Category Archives: Technology

Theatre of the Inane

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Elon Musk, insanely wealthy and looking to fend off boredom, has decided he wants to buy Twitter. He says he’ll pay $43 Billion.  Twitter doesn’t want to be bought and thinks it has a poison pill that will keep it Muskless.  He has suggested these are just the opening rounds of what can become an increasingly nasty fight.

We don’t twitt. We don’t Facebook. Both refusals probably are to our disadvantage when it comes to sharing this twice-a-week wisdom. But, frankly, we have a life and it’s not spent focusing on what’s between our thumbs.

When Twitter first came along, the Missourinet news staff was told it was going to have to start using it because it was the coming thing in communication.  The example given of its usefulness was a narrative series (forgive me, friends, I abhor the word “tweets”) of a friend of ours who was going somewhere and reported at various times that he had arrived at the airport, had been checked in, was waiting to board, was boarding, and was sitting on the airplane that was spending too much time packing in the passengers..

The Missourinet staff was unimpressed beyond description.

A few days later, your observer, the now-retired Missourinet news director saw a message from a friend who told the world that she was going to have to stop on her way home from work to get a new sump pump.

The news director quickly dubbed Twitter “the theatre of the inane.”

While Twitter has proven to be useful in distributing news in real time (as well as lies, conspiracies, accusations, and general trash), it still is awash in inanities.

Representative Harry Yates of St. Joseph would not have liked Twitter if it had existed in his day. He introduced a bill in the 1925 legislative session making gossip and scandal-mongering a criminal offense.   He proposed fines of ten to one-hundred dollars or a ten-to-fifty day jail sentence for anyone “maliciously repeating or communicating any false rumor or slander detrimental or harmful to another person.”

Yates would, of course, be apoplectic about Facebook.

His bill never made it into the statute books. It had some obviously serious First Amendment problems. And worse yet, if people couldn’t gossip or be mongers of scandals, there would be little to talk about, especially at the Missouri Capitol.  The place is a hothouse for gossip of varying degress of veracity.

But then again, imagine how nice would be the Silence of the Thumbs, at least in some places, if Representative Yates had succeeded.

 

The Pandemic re-defines work

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Most of us probably have pondered what kind of permanent changes will remain in our society when the Coronavirus pandemic is finally considered vanquished.  With variants emerging and some of them appearing to be causing a bump up in our health statistics this month, we might not be learning the answer to that question for a while yet.

Clearly, the idea of “work” has been altered by this pandemic.  What will “work” look like when this finally blows over?   A few days ago, National Public Radio ran a story focusing on how the pandemic has changed, is changing, or will change the workplace.  Audie Cornish, the host on the afternoon news show, “All Things Considered,” interviewed three people, one in particular.  NPR was good enough to provide a transcript of that interview on its webpage. We thought the discussion worthy of passing it along to those who might have missed the broadcast or who don’t listen to National Public Radio.

CORNISH: Why and how to bring employees back into the office – those are the kinds of decisions company leaders are having to make. And they’re thinking about how to give employees flexibility, how the pandemic has impacted innovation and company culture. We spoke to a variety of CEOs – Christina Seelye, CEO and founder of video game publisher Maximum Games in California, was one of them.

CHRISTINA SEELYE: Innovation’s a big one. I think that innovation – I haven’t seen the technology yet that replicates what it’s like to be in a room with people and bounce off of each other.

CORNISH: And Dan Rootenberg, CEO of SPEAR Physical Therapy Company in New York.

DAN ROOTENBERG: I do believe that people learn from each other more. There’s more collaboration. There’s Zoom fatigue. I mean, I’m on so many Zoom meetings. It’s, you know, it’s really exhausting after a while. And so there’s a totally different feeling when you get together.

CORNISH: Those at the C-suite level, they turn to experts at places like McKinsey & Company.

SUSAN LUND: So we’re getting calls from executives and chief human resource officers to say, OK, we’ve now gotten used to everybody remote. But how do we bring people back? When do we bring them back? What protocols do we need?

CORNISH: I spoke with Susan Lund, a partner at McKinsey & Company and leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. They put out a report in 2020 that was updated this year looking at the lasting impact of the pandemic on the workforce.

LUND: If you had told any business leader a year and a half ago that we were going to send the whole workforce home – at least the ones who could work from home – home for more than a year, they would say this is going to be a disaster. And, in fact, it’s worked out quite well.

CORNISH: But brass tacks, were we all more or less productive when it comes to remote work? What did your research find?

LUND: So what we find is that in the short term, people are definitely as productive, that it looks like they’re spending more time at work, in part because they don’t have the commute. They don’t have to go out necessarily to get lunch. They don’t even have the office chit-chat. So on one level, it looks like the number of hours that people are working is actually up. But long term, there are questions about innovation and new products and new ideas are going to be as forthcoming because of the remote work setup.

CORNISH: I want to dig into this data more. But first, who do we mean when we say we? Who’s been able to work from home? What portion of the workforce are we talking about?

LUND: It’s really office-based workers who are able to work from home. Overall, we found that 60% of the U.S. workforce doesn’t have any opportunity to work from home because they’re either working with people directly, like doctors and nurses or hair cutters, or they’re working with specialized machinery in a factory or in a laboratory. So it is a minority of people who even have this option. But overall, so 40% of the U.S. workforce could, in theory, work from home one day a week or more. And about a quarter of people could spend the majority of their time – three to five days a week – working from home.

CORNISH: When we talk about that 40% of people who do computer or office-based work, now a large number of them have had the experience of remote work. With that experience in mind, what are people learning about what a post-pandemic scenario could be for them?

LUND: So when you look at employee surveys, you typically find that the majority of people say, going forward, when we’re vaccinated, when it’s safe to return to the office, they still would like the flexibility to work from home a few days a week. So that’s a hybrid model. But then you do have a segment of people, maybe a quarter, who say I want to be in the office full time. Now, maybe they don’t have a good home working setup. It’s often young people in their 20s who are starting out in their careers. They want the mentorship and the camaraderie. And then you have another small portion who say I would like to work remote 100% of the time and work from anywhere.

CORNISH: There have been CEOs out there quoted here and they’re saying things like, well, we’re going to know who’s really committed to the job.

LUND: Yeah. So there is a lot of issues. So for companies going down this hybrid approach, there are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for. And one is that you end up with a two-tier workforce, that the people – it’s always the same people in the room making the decisions and other people are on Zoom or video conference, and that those on video conference end up being passed over for promotion, not considered for different opportunities because they’re not there. So companies are being thoughtful. The ones who are pursuing some kind of hybrid approach are thinking through these issues. And how do we avoid that to keep a level playing field?

CORNISH: We’ve been talking about this idea of who comes back, whose decision it is, that sort of thing. Legally, what do we know? Can employers force employees to come back? Can employers gently encourage employees to be vaccinated? What have you learned so far?

LUND: Well, it’s a complicated question. So on vaccination, it looks like it’s a bit of a gray area, but it looks like under federal law, yes, companies can require employees to be vaccinated if it impacts the health and safety of their workforce. On coming back to the office, I think it’s a little bit more clear. Companies can require people to work on site – right? – as a part of the employment contract. But what they risk, especially for talented professionals, is that people will go to other companies that do allow more flexibility on some remote work or work from home.

