A walk on Don Baack's birthday

Today is my friend Don Baack’s birthday. Don founded and leads SW Trails, which has established, mapped and maintained a network of trails in southwest Portland.

This afternoon, on a lark, I decided to try out one of the trail loops on the SW Trails map. I didn’t do it to celebrate Don’s birthday, but I might as well have. As I hiked and explored, I thought of Don and his SW Trails colleagues often, in gratitude.

The loop took me through solidly middle-class neighborhoods to the north and west of Bridlemile Elementary School and Hamilton Park. The architecture is relentlessly 1970s and 1980s. Occasionally the walk produced surprises: a sylvan creek, two cub scouts, a bamboo grove, a ’62 Corvette, a glade of moss and tree.

Here is some of it.

Enjoy.

The Potty Press finds a captive audience

When people are desperate to communicate, they find weird ways to do it. Smoke signals anyone? Morse code? Pig Latin? Text messaging shorthand?

Portland Community College, where I teach a couple of classes, got rid of its student newspaper two years ago. The Bridge, as it was called, never made any money, and no one with much knowledge about newspapers supervised it.

It was mostly an embarrassment that bled $75,000 in red ink each year.

Still, when edited and supervised well, student newspapers serve several important functions, not the least of which is to inform.

Last week, on a visit to the men’s room, I discovered over the urinal that PCC students had come up with a clever way to deliver the news. Each week they prominently post above the urinals and on toilet stall doors, a one-page flier called “The Potty Press” (see photo).

It consists of eight brief, boxed announcements. That’s just about all you have time to read during a between-classes pit stop.

And now for the I-just-couldn't-resist promotional slogans:

The Potty Press: The other toilet paper.

The Potty Press: The Bridge over troubled waters.

The Potty Press: What a relief!

The Potty Press: The news rush before you flush.

The Potty Press: It's there when nature calls.

Others come to mind, but I'll spare you.

Yes and No. Opening and Shutting.

Last night at a meeting, I shared with friends that I am troubled by the number of things I want to do. I worry that trying to do too much can result in doing very little at all.

To which one of them replied, "If you are willing to say 'yes,' you must to be willing to say 'no.'"

Her advice seemed related to the aphorism: "For every door that opens, another closes."

Was my friend saying that many of the those closing doors are ones we must shut ourselves?

A problem worth fixing?

In the nearly three months I've been admiring our new Hillsdale sign, I have been blind to a small problem with it.

Now that it's been pointed out to me, I can't avoid it. See if you can spot it. If you do, is it worth fixing? Or perhaps it has a certain quirky charm to it.

It’s 3 a.m. Why do you always call on me first?

In explaining Hillary Clinton’s victories Tuesday, pundits are looking at two campaign initiatives used by the Clinton campaign in the final week: the infamous "3 a.m. phone call" ad and Hillary’s complaint that she is always asked to respond to debate questions first.

Taken separately, (we’ll light-heartedly take them together later) each tapped into underlying visceral feelings. Remember, the last thing you want voters to do is actually think.

The 3 a.m. ad is the most obvious. The appeal is to fear, the stock-in-trade of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. In fairness, it is also strikingly similar to the famous Johnson daisy “countdown” ad used briefly against Barry Goldwater.

First, arouse fear, then have your candidate be the one who makes it all go away. There’s other stuff going on here. The ad’s creators chose 3 a.m. — the time we are most vulnerable. The hour we wake up from nightmares. Then there’s the whole implication that The White House is uncharted territory to Obama. Hillary, on the other hand, knows her way to the phone and the war room because she’s been there — never mind in what capacity.

The second initiative — Hillary’s complaint to media debate panels — plays on the public’s distrust of the press. It also raises the whole question of fairness and media bias. (And, yes, there is media bias, and audience bias, and individual bias etc.) “Media bashing” is one of the oldest ploys around. It always works. But her comment targets a deeper emotion common among women. (Imagine Obama, or any male candidate, complaining that he always gets called on second or first. Whiner!)

Women face the fairness issue repeatedly in situations controlled by men. The one that nearly every woman relates to is being a student in the classroom, where teachers (very often men) ask the questions. The old complaint was that the teachers never asked questions of females students. The attention was always focused on the males.

Clinton’s remark puts a twist on the female student experience. What she is really saying is “Why do you always give the guy the last word?” It is, in short, gender discrimination, and female students and women in the workplace have all experienced it.

So the ad invoked primal fears and the debate remark spoke to media bias and gender discrimination.

They worked in this segmented-messaged world.

But try this:

The National Security adviser is on the phone to President Hillary Clinton: “It’s 3 a.m, Madame President. Something terrible is happening in the world. We need a decision.”

The president: “Why do you always call on me first?”

Adviser: “Sorry, Madame President. I’ll give Vice President Obama a call.”

There is a silver bullet after all

The New York Times Science section ran a story today that confirms what those of us in the media literacy movement have been saying for years: Get the frigging TV (and computer) out of your kid's room.

Why?

The story — and the research — lists the reasons.

A Celebratory Display

A few hundred announcements like this one will be mailed this week. As the text on the back explains, the exhibit will be at the University of Portland's Buckley Center Gallery and will feature some of my typewriters as well as student photos of them. I'll also have some information about famous authors associated with the models on display.

I hope you can find time to drop by the campus at 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard. The Gallery's hours are Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. The dates, as you see on the card, are from Monday, March 17, to Thursday, April 10.

Retiring from "Retirement"

I’m supposed to be retired. Oh sure, I ‘m paid to teach a couple of classes a year and to write a monthly column for the paper I founded. I suppose the money means I’m only semi-retired. But, believe me, the pay hardly makes the work worth my while. I teach and write because I love to.

Still, when teaching and writing the column are added to everything else I do, I don’t feel retired at all. I’m busier now than I have ever been. Retired? Semi-retired? You’ve got to be kidding.

Recently I’ve thought I should take a mid-week “retirement day.” A day to just sit around and read or help out in the yard or take a long walk or comb a beach or hang out with a friend or noodle around on the piano or paint an oil or watercolor.

I find such a day inconceivable. I always have a long list of self-assigned tasks. One of which, by the way, is a daily entry on this blog (more on that later).

Beyond taking a “retirement day,” I’ve thought about what it would mean to retire from my “retirement.” That would mean really, REALLY, retiring. No more volunteering in the neighborhood. No more volunteering to work on media literacy. No more volunteering to put out an on-line community newspaper, the Hillsdale News, every other week. No more volunteering to put on typewriter exhibits. No more committees at the Quaker meeting.

And, as noted, there are these daily postings on the Red Electric.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going for a sudden, bring-down-the-curtain retirement from “retirement,” but I do plan to experiment.

You may visit here in the future (Tomorrow? Thursday?) and find that I’ve let a day or two or five go by with nothing posted.

Enjoy the silence. Enjoy MY silence.

I probably will give up teaching after next year. I’ve been saying that each year for three years, but this time I’m serious. For one thing, I keep talking about newspapers in my journalism class. Increasingly I am met with puzzled looks. Newspapers?

I’ll keep a hand in Hillsdale matters, but no new initiatives. Someone reminded me the other day of the adage, “Pick the low hanging fruit.”

There’s more to say about all this, but I’ll save it for another time, which may or may not be tomorrow.