because the story is just too interesting to let sit in a four year-old archive.]
"Holy. Crap. I don’t think we have any unbruised skin left on our body to take any more lumps regarding our mobile strategy. The Microsoft Mismanagement theory is in full force as we throw any willing body into the Mobile effort. Something good has to come out of those typing monkeys, rights? Windows Mobile Phone 6.5 or whatever the hell it’s called didn’t win any “Wows” and I discovered 1:1 the worst question to ask is, “So, can I upgrade it to Windows Phone 7?"
Last week, while watching Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s stiff introduction to Windows Phone, I wondered about his facial and body language. He didn’t exactly seem happy to be introducing Windows Phone, which launches a new brand for Microsoft and its hardware partners. The normally animated Steve seemed anything but happy to talk about Microsoft’s “cross-company vision” around three screens, one of which Windows Phone anchors.
Steve’s demeanor, expression and posture go oddly together with the importance of the announcement.
While watching Steve, I kept thinking back to lessons Fox TV show “Lie to Me“ teaches about lying—how a person’s expression can reveal what he or she really means. The TV show’s main character, Cal Lightman, is loosely based on Paul Ekman, who is a pioneer reading human facial expressions.
Paul’s work is quite remarkable. In the 1970s, the University California professor identified six basic emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise—that the face can reveal. There’s a universality about the emotions and their facial manifestations that transcends environmental influences. The expressions are human, regardless of country or culture.
Steve looks rather grim if you ask me, like he simply can’t contain his anger or disgust at having to announce what he knows is a stinker product. Yes, stinker—but more on that in a few paragraphs. Obviously, I’m no expert at detecting lying, certainly not from watching “Lie to Me” episodes or taking Paul Ekman’s METT—micro-expressions training tool—practice test (I did OK, but not exceptional). Still, I couldn’t help observe some things:
For about 5 seconds, Steve uplifts his eyebrows when talking about partners delivering “30 new Windows Phones by the end of 2009.”
Microsoft’s CEO raises his eyebrows again, more briefly, when discussing Internet Explorer for Windows Phones.
When talking about Windows Phone’s “new experiences,” Steve lifts his upper lip, exposing his teeth.
Steve keeps his lips fairly tight throughout the entire three-minute, 43-second video.
Except briefly when closing the video, by wishing people well, Steve doesn’t smile. Even the brief smile is from tense lips.
The video is best watched at YouTube in all Steve’s HD glory. Tell me what you see behind his expression and posture in comments. Raised eyebrows and tight lips could indicate anger when Steve talks about the number of phones or Internet Explorer. Most reviewers agree that IE is substandard compared to mobile browsers found in Apple, Google and Nokia phones. The raised lip to expose teeth could be sign of disgust. Regardless, the tight expression says enough, even to a non-expert regarding Steve’s real feelings about delivering a real stinker product to market.
I would have reviewed a Windows Phone, too, had I been able to obtain a device. I contacted HTC PR, which indicated there were no review devices available, which was a subtle way of saying none was available to me.
It’s a wonder that Microsoft could release that stinker.What other choice did Microsoft have? Already Apple and Google are sucking up mindshare and developers. But is Windows 6.5 really better than nothing? If there’s a slim silver lining in the Windows Phone dark cloud: Microsoft has released a product that makes Windows Vista look better, maybe even good, but at least not as bad.
The CEO couldn’t deliver the stinker with a straight face. Steve is too much of a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy. Could the normally animated Steve look any unhappier to be launching new Windows Phone software and hardware? Apparently not.
I’m in a bit of a blog transition right now, with Oddly Together’s future hanging in uncertainty. A man has got to live and feed his family, so I have to make Chronicle of Technology, Culture and Stupidity and my subbranded site at Betanews the greater priorities. The latter site pays, the other doesn’t, but it could someday. So could Oddly Together.
When I launched Oddly Together a few months ago, I had closed down Chronicle of Technology, Culture and Stupidity. My plan was to do technology blogging at Betanews and cultural, societal and storytelling blogging here. But the other blog, at joewilcox.com, had been around for a long time (that was good for search traffic and incoming links) and based on comments my readers there didn’t follow me to Betanews. So joewilcox.com is back and sucking away some of the blog topics I might otherwise do here. Additionally, I’ve converted that site to microblogging, even though WordPress as configured is nowhere as suitable as Tumblr.
Are you following any of this? I’m lost trying to explain it. Other changes: I ditched a Mac running Snow Leopard for Sony VAIO running Windows 7. Everyone knows the cool kids use Macs, or so I assume that means Tumblrs. My birthday passed, and I turned another decade—now making me 20 or more years older than most Tumblrs. But what I originally planned for Oddly Together otherwise fits well with the Tumblr community.