CORNISH: When people look back at this time, will it be considered a reset in some ways when it comes to work, or are we going to be back to where we were in 2019?

LUND: Well, my crystal ball is broken, but I think it will be a reset. I don’t think that we will go back to the same pattern of working. I think that the forced pause for everyone to spend more time at home with family and friends has really caused many people to rethink. I think that this really has been a reset.

Incidentally, Audie admitted that she was conducting this interview from a temporary studio in the attic of her house.

If you’d like to listen to the entire piece, including comments from others, go to:

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004862350/-why-do-we-have-to-go-back-to-the-office-employees-are-divided-about-returning

 

Notes From a Quiet Street

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Lewis Carroll wrote a poem called The Walrus and the Carpenter that seems to fit these occasional reflections on life:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

And whether pigs have wings.”

We discussed “cabbages” separately recently. Today we want to start with some ruminations about shoes:

I have concluded that shoestrings are an endangered species.

I bought some new dress shoes recently and I can’t keep the blasted shoestrings tied.  The left shoe, especially.  I believe the shoe and its string are in cahoots, planning to make a break for freedom at some particularly embarrassing moment—perhaps when I am walking down the governor’s staircase at the capitol or when I am leaving the church chancel, carrying the communion trays, or perhaps on a wet or snowy day when I am rushing to warm and/or dry place.   The right show and its string are a little less bold but it, too, shows signs of rebellion.

The strings are round, thin, and perhaps a bit on the short side. Maybe it is a reflection of the aging of my fingers that are not so supple as they once were and thin-ish round shoe strings cannot be handled with the dexterity and the firmness of my younger days.  Or maybe its just the design of the shoestrings.

Solving this problem reveals an important cultural collapse.

Shoe stores are disappearing.

First, shoe repair shops disappeared, probably as shoe sole technology improved and longer-wearing non-leather soles became popular and shoes became more disposable and informal.

Now it’s shoe stores.

I went to a shoe store to get replacement laces—flatter ones that I could tie tighter.  The lady went to the back of the store and rooted around for several minutes before producing strings that were supposed to be of the proper length for four-eyelet dress shoes.

They weren’t.

There was enough string to get through the four eyelets but not enough left over to tie a bow knot.  I tied the two strings together and the cats have been playing with them since.  At least somebody is getting some use from them.

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If a new Profiles in Courage is ever written for our times, there will be many cowards and few heroes.  Liz Cheney will have one of the chapters.

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Took a look at a new cell phone of a friend the other day.  Holy cats!  These things keep getting bigger!  Clothing-makers need to be planning larger butt pockets.  I’m seeing commercials for cell phones that open up so they’re twice as big.

Good Lord!  They’re turning into half a tablet.  Is there a size line that won’t be crossed or will this trend continue until they have handles and wheels so we can pull them along behind us?

And when will it be impractical to call them cell phones anymore?

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Been watching quite a bit of the local news on the teevee lately.  Actually, I’ve been watching quite a bit of local weather.

With a little bit of news and sports thrown in here and there.

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Got a little political education when President Biden spoke to a joint session of Congress on April 28th.   It sounded like a State of the Union Address.  It looked like one except for social distancing.  One ingredient (thankfully) missing was the irritating introduction of common folks in the galleries who are examples of noble events or noble presidential proposals.

But it was NOT a State of the Union address.

Jordan Mendoza, writing in USA Today explained that the Constitution does require a President to “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”  But there’s no set time for such an address.

Ronald Reagan started a new tradition in 1981, the year he was inaugurated.  Since then neither new  Presidents nor outgoing Presidents have given a State of the Union Address coming in or going out of office.  Mendoza reported that is “primarily because a president can’t really speak about the state of the country (after) just a few weeks into office.”

Although Mendoza didn’t report it, it seems logical to suggest that no such speech is given by an outgoing president because his recommendations for action will have no weight of authority behind them—and because Congress has better things to do than listen to one more presidential address that would be mostly self-congratulatory.

Since then the new President’s speech has been “An Address Before a Joint Session of Congress.”

 

 

 

A Ground-Source Heat Pump Nation

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It’s early afternoon on top of the Langjokull glacier (Langjokull means “long glacier” so I’m being a little redundant here perhaps) in the Highlands of Iceland. The ice is about 1,900 feet thick below us as we stand on the second largest ice cap on an island named for ice. We are about five hundred feet short of being a mile high.

And we are standing on top of two volcanic systems. But we’re relatively safe. There have only been thirty-two eruptions in the past ten-thousand years. We do not think when there might be a thirty-third.

This is a land of fire and ice, of long dark nights and long bright days, of heat and snow, of Northern Lights in the winter and whales and Puffins in the summer. It is a country the size of New York with a population equaling that of Anaheim, California. About 266,000 of the country’s 360,000 people live in one town, Reykjavik.

Iceland has about 130 volcanoes, about thirty of which are considered active. Glaciers melt from the bottom here because of the warmth of the ground. The water is pure and cold and it spills over dozens of waterfalls and careens through canyons carved through the volcanic rock laid down through thousands of years of eruptions.

In some places it’s boiling hot and there are geysers. Visitors are cautioned to stay on walkways lest they break through the thin crust and encounter boiling water. More than ninety percent of the homes in Iceland are heated with geothermal water heated by the underground magma that is part of the ecosystem of this fascinating country, an entire country that is, in effect, a ground source heat pump.

In other places, steam from geothermal sources generates electricity that provides lights to much of the island.

Heat and cold. Light and dark. The darkness of winter is setting in fast in Iceland. During our visit, we could make out outlines of mountains on the horizon about 9:15 a.m. and it was fully light by ten.   But by three o’clock we were headed back to our hotel because darkness was coming on fast.

Christmas lights go up early in November and they stay until February, not because Iceland celebrates Christmas for four months but because the people NEED THE LIGHT.

Actually, Iceland celebrates Christmas for about two weeks, beginning December 23 and running through Epiphany on January 6 with traditional events linked back to ancient Norse customs and figures such as the thirteen Yule Lads.

The lads are trolls, children of Gryla, a part-troll and part animal who lives in the mountains with her husband and the black Christmas Cat. At Christmas time she and her family come down out of the mountains looking for children who’ve been more naughty than nice. She likes to boil them in her cauldron while the boys go around visiting the homes of children.

Icelandic Christmas custom has children putting a shoe in their bedroom windows each evening for the thirteen days before Christmas. Each night, one of the lads comes by and leave small gifts—candy is always popular—for the good little girls and boys. But the child who has been a pain in the neck that day can wake up the next morning and find a rotten potato in the shoe.

The Yule Cat prowls the countryside and eats people who haven’t received any new clothing before Christmas Eve.

Those of us who live in the less harsh but soft and more temperate and light world of Missouri have a fat old man in a red suit who flies around with the help of reindeer.

