bookmobile

Bookmobiles Fall Victim to Budget Cuts

When I saw this headline, I was deeply saddened. And then I was thrown into a fit of nostalgia. I have written before about my early childhood, spent on the high plains of the Colorado open range. We lived several miles outside Peyton, a small town with a General Store, a post office, and a farm machine shop.

Peyton High School, where my mom taught, received weekly visits from the bookmobile. My dad and I would make the pilgrimage so that I could borrow Oscar Otter. I still have a vague memory of seeing the bookmobile parked by the school and being inside with my dad, book in hand. This pilgrimage was undoubtedly seminal in m lifelong obsession with reading.

Nowadays, information and knowledge are readily accessible at a much lower cost, thanks to Al Gore's internet. Still, I have a difficult time imagining how the Kindle will inspire a love of the written word in my children. The demise of the bookmobile is a highly symbolic event in the shift to digital knowledge. Still, because the internet has virtually eliminated the opportunity cost of searching for hard-to-find items, my mom located and purchased a copy of Oscar for my own kids to read. Maybe the world wide web can play a part in fostering my own kids' love for reading after all.

image from Wired.com

spinning

We love to complain about our long, arctic winters here in Minnesota, but there are plenty of reasons to get outside and enjoy the cold weather. A major reason, one that is an important part of Minnesota culture, is to spend time on the ice. After all, with more than 10,000 lakes, there's plenty of the hard stuff around.

Most parks feature an outdoor skating rink. Our house is close to Logan Park which has two hockey rinks with a skating rink between them. Last winter I was able to get out one time with Anna. I skated and pulled her behind me in a little red sled. This week we went back to the park. We ventured out onto the ice, even though we didn't have the skates or sled with us. Anna sure had fun spinning, though.

communion

Jesus does not eat with sinners to celebrate their sin. He does so to celebrate his grace.

Kenneth Bailey

in Jacob and the Prodigal

[hunting] ethics

A few weeks ago, I explained why I have started hunting. For an expanded conversation on the ethics of hunting, check out this interview in The Sun. You may also be interested in Krista Tippett's conversation with angler and artist James Prosek. Below is a slide show narrated by Prosek. It features features the angler's artwork, which is inspired by his pursuit of the elusive trout.

hace cinco años

CYOA

The first decade of my life happened squarely in the 1980's. This was the heyday of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. CYOA offers not one but multiple endings, reached by a series of choices the reader makes on how the story will progress. Each time a choice is made, a reader is directed to flip to a new, often nonadjacent, page to continue the story.

Christian Swinehart, a computational and graphic designer with a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience, has performed an intelligent exploration of the genre and its relationship to gaming. He also connects the genre's form to how data was organized and entered into computers in the age of analog computing.

The expose is illustrated with beautifully designed maps that represent visualizations of how the books were structured and the decision paths present within them. The site also contains some animations of the decision paths in different books.

This project represents not only a beautiful ode to a peculiar genre of children's literature but also an excellent example of how graphic and narrative should be used to create and relate knowledge.

As a bonus, there's even a CYOA book, Zork: The Cavern of Doom, that you can try out.

Image property of Christian Swinehart.

illuminati

If he is not a member of the shadowy group that rules the world, Cheney sure does a credible impression.

from Newsweeks' Top 10 worst predictions of the decade.

Image property of Paul J. Richards / AFP-Getty Images

dystopia

I love this scene, painted on a wall in Valencia, Spain. It reminds me of Animal Farm, one of George Orwell's dystopian novels. If you haven't read Animal Farm, you should. It's a historical allegory about the rise of the Soviet Union. We post-cold war readers, especially among the younger generation, may not be able to identify which characters and factions represent which historical figures and ideologies, but the story is a really interesting exposition of political tyranny and the frightening power of group-think.

For the full scene click here.

Image via unurth.

huntin'

I am a suburban kid from the Colorado Front Range, and my father is a suburban kid from metro Denver. Hunting has never been a part of our family culture. On the other hand, my mother is a farm girl from the virtually extinct rural Front Range, and her brothers are avid gamesmen. I have memories of my uncles returning from far-flung ice fishing trips to Mille Lacs and making mounds of venison German sausage at my grandmother's house.

With these memories in mind, I have allowed myself to open to the idea of hunting for game. After all, hunting is an important part of Minnesota culture. Hunting has also allowed me to spend some memorable time with my father-in-law.

Last winter, we journeyed to southwest Minnesota on an annual pilgrimage to visit Orville (a 97-year old farmer who still lives alone and keeps 6 horses as pets) and hunt the surrounding sloughs for pheasant. Today, for the first time, I'm going to deer hunt.

The more time I spend hunting, the more I have come to appreciate it. I am somewhat turned off by the macho thrill of hunting for trophies. However, I am attracted to the aspects of the sport that bring me into deeper understanding of the game and its environment. I love tromping through the fields or through the streams, observing the habitat, rhythms, and patterns of movement that animals exhibit.

I am also convinced that game meat is an environmentally friendly supplement to the meat we consume at our table. Farm-raised meat leaves a vast ecological footprint and is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Feed production and transportation requires large amounts of petrochemicals, and manure emits tons of methane into the atmosphere. Then there is the energy required to transport the meat to market and refrigerate it until it is served on the table.

Game meat comes from species which naturally reproduce in the wild, and it is far leaner than farm meat. I am not opposed to supplementing venison sausage with pork, but mixing the two cuts the fat content in the pork and requires less pork than a pork sausage.

To the urbane middle class, game meat may be a second-class substitute, but I would love to have you at my table to celebrate the bounty of our land. Of course, I have to actually see a deer first.

מזל טוב

Patrick and Benjamin just went through a lebenspartnerschaft or same-sex civil partnership on November 4. I guess you could call it "Take that prop 8!" part 2.

Congratulations, my brothers, and much love.

image property of *it's not a cabaret