Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The St. Patrick's Day parade isn't until Sunday, but it's still Evacuation Day in Boston, as I mentioned yesterday. And it snowed all night, so one of the predictable newspaper headlines is about "The Wearin' o' the White."

(Evacuation Day is a Boston-only holiday, supposedly marking the departure of the English troops from the city in 1776. Coincidentally, it gives city employees St. Patrick's Day off, and I think they turn off the parking meters even though it's not parade day. I don't know whether the snowplow drivers get overtime.)

Is it some kind of comment on the current state of journalism that the Boston Globe's excellent St. Patrick's Day webpage uses a Reuters photo of a pint of Guinness instead of a shot of its own? In the old days at the Courant, we hated to use syndicated versions of anything we could do ourselves. You could always find a one of our own photographers at the Press Box bar or Kenny's on Capitol Avenue, and I'm sure they would have been happy to take their own picture reflected in a pint glass rather than use one from a British wire service.

Of course that stuff about the hard-drinking Irish is an old fashioned and silly stereotype invented by anti-Irish propagandists 100 years ago, followed by pro-Irish comedians, journalists, politicians, the Hallmark card company and a lot of breweries and tavern entrepreneurs. ("It's just an excuse for fake Irish people to go out and drink,then throw-up on other people. This is the reason South Boston will always be considered third class,"says one of the first comments on the boston.com discussion board.)

The stereotype of the hard-drinking journalist is another tradition I hope is fading, thanks to health insurance and anti-depressants, or maybe they're taking their jobs seriously because of all the webloggers around.

The best lessons I take from the Irish, including my mother and many other singers and storytellers, all have to do with faith (in God, or your dreams, or each other), finding music in language (and everything in music), a general attraction to the color green, and a fondness for symbols of not giving up. The long-lasting head on a proper pint of Guinness will do for today's toast... Slainte!
By the way, the music articles on that Boston.com page are excellent. And here's my final St. Patrick's Day suggestion for the snowbound: a visit to the Internet Poetry Archive at iBiblio to listen to Seamus Heaney.

12:03:20 PM    

Happy Other "Days"

Today, March 16, some say, is St. Urho's Day, but there are probably still more Finnegans and Fenians than Finns in Boston.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, March 17. In Suffolk County (primarily the City of Boston), March 17 is also an official holiday called "Evacuation Day," although the Farmer's Almanac hints at an ulterior motive in the choice of the exact date on which to commemorate the British departure from the city in 1776.

Although there's little mention of Evacuation Day on the official City Website (whose manager, like most city employees, probably gets the day off), the calendar does list the Chieftains' St. Patrick's Day concert at Symphony Hall on, appropriately, the Green Line. It only took a little poking around the city site to find a link to the Evacuation Day Events List (some started two weeks ago!) at the somewhat shaky SouthBostonOnline.com.

The South Boston Tribune mentions a 228th Annual Evacuation Day Banquet and the fact that the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Road Race (separate events) will be on Sunday the 21st this year. The race begins at 10 a.m. It slows to parade velocity at 1 p.m., according to the city calendar. After the parade, the Shanghai Circus is at Symphony Hall, a fine combination for a multi-ethnic city like Boston.

With a little more searching, I did uncover a surprising multi-city resource: SaintPatricksDayParade.com. For a more far-reaching look, try the Irish Times at Ireland.com. And, last but not least, here's the Boston Globe's special treatment of the day.

5:05:13 PM    

Computers 'must become greener'. PC production needs to use less energy and fewer chemical inputs, a report from the UN University says. [BBC News | Technology | World Edition]
6:26:32 PM    

Oh nooo.... Should we be encouraging more webloggers?!

I had fun yesterday helping some folks at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology start their first weblogs, so expect productivity at MIT to go crashing through the floor sometime soon. (I'm joking. At least I hope I'm joking.)

Our leader, Andrew Grumet, provided an elegant one-line definition of a weblog for the class: "A frequently updated Web site consisting of posts listed in reverse chronological order."

To get through his fine intro-class outline in the time available, perhaps the best next step after that one-sentence definition would be to dive into Michael Feldman's tutorial on Manila (which the MIT class is using, via Harvard), or into Blogger or Radio or something. Discussion of what each individual in the class might do with a blog and looking at examples could come later.