The country has an officially established church, a state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Some folks will attend holiday services at Hallgrimskirkja, the church of Hallgrimur Petursson, a seventeenth-century poet and clergyman (although that’s a statue of Leif Ericson in front of the church instead of Pastor Petursson). This modern church is the largest church in the country and at 244 feet is one of the tallest buildings in all of Iceland.

 

 

 

 

 

Simplicity is its beauty. Workers started building it in 1946 and did not complete it until 1986. The original design was for a building not as tall as this one. But it grew in design when the Church of Iceland insisted on a spire that would be higher than the cathedral of Iceland’s Catholic Church.

Yes, we saw the Northern Lights.

Our cameras saw them better than our eyes did. To our eyes, the lights were barely visible. But our digital cameras with slow shutter speeds captured the lights and (if you look closely) the Big Dipper. We had gone out on a Northern Lights tour in a boat the previous night but they didn’t materialize. The second night, we took a bus an hour into the dark interior of the island. We were on the verge of giving up when the first slight glitter caught our attention.

But on our boat trip we did see a light—Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Light that is turned on during the winter for various periods.

This year, she went to Reykjavik to turn it on in honor of husband John Lennon’s 79th birthday, October 9. It will be turned off for the season on March 27. “Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world,” she wrote in a message in October. “Power works in mysterious ways. We don’t have to do much. Visualize the domino effect and just start thinking PEACE…

It’s Time of Action.

The Action is PEACE.

Think PEACE, act PEACE, Spread PEACE.

PEACE is power!”

It was late at night when I took that picture and I’m surprised it turned out as well as it did. It looks lighter than it was because of the slow shutter speed. And we were riding on a boat. Actually there are fifteen searchlights that form the column. The stone monument housing the lights features “Imagine Peace” in two-dozen languages.

Now—back to the glacier, back to where we started. Standing on a glacier is one thing. Going inside one is something else. But we did.

With sixty feet of ice over hour heads and hundreds of feet of ice and volcanoes beneath our feet we explored the interior. The tunnel was designed by a geophysicist and snakes through the glacier far enough that the trip through takes about an hour. We were given spikes that we stretched over our boots; some of our group had toe-warmers that they inserted inside their boots but it wasn’t all that bad (we thought), especially as long as we kept moving. In fact, it was warmer inside the glacier than it was outside.

There are some rooms carved into the ice, including a chapel where weddings are held from time to time, not something we could ever anticipate doing because of the hassle, if nothing else. Plus, we observed, who wants to start a marriage with a frigid spouse?

In the middle of our tour, one of our group was startled by the ringing of his cell phone. Somebody from Jefferson City was calling.   We’re sixty feet underneath the top of a glacier in Iceland, for goodness sakes, and a cell phone still found him.

The geology that shapes the island and the people who live there and the environment in which they choose to live produces some amazing lifestyle developments (at least amazing to us).

This is the biggest greenhouse we have ever seen, at Freoheimar. And it’s only one in a complex that covers about 1.25 acres that grows tomatoes and cucumbers and has restaurant facilities scattered throughout the vine-growing area. A computerized climate-control system takes care of temperature, humidity, lighting and carbon dioxide. Geothermal water heats the greenhouses. Pure cold water irrigates the plants. Plants are protected from pests by biological controls and bumblebees that care nothing about humans help pollinate the plants.

We’re not sure how tall the plants are—more than fifteen feet, we suspect. Visitors can have tomato soup and home-made bread for lunch. And, oh, is it good soup! And the bread is to die for. Each of us tasted a little tomato and this consumer who tolerates tomatoes on hamburgers tried one. Very low acidic content. It was almost sweet.

And the plastic container that these folks market their small tomatoes in: After the purchaser has eaten all the tomatoes, the container can be held under hot water and it disappears.

Iceland, where people live on volcanic lava rather than good rich (or not so rich) dirt could teach us Americans a lot about efficient, low-waste, natural living.

Two or three final things: Remember we mentioned the Christmas lights going up early and staying up late because people in long winter-dark time need light? How about this gas station/car wash?

Gas was costing about nine dollars (US) a gallon there. But people don’t drive little bitty cars. In fact, Iceland has an amazing variety of cars available from Skodas made in Czechoslovakia to Volkswagens from Germany and Jaguars from England, Subarus from Japan, and Fords from the United States, among others.

The Icelandic language is very old. It has no dialects. Old Icelandic is a derivation of Old Norse. The oldest written documents in Iceland date to about 1100 CE. Most modern Icelanders can read those documents because their language has been so unchanged. The Icelandic alphabet is based on the 12th Century First Grammatical. It also has six letters our alphabet doesn’t have.

Reykjavik also is the home of the only museum of its kind in the world. You’ll have to go to Google Images to see more about it. I cannot imagine the public reaction in most of this country if somebody opened a museum like it here. I did take some pictures of it (although I didn’t have time to get any farther inside than the gift shop—and some of the gifts would have made interesting objects on the airport luggage security cameras). Actually, it’s called The Iceland Phallological Museum but it’s best known by its sign.

Almost all of the land and sea mammals found in Iceland are represented. Including, uh, Homo Sapiens. In all, there are 282 specimens from 93 different species of animal. Should anyone want to create one of these museums in this country, we suggest locating it in Olean, the Miller County town of about 125 or so souls who have held an  annual Testicle Festival, which we understand has moved to another town.

So, we went to Iceland a couple of weeks ago. And we found it intriguing for several reasons. It’s about six hours from Chicago if you are so unfortunate as to want to leave from O’Hare International.

It was kind of an anniversary celebration for us. A week after Nancy and I got back and got the unpacking and the laundry mostly done, we celebrated our 52nd wedding anniversary.

Would we go back?  We have other places on our list but a maybe a summer visit when the whales and the Puffins are there…..

 

 

 

Notes from the Road

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Before we get into this, we note that a few days after returning from a short trip we turned on our computer and got a message reading, “Hmmm…can’t reach this page.” The message offered to connect me with my usual first page by using a different web address. I tried that and that didn’t work either.   Going back to the previous “can’t reach this page” page, I noticed another line:

“Report this issue.”

I wonder how many people have gotten similar messages and have clicked on that line before giving themselves a good solid dope-slap.

Now, on to our stories:

(Oh? What did I do about that “report this issue” message? None of your business. And besides, the red mark on my forehead has disappeared.)

I always get a good chuckle, if not a good laugh, from audiences when I say that God invented Kansas so Missourians would appreciate Colorado more when they get there.   Problem is, you don’t start seeing hazy mountains in front of you until you’re more than 100 miles into Colorado. I consider that area for several miles west of Limon to be Kansas West.

And in truth, Nancy and I don’t mind driving across Kansas all that much. A lot of our ancestors were pioneers who were there when corn was the dominant crop. We like the way the sky opens up, enjoy the Flint Hills, and the rolling prairies.

It’s easier to enjoy those things at 80 mph instead of looking at the back end of the oxen for the month it took thousands of people headed to the mountains 150 years ago.

Best name for a Kansas town: Grainfield. It’s three counties in from the Colorado border, a little place of about 275 people, that topped out at 417 in the 1980 census. Children from Grainfield attend Wheatland High School (another appropriate name), where the sports teams used to be called the Shockers, as in shocks of wheat (we mention that for the city folks who think the kids might have done weird science with electricity). They’re the Thunderhawks now.

