Houstonia's hilarious home run

Oh, please, Houstonia, please forgive me for re-posting this without even the slightest attempt at value-add.  It's just perfect the way it is, and it has to be shared!!  Bravo!!  Encore!!  Encore!!

:-)

Al Jazeera America rising, and what it means

About ten years ago, this was one of the most popular witticisms in America (variably attributed to Chris Rock or Charles Barkley):

You know that the world is off tilt when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest basketball player is Chinese, and Germany doesn't want to go to war.

They may have built upon each other over time with slightly different versions.  Screengrabbed from Google image search.  

I propose a 2014 update as follows:

You know that the world is changing when the best rapper is still a white guy, the best golfer is still a black guy, Germany still doesn't want to go to war, and the best domestic American news coverage is produced by Qatar under their governing system of absolute monarchy.

Al Jazeera America, aka AJAM (which is an interesting acronym given that it means "non-Arab" in Arabic), low-res logo screengrabbed from their website.  

Yes, you heard me correctly.  But rather than explaining my conclusion in this regard, given that I'm in a groove of quoting others here, I am honored to include one of my Facebook buddies, who recently beat me to the punch line in describing the circumstances that led to this result which is indeed bizarre by any historical precedent:

Our mainstream media has become a set of echo chambers tailored to their pre-polarized audience sets. They have a degraded purpose of passing off politicized opinions as news/analysis. Some are blatantly extreme in their bias like FOX/MSNBC, and others mask it a tad bit better.

I found Al Jazeera to be the best source of news in our wretched system of journalism. They also cover news outside our borders much better. Try it! Locally [in League City Texas], [DirecTV carries it on channel 347]. In case your cable provider doesn't cover it, their website offers a no-frills portal to topically organized content.

Is there anybody out there who would disagree with those precipitating conditions and, if so, why?!  That pretty much nails it in my opinion as well.  My buddy is not the first person to refer to domestically-produced news content using the term "echo chamber" (in fact there's even a book by that title), and he won't be the last.  What we see on TV is not news anymore - most of the content (what little exists) is nothing more than a carrier wave for propaganda.

The various echo chambers love to hurl echo chamber accusations at each other:
"YOU are the worse echo chamber!"
"No, YOU are the worst echo chamber!"

Screengrabbed from Google..

I actually found AJAM during a marathon channel surf a few weeks ago.  Every once in a while I have a full-blown attack of buyer's remorse because I'm paying big bucks for three million TV channels while all I watch is HGTV and TNG re-runs on Netflix (which, in case you were wondering, is currently running into bandwidth hell for this reason).  

Well, that's not exactly true.  I do also watch The Walking Dead, which probably means that I will be held financial hostage by DirecTV for the duration.  Meme screengrabbed from this source, which probably got it from somewhere else.  

So when I get those attacks of buyer's remorse, I go on a big hour-long surf just so I can look at what else is out there and reassure myself that it all still sucks, and I'm not missing anything.  

Except I paused on AJAM because it didn't seem to suck that badly.  

And then I was encouraged to watch further because I noticed that they only spend about 10% of their time - just six minutes per hour - running commercials instead of the 36% consumed by the average American network (which makes live TV un-watchable for me... who would voluntarily waste 36% of their time, duh?!).

But then I realized... could it be true?!  OMG, was I dreaming, or was I seeing ACTUAL INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM?!  

It's true.  I felt like I was suddenly transported back to 1980 and I was watching the CBC all over again, the way it was back then (not the way it is now).  I thought that kind of journalism was gone forever.  But apparently it is rising like a Phoenix from an unlikely bed of foreign ashes.

This situation begs two questions:

1. Why is this happening?
2. How long will it last?

With respect to those questions, my Facebook buddy lamented as follows:

Given the primary [American TV viewing] audience profile that mostly wants sound bites that reinforce their biases, I can see [AJAM] not surviving too long.

His point is valid - how could AJAM possibly support its obviously-massive infrastructure with only six minutes of adverts per hour as it comes up against the fact that Americans have been largely brainwashed to expect feel-goody personal validation as their primary news hour deliverable??  But I myself am not so sure that it will prove to be as simple as AJAM dying a quick and largely unnoticed near-future death.  I replied,

First of all, the normal business rules of cash flow and profitability don’t apply when we’re talking about anything having to do with the Arab world. Second of all, [my husband] suspects that they’re establishing themselves as ethically unassailable with their American reporting specifically because they wish to command a corresponding presumption of objectivity when reporting on the Middle East. If that’s the motivation, then they may be willing to fund an American financial black hole in perpetuity or something close to it.