The Tumblr team is improving features all the time, and perhaps a little Posterous competition helps there. As much as I like Tumblr as a publishing platforms, limitations bug me:
Content management is bearish at best
Other than adapting something like Disqus, there is no real commenting
Social networking features, while good, pale behind services like TypePad
I love that there are new Tumblr themes everyday, and someday, when I’ve got time, I may do my own. When it comes to CSS, I’m in need of some Dummies books. But I can code HTML. Hell, I supported my family in 1995 and 1996 coding HTML Websites (back in the day before WYSIWYG editors). Other aspects of the publishing platform just click. It suits me. I’d pay, absolutely I would, if David Karp and crew offered some premium features. Sign me up, baby.
I’ve considered other services. I have successfully exported all posts (except this one) from Tumblr to WordPress XML. The export opens up plenty of possibilities, such as TypePad.com and WordPress.com—or even Posterous. Themes suck at all three sites. TypePad themes are boring, and custom themes aren’t allowed at WordPress.com; that’s a benefit exclusive to third-party hosted WordPress. Posterous just added some themes, f-f-f-f-five of them, and all measure hurl on the yuck meter. I could preserve link structure at Posterous or WordPress.com by pointing the Oddly Together domain there. TypePad has far better features—most everything I’d want—but last century’s infrastructure. Publishing isn’t really dynamic, .html would break all my links and theme customization is convoluted.
So the question remains: Is Tumblr the place where I belong, where Oddly Together can fit in? Or am I just not cool enough for this crowd and need to retire to the old folks’ blog? Tumblr is a community as much as a blogging service. Is it the community for which this blogger and blog can find a place?
I have a suggestion for Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City schools: Publish a teaching offenders list.
I must be a slow learner, because until Saturday I hadn’t understood New York City’s losing battle with the powerful teachers union. Once teachers achieve tenure—after 3 years—they are employed for life and damn near undismissible, even for cause. Journalism professor Samuel Freedman wrote about the situation for the New York Times two years ago: “Where Teachers Sit, Awaiting Their Fates.” I missed that one, but not Steven Brill’s shocking “The Rubber Room: The battle over New York City’s worst teachers” in Aug. 31, 2009, The New Yorker.
Teachers accused of criminal behavior, misconduct or simply bad teaching cannot be dismissed in New York City because of the union contract. But that doesn’t mean the school system is willing to let them teach. These teachers go to “what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room,” Steven writes. There they wait, receiving full pay, for a seemingly never-ending arbitration process to unfold.
Some of these teachers are well paid for sitting around and doing nothing. Steven spotlights one elementary school teacher who “earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year,” and she asserts deserving “‘every penny of it.’” Normally, I would say yes, for awaiting due process. But “it takes between two and five years for cases to be heard by an arbitrator,” Steven writes, or in one typical case “eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States.”
For a variety of reasons, including school closures, teachers end up on a reserve list for reassignment elsewhere. According to The New Yorker story, teachers not reassigned after 9 months aren’t likely to be. They end up in the Rubber Room, too. Nine months, eh? I suggest that New York City publish a list of teachers sitting in the Rubber Room, collecting tax payers’ money, after 9 months.
Surely there are freedom of information laws that supersede any teachers union contract. After all, it’s a public school funded by public money collected from taxpayers. Should Jack Broker be laid off and sending his kid to a public school where teachers collect six-figure salaries for doing nothing more than sitting around all day? Perhaps Jack—and hundreds of thousands other New Yorkers—would like see who is on that list.
A teaching offenders list would put pressure on some teachers and even the union to speed up arbitration so that it takes no longer than nine months. Teachers who don’t teach go oddly together with salaries for teaching. It’s not right. Joel Klein should widely publicize the list. New York City tabloids could have a helluva good time updating the teaching offenders list once a week.
Peer pressure is a powerful force. It’s one thing for these teachers to hide behind the union, which assures their salaries and anonymity. It’s something else for them to be exposed for all New York City to see. I predict if published, the teaching offenders list would be where the rubber room meets the road.
Today, Microsoft sits in a very similar position in smartphones: unable to even define a vaporware vision of the future that hasn’t already been delivered by Apple.
Insightful article about the patterns Microsoft has taken with its mobile and portable products and the likely path of self-destruction for the near future, plus the best justification I’ve heard yet for the Microsoft retail stores:
[The presumed upcoming Windows Phone] almost requires Microsoft to build out its own copycat retail stores (were you wondering why?) so that it can attempt to sell the Windows Phone and the Zune to customers without any distracting Android, Symbian, and RIM alternatives, and particularly no iPods or iPhones around.