Grainfield’s old opera house is on the National Historic Register. We don’t know when the last opera or any other performance was held there. The place is an antique shop now. Not surprisingly, it’s the dominant building in a town that, like a lot of small Kansas farming towns (one up north particularly close to your observer’s heart) seems to be shrinking back into the prairie.

But if you’re on I-70 and not enjoying the experience as much as we do, you might drop in on Grainfield.

Or just down the road, at Quinter, which boasts the Fick Fossil Museum (do not try to say that real fast too many times). The oldest Mosasaur skull in the world is on display there.

Not far away is Oakley, which is near Castle Rock and Monument Rocks, the chalk remnants of the great inland sea that split present North America into two land masses about one-hundred million years ago. Nearby Quinter, about 30 miles from Oakley, is Castle Rock, from the same time period.

—The features live on in the Kansas University cheer, “Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk.” At least we suspect that’s where it came from, should any Missourians care.

Incidentally, all of this silly Kansas-Missouri animosity aside, we like Lawrence and we think the KU campus perched on Mount Oread (seen from the interstate) is a lovely campus. It, too, has a nice fossil museum but it’s most famous museum attraction is the hide of Comanche, the Seventh Cavalry Horse that survived Custer’s ill-considered attack in Montana. The hide is stretched over a taxidermy mount so it looks like the horse. Although Comanche is sometimes described as “the only survivor of Custer’s Last Stand,” he isn’t. A lot of Indians survived. And about half of Custer’s troops survived a few miles away on another hill.

As long as we’re providing you with a travelogue, you might consider drifting off the interstate about 115 miles east of Quinter, in the Ellsworth area, and going to Lucas, which is the home of The Garden of Eden. We wrote about it years ago on the old Missourinet blog—about a Civil War Veteran who hated corporations and decorated his house built out of concrete logs with concrete anti-corporation figures and figures from the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, something bizarre to many visitors but also an interesting piece of self-expression through folk art.

Of course, if you want to get up near Highway 36 you can visit the largest ball of twine, in Cawker City, or if you want to drop down to Highway 50, you can climb down into the world’s largest hand-dug well at Greensburg—and while you’re there you can appreciate the effort to rebuild the town after it was flattened by a tornado almost twenty years ago.

We always enjoy driving through the miles-long Smoky Hills Wind Farm about 140 miles west of Topeka. There are 155 of these giant three-bladed machines, some close enough to the road that we can appreciate how big those things are. There’s an interesting juxtaposition near the eastern end of the farm, a church with a big windmill nearby:

 

I call the image “Higher Powers.”   This picture isn’t a good one. It was shot with a cell phone while Nancy was driving about 80. One of these days I’m going to have the good camera and we’re going to stop and do it right. We find these big wind turbines (the official name; I guess “windmills” are the old things we sometimes also see along the road that pump water for livestock) kind of fascinating.

We “enjoy” running on a couple of toll roads in the Denver area.  We saw “enjoy” because they don’t have toll booths.  Cameras take pictures of our car’s license plate and a week or two later a statement arrives in our mail box saying how much we owe the state of Colorado.

Saw a headline in the Longmont, Colorado newspaper that recalled an old television comedy show and we—for some reason—thought, “Ralph Kramden would be proud.”   For those few who peruse these entries who do not know about Ralph Kramden, let us perform an educational service.

 Ralph Kramden was a television character in “The Honeymooners” skits, a New York bus driver in the 1950s and 60s who made $62 a week and who lived in a small tenement apartment with his wife of fifteen years, Alice. Ralph was a bombastic, fat, man with who was often scheming on ways to get rich. His schemes, often hatched with sidekick Ed Norton, an always-cheerful sewer worker who lived with his wife, Trixie, in the apartment upstairs, never worked. Alice was the queen of the put-down who dreamed of a better life that included a refrigerator that didn’t need to have a bowl underneath it collect water that dripped from the ice box. Sometimes she would irritate Ralph with her spot-on observations of his girth or job or scheme and he would, in anger, threaten:

“One of these days, One of these days, Alice: Pow! Bang, Zoom, you’re going to the Moon.”

It was funny then and it remains funny in the context of its times. Of course, it wouldn’t play at all, now. But those were different times. By the end of the skit, the humbled Ralph would tell Alice, “You’re the best,” and they would kiss and the screen would fade to black and then to a commercial.

Ralph Kramden was played by Jackie Gleason, who might be remembered by some younger—but increasingly older—movie viewers as Sheriff Buford T. Justice from the “Smokey and the Bandit” films. Alice was played by Audrey Meadows. You can still see “The Honeymooners” sketches on various YouTube videos.

Ralph, a prophet in his way, and Alice, the beneficiary, might find that headline, uh, meaningful, I thought.

Longmont, by the way, is the hometown of Vance Brand, an astronaut who was the command module pilot on the 1975 flight that linked a leftover Apollo capsule with a Soviet Soyuz capsule for the famous “handshake in space” that was the first American-Soviet joint space venture. He also flew three shuttle flights, including the first fully-operational flight. He might have walked on the Moon if there had been an Apollo 18 mission.

Well, enough of these latest notes from the road, which culminated with a hike to 12,005 feet and an involuntary geological study of the relative hardness of my head with some Rocky Mountain granite that left a temporary mark on my forehead and some marks on the granite that will wash off in the next rainstorm.   Conclusion: both seem to be of equal hardness.

—which might explain why we drive across Kansas rather than fly over it.

Bearthday

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I struggle to say that I remember things fifty years ago. Remembering things fifty years past is a reminder of mortality. Maybe that’s why it’s uncomfortable to say it.

Memory is never fifty years old because memories don’t age. They’re always in the present in our mind. We are ageless in our memories.

Fifty years ago, on my birthday, we sent three men to the Moon.

I remember it as if it were—–

Not fifty years ago.

The Vietnam War was eroding our national will. The Civil Rights movement forced us to look at ourselves more than we wanted to look and it provoked intense emotion expressed in various ways. The Cold War over freedom and oppression was a daily factor. But there still was a residual of the optimism and it was nowhere better expressed than what was to happen that day.

The radio station I was working for in Jefferson City at the time (it’s no longer in Jefferson City) had no national network. So we couldn’t follow the buildup at Cape Canaveral, as it was then called, as intensely as the other station in town, a Mutual affiliate. But we were paying attention and on our newscasts we did let our listeners know what was happening.

This was in the days of 15-minute newscasts in the morning, during the noon hour when Derry Brownfield, our farm director, updated the farmers in central Missouri on the daily markets and agricultural news, and during drive-time in the afternoon.

The script for the 7 a.m. newscast that morning is in a landfill somewhere. But I can hear my younger voice closing the newscast noting the significant events unfolding in Florida. I had brought to the station that morning an LP record of one of John Kennedy’s greatest speeches and I had dubbed part of it onto a cartridge tape. I played part of his speech at Rice University from September 12, 1962—the part that is in bold type below:

“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

“…Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

“Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

I remember after the tape ended with Kennedy saying, “That challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

I said, “And that’s why we are going to the Moon today.”   And closed out the newscast.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, it’s important we think about John Kennedy’s 1962 speech. In recent years some presidents or presidential candidates have said we need to go to the Moon again and Mars, too. But their remarks have caused only little ripples in the public mind.