Beyond Andrew's one-line definition, my additions are full of conditional words like "usually" and "often":
... which almost always has links to other sites,
... often summarizes or comments on the contents of those links,
... may focus on one or more consistent subject-matter topics
... commonly uses weblog software to make it all easy
... usually features "a single author's unedited voice"
... but may have a group of authors
... and they may follow a common theme or style.

Beyond that, the use of pictures, design elements, calendars, archival links, blogrolls, multimedia, category structures, RSS aggregators, and all the other bells and whistles vary widely. Weblogs are as uniform as Jello...

Are they journalism? Many are. Some do "news reporting"; others do "punditry" or a new citizen civics. Some have a history. Some seem to be accumulating book chapters. The bigger the group of authors and the more formal the style (even editing to provide a "collective voice"), the more a Weblog starts to look like a magazine or newspaper. Or a stack of them -- think of each day's edition as the time stamp on the "log," a fine word for a pile of newspapers made from dead trees.

Unedited individual voices have great energy, but --my roots are showing-- sometimes I think it might not hurt if even single-author weblogs kept a dictionary handy and consulted The Associated Press Stylebook.

Fussing to get things right is expected in journalism, but it can make weblogging take even more of your day. Personally, I'd blog more often, but I find blogging and fussing with details too tempting as ways to keep from getting things done. So, of course, are newspapers, television, music and books. Sometimes it seems my life is one big "to do" list with very little in the "done" column.

I mentioned some of these issues to one of MIT's new weblogger's in an e-mail today, and the next three things that plunked onto my desktop through a topic-oriented weblog aggregator, were a nice feature on weblogs from USA Today linked above, news that the U.S. Navy is experimenting with weblogs (note my warning about M.I.T. productivity in the first sentence), and a timely note from Jakob Nielsen on Cleaning Up Information Pollution:

Oh, look. It's almost 5. I'm getting back to work now. Are you?

4:28:14 PM    

Happy New Year from Somerville, the un-Cambridge

Boston may have its First Night fireworks, but the city of Somerville greets the first day of the New Year with history, hoofbeats, huzzahs and the hoisting of an almost-familiar flag.

The horse's rider was "General Washington," delivering the red, white and blue banner of the united colonies to the top of Prospect Hill, reenacting the events of January 1, 1776. This time, the only gunfire was a salute to the flag, as veterans of more recent wars, city officials and more than 100 other citizens, some in 18th century costume, joined in the noontime ceremony. (Yes, some really did cheer "Hip, Hip, Huzzah!")

The original flag with red and white stripes for the 13 colonies was flown from the fortified hilltop in defiance of the British garrison across the river in Boston. Pre-dating the Declaration of Independence, the Prospect Hill flag carried Great Britain's red and white union crosses on its blue field until they were replaced by the first 13 stars. Whatever its details, back in 1776  the flag and its Continental Army did the job -- the British were forced to leave Boston on St. Patrick's Day. That's an event still celebrated on March 17 as "Evacuation Day" in that city. It's a fine coincidence that closes government offices and schools and turns off the parking meters for the day of the parade. (Driving out snakes was one thing, but parking in Boston is an evil St. Patrick never had to contend with. ) Somerville, formerly part of Charlestown, has been independent of Boston for more than 150 years, and is proud to have its own identity. A speaker at the New Year's Day event mentioned annoyance at some sources that name Cambridge as the site of the First Flag raising.

In present-day Somerville, tradition is not the only thing that needs upholding, city officials noted. The 101-year-old triple-decker stone tower that flies the First Flag year-round is in need of repair, including the considerably less historical fiberglass flagpole atop the tower. Officials said they feared the pole wouldn't take the strain of raising a much larger flag donated for the annual ceremony a few years ago by Flagraphics of Somerville, so Thursday's event used the standard-size flag.

Even that one took some work to raise from street level, but it gradually made it to the top -- just as the sun burst through the clouds to set it aglow. Honest. It was enough to make you go "Huzzah!"

[Click the flag for more pictures and a few captions, and let me know if you'd like larger versions or permission to use them elsewhere.]

Footnote (Jan. 4.)