Time will tell how this thing evolves.  Will the effort last?  Will AJAM manage to thoroughly embarrass and shame the front-running American networks into reverting to higher journalistic standards??  In effect, will it save Americans from their egotistical echo-y selves??  We await the answers.  Meanwhile, we can sit back and enjoy the show - the news show in which AJAM is hands-down beating us at what had previously been our exclusive journalistic game.   

Sam

I am reminded of the line from the old Jesus Jones song "Right Here, Right Now":

A woman on the radio talked about revolution
when it's already passed her by.

There's an extraordinary young man from a little town 13 miles south of here and I believe he has already changed the world.

I think we've hit a tipping point with this one, even if we can't yet articulate exactly what it comprises.  But the signs are there.  There is a little gas baggery on the internet, but given the magnitude of what was represented by the young man's recent announcement, gas baggery is almost completely conspicuous by its absence.

Similarly, there are no negative or even neutral reader comments appended to any of the local news stories on his announcement - I keep checking and they haven't appeared, a development which flies in the face of our well-deserved reputation for hosting a large and vocal fraction of right-wing religious fundamentalists (I use that noun loosely).

Perhaps most tellingly, no critical or derogatory memes appear to have been spawned in response to this young man.  You have to remember that the vast internet community, with all of its wing-nut extremism, makes memes out of defenseless people disabled by conditions such as Downs Syndrome, for crying out loud.  The wing-nuts will stop at nothing to defile and ridicule every person and public interest story that makes the news.  But Michael Sam?  Not a single image out there.  It's as if the entire world is holding its collective breath, and holding its tongue, waiting to see what happens next.

But it has already happened.  Regardless of what becomes of Mr. Sam from this point forward, the thing - whatever it really is - has already passed us by.  We'll only be able to really understand it at some unknown future moment of 20/20 hindsight.

As we wait for that point on the time continuum to intersect with us, please consider devoting two of your minutes to contemplating this unusually powerful video below.  If you don't watch a single other commentary on the Michael Sam situation, watch this one. Good ol' WFAA knocked it way, way out of the park (yeah, I know - wrong sport, but you get the picture).  Here's the URL if you're reading this on mobile device, and the embed to follow.

Right here, right now
Watching the world wake up from history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olc5C4SXAYM

Please consider blogging or tweeting

We've got a snow day in greater Houston and no snow to show for it.  As soon as the public school districts began announcing closures yesterday, the domino effect began in earnest.  Commercial cancellation announcements began pouring into my email box and visual voice mail account.

If you're wondering what to do with a bit of unanticipated free time today (or any other day), please consider starting your own blog or Twitter feed, especially if you might be able to see yourself participating in some kind of a community connective role.

There are 300,000 people in Galveston County, and very little community-oriented citizen journalism that I can find.

There are 200,000 people in "greater Clear Lake", which overlaps with north Galveston County, and the same observation applies.

We have a couple of notable exceptions, the most prominent of them being Island Drumz, which is the Clear Lake Shores blog.

Clear Lake Shores is about the size of a postage stamp.  Seriously, about 1,000 people live there, which is probably less than the population of Centerpointe subdivision with its 438 single family homes, most of which contain multiple-person families.  And yet Island Drumz has 68 subscribers and usually receives over 1,000 hits per week.  Do the math.  

If you do the math on that one, what you find is that Island Drumz is an effective mechanism of local social connection and information-sharing.  It represents a phenomenon that is rare in our area.

Bay Area Houston Today is another local example, but many of its posts promote ideological positions to a degree in which neither Island Drumz nor Centerpointe Communicator engage.  I do my share of editorializing - that's one of the perks of being a blogger - but it's not my primary focus.  And if I want political information, I tend to cut to the chase and go straight to The Texas Tribune rather than any given blog.

Our area's original blog was The League City Blog, which once again had a political focus, but at least it contained some hard information about what was going on around here.  Real Scary League City Politics was a similarly-themed progeny, but as of this writing, both have been dormant since 2012.

In sooth, the local blogging field is wide open.  Ditto with Twitter, from what I've seen so far.  Seven days ago when I announced that I was going to supplement blogging with tweeting, I made the statement "I was reluctant to begin this initiative" (Google Chrome has a sense of humor with cut and paste formatting, apparently).  Three days ago, a New York Times blogger neatly explained the reason for my reluctance in a piece titled "Valley of the Blahs:  How Justin Bieber's Troubles Exposed Twitter's Achilles Heel".  Simply put, Twitter is degenerating into a forum where people are trying to be noticed more than they are trying to be useful, which was Twitter's original purpose.   And in fact, much of what I've found in perusing Twitter fits into that category.  Nevertheless, it's still one of the best connective options we've got right now.

