Friday, May 29, 2009

Twitter Time

I was on car pool duty, arranging rides for a group of Michiana teens, but nobody had a phone number for one of the kids. Apparently today’s youth use the telephone for matters of practicality not so much, compared to previous generations. What about email, I asked. Email is over, email is so yesterday, my passengers from Teen Planet informed me. They’re tracking and arranging their lives on Facebook.

But most people know Facebook by now – even fogies like me have Facebook pages for staying stay in touch with friends. The new is wearing off and it’s time for restless techies to move on.  So let’s all try Twitter, which has the advantage of being simple and not very time-consuming. On Twitter, you send a short message from your phone or computer to anybody who subscribes to your account. Those messages are called tweets, and subscribers are called followers. A famous person like Oprah might genuinely have one million followers reading her tweets – imagine that. Hope she’s got something to say.

Everybody knows that good things come in very small packages.  But seriously, a web service where your messages are limited to 140 characters – not words but type-strokes, and every space and punctuation mark counts? That’s a Twitter message for you, a tweet. If you go on too long, Twitter cuts you off. Why? Are we running out of electrons or something?

And what can you say in 140 characters, anyway?  Here’s what one of history’s most beautifully compressed documents, the Gettysburg Address, becomes in Twitter’s hands: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the prop

Not quite as satisfying as Lincoln’s original text, is it? But you can turn his ten classic sentences into a little tweet like this: 87 years of liberty, and now this shocking battlefield is consecrated by soldiers’ blood. We must fight on, for human freedom must not die.

I’ll take the original version any day. It’s awfully easy to make fun of Twitter, which certainly suffers from human excess just like other parts of the Internet. For example, one sad Michiana resident uses Twitter to record her frequent bouts of drinking. But other people from many walks of life have heard the promise of melody in Twitter’s humble tweet.

For down deep, Twitter is completely open and free and flexible.  You can do anything social with it; it’s a platform for people to people invention. Some folks connect around a shared hobby or because they attend the same college; some share restaurant tips in a tourist town; some advertise their commercial services while others just keep up with friends. For me, the most interesting ones, though, are far-flung individuals who come together around an issue they care about.

For example, on Twitter, you can easily find a few dozen journalists working on how to reinvent a new, 21st century newspaper that will serve democracy without bankrupting the owners. These folks trade ideas every day; they provide links to relevant articles; they create podcasts where two or three of them discuss the latest developments in this very pressing issue. Over time, they coalesce as a community, and their ideas clarify and grow strong, all because they share their thinking each day in 140-character bursts of captured energy on Twitter. If you’re doing something that would be enriched by conversation, Twitter can help kindred spirits find you.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on May 29, 2009
Community • Customs & Rituals • Media & Technology • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, May 22, 2009

A Taste for History

What’s your favorite way to divide the world: Between glass-half-fullers and glass-half-empties?  Between lovers of cake or pie?  Between folks who think the world can be divided in half and those who don’t?  Well, I like to divide, and my favorite way is a matter of taste:  Black licorice versus red licorice.  I’m solidly in the black camp, always have been, and, by the way, it’s the only real licorice camp, as those of us know who also cherish black jellybeans, ouzo, fennel, and of course Good and Plenties, with their pink and white sass and toothsome chew.

Fewer and fewer folks seem to cherish the sweetly herbal, antique flavor of real licorice, and I wonder about other flavors that are becoming obsolete, like sasperilla, bitingly gingery ginger ale, blackstrap molasses, or candies perfumed with medieval flavors like clove or lavender. I first observed this “lost flavors” phenomenon when I was about 10 years old and on a family driving vacation through New England.  We stopped at a rustic store deep in the Vermont woods and I unzipped my fake leather coin purse for some historic-looking gum with a red line drawing of an Indian Chief on the little white box.  The gum was made of tree sap, a confection I had just learned about in 4th grade social studies, so I felt like a wise historian as I made my purchase. I pried open the box to find two pieces of what looked like cat turds and tasted exactly like—guess what?—tree sap!  I masked my grimace under sophisticated evaluation— “Interrrrresting …!”—and hastily purchased a rescue souvenir—a tin of tiny lavender candies with Marie Antoinette on the filigreed cover. I popped a pearl-sized candy in my mouth to clear out the piney flavor, and suddenly tasted … soap?  My modern palate failed me again, but I cultivated a taste for lavender by the day’s end, a lesson that stuck.

That early experience piqued my interest in the way taste evolves and what we might be leaving behind.  While we’re often nostalgic for past flavors at holiday time, early summer is better for exploring and reviving what we’re missing, since farmer’s markets provide a wonderful range of fresh flavors that connect us to our locovore past.

Humans have been cultivating and saving seeds for 12,000 years, with incredible biodiversity as the result—but we’ve lost most of it.  Thousands of varieties of rice were grown just in China.  Around the world over 5,000 varieties of potatoes thrived.  And now?  Only 4 potato varieties are widely cultivated, and they are bred more for longevity than tastiness.  In the 19th century, 7,000 varieties of applies grew in the United States alone! And here’s the kicker: 97 percent of the vegetables grown at the turn of the 20th century are now extinct. 97 percent!  That leaves us three percent of the flavors, three percent of the delight, three percent of the adventures for our deprived taste-buds (The Future of Food).