—Because, coming from them, they’re just words. They don’t call on you and me to want to reach for something great. They don’t challenge us to think that, as President Kennedy mentioned earlier in his speech, “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”

We do not hear calls today for “answerable courage.” We don’t hear those who lead or want to lead us speak of “new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Some observers believe proclamations about returning to the moon and heading for Mars are intended to gin up a few votes in an election cycle. And the public knows it and is unmoved.

Fifty years ago was a beginning and a beginning of an end. We are people of short attention spans who too easily spend our time looking within where we are apt to find narrowness and selfishness instead of looking out where we find challenges to meet, good that we can do, rights that we can win.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was one of the few people granted an in-depth interview with Neil Armstrong, who bore the public burden of being the first man on the moon by becoming a very private person. Brinkley tells in his new book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, of asking Armstrong “why the American people seemed to be less NASA crazed in the twenty-first century than back during john F. Kennedy’s White House years.”

Oh, I think it’s predominantly the responsivity of the human character. We don’t have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the future. We’re very “now” oriented. I’m not surprised by that. I think we’ll always be in space, but it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases, it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control.

Kennedy had the external factors. The Cold War and the Soviet early successes in space. The Bay of Pigs debacle and the need to get beyond it. The Civil Rights effort that was mushrooming. And other issues. But his speech at Rice University was a challenge for the country to move forward at a time when it could become consumed by other issues—and it did.

By the time my brother-in-law and I watched the midnight launch of Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission to the moon, from the press site at Cape Kennedy slightly more than three years after this historic day in 1969, we as a people were so looking inward at the war, the civil rights struggle, the ongoing Cold War, and by then Watergate that the cancellation of three moon flights that were originally scheduled stirred little public regret. The idea of doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard” seemed lost. And they seem lost, still, today.

Of the twenty-four men who flew to the Moon, the only people who have seen the entire earth and watched it shrink into the surrounding blackness, only twelve survive. Only twelve of the twenty-four walked on the moon and only four of them are still walking on the earth: Buzz Aldrin, now 89; Dave Scott, 87; Charlie Duke, 83, and Harrison Schmitt, 84. The other eight moonwalkers have, as one source put it, “left the earth forever.”   All three of the first men to see the moon up close (Apollo 8) are still with us, though. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell are 91. Bill Anders is 85.

Some historians wonder if Apollo was worth it, if going to the Moon and bringing back a few hundred pounds of rocks was worth the $24 billion total expense in the 1960s and early 70s, at a time when we were spending $30 billion each year on the Vietnam War. One of them, Andrew Smith, whose Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, was published for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and has been republished for the fiftieth, recalls an earlier Kennedy speech, the one to Congress in 1961 in which he set the goal of sending men to the Moon and returning them to Earth within the decade. He says the Moon goal resulted from Kennedy’s recognition that the Cold War “was going the be won or lost in the so-called Third World, and that cultural factors would influence the loyalties of wavering nations as much as economics did.” He maintains Kennedy wanted to capture imaginations throughout the world, a way to make democracy the system of choice, and also wanted something Americans could enthusiastically support. The answer, says Smith, was “theatre—the most mind-blowing theatre ever created,” that the Apollo program was “performance, pure and simple.”

Smith argues that the lasting value of the missions isn’t the science behind them or the rocks the men brought back. It is that these missions for the first time allowed us to see the entire earth, alone in the vast blackness of space. “It’s clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did…was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small.”

Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon with Alan Shepard on Apollo 14 told Allen, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!’”

While Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the Moon with the Apollo 15 flight, Al Worden was by himself in the Endeavour, the command module orbiting above them. For sixty-seven hours, Worden was alone in the universe, often out of touch with anyone, anywhere, when he was traveling behind the Moon. He shared his thoughts in his 1974 book, Hello Earth, Greetings from Endeavour. One of his poems reads:

Now I can see where I’m going and am impatient to get there—                                       What will I see? The wounds of ageless strife, the anguish of cooling and petrifying, the punctures of an infinity of coolness?                                                                                   No signs of healing, or love, or care, or compassion?                                                         She is not healed. All the scars are there—from birth.                                                        Poor lady of the night.                                                                                                          But we love her and she knows it full well, for she has been faithful all these years.          And what of the scars on the planet earth?                                                                         Will she end up like the lifeless old moon, revolving slowly, hanging naked in the sky?     Life is too precious to let ego-centered ideas snuff it out.                                                   The moon must teach us, not only of age and geology, planets and solar puzzles            But of life, else we end up like her.

Smith says, “Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn’t, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes.”

So today, fifty years after the launch of Apollo 11 on my bearthday, let us look beyond the event and ponder the thoughts of Mitchell and Worden and Smith.

And Kennedy. And be unafraid of doing things because they are hard—-even if the hardest of things is seeing ourselves.

(Photo credits: Apollo 11 launch, Al Worden’s photo of the Moon and Earth, and Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt unfurling the flag with a tiny earth in the background, and the “blue marble” photo from Apollo 17 all are from NASA)

 

Sponsorships

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State government never has enough money to fix the roads, educate our kids, take care of those of us in our declining years, pay our prison guards and state employees  enough to get off of food stamps, maintain hundreds of buildings it owns, keep our air and water safe, and a lot of other things.

I woke up on a Monday morning a few weeks ago with the solution.  I think it was the day after I’d watched the Indianapolis 500 in person and the NASCAR 600-mile race at Charlotte that evening on the telly.  It came to me that state government could make millions if it followed an economic model based on racing.

A few years ago the stock car race at Indianapolis was called something like the Your Name Here Crown Royal Brickyard 400 Powered by Big Machine Records.  Each year the name of some citizen—a private citizen who was a veteran or someone who had voluntarily done something of public benefit would be picked to fill in the “Your Name Here” part of the event name—a nice thing to do to recognize the importance of people like most of us who do good stuff just because we do good stuff.

And if you watch any of these events, you know that the first thing the winners do in the post-race interview is thank all the sponsors whose logos adorned their cars and are sewn onto their fire-resistant driving suits. “You know, Goodyear (Firestone) gave us an awesome tire today and our (Chevrolet, Honda, Toyota, Ford) had awesome power.  I’d like to thank Bass Pro, M&Ms, Budweiser, Coke, Monster Energy, Gainbridge, NAPA, and all my other sponsors who make this possible—and the fans, you’re the BEST!!!”

Suppose state government was run like that.

At the end of a legislative session, the Speaker and the President Pro Tem, in their joint news conference, began with “We have had an awesome, productive session here at the Anheuser-Busch Capitol powered by Ameren.”

“The Monsanto Department of Agriculture driven by the Missouri Farm Bureau will be better equipped than ever to regulate corporate farming through the Tyson CAFO Division.