There is a HUGE latent demand for local information and connection with the other people who surround us.  We know this with absolute certainty.  Humans of New York recently proved it to us in spades.  HONY is essentially a forum through which local people communicate their individual stories.  They do it anonymously but viscerally, and they do it in a way which is less self-promotional and navel-staring and more in the style of sharing their wisdom and life lessons learned.  And people can't get enough of it, because that is exactly what is so missing from our social universe.   The blog has two million followers and the book that followed the blog was an instant #1 best seller.

When I conceived of this blog in 2011, I added a tab called "Neighbors" and I foresaw including content that was very similar to what HONY has since invented (this post from November 2011 best reflected my original intent for that post category).  But I didn't develop it because the idea was such a different paradigm that I was afraid it would creep people out.  I saw an acute social need for that kind of content, but as a small-scale contributor to the communicative universe, I wasn't sure that I would be a suitable person to try to re-set that precedent.  HONY has now smashed the old paradigm on behalf of us all.

Particularly if you are an older person, what are you planning to do - die with all your empirical wisdom still trapped inside your own head??  What would be the sense in that?  What if you were to share some of in an accessible format such as a blog, within the context of your life here in our local area?  I'm not talking about the navel-staring and self-promotion that characterizes so many individual private blogs.  I'm talking about sharing useful information.

Useful sharing benefits everyone, including the sharer.  A few months ago, a senior member of my scientific profession lamented in a public editorial that he had lost his enthusiasm for his career.  After about thirty years of doing essentially the same things, it had become stale to him, and he wondered what in the hell he could possibly do to keep himself engaged in the gap that he now dreaded, the ten-year gap between the onset of staleness and the final relief of retirement.  He hit upon an increased focus on mentoring junior members of our field, and suddenly he found himself filled with joy and renewed drive.

His story of typical of how life works.  Connection is good.  Sharing is good.  Mentoring is good.  Transmitting accumulated wisdom is good.  So, yeah, there are a lot of people out there who absolutely do not want to know about toilets that don't function properly.  Fine - they can enthusiastically skip that particular blog post.  But rest(room) assured, there's someone else out there who is looking for some guidance on that and literally a million of life's other small challenges.

Think about it.

What you should know about, vs. what the news tells you about

This meme is making the rounds on Facebook, with over eight thousand shares thus far.  It's a good creative idea in principle, but I think it's worth calling out what is so fundamentally wrong with this particular presentation.

Tap to expand.  This is the original version, uncredited.

In order to credit the maker and provide them with a trackback opportunity, I attempted to determine the origin of this meme, but my efforts were to no avail. Here's TinEye's analysis. Zippo.  

When one of my journalist friends shared the thing, I commented "They left (pun intended) an important one out of the "should know about" column: Why being co-opted by [mostly political] propaganda is no better than succumbing to the lure of junk culture."

My journalist friend then invited me to elaborate, which I proceeded to do in kind:

Tap to expand.  My version, off the cuff.  I added an attribution in case anyone wants to trace this one back to its source. 

The point of my version is to emphasize the following paradoxical truth:

If we take care of the little things, the big things have a way of taking care of themselves (channeling an old English proverb and a number of more contemporary like-minded sources). 

It does neither a person nor a community any good whatsoever for someone to devote time and energy to learning about some dissociated topic such as uranium depletion, especially when almost everything published on that subject has been sensationalized for the purposes of maximizing obsessive hand-wringing in the audience. 

If we instead devote our attention to community building, then we grow the energy, strengthen the moral principles, and enhance the tools that people require as prerequisites to doing things such as properly managing uranium, if they happen to be working in that specific capacity.

And while we're on the subject of what the commercial news media is and is not helping people to know about, might I remind everyone that what you see in any given newspaper bears only partial resemblance to what readers would like to see in that newspaper. 

For example, I mention faith-based organizations in my meme version above (and my definition of 'faith-based' is inclusive of all traditions, including humanist, agnostic, atheist, and polytheist).  I have another journalist friend, unaffiliated with the person who shared that original "should know" meme, who once told me that market studies consistently reveal that an *overwhelming* majority of newspaper readers want to see more faith-based content - not proselytizing, but objective information and reporting:  Who is out there, how do those groups define themselves, and what are they doing in and for the local community? 

But almost none of that type of content makes it into the average American metro newspaper - why??  Because advertisers are too afraid of being incorrectly associated with specific groups.  They don't want their ads to appear on the same pages as faith-based content because they think it would turn off and drive away readers who are associated with different faith-based groups. 