Happily, the time is ripe for pushing our palates into deliciously historic territory.  Given our long, warm autumns, it’s not too late to visit the Seed Savers website to order seeds for an heirloom tomato plant that might time-machine you back to when tomatoes were painted beauties of striped greens and golds, or pinks and bruised purples, their flesh scented with notes of lime or even chocolate.  The history of Seed Savers, in Decorah Iowa, is both humble and lofty, begun in the mid-1970s when Diane Ott Whealy’s dying grandfather passed along seeds from plants his family brought from Bavaria in the 1870s—a German Pink Tomato and a vining flower many of us grow today—the Grandpa Ott morning glory.

Our farmer’s markets increasingly feature funky heirloom tomatoes, purple asparagus, and a rainbow of greens, squashes and potatoes that are lightyears away from most supermarket fare that reflects homogenized agribusiness greed. Let your taste buds—and your well-placed dollars—support and demand food that carries history, biodiversity, and just plain deliciousness.

If you’re still in the red licorice camp, here are two temptations:  One: next time you make coleslaw, replace the cabbage with shaved raw Brussels sprouts and fennel, and replace the creamy dressing with a citrusy vinaigrette. Way to explode a side-dish, people!  And Two: the New York Times just ran an enticing article about absinthe—that famously antique and artistic licorice liquor, legalized in the U.S. in 2007.  It does not, in fact, make you crazy, it only drives your taste buds wild, while providing a cool green glow over ice in the late afternoon on a hot summer day … a perfect libation, and not only for the Good and Plenty set. See you in the back garden!

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on May 22, 2009
Community • Customs & Rituals • Food • Health • Home & Garden • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, May 15, 2009

Hunting Rhinoceros in Intensive Care

I’m sitting at the bedside of a man in the intensive care unit, watching his face as three thousand dollars worth of clot-dissolving drugs drip into his arm.  The man is having a heart attack.  But he’s slow to accept this fact, racing ahead in full blown denial like a rhinoceros in a TV safari show, soon to be enlightened by the tranquilizer dart sticking out of his hide.  I’m the chaplain, like the Marlin Perkins TV host, following the rhino in my Jeep.  Waiting for some sign that this man, forty-nine, married and maybe dying, is coming to terms with the reality of his situation.  It’s not coming easy.

“No, I don’t want to call my wife!” he shouts.  “Where the hell’s the doctor?  I’ve got a sales meeting tomorrow in Chicago.”

So what brings you here? I ask.

“I’m not sick!” he gallops along.  “Never been sick a day in my life.  Its just my ulcer.”

Well, that is strange, I say.  Wonder why they’re keeping you here?

“This is bull---Rrrrrr!” he grimaces.  “Feels like a piano on my chest!” The rhino staggers, breathing hard, then jabs his finger at me.  “You know what’s wrong with hospitals?  No respect for people’s time.”

You sound a little angry, I observe.  People here disrespecting your time?

“No, no, I’m not angry!” he spits at me.  “Wouldn’t you be?” Bam, the rhino spun around and slammed into my jeep.  I hang on, and don’t react.  I need to save my energy: he could thrash around like this for hours.  But he’s bleeding.  Energy, options, fear.  I’m patient.

“Oh now what?” he groans.  His nurse appears with a small paper cup of pills.

“You want us to call your wife yet?”

“No,” he says, “You call me a cab, that’s what you do.  Where’s my phone?”

“No phones allowed in intensive care,” the nurse says, sliding out the door.

The minutes crawl by.  The man tosses, turns, complains, demands to see his doctor.  His doctor, knowing what a joy this man is, is sipping bad coffee in the break room, writing orders.

Back at the bedside, the rhino-man puzzles aloud.  “I kept telling the doc it’s just my ulcer, but he’s not doing anything for it.” He looks at his bare legs sticking out of his gown and settles down a bit.  I move closer in my Jeep.

Yes, I was meaning to ask you, I say.  What brings you to the hospital tonight?

“Never sick a day in my life,” he mutters, drumming his fingers on the side rail.

I wait.

He shakes his head and groans, less animated now.  He’s weakening.  “Aw hell,” he says.  “They say I have a little--heart problem.” The rhino is standing still now, wobbling.

A little-- heart problem? I say.  What’s a little heart problem?

“Aw, you know.  These doctors ain’t so smart.”

I wait.

He looks up at the ceiling, over at the IV pole, down at his legs.

“If I can’t work,” he says quietly, “I don’t know what I’ll do.” Then, silently, barely perceivable, his chin begins to tremble.  “I brought a lot of this on myself,” he says.

And I sit back in my Jeep.  Exhausted.  I pick up the phone, which was right behind him on the night stand, and hold it out to him.

He stares at it.  Then he reaches for the dial.

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on May 15, 2009
Health • Work • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

April Lidinsky -- A Taste for History / More essays by April

Joe Chaney -- A Culture of Cheating / More essays by Joe

Ken Smith -- Twitter Time / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- The St. John’s Bible / More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather

David James -- More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth

Jeff Nixa -- Hunting Rhinoceros in Intensive Care / More essays by Jeff

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan