Not sure what to get someone for the holidays or their birthday? Art's always a good start.
Coming after Thanksgiving, I'll be putting together some specials from the photo store, and you'll have to be following me on Twitter to get instructions for discounts (an @reply will be required, so checking my status updates on Facebook won't help you).
Feel free to leave comments below as to which photo(s) you'd like to see discounted.
On the night of November 9 and 10, 1938 – 70 years ago today – a state-sponsored progrom (riot, incursion) killed 92 German Jews and saw somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 Jews arrested.
Synagogues were burned. Jewish-owned shops were vandalized or destroyed. There was so much glass they called it Kristallnacht (Wikipedia), the night of broken glass.
It brought to a head five years of increasingly restrictive anti-Semitic laws, and offered only a hint of what was to come in the ensuing years.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is doing a special exhibit this year.
If, by the way, you haven't been to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, next time you're in DC, give yourself four hours there, and a couple hours of recovery time.
From the time we're young, Jewish people are taught about the Holocaust. We see movies. We read books. We hear from survivors – though even people who lived long, healthy lives after the Holocaust are dying off now.
We take it personally, even all these years later. Working for a weekly newspaper about six years ago, I was sent to cover a school event that featured children of Holocaust victims and children of Holocaust perpetrators sitting on a panel, talking primarily about forgiveness. I sat in the back of the auditorium and pretty much bawled for an hour and a half.
We are taught to never forget. If you forget, it could happen again.
And so the world puts on its blinders, and makes sure that Jews don't ever have to live through genocide again.
We forget about the six million gypsies, homosexuals and others who died during the Holocaust. In the U.S., we're systematically denying the latter group rights (that's the first step, by the way). We didn't believe anything was happening in Rwanda in 1994. We did so little about Darfur. We're certainly not in the Democratic Republic of the Congo right now.
I'm not naive enough to believe we can all just get along and that's that. But when we see genocide, why are we sitting still?
Please note: Due to an unfortunate element that exists on the Web, comments are closed for this post. You can @reply me on Twitter or e-mail me directly if you'd like to have a comment posted, and I'll add it to this post. Any threatening messages will be forwarded to law enforcement authorities.
In case you missed it, the U.S. elected Barack Obama to the office of the presidency on Tuesday.
It didn't really surprise anybody. Even Karl Rove predicted he would win in a landslide.
Obama is African-American, and if you're not up on your U.S. history, please leave right now, go to the library, and educate yourself.
During the primary season, it became clear that the Democratic Party was going to make some history. It was either going to put a woman at the top of the ticket, or it was going to put an African-American at the top of the ticket.
Some people – including some close to me – said that they would vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary because they were worried there were people in the country who would vote for the Republican candidate (we later found out that would be John McCain) solely because they wouldn't vote for Obama because of his race.
My response? These people wouldn't vote for Clinton because of her sex. Also, they would probably vote Republican even if John McCain were the Democratic candidate.
Once Obama and McCain were nominated by their respective parties, race became all but a non-issue. McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, certainly couldn't use race as an issue, at least not overtly. Same for the mainstream media, even if they were to endorse McCain/Palin (which very few of them did).
But once Obama got elected, people all over the world – including in the U.S. – started reacting positively at the fact we had elected a black man to the presidency.
Black voters interviewed by members of the press – particularly older ones, who had lived through depression-era segregation all the way up through the civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s – celebrated. Some said they feel at home for the first time.
McCain, in his concession speech, brought race into the picture.
It feels like this election was never about race, but the reason for that is we have an economic crisis and two wars on our hands. Mitch reminds us that Obama's victory doesn't mean racism's dead in the U.S. He's right, of course. It just means race wasn't the top issue in this campaign.
There's still a lot of work to do, and it's not only racism that needs eradicating in the U.S.
Several states added constitutional amendments making gay marriage illegal. One state added an amendment – presumably aimed at gay couples – making it illegal for unmarried couples to adopt children.
Women still make less money than men for equal work – I've seen numbers that say women's salaries come in about 75% to 84% of men's salaries.
Some reading for you:
» The Housewife of the Revolution asks, "What are you doing to eliminate inequality?" Me: Doing the best I can to not use the privilege that comes with being a straight, white male.
» Keep it Trill wants to know how people in California could say Yes We Can to Obama, but No You Can't by passing Proposition 8.
» Here's one I found most illuminating, though: Jasmyne Cannick, a black lesbian, was out campaigning in force in California, but didn't feel the need to talk about Prop 8 at all, feeling a struggle she felt personally had been co-opted by a primarily white No On 8 movement.
Policing the vote: Twitter edition #votecny #votereport
You may have heard, but the U.S. is electing a president (and 435 U.S. representatives, and 30-odd senators, along with countless statewide and local officials) Tuesday, Nov. 4.
That's tomorrow, if you live stateside.
Not every state is fully compliant with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) – New York falls into the "not compliant" category – and we're expecting at least some trouble, though hopefully it won't be as widespread as some people think it could be.
If you're in New York, by the way, you're probably using one of those lever machines. If you're not familiar with how they work, watch the video above.
Twitter, via the hashtags standard (more info), has set up some ways to for citizens to police the election.
If you run into minor issues (long lines, people holding signs too close to a polling place entrance), use a #votereport hashtag. Also add a #ZIPcode hashtag to be entered as a location. Check out the votereport aggregator here, including a map of where reports are coming in from.