And I have to agree with this:
[…] in the smartphone space, where the winners are clearly RIM and Apple, the Palm Pre looks to have some potential, and Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile are all struggling to keep themselves afloat as “my OS, your hardware” platforms.
The “my OS, your hardware” model is clearly dead for smartphones and portable media devices. Maybe somebody should tell Google.
Joe says: The full Roughly Drafted post is absolutely worth reading. Damn, I should have written that. :) Daniel Eran Dilger delivers a convincing analysis.
In May I described Zune HD as “Microsoft’s new mobile platform.” The Q isn’t if Microsoft will do a phone but when—and, as Daniel points out, what that means for Microsoft partners.
This morning, a Katydid temporarily took up residence on our screen door. I used it as opportunity to test the iPhone 3GS auto-macro mode. Pics were all crap. But these four taken with the Olympus PEN E-P1, using the natural macro scene mode, are quite good (See my Olympus PEN E-P1 gallery for larger sizes and camera settings info. But they’re not better than the snail close-ups taken with the Nokia N97.
The topic interests me—and hopefully you—because my RSS habits are changing. I even briefly considered dumping RSS for services like Facebook and Twitter, which is what Sam recommends.
Google’s second edition of Power Readers prompted Sam’s post. Power Readers is a collection of mostly journalist types’ reading sources. Google compiles the list to promote RSS and Google Reader. Sam says he hasn’t used Google Reader in weeks and that there really no longer is place for RSS:
The truth of the matter is that RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool, an aggregator of news headlines that never really caught on with the mainstream the way Twitter and Facebook have. According to a Forrester Research study about the reach of social technologies, only nine percent of US online adults said they use an RSS feed monthly, down from 11 percent the year before. By contrast, 50 percent are visiting social networking sites, up from 34 percent last year and 39 percent are reading blogs, up from 37 percent a year ago. The official name for RSS was Really Simple Syndication but for the many people, including those I helped set up with an RSS reader, it never really was that simple.
Sam is right, RSS never made the consumer mainstream and probably never will. Revealing: Teen RSS usage. If digital natives aren’t using RSS, it will probably never break the mainstream. But younger Millennials do use social networks like Facebook.
Marshall responds to Sam:
Twitter, Facebook and aggregators like Techmeme or Google News suffice for Sam, he says. He’s far from alone. They sure don’t suffice for me. I do get a whole lot of story leads, perspective and more from Twitter (something I wrote about in an article titled ”Twitter is Paying My Rent”) but RSS is no less important for me today than it used to be.
Marshall also no longer uses Google Reader. He explains: “Our team scans over thousands of company RSS feeds each morning for updates (what news writer wouldn’t do that?) and we use an open source customizable meme-tracker to make sure we haven’t missed anything important.”
Perhaps this is telling commentary about how Marshall and Sam use RSS. I rarely read anything on ZDNet, but ReadWriteWeb is daily, mandatory consumption.
RSS is important for news gathering and for other purposes. There are plenty of services, like FriendFeed, that pull RSS feeds. Sam rightly points out lagging direct consumer usage but wrongly writes the RSS epitaph. Marshall understands the value of feeds and puts them to good use.
I also considered dumping RSS for Facebook and Twitter. The latter had been really useful. But then, a few weeks ago, about the time of the Twitter DoS attack, the quality of tweets changed. My good Twitter traffic is down, while the tweets I would want are gone. Perhaps it’s a coincidental function of summer vacation, and fewer of the people I follow are tweeting. Meanwhile, marketing tweets increase in number.
I won’t abandon RSS feeds, but I am changing how I consume them. I’ve dumped most of my commercial news feeds; there’s too much repetitive news that isn’t interesting. I’m also looking for a good RSS reader—or, better, feeder. For news and such, I want the feeds coming to me based on keywords or hashtags. I don’t want to monitor news feeds anymore.
At the same time, I am increasing the number of people I follow, by RSS or services like Facebook, FriendFeed or Tumblr. I find many people posts to be much more interesting and original than the blathering commercial blog and news sit content. ReadWriteWeb is one exception.
How did I enter this discussion? Marshall’s personal blog post showed up in my RSS feeds. Perhaps non-RSSer Sam missed it?
Would you pay a buck to read New York Times story, “A Cul-de-Sac of Lost Dreams, and New Ones,” online? I would. The quality of reporting—over many months—and presentation, which includes photos and video, simply isn’t easily reproducible by most free-content, commercial blogsites.
Perhaps in an alternate universe, the Times charges online for this story, which I saw yesterday on iPhone 3GS and my wife today in the newspaper. We subscribe to the Sunday Times.