The key phrase there is "They don't want their ads to appear on the same newspaper pages as faith-based content".  There you have the kiss of content death, the reason why so little appears despite the fact that most people want it and would gladly pay for it. 

Fortunately, I don't have any advertisers to satisfy, so I can come right out and say things like that.  But we've still got a long way to go before folks cast off their uranium reality show celebrity divorce scandal addictions and start focusing on the importance of what's actually staring them right in the face.

Oh, look!!  It's a very non-dogmatic assertion, very benign and most people would agree that it contains universal truth, but it still technically falls into the category of faith-based content because its author was a famous Unitarian Minister.  But fear not - no advertisements were harmed in the posting of this quote meme.

I can't do everything, but I can launch the occasional meme refinement and I can also call bullsh*t in some of those instances where it needs to be called.  And if everybody made tiny contributions in kind, what might the net result be?

Quote screengrabbed from this site. 

Extreme mystery solved

Ask and ye shall receive.  On December 18, I raised the issue of the now-for-sale local Extreme Makeover house, a question which seemed pertinent given that League City is once again poised to embark on another "free house" promotional event, one that is not without ongoing controversy (link paywalled).

Screengrab from that post. 

Eight days after I asked, Chron has answered:

Screengrabbed from this article, which explains that the family was done in by a number of factors, chief among them high carrying costs, especially the five-figure annual property taxes triggered by a dream home built on this vast scale. 

Chron also linked to this article which explains how and why so many "free house" winners ultimately lose their windfalls.  Hopefully as these cases accumulate, they will serve as a lesson for groups trying to balance public relations and private practicality:  Is their primary goal to actually help these families, or are they just trying to make a big splash for TV?  Because packing up and moving is Extreme-ly disruptive, especially for children who need more situational stability than adults do.  If high carrying costs force many winners to quickly sell their "free" houses, the purely-human benefits of this practice certainly become debatable. 

Anyway, best of luck to the Kemah family as they move into the next less-grandiose, more human-scale phase of their lives. 

Extreme mystery

Kemah's "Extreme Makeover" home has been for sale for months now without a peep as to why, or what will become of the approximately fourteen people, mostly children, who live(d?) there.

Remember this?  Just three short years ago, the project captured the attention of north Galveston County and League City, with then-mayor Toni Randall playing a visible role in its development.  Technically the home was in Kemah, but it was situated just a stone's throw from the League City municipal boundary, so League City residents were very much involved. 

Low resolution photo screengrabbed from the well-known Houston real estate blog Swamplot. 

Actually, I understate.  The project captured the attention of all of greater Houston.  Screengrabbed from this KTRK story. 

The circumstances of the sale seem a bit bizarre, if the information posted online is taken at face value.

The internet is positively littered with re-posts of the real estate listing.  It apparently began its life as a sale offering at around $800,000...

...only to see its price slashed to $575,000 a few months later.

Screengrabs from a Google search. 

But here's the weird thing:  the widespread use of the word "infamous" in these listings.  Infamous?!  If you were trying to market a valuable commodity in a positive light, would you refer to it as "infamous"??  Maybe if you were trying to sell a pirate ship or Jimmy Hoffa's Rolex.  But a family home??

I'm not a realtor so I cannot look this up, but some sources suggest that the sale is a foreclosure.

Another Google screengrab, although the active Houston Association of Realtors listing makes no mention of foreclosure or short sale. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way that a "free" house can be foreclosed upon is if it were effectively re-mortgaged by way of a cash-out refinance or home equity loan of some type. 

Anyway, this mystery has come to my attention because of a recent attack of foot-in-mouth disease on the part of Councilman Todd Kinsey, and by that I mean the idiom rather than the virus of similar name. 

The story goes like this.  Another organization is now seeking to raise funds to build another "free" home in League City, this time for a military veteran's family rather than for a family devoted to domestic public service, as the Kemah family unquestionably was.  League City is reportedly contemplating whether or not to kick in about $20,000 to that organization's upcoming fundraising effort. 

During the course of this, Galveston County Daily News quoted Kinsey as referring to "[his own] legacy", which arguably sounds like he's trying to allocate other peoples' money (i.e., our taxpayer dollars) in a way that primarily makes himself look good.  Public response on GCDN has been neither kind nor forgiving. 

The issue raises the obvious slate of questions: 

• Should so many tax dollars be devoted to the benefit of just one family who hasn't even been identified yet?? 
• What about every other needy person and family?? 
• What makes one family more incrementally deserving than any of the next hundred others who might be considered for a similar benefit?? 
• And do these "free home" schemes even accomplish their purported goals in the first place?  Who really benefits in the long run? 

