I Forecast a Dismal Year for Forecasters

Wouldn’t it be great if journalists in the United States would grill our politicians and bureacrats like this!   This interview reminded me of a Monty Python skit on steroids.  Despite the pathetic John Hirst in this video, Great Britain has contributed mightily to the world of meterology and travel. 

English clockmaker John Harrison (1693-1776) invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought and critically-needed key piece in solving the problem of accurately establishing the East-West position, or longitude, of a ship at sea, thus revolutionizing and making long distance sea travel more safe, according to Wikipedia.  Read the fascinating book about this by Dava Sobel, link below. 

Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy of the Royal Navy(1805 – 1865) the captain of  the HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage, was a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate weather forecasting a reality, according to Wikipedia.  Wikipedia isn’t always reliable, but I think we’re safe here.

Dava Sobel’s website.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (Paperback)

I found the viedo above, thanks to a commenter on the meteorology blog “Watts Up With That?” which you can find in my blogroll.

Also, a site I recently discovered about journalism is “Big Journalism.”  I’ve added it to my blogroll. Check it out.

All the News That Fit to Print

President Thomas Jefferson.

I’m a news junkie.  I can’t get enough, but it’s also a curse.  I don’t like being addicted and sometimes I get p.o.’d at what I read, but I can’t help myself.

Thomas Jefferson, one of my favorite presidents, had a love-hate relationship with newspapers, which were as full of scandal, calumny and innuendo in his day as they are in ours.  Nevertheless, he defended his firm beliefs in freedom of the press against attacks against the First Amendment of the Constitution.  He was often the object of a newspaper attacks, but he also knew how to use newspapers to advance his political career and that of his party, according to Willard Sterne Randall’s biography of Jefferson.

Here are some of Thomas Jefferson’s quotes, which show his mixed feelings about the “press.”

• Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
• Educate and inform the whole mass of the people…They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
• Information is the currency of democracy.
• The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
• Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
• Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
• Wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
• The abuses of the freedom of the press here (Washington) have been carried to a length never before known or borne by civilized nations.
• I have been for some time used as the property of the newspapers, a fair mark for every man’s dirt. Some, too, have indulged themselves in this exercise who would not have done it, had they known me otherwise than through these impure and injurious channels.  It is hard treatment, and for a singular kind of offence, that of having obtained by the labors of a life the indulgent opinions of a part of one’s fellow citizens.  However, these moral evils must be submitted to, like the physical scourges of tempest, fire, &c.–
• Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time and that of twenty aids could effect.  For while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented….But this is an injury to which duty requires every one to submit whom the public think proper to call into its councils —
• Our newspapers for the most part, present only the caricatures of disaffected minds.
• I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus, and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much happier.

   Here are some bonus Jefferson quotes on the current economic situation:

• I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
• I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
• It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
• Never spend your money before you have earned it.

And lastly, a Jeffersonian thought about political candidates:

• Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

Newspeak

George Orwell

Since this current United States presidential campaign began, trillions of words have been spoken, written, blogged….

I won’t add to the cacophony with my take on the candidates, their followers, the media, the voters and the onlookers.  Instead, I’ll point to the master political wordsmith, George Orwell.  

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, a British novelist, literary critic and essayist who was passionate about the importance of honest and clear language.  He warned that misleading and vague language could be used to manipulate thought and politics.  He railed against “vagueness and sheer incompetence” and criticized his contemporary political writers for preferring the abstract to the concrete.  Doesn’t that ring particularly true today?

The language and ideas of Orwell’s dark, satirical novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have become part of our culture.  Who hasn’t heard of “Big Brother is Watching You” and “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”?

His Down and Out in Paris and London was very moving.  He was fiercely anti-totalitarian, anti-Communist and anti-imperialist.  He described himself as a democratic socialist.  

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main character Winston Smith recognized that he had to live as if the “Thought Police” were tuned into his and everyone else’s every movement and sound.  The Ministry of Truth developed “Newspeak,” a very limiting and restrictive language, which included “doublethink,” in which you hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, passionately believing both.   This is epitomized in the party slogans: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.