I’m increasingly bothered by the free, commercial Web, where somebody produces content given away but subsidized by something else, usually advertising. My problem is less the free content and more what little goes into producing it. Many blogs pay writers based on traffic. It’s a shark lifestyle. Sharks are constantly moving, persistently eating just to survive. They can never stop. Pageview-supported bloggers must constantly produce content to survive. Many could never stop to do the kind of reporting that makes the Times’ Cul-de-Sac story tour de force. The story, as told across several mediums, is magnificent journalism—and the kind not easily reproduced by the majority of commercial blogs, whether run by individuals or organizations.
Stories like this often require time commitment and qualified, salaried staff, but not always traditional news organizations. Some blogs, as they mature and make quality reporting and original content higher priorities, are less shark and more hawk—patiently surveying the landscape for prey. In April 2009, Gizmodo filled “Music Tech Week” with wonderfully insightful posts that show where—and how—blogging and traditional journalism can intersect: Original content. Gizmodo bloggers reminisced about “my first album” and explained “why the Beatles in mono rocks a lot more” or “the difference between $100 or $100,000 speakers.”
But the crowning story—the one worthy of some traditional journalism award: “Why We Need Audiophiles.” John Mahoney’s story begins:
This is Michael Fremer. He’s listening to ‘Avalon’ by Roxy Music on his $350,000 stereo system. It sounds excellent. He’s a bit crazy, but if you love music, you need him.
John’s profile isn’t just about the audiophile, but a meeting of generations—one man raised on vinyl records and the other on MP3s. They go oddly together, and surprisingly well.
Unfortunately, Gizmodo’s music tech series and some of the blog’s other original content is the exception and not the rule. Surveying many commercial blogs, I see that too much so-called news is nothing more than link traffic. Somebody writes something somewhere and a bunch of blogs report on the story or that some news site or other blog wrote such-and-such. Links often don’t even go back to the original content, but to some intermediary blog writing about the original source. Along this process of linking, there is little—and often no—follow-up reporting. The record stands, perpetuated by linked posts, without verification or correction. I suppose these bloggers should be praised for having so much trust in their peers. Yes, trust that no one would stretch things just a little to get more pageviews, many through links, and subsequently more advertising revenue (Oh, cynical me).
All this free, unverified, cross-linked information is killing traditional news organizations. Much as I’d like to portray them as victims, they are part of the problem. Traditional new organizations are host on their own petard, as the summarized phrase goes. “The follow” defined Twentieth Century news reporting. Perhaps the Los Angeles Times got a big scoop, or something less, and other newspapers rushed to follow the lead. They had to get the same story, too. In my experience working as reporter, the motivation was often less about readers and more about competition and editorial pride.
The follow would sometimes lead to unnecessary and, from a news perspective, undeserved feeding frenzies around events or personalities. It’s a practice I detest, and I often refused to, well, follow. I pissed off many editors by saying, “No,” to following the competition. On those occasions where I obeyed my bosses, my reporting would start from scratch rather than build on the original or following stories. Any good reporter knows that the follow often leads to misreporting, particularly if something wasn’t quite right with the first story. Original reporting can correct the official record but not the already spread misinformation.
Many commercial blogs practice Frankensteinian versions of the follow, by the aforementioned linking. These sites are parasites at worst and sharks at best. Most of them don’t produce original content other than the summaries they write about sources they link to. Either they lack the skills, time or wherewithal. Anybody can cut and paste. But not everyone can report and write good, original stories.
But the cut-and-pasters don’t care. They make their buck by getting up posts that catch search engines. Google search doesn’t distinguish between original and link-aggregated content. But some search engine should. Are you listening Microsoft? Why not do with Bing what Google won’t—or can’t—truly differentiate original from aggregated content.
Then there is the New York Times—the Grey Lady—which this post is supposed to be about. Newspapers’ problems are bigger than declining classified advertising or news organizations giving away valuable content online for free. It’s difficult to charge for something you produce at great expense only to have someone else summarize and redistribute the content for free. There is too much parasitic, aggregated free content produced for nothing competing with valuable content that costs money to produce. That’s where all these free-content, commercial blogs are killing traditional news and even new media types like Gizmodo (which don’t see the problem yet).
In June 2008, the Associated Press made big, splashy, negative headlines for asserting that blogs excerpting its content infringed its copyrights. I scoffed at the idea then, but no more. Businesses or people producing original content will never successfully sell it, as long as some else can redistribute the essence of the same content for free. The AP has a point about protecting content it charges for and costs much money to produce.
Related problem: There is no industry consensus, whether from traditional news or new media, on what to charge for valuable content online. The Times’ Cul-de-Sac story and Gizmodo’s audiophile profile are original pieces of content worth paying for. But how much?
