Harrumph!

The widespread, irrational hostility toward bicycles continues. Despite the slowly growing number and percentage of Americans cycling — for fun, exercise, commuting, shopping — an astonishing clot of us have visceral, anecdotal reactions to two-wheelers.

In fact, as a long-time marriage-equality blogger, I see clear parallels in attitudes. As surely as bicycling and same-sex marriage are the future in the world as well as this country, reactionaries hate those realities. They seem not to care whom they hurt in their process of protesting and impeding progress.

While not the time and place for marriage talk, yet another death of a Boston cyclist and in particular, a crackpot column in today’s Herald are apropos.  In our winger tabloid, Margery Egan builds from the false premise of her first sentence, “Boston’s streets aren’t wide enough for bikes and cars. It’s as simple as that.”

Of course that’s crap. Traffic studies by city, state, academicians and other repeatedly prove a little planning makes room for all, pedestrians included. The more than clever head of bike programs, Nicole Freeman, has judiciously added bike lanes, paths, racks and such where they don’t disrupt, as has her Cambridge counterpart, Cara Seiderman. Their successes are invisible to or ignored by bike haters.

The comments to Egan’s column are almost exclusively what one expects in the Herald. Some even literally wish death on cyclists, a.k.a. those who are reducing congestion by removing their cars from the road while they spin.

What’s most telling is how Egan and many comments use anecdotes and unprovable generalities to justify reckless driving and operating to endanger. You see, wrecks and even deaths are the cyclists fault because if a driver has to slow down, well, that’s what makes them go fast, buzz cyclists, and hit them.

In the real world though, those us who are multi-modal perceive differently. In particular, drivers are clearly irritated at having to wait behind a cyclist or even slow a little to pass safely. The same driver on the same roads at the same time invariably waits much, much longer behind other motor vehicles. They seem to accept waiting through one to four lights as a cost of driving, so long as it is a car or truck and not a bike ahead of them. What’s up with that?

For whatever good it does in no-blood-no-ticket Boston, such driver behavior is governed by state law, not local traffic regulation. That is on the side of the cyclists.

There is no legal justification for j-hooking or claiming, “I just didn’t see her.” Instead, read MA General Laws Chapter 90 and particularly Section 14. That includes plain command, “In approaching or passing a person on a bicycle the operator of a motor vehicle shall slow down and pass at a safe distance and at a reasonable and proper speed.”

There are no built-in excuses, like unless you’d have to slow down or except where the road gets narrow. The onus is entirely on the driver to pass safely. That’s that.

There again, what kind of denial or emotional pull makes drivers accept waiting behind cars but not slowing for a cyclist? Are they so identified with motor vehicles that they lose all reason and judgement?

There will be more cyclists on our roads. At a slower pace, there will be more enforcement, and not just at the Egans would it on what they see as crazed scofflaw bike types. It’s likely that as more drivers lose their licenses and pay big fines for hitting cyclists that they’ll catch a whiff of their responsibility.

It shouldn’t be so hard. If you were brought up right, you’d know not to put other people’s bodies and even lives in danger because you’re impatient or choose to be unobservant.

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Candidate Deval Patrick suddenly made blogging significant in Massachusetts six years ago. Sure, he treated us new-media sorts like press/broadcast, but it was two way. He estimated smartly and rightly that what came to be called netroots could swing elections as surely as any ethnic group. It worked for him.

Two years later, it worked for his good buddy, a certain Barack Obama. Each guy ended up with adoring, earned support from bloggers and other new media types. Of course, we grubby bloggers were not alone in our support. Yet, the rising internet-related folk, largely teens and 20 somethings did make the difference in Obama’s victory. While other candidates seemed to snort at Patrick and Obama courting the young and the idealists, hey, it worked for them.

Gone.

At yesterday’s annual Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s ascendancy-to-office street party, I mourned the demise of visionary pols, replaced by academicians and biz sorts. Simultaneously, my Left Ahead co-host Ryan Adams has likewise drawn attention to the dwindling number of political bloggers, particularly locally. This whimpering little trend dovetails precisely with politicians’ indifference. Finally and obviously, following the Citizens United rape of the campaign system, candidates understandably look to bucks, bucks and bucks, and away from the direct and online interpersonal reactions that determined the results in 2006, 2008 and 2010.