If you have major troubles – people blocking entrances, not being allowed to vote, not being allowed to fill out a provisional ballot, that sort of thing – get Election Protection involved. You can call them at (866) OUR-VOTE (687-8683). On Twitter, use a #EPxx hashtag, where xx is your two-letter state abbreviation. Throw in a #ZIPcode for good measure. And let #votereport know, too.
What it comes down to is, the more information that's out there, the better. The more people know you plan to exercise your right to vote, the better.
I've also set up some hashtags for local folks. If you're writing about the election in Central New York, use a #votecny hashtag to get into the mix on syracuse.com's Twitter page.
The bottom line is, we're having an election tomorrow. This stuff's important, people.
The goal of nanowrimo is to churn out a 50,000-word novel between midnight on Nov. 1 and 11:59:59 p.m. Nov. 30.
That's 1,667 words per day, or about 70 words an hour (daylight savings time ends this month, so we get an extra hour).
In 2006, I set a goal of actually writing those 1,667 words each day. I did great for four days. When I missed one day, looking down the barrel of over 3,300 words got daunting, and I only got 1,000 out. That left me with 4,000 words the next day, and that was it for me.
I'm not going to be so much concerned with daily word counts this year. I may aim for 12,500 words a week, but even then, I'm not going to sweat it too much, because I know if I get going, I can churn out 5,000 words in a sitting, get up, stretch, grab a glass of water, and churn out another 5,000.
And this time, I'm going the creative non-fiction route. As far as fiction goes, I'm really good at creating characters, but just no good at having them do anything interesting. Fifty thousand words of character development with no plot just sounds miserable.
Also, I'm thinking if I do this correctly, I could sell it in pieces, rather than having to shop the whole thing. But maybe that's getting ahead of myself. But I'm geared up for this, think I can really do something fun this year.
Scary. The CSM is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. It's won six Pulitzers and a special citation, and it might just have the best international coverage of any U.S.-focused news outlet. If a paper like that is having trouble, I'd have to worry about other, not-necessarily-so-amazing papers.
Of course, the CSM is based in Boston and serves a national audience, and there aren't many of those anyway.
Really exciting. I've long thought that newspapers' print editions should complement their online offerings, rather than vice-versa (for the record, this was my belief before I started working for a newspaper-affiliated Web site). The Web may be bottomless, but people tend to skim.
Print news hole, however, is not infinite, and furthermore, newsprint is fairly expensive, so you tend to fill as much as you have to, not as much as you can.
Ideally, what goes on the Web are all 300-to-500-word briefs and interactive elements like slideshows, photogalleries, videos, and Flash graphics. What goes in the paper would be 3,000-to-5,000-word versions of the best of the stories, along with large, interesting informational graphics.
The idea is not to see the two media as competing, and not even as places for duplicating content to reach a broader audience (though shovelware has, thankfully, gone out the window in most places). Instead, use each for its advantages. You don't need to cram another 200-word blurb about a fire at a vacant house into a corner of the paper, but you can stick it online and tie it to a 4,000-word piece about absentee owners and insurance fraud that's running in the paper.
The item the CSM put out about the switch cites a combination of 40 years of declining print circulation and a growing Web audience. I'm sure that could be said of almost every daily newspaper/Web site pair in the country – as our jobs become more mobile, our lives become more hectic and our wallets become thinner, we don't take as much time to read a newspaper, and if we're not taking the time to read it, many of us aren't buying it. But we're reading online, and through a variety of sources, including our mobile phones and headline aggregators, and through social media services like digg, Twitter and Facebook.
Yes, it's going to be tough, and I'm guessing they picked April 2009 because (a) they can ramp up the plan, (b) train people, and (c) have enough cash to get them through the next six months.
I think that a lot of companies are going to look at what the CSM does, and adopt or modify it as a concept. It's an influential news organization, and it's a changing world out there. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do.
One of the things they've been working on – in addition to ensuring safe sidewalks, clean neighborhoods, and good rental programs – is a skate plaza attached to Huntington Park.
It's quite a project they're proposing. I went over to the site with a couple of members after our meeting, and saw that some neighborhood kids had built a BMX course through the woods; those trails would circle the skate plaza.
The plan is for a multi-use plaza: there would be picnic tables, and the way the land is sloped, it could be used as an amphitheater, as well.
If you're questioning the need for a skate plaza, talk to shop owners who keep chasing skaters away; ask the county, who gated up the Everson Museum plaza so skaters would stop using it; ask the folks who have put up signs at the Village Mall in Liverpool that say "Final Warning: No Skateboarding or Rollerblading."
Why can't they just use the skate park at Onondaga Lake Park? A few reasons:
• It's too small for large groups, or for mixed groups of bikers and skaters • It's not in their neighborhood; they need rides to get there • You pay for 90-minute sessions, and have to rotate between skaters and bikers
Seriously, who wouldn't want something else to do for teenagers?
The National Guard, the ENA members told me, have been doing some mobile skate parks. This makes sense, as one of the members pointed out, because skateboarders are fit and athletic, they're very aware of what's around them, and they're disciplined enough to work at the same tricks over and over.
I'm going to start mocking up a Web site for them. It'll be a volunteer deal, and I'm going to do a combination of static design and using Blogger as a content management tool, much like I do for this site and a few others that I run.
I'll keep you posted; I'm excited about this project.