In parsing that final question, we might look to the last "free" home that got built near League City, and what happened with it.  Although that story may very well remain a mystery, the verdict is that what happened was almost certainly not good, if the house is now being lost.  I've mentioned in many other posts that I'm a home improvement junkie - real estate porn is my recreational indulgence.  Like thousands of other League City residents, I watched the growth of the project on the Extreme Makeover TV show.  Which makes watching this follow-up video all the more surreal:

Epic racism

It really, really chaps my rear end when I have to get important and mainstream Houston news by way of the "Epic Sh*t" Facebook group instead of through what are supposed to be the conventional, respectable channels of journalism.

I read Houston Chronicle daily, including the paid subscriber portions, and I saw not one word on the story of Landry Thompson, who traveled to Houston with her dance instructors and was forcibly taken into CPS custody despite overwhelming evidence that her circumstances were proper.

Furthermore, when I search the Chronicle online edition, I find no hits involving her name.

Screengrabbed from www.chron.com's search engine.

I can, however, get the story from HuffPost.  I can get it from ABC's Good Morning America - but apparently not from the ABC affiliate KTRK (which dominates our local TV market, by the way). 

Silencio.  What's up with that, exactly??  ABC can't claim that they didn't possess the content, because they broadcast it nationally. 

Screengrabbed from KTRK. 

This was an incredibly important local story last week, and apparently only KHOU had the guts and the conscience to report it.

"Only on KHOU" indeed.  Screengrabbed from Facebook. 

This story was incredibly important for two reasons:

(1)  Because HPD really screwed up.  There is no excuse for what they did to these people.  And then they compounded their unbelievable screw-up by intentionally NOT issuing a proper apology!!

(2)  Because this could have been an excellent teaching moment for the public in more ways than one, instead of being something that the local news media seems to have buried  - why? - because they don't want Houston or HPD to look bad so maybe it's best to sweep it under the rug?  Or far worse, maybe because they think that there was really no story here?!

These young people did everything correctly, and their civil rights were still violated, in my opinion. 

Most importantly, they were traveling with a notarized custody document.  That's the big missed opportunity for public education here.  Properly-presented news coverage could have given the public more information on this vital tool which is designed to eliminate confusion and ambiguity on exactly this kind of situation. 

And on that subject, I myself can speak from experience.  I have a daughter whose last name is different from mine, who isn't the same color as I am, and who doesn't strongly resemble me.  Particularly when we travel abroad, we always travel with a notarized document from her other biological parent explaining that she's properly in the custody of me and/or whatever larger group she is with (I can't tell you what law or rule compels this practice, because I only learned to do it by word of mouth from other people with similar family complexities). 

Racial profiling does work both ways, eh?  Of course, it's absolutely nowhere near as common for a white woman to be profiled as a black man, but it does happen.   Over the years, I have been interrogated.  It always starts with the same suspicious question:  "What is the relationship of this child to you?!"  And it always proceeds with the same initial answer:  "I gave birth to her."  If I'm feeling a bit puckish that day, I might volunteer that I delivered her naturally after only 12 hours of labor, which is unusually short for a first pregnancy in an ass-less American white woman (translation: small pelvic structure), but I was very physically fit and so it was an efficient process. 

But it doesn't matter how much TMI I provide.  More than once, the historical result has been a furious glare as the "authority" mentally embraces his or her default belief:  That it's more likely that I'm one of those sinister rich bitches who trafficked the defenseless child of color out of the third world so that I could chain her to my toilet and use her for slave domestic labor for the next fifty years of her life.

Unlike the young people in last week's news story, I've never been pushed beyond the initial phase of interrogation.  Maybe its because of that expectant look on my face that always says, "Go ahead - make my day."

I do hope that the Thompson family decides to litigate in this situation.  I certainly would if I were in their position, but that's an individual decision and a tough call either way.  It probably wouldn't gain them that much personally, but it would do a tremendous favor for American society by publicly emphasizing that not all young black men are criminals.  And not all unusual child custodians are criminals, either. 

Major, major kudos to KHOU in stepping up to the plate on this one. Here's their initial coverage:

Set your DVRs for HGTV tonight

According to Galveston County Daily News, there are two more locally-filmed episodes of HGTV shows coming up - the "Beach Front Bargain Hunt" episode that airs tonight, November 24, 2013 at 8:30 p.m., and a different episode scheduled for December 1, 2013 at 7:30 p.m. 

Both were shot in Galveston, which is small consolation for all the Centerpointers who missed the episode of House Hunters that was filmed mostly in Centerpointe and which premiered about two months ago. 