I’ll paraphrase Orwell’s six rules for writing:

1.) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you commonly see in print.

2.) Never use a long word when a short one will do.

3.) If it is possible to delete a word, always delete it.

4.) Never use the passive voice, where you can use the active.

5.) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

 In typing this list, I thought of my college editing professor, John B. Bremner, who was formidable in pounding the rules of grammar and usage into my head. I can still hear him bellowing the rules whenever I struggle to keep my writing clear and concise.  In fact, he would have barked at me for using “formidable.” Couldn’t I find a shorter word?  His rule was “never use a Latin-based word, when a nice, short Anglo-Saxon word would work.”  As an example, I could have used “suffice,” rather than “work,” but his ghost wouldn’t let me — this time.  I do think a little variety is good. (I used “cacophony” above instead of “noise.” I like the way it sounds as if something’s stuck in your craw.)  I studied (very inadequately) Latin and French, so it’s too easy to incorporate (more Latin) those languages into my writing — probably badly and inappropriately!

Back to Orwell.  He was a prolific writer. Some of Orwell’s everyday observations in his diary are now being made available in blog form at www.orwelldiaries.wordpress.com  I’ve added Orwell’s blog to my blogroll, too. Orwell’s blog has a lot of interesting sites on his blogroll, so don’t miss it.

A link to an article in the New York Times about Orwell’s “blog” is What George Orwell Wrote, 70 Years Later to the Day  A link to my post about two other essayists about contemporary life, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, is There Will Be Blog. When you jump there, you have to click on the title to get the story.  I’m trying to get more use out of that post!

John B. Bremner wrote a great book on writing, “Words on Words,” which is still available.  I also like the new “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty tips for Better Writing” by Mignon Fogarty. She helps me with pesky punctuation questions, among other writing problems I face.

UPDATE: George Orwell is in the news again! (Along with Evelyn Waugh.)  He’s in a new book, reviewed here Two of a Kind in the New York Times.

Fauxtography

 

                                                                                                                                                                        My friend unveiled her family portrait at a neighborhood party.  In the photograph, she, her husband and their five beautiful children — teenagers and young adults — were bathed in a glow of filtered sunlight as they casually stood in a courtyard.  They looked so happy to be there together.  

There were oohs and ahs all around, but this is what we were thinking.  What did she have to promise — or threaten — to get everyone together at the same time — and smiling, too!  Before any of us was bold enough or rude enough to ask her, my friend confessed. The daughter on the left had thrown a snit about the photo appointment and had shown up too late.  She was later photo-shopped seamlessly into the photo. 

No kidding?  So this family had warts, too.  Then we marveled at the photograph.  The tardy daughter blended in so well with the rest of the family. The same lighting, the same shadows, the same stance, the same size — everything in the same proportion.  I’ll never trust a family portrait again, although I should have been wise to this long ago.  A recent New York Times article discusses this phenomenon in this article. Here’s the link: I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop.

This is a flat wall! There is no gallery here. This is an example of "trompe-l'oeil," which means trick the eye.

Humans have been doctoring reality since the days when Cro Magnon man drew out-sized bison on the cave wall to brag about his hunting prowess.  Artists throughout history have been fooling the eye in “trompe-l’oeil,” making you think something is real when it isn’t.  One of the first movies was of men rocketing to the moon, not that anyone was fooled.

Equally difficult is photographing things as they are. The camera lens distorts.  Neither film nor digital can capture reality the way the eye can.  The eye is more sensitive to color and can see more hues than the camera can capture.  I’ll write more about this later.  In the meantime, don’t be fooled

There Will Be Blog

The mini-van’s thermometer shot up to 94 degrees as we left leaf-shaded suburbia.  We hurried (careful not to exceed the speed limit) into the city, eager for a soft seat in a cool theater at a late afternoon movie, just before the higher evening prices kicked in.  We chose “Gonzo,” a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, a man more than a decade older than us who chronicled our generation in a way we had not quite experienced ourselves.  We were happy to go along for the trip, even though we weren’t hurtling down a highway in a convertible Cadillac, fueled on Wild Turkey and weed ala Thompson.  We bought our tickets, fumbled for seats in the dark and settled in.

Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo journalist.

Hunter S. Thompson was like an early blogger.  Although his words were published — not instantly blasted to the public in bytes — the impact was almost as immediate.   He created, or at least perfected, personal, interactive journalism that shaped the news from his days of living among the Hell’s Angels and Merry Pranksters to dining with presidential candidates.

For the 1972 presidential campaign, he typed his words on the campaign trail at the last minute and fed them into a primitive fax machine, while the production staff at Rolling Stone magazine waited for these last pages, usually hours after the printing deadline.

I was a student journalist during the 1972 campaign.  I have no copies of the words I wrote that were printed in the student newspaper, but I’m sure they had no long-term or even short-term impact.  I just felt lucky to be the one chosen to document George McGovern’s visit to Union Station in Kansas City.  I also wrote about Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s campaign stop for her father at a hotel near the Country Club Plaza.  What I remember most was a video appearance of Richard Nixon on a large screen and wedges of iceberg lettuce swathed in French dressing on plates in the hotel kitchen, all equally unpalatable. Somehow I ended up in the receiving line and shook Julie’s hand.  I worried a little at the propriety of looking like a fan or an admirer.  Journalists need to remain objective. Thompson said he always wrote the facts — as he saw them.

While he knew he’d get better stories as an anonymous observer, he didn’t mind shaping the story.  All journalists do that to some extent. We get to know our sources, even want to be stay on good terms with them.   Somehow, even though Thompson often angered his subjects, he still got access.  According to “Gonzo,” Thompson rode in a car with Nixon for more than an hour, chatting about football, because he was forbidden to mention politics or the Vietnam War. I’d be very surprised if Thompson wasn’t on Nixon’s enemies list.  Thompson loathed Nixon, favoring McGovern and making no secret of that.

Thompson shared his notes with Tom Wolfe for his “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”  Wolfe created his own form of writing, “the New Journalism,” using a colorful, original, involved voice.  Wolfe called Thompson the greatest American comedy writer of the 20th century.  Both men coined phrases that became a part of the language.  They both created trademark images of themselves, standing out in talent and in appearance from the crowd of writers in 1960s and 70s.

Tom Wolfe, 1978, on a street in New York City, in his trademark white suit, which helped to stand out among the crowd of writers.

They couldn’t be more different in style. Thompson was casual, with his sunglasses and dangling cigarette and wearing some kind of slouchy canvas hat.  Wolfe is refined, always dapper in a white suit, hat and cane and white or two-tone shoes.  In November 1987, my husband and I happened across Wolfe in the Boston airport.  Wolfe had been in town plugging his Bonfire of the Vanities.  My husband took the seat next to Wolfe, whose elegant pale cream wool coat was neatly folded in a chair, his white homburg hat resting on top.  Wolfe was like a character in a book from another era, who was keenly and quietly reading us and the others in the waiting room.  I was suddenly very aware of my wind-blown hair and too-casual traveling clothes.   I later read in Bonfire the words of one of the characters deploring the poor state of dress of air travelers.

Perhaps, Thompson would scoff at millions of bloggers besieging the world with their own views, their own experiences, a cacophony drowning one another’s voices. Actually, he probably wouldn’t care.  Some people just rise above the crowd and will always find readers.

When I tell Pat, a friend, about an article I’ve posted or published, she promises she’ll read it — some time, maybe after a long day of work as a pediatric nurse practitioner, after yard work,  after dinner.  I laugh.  She was one of the group of us who’d seen “Gonzo,” and then her husband John encouraged me to write a “gonzo” post.  Gonzo is hard…..

A friend, Jan PlanetJan says that encouraging friends to read your blog feels like “peddling giftwrap for your kid’s middle school.”

Inspired by the title of another movie we’d discussed, Pat says to keep at it.  “There Will Be Blog,” she proclaims.   And, so it continues.