I have a double fret for the 2012 election. First, I fear that the young voters are not sufficiently engaged to vote and to get others to do so. Second and more pervasively, I fear that voters weary of woes, recession, and fears of the future would vote the fantasy, that is, they’d go for a Reagan or Bush the Lesser jive about guns-and- butter or roe insanely trick-down economics. Regardless of decades of continual winger failures in economics and public policy, the siren call of the myth lives in the simple minded.

On the positive side for us lefty sorts, the Republican Party in general and Mitt Romney in particular are doing their worst to alienate voter groups. Any woman, African American, Latino or poor person would be an absolute fool to vote for Romney. Yet even with the evidence, we know that 40% or more will vote the fantasy way.

With November only a season away, I wonder about the strategies of the big shots, like Presidential and Senatorial candidates. They aren’t going for the netroots. In fact, all the candidates are viewing blogs, podcast shows and such as tertiary or lower addenda to their campaigns. They aren’t seeking out the influential and/or smart bloggers and other analysts.

Does this mean that the four years of bloggy influence has come and gone? Alternately, does this mean that the current crop of would-be office holders are not savvy enough?

To Ryan’s musing, there are fewer local blogs. Many of my old chums no longer publish the electrons.

As one illustration, I had an amusing set of interactions with US Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren and her handler yesterday on Chesterfield Street at Menino’s party. I wore my HICKS FOR ELIZABETH button. Warren saw it and said twice she love it, adding once again how great my yellow glasses frames are. In contrast, her handler did her best in the scrum to keep me away from the candidate.

Warren and I both worked the crowds from different angles. I chatted up political chums, such as Menino, MA Treasurer Steve Grossman and City Councilor Felix Arroyo, and other podcast guests. Relentlessly on her own, Warren worked the hamburger and ice-cream scoffing folk of voting age all around the booths.

As our loops intersected a few times, at one point, I handed Warren my HICKS button.

I tend to think of her as relatively straightforward and courageous. Yet, under the admonition of her handler, she got gutless. I asked the handler whether Warren still intended to go on a BlueMassGroup show; she said yes. I said that Left Ahead was still waiting for another visit, to which she said it wouldn’t happen. That kind of gun-shy behavior is nto suited to the valorous.

In fact, when I handed Warren my button, she said again that she loved it, but suggested I give it to her later and looked at the glowering eyes of her handler.

We can put it down to pragmatism or cowardice for the button and the Left Ahead re-visit. We must put down the cluelessness about new media to a simple lack of vision. The current candidates somehow missed Patrick and Obama’s lessons, relying instead on the dull and improbable ads and even newspapers.

I guess we can’t expect every election cycle to be filled with insight and wisdom.

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I won’t be putting up much here or at Marry in Massachusetts, maybe for a couple of weeks. Friday, I had a serious bike wreck. I’m limited to one hand and may need some surgery. Typing and sitting among other acts are big, painful deals.

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Striding the aisles of the new Hyde Park Stop & Shop, I was aware how loose my trousers were. That’s smirk making.

Consider yourself warned. Self-absorption follows in this and related posts. Already, chum John experienced that in our recent four-day trip to Manhattan. I had started a low-carb regimen and talked about it. I tried not to harp, but it was everywhere. We’re drinking buddies, usually concentrating on ale. Beer is very expensive in carbs, ale less so, wine even less so and bourbon is free. So I’m sure he got bored suggesting brews and hearing me dither or pull out the carb counter and see if I could afford it.

So what brought me to my own modified Atkins world, you may ask?

The answer relates to that self-absorption we bloggers seem to epitomize but also transcends it. The more salient response is the incompetence and ignorance of health professionals. Therein lies the justification for this series.

I’m tired of being trim for a little bit and chubby for quite awhile. I’m also well beyond the teens and 20s when I could cast aside poundage and excess fat in a few weeks with modest changes in exercise or food choices. Way back in those days, I recall a woman with whom I kept company. She is about 10 years older and even then, in her 30s, has trouble paring a single pound off when I could drop 5 or 10 in a week or two.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Well, we either age or die. Aging isn’t terrible, considering the only alternative. With that process comes a slower metabolism for nearly all of us. We as a nation then end up late or soon consumed with consumption of food and drink.

We care, we whine, we compare, we plot, we despair.

Of course, there are the tiny subset of exceptions. There are ectomorphic somatotypes. Those skinny men and women with neither visible fat nor apparent muscle mass, women with no breasts or hips to hold and men with no shoulders and wee, wee thighs. These freakish folk tend to have permanently high metabolic rates, as most of us did in puberty. They also tend to disdain the struggles of the 90-some percent of us who discover tighter pants when we have changed nothing about our activity, food or drink.