“The Master Lock Department of Corrections employees are getting a significant pay increase; The Depends Division of Aging is expanding its services significantly; the Tracker Marine Water Patrol is able to hire more officers; and the Dollar General Department of Revenue is going to install new computers to get our H&R Block tax refunds out faster.

“The Cabela’s Department of Conservation sales tax renewal has been put on the ballot next year.  The Wikipedia Department of Higher Education driven by Nike has been given more authority to approve such programs as the Shook, Hardy & Bacon Law School at UMKC, the Wal-Mart Business School in Columbia, the Eagle Forum Liberal Studies program at UMSL, and technology developed at the Hewlett-Packard 3-D Missouri University of Science and Technology will now be capable of building new football facilities on our campuses for pennies..  And we found additional funding for the Cologuard Department of Health and its Purdue Pharma Division of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

We also were able to put a proposal on the ballot next year to increase funding for the Quikcrete Department of Transportation.

“We couldn’t do all of the great things we’ve done in the 101st Session of the Citizens United General Assembly fueled by Laffer Economics without the support of all of our state’s other great sponsors.

“And we appreciate the participation of you citizens out there.  We couldn’t do this without all of you. You’re the BEST!!!”

And the confetti made from 1,994 un-passed bills would rain down and the legislative leaders would spray champagne (or, more likely, shaken-up Bud) all over each other in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Legislative Victory Circle (previously known as the rotunda) and the legislative mascot dressed as the Official State Dessert would dance to a celebratory song performed by Sheryl Crowe, who next year will be chosen as a project by a third-grade class studying state government to be the subject of a bill designating her as the Official State Country Singer.

This would never work, of course.  We can’t see members of the legislature in uniforms that have state government sponsors’ patches all over them during the sessions or campaigning in outfits that have the logos of their donors.  And the Senate would just flat out refuse to tolerate anything that would eliminate Seersucker Wednesdays.

Even if government tried something like this, the Supreme Court would be tied up for years in lawsuits determining whether sponsorships should be calculated as Total State Revenue under the Hancock Amendment, thereby triggering tax refunds that would undermine the entire idea.  And Clean Missouri would get another ballot proposal approved by voters that would tie the Missouri Ethics Commission into knots trying to define whether sponsors constitute campaign donors.

Hate to say it folks.  In the real world, if we want better services or more services or better roads or prison guards who don’t have to hold two other jobs, it’s us taxpayers who will have to be the sponsors of state government.    And after all, shouldn’t we want to be

THE BEST?

King Canute, Charles Wilson, and the dangers of rejecting change

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We have a lot of misquotes that we like to quote to prove our points in arguments and discussions.

One arose when Charles E. Wilson was appointed by President Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. Wilson was the President of General Motors and his position triggered intense questioning during his confirmation hearing.  When he was asked if he could, as Secretary of Defense, make a decision that would be bad for GM, he said he could although he could not think of such a situation happening because “for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Through the years his statement has been turned into the rather arrogant and erroneous quote that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.” It came to mind recently when GM announced layoffs and plant closures affecting thousands of workers in the United States and Canada.

The President has threatened GM with various penalties if it doesn’t reverse course and keep running factories and keep employing people making vehicles that consumers aren’t buying in enough quantity to justify their continued production.

It’s the equivalent of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 ordering the thirteen-thousand manufacturers of wagons and buggies and their supporting industries (horseshoes, harnesses, buggy whips) to maintain production while people drove by their factories in Model T’s.

Paul Turner has recalled in his Adaptive Insights Blog that there were 4,600 carriage manufacturers in 1914, the year after Henry Ford fired up his first production line.  About a decade later there were only 150 of those companies and just 88 in 1929.  “Companies that tried to hang on to the past, or simply apply old world skills and technology to the new world simply failed to exist,” he wrote. One company that recognized the future and embraced the idea that it was not in the business of making wagons and buggies, but was in the transportation business was Studebaker. But changing economics, market demands, and public taste eventually drove Studebaker out of business, along with its late partner, Packard.

Think of the badges that have disappeared in recent years—Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Mercury.  We let them slip away with some minor mourning, not paying as much attention as we might have to what their disappearance meant.  But now Ford has announced it’s getting out of the passenger car business because of changing public demand. And General Motors has ignited public awareness dramatically with its announcement that the products it makes, while good products, are not what the public wants in enough numbers to justify continued production and before GM becomes another Studebaker-Packard, it has to reprogram itself for what tomorrow’s consumer wants.  And tomorrow’s consumer appears to be leaning more toward being a rider than a driver and increasingly turning attention to electricity rather than gasoline.

We have lived through numerous non-weather climate changes and that is happening with the auto industry—worldwide—might just be the most eye-catching example.  The sprouting of big windmills and wind farms is an unmistakable indication that the way we get our energy in ten years will be much different from the way we get it today.  A former Sierra Club CEO, Carl Pope is quoted by Theenergymix.com saying “Real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long-established livelihoods, and leave a trail of wreckage behind them.”

Some will see the words “Sierra Club” and immediately dismiss Pope’s observations as drivel. But remember how quickly the wagon makers and their extensive support industries that employed thousands of people disappeared.  Pope wrote in 2015, just three years ago of, “fossil fuels, with coal companies declaring bankruptcy at the rate of one per month, stock exchanges delisting their stocks, and oil and gas beginning to lose market value.”

Woodrow Wilson probably could have gotten a lot of votes in some places if he promised to revitalize the horse-drawn wagon industry. But by then, Lydston Hornsted had driven his 200 hp Benz faster than 124 mph, pretty well proving one horsepower was not the future of transportation.

Change is not coming in transportation and energy alone, it is here and it is gaining momentum.

Paul Turner set forth three lessons from the transition to the car:

  1. “Only those who embrace creative destruction will make the shift…The carriage makers that didn’t invest in retooling their production failed. Most were too busy protecting their existing, dying, revenue streams. The same holds true today….”
  2. “The transition is much faster than anyone expects.” He cites the death of the wagon industry 1914-1929 and remarks, “That’s akin to a staple of the year 2000 sliding into the dust today—or perhaps today’s cars essentially being replaced by self-driving cars by the mid-2020’s. The pace of change can be disconcerting. Those that have spent their entire careers in a single industry invariably underestimate the breadth, depth, and speed of change. The speed of disruption and the unwillingness to put aside antiquated technology is a potent combination capable of bringing organizations to their knees much faster than thought possible. Innovators like Google with a self-driving vehicle, and Tesla Motors with an electric vehicle designed from the ground up understand this, while the old automakers do not.”
  3. “New innovators emerge out of nowhere, faster than the old world leaders expect.” Forty-six hundred carriage makers were in business in 1914. A dozen years later there were 3.7-million cars and trucks on the roads, some of them driving past a lot of shuttered carriage factories.

He concludes, “Holding on to the past is more risky than embracing the future.”

The Twelfth Century English Historian Henry of Huntingdon told of King Canute setting his throne by the seashore and commanding the tide to stop before it wet his chair and his robes.  Moments later the wet king rose and turned to his followers and told them, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

The tide is here and it is going to keep coming and General Motors is the latest “king” to realize sitting still is to become submerged by the future.  There is pain in change but history tells us that ignoring change or ordering us to ignore that change is asking for a mouth of salt water at best, drowning at worst.