I described it in this post and attempted to find additional scheduling information in this other post, but I came up empty-handed.  I still can't tell when it will be re-broadcast, as most of those episodes eventually are. 

Screengrabbed from HGTV. 

Here's what was frustrating about the Centerpointe episode:  According to what I was told after writing those two posts linked above, HGTV actually did inform our POA that they were filming here as they were doing it some months back.  The POA was supposed to get a heads-up as to when the episode would actually air, but apparently the communication wasn't successful for whatever reason.  So the POA never knew, and I ended up being one of the only (if not the only) resident in the entire subdivision who saw the danged thing.  And that only happened because I'm a home improvement junkie who watches a great deal of HGTV.  I just happened to have the TV on at the time.

Anyway, enjoy the Galveston episodes as your small consolation prize.  I'm curious about how HGTV's coverage will address the looming issue of flood insurance, if they address it at all. 

Five hundred toward ten thousand

Nothing rational can be done with this, my five-hundredth blog post, except explain why in the hell I wrote five hundred blog posts, many of them lengthy and complex.

I got this meme from The Summa blog, but I don't know where that blog's author got it.  That's the nature of internet memes. 

I get this question a lot, usually from another Centerpointer with an uneasy look on his or her face:  Why am I spending so much time on this?  Why am I doing all this work?  We live in a profit-driven society - my effort makes no sense in any deducible context.  I'm not getting paid.  I'm not getting promoted.  I'm not getting applauded.  I'm sure as hell not getting famous.  And half the stuff I write isn't all that interesting or compelling, unless you happen to be the frustrated newbie who is trying to figure out how to pry the attic hatch back open after the cord has snapped off, the kind of newbie I hear from daily. 

Part of this I've explained previously - I really do like helping people.  We live and die by the almighty dollar, careening madly from one consumeristic transaction to the next.  Something has to be done with a primary eye toward one's fellow man, or else one's entire life perspective ends up simply going clickety-clack in a stultifying roundabout fashion. 

But there's another reason as well.  I really, really wanted to be an investigative journalist when I grew up, but I grew up poor.  Even back in the early 1980's when I graduated from high school, it was obvious to me that choosing a "soft" career such as journalism was a risky chance that I personally could not afford to take.  For reasons I don't consciously understand, I strongly sensed the impending precipitous decline of journalism even before its technological causes were invented.  So no journalism - having nothing whatsoever to fall back on in life, I had to do the safe thing and choose the "hard" career field of science instead, the choice that was all but guaranteed to yield financial security and the greatest diversity of professional options. 

My science career has achieved exactly that, and in ways I never could have predicted.  But still there is the unfinished business of the journalism thing.  I had a university professor who beseeched and begged me to abandon science in order to become a writer instead, and when I explained my poverty rationale to him, he promptly began to cry.  "Don't worry," I comforted him.  "I can do both.  I'll find another way to get there as a writer.  I promise you." 

Blogging is part of that way.  The folks who become uneasy when they can't identify my motives aren't seeing that this is part of my proverbial ten thousand hours of development time.  That's precisely what's in it for me - pure practice.  I'm still not completely sure what "get there" will prove to be, but not knowing is part of the fun of it.  And if, along the way, I get to help the attic cord people and occasionally instigate a deer-in-the-headlights moment over at City Hall, then that's the icing on my long-awaited cake.

:-)

Yup. And stay tuned for more.

 

License and liability

Here's a great example of why mainstream commercial and nonprofit citizen journalism complement each other so well:  Galveston County Daily News published information that no blogger would ever be able to touch directly for fear of litigational repercussions. 

The source article is behind the paywall, but a PDF of its supporting graphic may be directly accessible to non-paying users through this link.  This is a small screengrabbed excerpt that encapsulates the bottom line. 

My first response to seeing this was "Oh... my... GAWD."  Not because of the wild increases in flood premiums which we all knew were coming, but because GCDN was able to make that statement in the first place, given that it could now be argued that they just put the kybosh on any further potential to sell the piece of real estate that they cite.

You might debate that statement by responding, "But the deleterious condition of disproportionate flood insurance burden existed prior to GCDN's reporting of same, was not caused by GCDN, and would persist irrespective of their news coverage, so why does it matter?" 

I'm not a legal expert, but according to what I've been told by others who have been involved with this sort of stuff, it potentially matters because GCDN caused a negative condition to become public which otherwise might have been contained to the far more private level of the individual sale transaction.  And in so doing, a litigator could potentially argue that they disproportionately impacted the market value of that piece of real estate relative to comparable properties.  It's as if GCDN pointed a finger and yelled, "It's the Amityville Horror house!!" only by virtue of an insurability predicament rather than purported evil spirits.