On the First, this blogger focused more on getting a few pictures online than actually "covering" the flag-raising ceremony and the "who's who" involved. Mayor-elect Joe Curtatone, whose inauguration is coming up tomorrow, was one of the speakers. Congressman Michael Capuano was in the crowd and waved when introduced, but passed up the chance to sit on stage. I didn't see outgoing Mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay at the event, or unsuccesful mayoral candidate Tony Lafuente, although his company Flagraphics was thanked for donating the oversized ceremonial flag that the city originally intended to use in the ceremony. The weakness of the flagpole, not Lafuente's weakness at the polls, was given as the reason for performing this year's flag-raising with a standard-size banner.
9:46:42 PM    

Bagging the Blog (temporarily)

Picking up on the last line of my last post about Howard Kurtz, my own blogging ideas for the near future include an experiment: Taking my media-life and blog-work "offline" as much as possible through the end of the year. For the weblog, this could be just the break I need to back up and add categories to my old entries, making them more useable as "course notes" someday.

Outside the computer, I'll be doing pretty much the same thing: shuffling around boxes of books, photos, files and papers, making my life more organized and portable for whatever comes next.

To help me stay focused, I'm unplugging the TV tomorrow, my birthday, and will see how long it is before I at least feel the need to pick up a DVD at the library. The computer will stay online for e-mail only. I'll archive listserv messages instead of reading them and following the inevitable Web links.

In his book about being over-mediated, The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben's solution was to head for the great TV-free outdoors. It's a bit chilly for that right now in Massachusetts. For me, it may be enough "fresh air" to quit surfing, saving and scribbling on Web pages for a week or two.

I'm also inspired by a memo I stumbled on in 1985 at Multimate International, the software company where I had worked for a couple of years. I was composing a company history as part of an SEC filing so that the boss could sell out and buy an even bigger yacht to sail around the world. (He landed in Colorado; I wound up writing about yachts. Go figure.)

Creating the company narrative was a better job than trying to get reviewers to say nice things about software that was past its prime, despite its $2 million a month in sales. In the history files I hit a memo written by a chief engineer in the program's early days, which sums up my current feelings. It went something like this:

Sometimes I think the same announcement should be posted at the entrance to the Web during this day of proliferating interlinked weblogs. Well, my entrance to the Web, anyhow. For now, I'm going to pretend that I have enough documents.

6:27:20 PM    

Weekend Reading

From my news-aggregator subscription list... Paul Jones at ibiblio.org (featured in the Wired article below) may appreciate the juxtaposition:

Where Sharing Isn't a Dirty Word. The University of North Carolina has a wealth of information available on ibiblio, its massive digital library. And it's free. Michelle Delio reports from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. [Wired News]

'Lightning Man': Whose Line Is It, Anyway?. The historian Kenneth Silverman lays out with great thoroughness the troubled busy life of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegraph's inventor. By Richard Brookhiser. [New York Times: Books]

'Doing Our Own Thing': Talk Is Cheap. John McWhorter charts Americans' mounting distrust of written English and the decline in oratory, poetry, music and thought. By Christopher Caldwell. [New York Times: Books]




4:48:08 PM    

Salvo, 1943

For Veterans Day, here's a salute to veterans and a page from Salvo, which apparently was a magazine at the Salina, KS, Smoky Hill Army Air Field in 1943, when my father was in training there before shipping out to Europe. As far as I know, he didn't do much "modeling" as part of his Army Air Forces career, but I suspect being the photo lab sergeant put him in the right place when a photographer needed someone to demonstrate how not to salute.
So why is this picture in my "journalism" weblog? For one thing, I'm curious about the "community journalism" function of a publication like Salvo, where my Dad could help get the news out -- and give the gang a laugh. There certainly weren't a lot of laughs ahead. (Some AAF stats.) If you've stumbled on this page through some Army Air Forces search and have information about Salvo, please add a comment or send me a note.
Among other things, I'm curious whether my Dad ever shot any pictures for the magazine. After I explored the AAF link above, its webmaster pointed me to the Air Force Historical Research Agency, which looks like a great source for journalists and news librarians to bookmark.
How else to make this relevant as a weblog entry? Well, Dad's initials were RSS, the same as the syndication protocol most weblogs use, and every time I see those letters I miss him. (I'm RBS, after Robert the Bruce, for one of Dad's mother's Scottish heroes.)

3:47:29 PM