Being a pretty pure mesomorph with arms and legs like oak-tree limbs, but a tendency to tuck extra fat on the torso, I figured the medical world might give me some advice in my personal struggle. That was naive.

I’m no newcomer to diet/exercise/weight and fat control. Yet, not getting results, I went to the pros. I has used a damned good program, CrossTrainer, to track my intake and exercise. Also, being a pretty type-A tech writer, I backed that up with Lose It! Fastidiously, I plugged in each bit and every step. I counted grapes, measured yogurt, weighed cheese, and used the report of the elliptical machines as well as putting in the distance and duration of each bike ride.

Both programs had me losing lots of weight. I put in serious exercise time, yielding rated 1,000 to 1,600 calories burned six and sometimes seven days a week. Moreover, I wasn’t cheating in the slightest. Every morsel and motion went in accurately. That is my wont. The programs reported I should be losing half a pound to .8 pounds per day.

Yet on the weekly weigh in and body-fat machine measures, I was chubbing up. My doctor’s scale showed that meager confirmation as well.

While I had read a lot about nutrition and weight control, I needed help. I turned to doctors and got a referral to a nutritionist.

DIY Health

Fuggedaboutit!

Docs, nurses, even nutritionists are ignoramuses about food and weight. With the flood of information and the myriad patients in their examining rooms, they remain ignorant, if not stupid. It reminds me of the many ministers I know who decry how little they learn of church management in divinity school, often a single course. Then when they get a parish, they are excepted suddenly to be or oversee the CEO, COO and CFO roles.

Unlike clerics, who look to board members, staff and others for help, medical professionals tend to feign competence and exhibit confidence. I have found they they deal instead in platitudes and formulaic responses.

The worst for my issue is calories-in/calories-out. “All you need to know is consume fewer calories than you burn up and you’ll lose weight,” they invariably say.  Elephant feathers!

Even telling my primary doc and nutritionist, even producing two years of weigh ins, with body-fat readings, and as much exercise and calorie intake printouts as they wanted to see, I got the same jive. It always came with the self-satisfied look of the ignorant. Calories-in/calories-out.

I can believe for some ectomorphs, that works. I can believe that those basal metabolic rate estimates and exercise expenditure estimates are reasonably accurate for a small percentage of people. Yet, I know far too many, including myself, for whom those don’t work, don’t work by a big factor.

In fact, I turned to my doc and a nutritionist precisely because I was assiduous in recording all, but did not get the expected result. My wife is fond of noting that I am an outlier. I am my mother’s son, the one who is precise, detailed, and honest. I do the scientific method.

So, provided with my proofs that the estimates of intake and expenditures did not work for me, what do you suppose the pros did? Of course, they doubled down. Calories-in/calories out.

The doctor was dumb enough to say things like, “Oh, I guess the calories are coming from the air.” The nutritionist had next to no quibble with my three-days of detailed consumption/exercise I printed out. She suggested adding more calories, specifically more fat in the form of olive oil, but had no answer for why I was not losing as the two programs reported I should be.

Medical Deafness

I thought of nutrition overlord/author Michael Prager. He has different issues leading to being fat, a self-defined food addiction. Yet, as a newspaper reporter for years, he had his own methodology. He tracked down a nutritionist west of Philly who didn’t do formula, who didn’t pull platitudes, and who did listen to his story to produce a custom plan.

Instead, my doc and nutritionist shoved the same hand of food cards across their desk to me, not hearing what didn’t work. In fact, at a party I ended up with three other people, all of whom had been to docs and nutritionists. One wanted to gain weight and muscle and we other three to lose. We all got identical diet advice. That’s craziness.

So I read. I went to libraries. I clicked around the internet to pop and academic sites. I went way back to William Banting’s 1864 booklet on who he dropped lots of flab. I did current research. I went so far as to find out that everything of value I wanted had been in Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories all along. I could have started and ended there, but given my anal-retentive nature, it’s better I found it after a lot of research so it had all the more credibility.

Part 2 of this series will go into what’s been working for me.

I have a food site I started in concept before my effort to lose some fat. It will have mostly food-enjoyment articles, recipes, videos and such. I remain a serious foodie. Yet, most of us adults are conflicted about food. I’ll address it all. Look here for the nutrition angle. I’ll announce the food site when I open it to the net.