Get over it and fight back

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St. Louis Rams merchandise has become St. Louis Rams memorabilia.  Look for big markdowns in sporting goods stores for jerseys that say “Gurley” on the back.  Don’t bother calling Stan Kroenke and the National Football League all kinds of nasty names. They don’t care and while you’re thinking up creative new epithets to apply to the situation, time is a-wasting. 

Mayor Slay wants to pout and says he’s through with the NFL.  And Offensive Line Coach Nixon says the league talks out of both sides of its mouth.  Get over it.  There are worse things than hearing the NFL say St. Louis is not an NFL town.  One of the worse things is accepting it.  There’s got to be a better answer to the NFL blasting St. Louis as “inadequate” than saying “am not!”

There’s a line in Meredith Willson’s Broadway musical of years ago, The Unsinkable Molly Brown “Nobody wants me down as much as I wants me up.”

St. Louis will survive and thrive without a pro football team. They’ve done it before.

But if St. Louis wants a replacement NFL team, it has to regroup immediately and be aggressive.  And go get the Oakland Raiders.  

The Raiders are the odd man out in the Los Angeles sweepstakes. They probably feel bruised, too. Speculation already is being offered that the Raiders will move to San Diego to replace the Chargers, who are likely to become Kroenke’s alternate-weekend tenants in his new stadium in a Los Angeles suburb.  St. Louis needs to nip that San Diego talk in the bud. After all, the NFL has dissed San Diego, too,. And there are all kinds of good reasons fans should be going to St. Louis Raiders games sometime in the future and some good reasons why the Raiders should want to play in St. Louis.

We know the Raiders don’t want to be in Oakland.  Heck, they’ve already left it once to go to Los Angeles from 1982-1994 and (believe it or not) decided to return to Oakland.  So we know the Raiders have shallow roots.  They also share a stadium with the Oakland Athletics, a team that once was the Philadelphia Athletics before they were the Kansas City Athletics and then the Oakland Athletics.  And the city of Oakland has refused to commit any taxpayer funds for a new football stadium.

Think of some other NFL history.  Think of the great Chiefs-Raiders rivalry.  Think of the marketing opportunities that could come if that rivalry was a cross-state rivalry that would make the annual Governor’s Cup competition TWO regular season, inter-divisional contests, not just an exhibition game.   

Stadium?  St. Louis already has one. It’s domed so the first Chiefs-Raiders game could be played in the sunshine early in the NFL season in Kansas City and the second one could be played as a season-concluding, everything is on the line on a frigid day game—indoors. 

Remember that Stan Kroenke felt the dome could be a top-tier stadium worthy of keeping the Rams in St. Louis if it got a $700-million upgrade, which now looks like an offer that shouldn’t have been refused.  So instead of the Raiders moving to Los Angeles to play in a $1.9-billion dollar stadium they wouldn’t be able to call their own, they could move into the domed stadium in St. Louis that would be upgraded to top-tier quality and they would be the only football  tenants.  And St. Louis can be an NFL city again with a Kroenke-certified top-tier facility for a price that is in NFL terms reasonably sane, not the financial disaster Kroenke claimed the riverside stadium would be.  

The team could keep its “Raiders” name because it would be appropriate to St. Louis.  Let’s not forget that Lambert-St. Louis Airport was once a world-class airport until a corporate RAIDER named Carl Icahn got his hands on TWA and messed around with it until TWA disappeared into American Airlines and the St. Louis hub just disappeared.  Don’t forget that some folks in Los Angeles might think of St. Louis as a city that pulled a raid on LA and took the Rams away to begin with.  We could probably find other examples of raids (including prohibition times in the city once called “Anheuserville” by some critics).   

 ESPN’s Paul Gutierrez, who covered the Raiders for eight years, says the NFL has declared San Diego and St. Louis “non-viable” for an NFL team (which might preclude the Raiders from moving to San Diego if the NFL is consistent).  He suggests San Antonio and Portland, Oregon might take a run at the Raiders.  But the “non-viability” of St. Louis  was based on comparisons to Los Angeles and the St. Louis plans for a new stadium that raised questions about financial viability from the NFL.  But if Oakland WANTS to move to St. Louis to play in a stadium renovated the way Stan Kroenke would have found acceptable—-well, we know the NFL is sometimes not a synonym for “consistency.” 

Don’t waste time crying in your foreign-owned beer, St. Louis.  Regroup.  Raid the Raiders. Convince them you’re much better than what they have and what they get can continue to improve.  And start squirreling away cash for the entirely new stadium you know will have to be built someday. 

IF, however, the name of the game is to spend an INSANE amount of money for a new stadium, then do something that fits with the city’s history and spreads the costs around.  Such as?

A new stadium OVER the Mississippi River, not next to it.  

Don’t bloody your nose snorting over this “impossible” idea.  One hundred and forty years ago or so, there were plenty of people who told James B. Eads that his idea of a bridge over the Mississippi of the kind he proposed to build was impossible.  Eads, not being an engineer, saw no reason to listen to his critics.   His impossible idea is now one of the symbols of St. Louis. 

There was a time when the idea of building a 630-foot stainless steel arch on the riverfront was ridiculed.   Yet, there it is and the city and the federal government are spending a lot of money to rehab it and the area around it.  It has turned an eyesore of a riverfront into one of the world’s great entrances to a city.  

A stadium over the river.  It would never work, you say, because it would weigh too much.  Not if you built it out of carbon fiber and industrial grade aluminum (if industrial grade aluminum is good enough for the Ford F-150 built in Kansas City, it’s good enough for a footballs stadium at St. Louis) or titanium.  What an engineering marvel that would be!   What an international symbol of a city forging a new technological identity in the 21st century it could become!  

The Eads Bridge is a 19th century symbol.  The arch represents the 20th century.  The stadium over the river would say so much about the 21st century people that we are, and it would be right in the middle of the nation, a draw for thousands, maybe millions of people, to see and visit on the other 41 weekends a year. 

Why build it over the river?  To spread the costs around.  Think of the Stan Musial Bridge.  Missouri didn’t pay for all of it.  Illinois paid for some of it.  Another Missouri-Illinois project that could lead to immense economic development on both sides of the river would revitalize both St. Louises and their surrounding areas would offer economic opportunities that would make the Lumiere Place and the Alton Belle casinos look like penny arcades when it comes to economic benefits. 

Need an example?  The Kansas Speedway has been a huge economic development success just across the border from Kansas City.  And every time something new happens in that area there should be increased embarrassment on the Missouri side because our legislature had a chance to provide incentives for that track to be built near the Kansas City airport.  Legislative shortsightedness cost Missouri big-time then. St. Louis suffered the same disorder with the Rams (the same way it did with the Football Cardinals).  Time to get a new prescription.    

Sure, you’d have to consider what would happen in flood times.  But that’s an easily-addressed matter, really.  This is a time for boldness, not bruised egos.  Floods?  A small, occasional annoyance.  They can be dealt with.   