Again, I'm not an attorney or a legal expert of any kind, but I do know that commercial news media works within a framework of "freedom of the press"-style protections and insulation that the rest of us don't necessarily enjoy.  Hence they can do that kind of thing and remain unscathed where another source might find themselves being sued if they tried something similar. 

However, it's interesting to note that "freedom" also works both ways.  While commercial news sources may not be as vulnerable to litigation as the rest of us, they are very sensitive to the tastes of both their subscribership and their advertisership, and thus may voluntarily edit their content to maximize their appeal to both.  I keep in touch with a variety of journalists locally and nationally, and there have been times when, in discussing current events, I've been told, "We can't publish [that topic] because we simply cannot 'go there'.  But if you publish it, we would then be at liberty to publicize the fact that you produced commentary on [that topic]." 

Moral of the story:  As Joel Salatin strongly advises, read eclectically.  Don't confine yourself to any given commercial or nonprofit echo chamber.  You'll get the best cross-sectional exposure to both facts and ideas by being diverse in your sources. 

Breaking news

I call it "breaking news" because every time the mainstream news media reports on League City, it seems to break our collective spirit a little bit, with stories of one questionable municipal antic after another.  By the law of averages, shouldn't it be some good news this time?? 

Tune in to KTRK or FOX for the evening newscast and you should be among the first to know, because it is their boom trucks and reporters working up at the muni complex as I type this.

Tell us something good, please.  Really.  We need it. 

EEEeeeeee!!

I'vE rEquestEd both via Email and commEnt that it bE corrEctEd in thE E-vErsion, although thE frontpagE itsElf is obviously a lost causE:

Low-resolution screengrab of today's front page, Galveston County Daily News.  Look at the article in the lower right hand corner. 

Yes, that article refers to us, but you wouldn't think so from simply reading the title.  It sounds like homeowners in Centerpoint's service area are getting some kind of a tax break, which might make a lot of readers unrealistically joyful until they discover the actual truth of the matter. 

This is not us.  This is not related to us.  We have nothing whatsoever to do with this corporate entity. 

Screengrabbed from Centerpoint's homepage. 

There is an "E" on the end of Centerpointe.  EEEeeeeeee!!!  I've noted on previous occasions what a pain in the rear end this name similarity is.  It causes routine confusion on a variety of matters.  If nothing else, maybe today's article will serve to raise awareness of the fact that we are a distinct legally-defined and unrelated entity, not some spin-off of a utility corporation analogous to what Exxon did in creating Friendswood Development Company. 

And oh - the article itself refers to a tax refinancing deal that may lower our PID payments.  More on that later.

Creationism controversy: What's different now?

The mainstream media seems like it might be suffering from an attack of short memory syndrome, and so I'd like to help rectify that here. 

The internet positively exploded yesterday with retreads of the AP story surrounding the apparently-growing textbook controversy in Texas, as creationism once again threatens to rear its inappropriate head in public school science classrooms.  The list of news URLs went on for several pages Monday night. 

Screengrabbed from Google. 

But here's what I found curious:  Neither the Associated Press nor any of the related media sources that I've read have thus far have invoked Kitzmiller while framing the issue in its present-day Texas context.  OK, some so-called "social conservatives" are once again pushing for the teaching of creationism at the expense of science instead of in its proper historical and cultural context  - that's no more surprising than the sun rising in the east.  But what hasn't yet been explained is why this newest challenge rises to the level of justifiable alarm.  As a nation, we've been there, we've done that, and in Kitzmiller, Judge John E. Jones III did a jaw-droppingly good job of setting everyone straight on the issue (trial transcripts here; judgment here).  

In a word, yes (tap to expand).  Screengrabbed from this source. 

At this point, there are the popular news stories and Texas Freedom Network has initiated a campaign called Stand up for Science to oppose these developments (the grab above is from their summary document).  But the Constitutional precedent has already been strongly reaffirmed on this issue, has it not?  And recently, and by Republicans to boot. 

According to the NOVA episode "Judgment Day", Judge Jones (rear right) had been recommended for his position on the bench by Senator Santorum (left) and appointed by George W. Bush. 

Screengrabbed from "Judgment Day". 

So even if some rogue Texas creationists were to succeeded in getting inappropriate textbooks approved, what's the worst-case scenario?  Presumably, the usual squandering of an inconceivably large number of public dollars on some Rube Goldberg-style legal machinations would quickly follow, as it always does in the unwinnable culture war.  The litigation would launch, textbooks would get tossed, and Texas would then resume its expected social trajectory none the worse for wear (except financially, of course).  Or would there be more to it this time than just that? 