This series includes:

Call it Lifestyle on the intellectual and emotional commitment to low-carb
Watching the Struggle on my grandmothers diet woes
Wrestling with Fat on overcoming fear of dietary fats
Hunger? do you starve on a low-carb diet?
Low-Carb Eats on what’s on the menu in the regimen
How Much of What Food on calories-in/calories-out cliché
Dr. Cadaver on mindless trust in group averages
Who’s Counting on body fast v. weight
Part 1 on pants don’t lie

Tags: harrumpher, fat, diet, exercise, Atkins, Prager, Taubes, nutrtionist

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Creeping bloggerism continues. Here in MA, the Grand Poobahs of justice, a.k.a. the Supreme Judicial Court, ruled on their rules today to bring citizen journalists into their news media fold.

To most, that is between small and nothing. To internet writers, it’s hot stuff.

Universal Hub’s Adam Gaffin was quietly, politely, as is his wont, in the scrum from the beginning. He was quick to note that he helped draft the update, upgrade to SJC rule 1:19. As innocuous as it might seem, the change by the whole SJC brought the body into this century. This likely will lead other sleepy atavistic judges in other MA courts to attention. Oh, they will think, the SJC says bloggers are journalists. How about that?

The salient point in the rule ruling is the new definition:

The “news media” shall include any authorized representative of a news organization that has registered with the Public Information Officer of the Supreme Judicial Court or any individual who is so registered. Registration shall be afforded to organizations that regularly gather, prepare, photograph, record, write, edit, report or publish news or information about maters of public interest for dissemination to the public in any medium, whether print or electronic, and to individuals who regularly perform a similar function upon certification by the organizations or individuals that they perform such a role and that they will familiarize themselves or their representatives, as the case may be with the provisions of this rule and will comply with them. 

Sure, blah, blah and sure, the Poobah proprietary continues — no stealth recording or photography, advance permission from the PIO and judge and so forth. Yet, it’s a welcome and overdue change.

I think of a certain MA Governor, a Deval Patrick, who five years ago to the month dubbed bloggers press. He held a town meeting at Boston Latin School, replete with the likes of Mayor Tom Menino speaking before him. Then he squirreled up in room 023 of the basement with a few dozen of us reportorial bloggy types. He held a full press conference, yes, press conference. He had use netroots and new media to get elected and had not forgotten.

He continued and keeps involving us in his media communication. He’s come on Left Ahead several times. In short, he acknowledged from the beginning of his first campaign that bloggers could be news media if they reported and analyzed.

Such is pragmatism and realism.

In contrast, I think of the treatment by more traditional media even recently. Many seem to resent bloggers in puerile and competitive ways. They should mature a bit.

Locally, the likes of the Boston Globe rarely mention a blog’s name, even as they quote them without attribution. (Video god Steve Garfield has been splendid in calling the Morrissey mob on that.) In my own petty concerns, I think lately of BUR’s Bianca Vasquez Toness using me, quoting me for a piece on Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley…without citing my blogs or podcast. She had been reading my stuff, but defined me as “a political blogger in Hyde Park.” Try to imagine how BUR or NPR would react to their material being quoted with the only reference being to “a  college radio station in Boston.”

Likewise and worse, during the prolonged frenzy about US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and me bantering about right wingers calling her a hick for being from OK and an elitist for teaching at Harvard Law, most newsy types avoided attribution. Some cited Left Ahead, but not by URL. There was nationwide (and beyond) coverage but none of the major media provided the professional courtesy of linking to the source. Even in multiple Youtube excepts of Warren and me, they treated the clips like their own material.

As an amusing aside, my wife laughed at ABC News’ typo in its coverage, where “Host Mike Ball” was rendered at “Hot Mike Ball.” She may be one of the few in the world who agrees with the error, but many other outlets repeated the typo though cutting and pasting. So for a couple of days, I was hot.

I feel newsy as a blogger for having come out of journalism school, working in high-school and college papers, before daily and weekly newspaper jobs and on to magazine writing. I quote sources. Whenever possible, my newsy blog posts include links as well as identification for those cited.

There’s no reason beyond childish competitiveness and bad training that MSM folk can’t, won’t or don’t credit bloggers and podcasters.

When we have an elected official, candidate for office or any expert on the Left Ahead show or as part of a post, if it’s good enough to quote, we should be good enough to cite. I’ve heard my stuff quoted locally as well as on the networks. The likes of GBH’s Emily Rooney treat that material like it’s theirs, public domain or maybe original.

I can’t control that kind of abuse. However, in the future when Vasquez Toness or other newshounds sniff around, I’m making it plain. the SJC acknowledges that bloggers and our ilk can be news media. I expect the professional courtesy that I extend to them. If they quote me, any of my blog posts or any of my podcasts, I require a full citation with a URL. If their J-school profs, editors or program directors or their mammas for that matter didn’t teach them that, I can provide that service.

Tags: harrumpher, Left Ahead, news, attibution, Gaffin, media, Universal Hub, WBUR, SJC, Toness, Elizabeth Warren

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Hair on fire. Apology on tap.

After five days, this blog is back up. I regret all who got database connection errors in that period. I did too. Most hits here come from Google and other search engine operations. So, if you were clicking around for something, I hope you found it elsewhere.

Logo note: The problems and solution came from GoDaddy. I claim fair use of its surely copyrighted and/or trademarked logo.

For the curious, the outage came in a server migration. I’ll be upgrading WordPress now. I could not before for some convoluted set of reasons whereby my old GD servers could not upgrade to the MySQL versions that WP and other modern apps require.

After telling me on and on for two years they couldn’t help unless I closed the account and reopened it, they announced thaty they could when I called again last week. Yet, it did require new technologies on new servers, saving off everything, shutting it down, and waiting up to four days for the GD IT fairies to work their magic.

I was away for the weekend, so that seemed OK. Yet it turned out that wasn’t quite the case. All of the GD tech are pleasant and most know a lot. It was the small seams that caused the garment to come apart.

After GD saved the DB with five years of blog content, a tech directed me to copy the whole server content to my HD…just in case. He assured me that almost certainly, the automated migration would restore the works. I just had to call in a day to put in the order for the new 4GH server transfer.

I did call in, only to hear, curiously, that the order was in and in a couple of days, all would be as it was on the new technology. As these things tend to go, that didn’t happen. I returned to see messages by URL that there was no database connection or by IP addresss to the new server that there was no database at all.

Turns out, the latter was correct. The third nice tech apparently does this transfer regularly. She told me correctly that I needed to follow three separate intricate, but well documented procedures, which she sent me by email. I had to create, restore and configure the DB manually with GD tools online. Where were my fairies?

This was the proverbial blind men and elephant in that each tech was savvy about parts of it. I didn’t get the big picture and real set of procedures until the third tech.

Far, far worse things happen in the computer and internet worlds.

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In this season of annual-updated, photo-illustrated family letters, let us praise the continuing migration of the most relentless of beasts — the cute and personal LITE. Many under 30 escaped some migratory stages, but the herd of pseudo-candid will continue to seek new homes.

Today, I came across a witty and insightful “Oh No! Blogging is REALLY, REALLY dead this time!!!!!! : D ” post on gapingvoid.com.  To my point, it includes:

We for­get JUST how utterly time-consuming blog­ging used to be, back when it was the only game in town. I remem­ber the early blog­ging days, don’t you? Remem­ber how kee­ping up with the blo­gosphere pro­perly took ten hours a day? Nowa­days, the only peo­ple who are left blog­ging are the peo­ple who REALLY want to, who ACTUALLY have something to say. Ever­yone else is uploa­ding cat pho­tos on Face­book. I think this is a good thing.

Yes, mimeographed (look it up) annual holiday letters preceded photocopied ones. They came before the dreaded desktop publishing (young’uns may need to look that up as well).

DTP all too clearly proved the poverty of the typical intellect, imagination and artistry. Putting layout, illustration and typography options at the disposal of the masses produced millions of newsletters and personal epistles in what is known derisively in journalism circles as circus layout (alluding to Ringling Bros. posters). It seems everyone felt their most trivial thoughts were brilliant and worthy of circulation when there was enough variations on fonts and type sizes. How could everyone else not realized how handsome and clever were their children, pets, houses, and on and on?

Along came the World Wide Web, which most folk use synonymously with the internet. A decade latter, it was blogs. They were the new habitat of the cute and cluttered herd.

Along came variations and most notably Facebook, as gapingvoid’s Huge MacLeod noted. There’s a home for all-too-easy display of cute kids and kittens, leading to a herd migration from blogs. Now those who need to show their beloved beings, or every meal they eat (seemingly in purple and black tones of unappetizing low quality), do so nearly instantaneously on FB.