One of my favorite "unwinnable war" memes, courtesy of Cheezburger.

Perhaps more details will emerge in the coming days.  Hopefully some of you media people have your trackback ears on, because many of us would like to know more about the core of this emerging issue.   

A rose by any other name.

Excerpted from the Kitzmiller decision, page 8. 



The remarkable elegance of Kitzmiller is found in the way in which the plaintiffs were able to show, using actual physical evidence, that "intelligent design" is quite literally creationism re-labeled.  It was so striking that, at times, I wondered if an intelligent designer actually had a hand not in the arising of life, but in the trial. 

It is resoundingly and emphatically unconstitutional to teach creationism within the context of science in an American public school system.  That much was affirmed long before Kitzmiller. 

Screengrabs from "Judgment Day", from frames around the 1:27 mark.

The number ones

This post is intended for other bloggers. 

Tag line:  How to run a noncommercial blog which successfully reaches its target audience.

Answer:  Check your premises, the very first one being, how do you define success?   Prevailing internet wisdom will tell you that success and clicks are positively correlated, but that's a strictly commercial paradigm.  You don't want to maximize total number of clicks - anyone can do that, but it's a mirage because most of the clicks landing on any given website don't mean very much (they just look like they do because they're so easy to measure).  What you really want to achieve is the best possible ratio of high-quality clicks which, depending on your application, might actually mean driving traffic away from your website rather than toward it.  Kinda counterintuitive, eh?   Like swimming upstream against a surging torrent of bytefish. 

Number ones are a proxy measurement of click quality.   If you can hit a number one topic ranking anywhere in Googlespace, you know you're getting somewhere meaningful. 

In my case, because this blog was developed as a noncommercial tool to help people with many of life's more mundane challenges, some of my number ones are pretty dull, as content goes.  But again, one has to re-think the definition of success.  I'd rather reach one person who genuinely needs pay-it-forward guidance on some daily homeowner irritation than reach a hundred people who really don't need anything but are just messing around with internet surfing because they like looking at pretty pictures. 

Of the sixty thousand pagehits this blog has received so far, about 98% of them appear to have fallen into the former category.  Every once in a while, there is a minor blip in comment spam (which is the internet version of graffiti) or bot traffic, incidents which are thus far manageable using embedded tools such as those supplied by fight-back groups including Project Honeypot.  But almost all of those 60,000 hits to date are real enough to result in very high Google rankings.  For grins, here is a subset of this blog's number ones to date:

Yes, absolutely - attic cords are pretty darned dull, as topics go.  But you'd be surprised at how many people are seeking input on what to do with them. 

I am by no means the only homeowner whose carbon monoxide alarm was triggered unexpectedly by carpet cleaning. 

Gardening posts remain popular...

...with the expected strong regional correlation. 

Don'tcha hate it when that happens?!  Me, too!!

And ain't it curious when that happens?!

It's easy to be number one on the topic of stacked stone landscaping in Houston, because nobody does stacked stone landscaping in Houston.  Not yet, anyway.  Except us, of course. 

Reaching a #1 status for a topic like this is really quite cool, because unlike attic cords, this is not an obscure issue.  Many, many homeowners have electrical transformers or utility boxes in their yards that they wish to disguise.  If you were to calculate the amount of money devoted annually in America to the concealment of exterior utility boxes, it would probably equal the GDP of a few small nations on earth. 

Also cool for this topic because, again, it's a subject that a greater number of people are interested in.  And a lot of vendors attempt to attach content to the selling of their floor tile, so having a non-profit, non-traffic-enhanced (read: non-pay-per-view) piece of content snag that ranking honor is not an automatic process. 

And of course, the posting piece de resistance where ranking is concerned.  This isn't just a Google number one - I think it basically dominates the entire known universe on this particular subject, Cherenkov or no Cherenkov. 

By far the biggest change I've seen in the past three years of blogging is the breathtakingly-rapid migration to mobile devices.  That stuff you read about the perilous decline of MSFT's market share?  In my experience, it's true.  People are not sitting at desktop computers any more - they're accessing almost everything they read on phones and tablets (which is why you'll now see me use the word "tap" instead of "click").  I'm to the point of inferring that up to 95% some of my post access is via mobile devices.  This change has been so rapid that those of us who are restricted to blogging freespace are losing our ability to track traffic because technology hasn't kept up (e.g., StatCounter either can't or won't compile details on mobile sources).  So I'm enjoying my ability to identify my own number ones while I can, which may not be for much longer.