Certainly a very positive outcome of this migration is that finding and keeping up with relevant and meaningful blogs has gotten easier. Many of the regularly updated ones are far more likely to feature news and views, and not furry, drooling or pasted-smile loved ones.

All hail the migration!

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As usual, alternating her smart views with silliness, Rachel Maddow had fun with Pakistan’s announcement that it was banning well over 1,000 words from texting. F-word phrases of course made it, as did one that amused her, if you pardon, no end — crotch monkey. Then in what she lightly proclaimed as “a small reprieve for foul mouthed liberty,” the government stepped back, saying it was kind of a test.

The initial list includes 1,109 English words and 586 Urdu ones. Selections from the four major regional languages are in the works.

Maddow was also amused that one of the officials who would been (and likely will be when this comes to fruition) responsible for implementing the spying and censorship had the last name of one of the banned English words, Butt.

Pic Note: The image is adapted from John Paul Young’s photostream and under Creative Commons license.

That’s a fairly common last name there, as it is in the singular or plural in many English, German and French speaking countries. I bear my own surname cross and empathize with the Butts in the puerile ridicule they often endure.

I’m not big on censorship and snort at the vainglorious and futile effort to re-cork the texting genie. Yet, I’m not surprised that Anglo-Saxon vulgarities and common phrases for sex parts and acts made the initial thousand-plus.

However, in a country where people surnamed Butt run the soccer league or are stars in it, as well as are high ranking officials, how silly is that to ban their names?

Years ago here in MA, I was not amazed to learn that my last name, Ball, is not deemed suited for display on a license plate.

Even Wikipedia has a page listing some of the noted Ball sorts and I have that occasional blog in which I have tunneled down to some of the many with my specific version. I feel that over the years I’ve more than earned Ball.

We moved every few years throughout my childhood. While Ball is a fairly common last name — 300 and something down the list of the tens of thousands of U.S. last names and much more common than non-ridiculed ones like Robertson — it gets far more than its share of puerile jokes. As we moved, I endured the same highly obvious repetitive puns and insults again and again and again. It was worst in junior high and high when kids and even teachers always had sex in mind.

In college days, I had a discussion with an Ivy linguist about risible surnames. He figured that mine had the greatest number of possible jokes. For a few like Fuchs or Shoemaker, there are jokes, but a pretty limited set. Mine includes, but is not limited to, most sports, primary sex acts, sexual body parts, myriad clichés like on the ball, have a ball, behind the eight ball, and get on the ball, food like meatball, non-sexual body parts like eyeball, formal dances, and down the list.

Over the years, it turned out to be a sort of intelligence test as I moved into a new school or neighborhood. People who made the most predictable insults invariably stood grinning as though someone was supposed to confirm how clever they were. These are the same folk who ask a tall person how the weather is up there or inform a balding guy that he’s losing hair. Sigh.

I briefly wondered whether ball made the Pakistani list, or just the more obvious balling. The beadles compiling the list must be bureaucrats’ bureaucrats.

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As a chum posted on FB, “If I want strangers to read the story of my life, I’ll write a fricken autobiography.”

That should be the road sign marking the bifurcation of Facebook. As in yesterday’s rant about the most recent blunders of pop companies, I remain astonished at the paternalism or we-know-best-ism of those companies.

At it’s f8 event (chronicled in tedious detail in the FT), the big honking chief FACES, like founder Mark Zuckerberg, intend to crush competition with technology and cachet. The ALL NEW IMPROVED version has an annoying constantly updating news feed sub-window, but really one thrust in two features.

First, there’s more media, either to ingest or to regurgitate. More videos, more pictures, for you, from you, from Friends. OK, for the target audience that’s smart enough. FB users have largely come up reading little. They are the 21st Century equivalent of tabloid customers — why read, when you can get a flavor of something by looking at a picture? It may be a small-brain marketing ploy, but it is timely and profitable.

Second is that timeline. The FACES at the announcement can’t withhold their joy at their cleverness here. They are enabling a logorrheic (small and few words, but in many, many places though) display of personal trivia. Each FB account can be self-absorbed in a way few have seen outside mental institutions.

Those who think the foursquare (a.k.a. rob-me-now) application is egotistic and inane may have palpitations now. FB is automating this self-absorption, which seems for the moment largely limited to the 20 something and 30 something users. For a long time (in net speak), you could bore people with personal trivia, but you had to do it piecemeal. On FB or Twitter or Tumblr or foursquare and a few others, you could put in:

• Where you were headed
• Where you arrived
• Whom you were with
• What you ordered
• What you ate
• What movie you saw
• And on and on and on

This level of detailed sharing supposedly is gregarious. It supposedly influences others. It supposedly is avant-garde. It is certainly increasingly popular. The new FB timeline jacks that up by letting you automate such inputs and lay out a garden slug like trail of all your activities.

Not too long ago, and still in some groups, folk ridiculed bloggers for the ain’t-my-kid (or kitten)-cute posts. People would photograph adored beings or every meal. Those sad little blogs would have look-at-me-and-mine content exclusively. Even close family members quickly lose patience with those.

Now it looks like FB will force a true bifurcation, largely along  generational lines. Those who believe that each act and choice is as worthy of comment as any other should love this timeline concept. Berners-Lee knows, the FACES will love it; those who leave their slug trails for all to see and follow will provide a level of salable marketing data unknown today. We may soon see, should we have the stomach for it, when people pet their cats, have their bowel movements, or choose a peach instead of apple at Whole Foods.

This is only different in degree from how most of us use cellphones. We don’t seem to realize how stupid we are and how much of our lives and thoughts we waste by constantly speaking drivel. Walk a store or mall, ride a subway, or sit in a waiting room anywhere to overhear it. She is about to go into a pizza parlor. He thought last night’s The Office sucked. Often these cell phonies walk into each other or posts, sometimes they drive that way too. Broadcasting trivia is the feel-good-right-now stupidity of the era. The FB timeline capitalizes on that emotional need brilliantly and viciously.

I suspect when this settles, user graphs will show a steep drop-off by age. Many of us don’t and won’t care about minuscule choices of others any more than the status of your FarmVille cow.

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Through the accident of calenders and school schedules, we headed to Block Island on September 11th. The side effect was a relief from the relentless, if understandably expected, leaping, braying 10th-anniversary commentary.

Leading up to and in that morning’s papers, NYT and Globe definitely included, were all 9/11, from not-news to full-page ads, to editorials. Americanism points were in the tally for everyone. Advertisers see a chance for another few bucks by association. Editors feign insight or wisdom where they had none. No one it seemed wanted to appear less patriotic and involved than the next exploiter.

We had long before found that this year, Sunday, 9/11 would be the very end of the tourist season there. Rooms were more available, enough restaurants were still open to satisfy, and we would not be madras to polyester with other interlopers.

We took cell phones for family contact…if necessary. However, Even though our guest house did not brag about WiFi, I figured that there’d be lots of free wireless around. Hence the decision about whether to go three days without internet, news or social media. I admit to a Jones on all.

We receive multiple newspapers (each of us having been newspaper and magazine writers and editors). We’re on the tubes throughout the day, and blog, tweet and blah blah blah.

Yet when it came time to pack, I looked at laptops and the iPad. I realized I had lots of room and any of them would be light. Upon arriving, I could fire one up or not.

The planned or-not won. I took nothing.

We left early, right after breakfast and the Sunday papers. We didn’t speak of 9/11 and had no reminder until the ferry left Port Judith. There and then a Coast Guard gunship paced us to and beyond the breakwater, well into the open sound.

That’s not usual and almost certainly a date-specific display of caution or precaution or something. It was certainly unnecessary and suited only for those simpleminded who are wont to chant, “Better safe than sorry.”

For three days and two nights, we did just fine. We spoke to each other, of literature, of the wildlife and other nature we saw or touched or photographed, of our kids a bit, of our current and earlier selves more, and of the comparative textures and tastes of food and drink before us. We biked every paved foot of the island. We marveled in the deep tones of the shingles — round pebbles thumping insistently to beat of the tide — as we walked upper Crescent Beach. We toured Indian and white-settler cemeteries.

Returning Tuesday PM to the newspapers, the net, and the news, we missed nothing. Commenters had nothing original nor insightful nor wise not palliative. They spoke flatulent words only competitively, because everyone else was doing it.

As emergencies and wars and crushing disappointments prove our mental and intellectual mettle, so do eulogies and memorials demonstrate our compassion and understanding. The many efforts we saw on returning failed. If the worst of times brings out the tritest of clichés in us, we had best speak aloud to ourselves what we intend to say…and then keep quiet.

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