It’s halftime and St. Louis trails but the game is not necessarily over.  Coach Slay and offensive line coach Nixon need a stirring clubhouse speech. 

“There’s no time to sit around licking wounds.  They’ll heal anyway.  Get a couple of stitches, put a piece of tape over it, put the helmet back on, and get out there.  We aren’t playing for tie and we’re not going to accept a loss.” 

In the end, the city still might be on the short end of the fight but there’s no dignity in getting knocked down and deciding to pout on the canvas instead of getting up to punch back.

 

Time in a capsule

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An email arrived at the Missourinet from Arcola, Illinois a few weeks ago.

I wanted to get a message to Robert A. Priddy and tracked him down to this website. Today I found a message Bob left in a 1916 issue of the archived Arcola Record Herald newspaper. The message was written in 1961 when Bob was working there over the summer. The note said he was home for summer from University of Missouri. The message said, “The last person to gaze upon this page was I, on this day, July 13, 1961.” Just wanted to let him know I found it and left it there but added my own message for the next person to find.

Thanks, Nancy Rairden, Arcola, IL

Nancy Rairden on April 17 had opened a little time capsule I didn’t realize that I had created a long time ago. The Arcola Record-Herald is a weekly newspaper in a small town south of Champaign and about half an hour from my small home town of Sullivan.  An graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Harry Stonecipher, was the owner of the paper then and as a member of the fabled “Missouri Mafia” had hired the college kid who walked into the office one day hoping to get some experience in a newspaper office before starting his journalism classes that fall at the University of Missouri.  One of my jobs was to compile the weekly historical column—you know, the 10, 25, 50 years ago thing.  I don’t recall why I was looking at only 45 years.  Maybe we didn’t do 50.

The note left in the 1916 bound volume had been long forgotten.  But since getting Nancy’s message, I seem to recall putting the note there and wondering when the next time would be that somebody would be reading the newspaper from so long ago.  Now I know. Fifty-four years.

All I had said was that I had been there.  Time capsules are kind of like that.  “We were here,” they say to the unknown figures who will open them decades later.  That’s the basic message in all of them.

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The big copper box installed in the state capitol cornerstone was removed the other day and will be opened before the centennial observance on July 3 of the cornerstone laying a century ago.

Organizers of the centennial event think they’ll draw a better crowd and the event will be better-staged if it’s held in conjunction with Independence Day activities in Jefferson City. The old things won’t be put into the new time capsule that will be placed somewhere in the Capitol, probably, not back in the cornerstone.

New stuff will be put in the new capsule and the old materials will be cared for by the state archives after being displayed for a while.  As this is written, we don’t know specifically what’s in that box. We do know there were some newspapers and a book of Missouri history and a copy of the bill authorizing the bonds for the new Capitol.  But the folks who lifted the box out of the cornerstone thought it weighed about sixty pounds, indicating there’s a lot more than those things in there.  It will be opened in a sterile state health lab in case any dangerous mold has grown inside it.

The actual cornerstone laying date was June 24, 1915, a huge event in Jefferson City. The centennial of the event is unlikely to attract the kind of crowd that gathered a century ago although it would be nice to see a good-sized gathering.

The state is asking Missourians to suggest what should go into the new time capsule, which gives rise to a discussion about why we have them. If you could put something into the new Capitol time capsule, to be found 100 years from now, what would you put in it?  If you could leave a message for your Missourian descendants to read in 2115, what would you tell them?

In one form or another, you would say to them, “I was here.  I was as alive as you are now.”  Even if it is only a note that says I was the last person to look at this page of this bound volume of old newspapers until you came along, that’s the basis for what we would put into a time capsule.

Sometimes families create their own.  A friend many years ago bought a couple of trunks, one for each of their children, and put things in them from the family’s past and the then-present future.  The trunks are to be opened in fifty or a hundred years by descendants these folks will not live to see.

Sometimes the time capsule is nothing more than a shoe box given by one generation to another to just hang onto because it has some things in it that the giver considered important to them.

Some people in Georgia in 1940 created the Crypt of Civilization.  If the wishes of the creators are carried out, it won’t be opened until 8113.  By someone.  Or some thing.  Pessimists and Optimists alike might wonder if it ever will be opened because by then mankind, or whatever mankind has become, will have fled the dead, contaminated, resource-depleted earth for a habitable planet light years away.  At the same time, the mere presence of the Crypt of Civilization makes one want to be there when it’s opened just to see what life is or what life is like in 5998 years.

What’s in it?  Microfilm.  About 800 books including several novels show everything from the way we amused ourselves to humankind’s historical record to descriptions of our industries, our medical procedures, patent documents, sound movies of great men and women, recordings (on record) of important speeches made on the radio (radio did a lot of that then—speeches, not just talk)—even what one source calls “an apparatus for teaching the English language.”  Who knows what people will be speaking in 8113?  Seeds of flowers and trees and vegetables and other plants are in there. All of this is in a room ten feet high, ten feet wide, and twenty feet long under Phoebe Hearst Hall at Ogelthorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia.  (Phoebe Apperson Hearst was a Missouri girl who married a California miner and became one of the world’s wealthiest women.  She was a great philanthropist and the mother of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.)

Organizers of the crypt hope it survives six millennia.  It is lined with porcelain enamel plates embedded in pitch, is sitting on bedrock and has two feet of stone above it.  A big stainless steel door has been welded shut.

Amazing.   But will the beings that open the crypt in 8113 have the technology to play the records. Will they have 35 mm sound film projectors?  Will the microfilm survive or will it have turned to jelly?  We know from the ancient Egyptian tombs that seeds can survive thousands of years.  But will Hearst Hall?  Or Ogelthorpe University?  Or Georgia?   Or the earth?

Time capsules are best if not boastful of the generation they seek to preserve. Instead, it is best that they reach out to those who will come after, leaving a record of a moment in time and a presence.  We may be proud of what we are today but we know that what we consider modern will be antiquated by the year the capsule is opened and that’s okay. We have left a record that says, “We got this far in 2015.”

In 8113, someone or some thing might discover the Crypt of Civilization and will know that Twentieth Century Homo Sapiens reached out to them and tried to leave something more substantial behind (perhaps) than Mount Rushmore’s by-then weathered faces that said, “We were here.  And in our time we were thinking, creative creatures.”

And, oh, how we wish we could see your world in 8113 when the capsule is found. .

The Missouri Capitol time capsule will be a message from 2015 to the great-great-grandchildren of this generation.  It’s a lot easier to be confident there will be people here in 2115 than it is to imagine how the Crypt of Civilization will be opened or by whom. And what should we say to those to open our time capsule?  Maybe something like—

We who think we are advanced today nonetheless recognize that we live in an imperfect world, one that is too much divided, too often ridden with greed, fear, hate, and quests for power, We recognize that we as Americans and Missourians have retreated from an era in which nothing seemed impossible, even walking on and exploring the Moon, to an era where we look inward, guarding ourselves against the perceived evils of those who are different—as mankind has done for eons.  We live in a world where we have friends on the other side of the earth but do not know the names of our next-door neighbors.  But beneath it all, we have hope and in clinging to hope we make painfully slow progress in resolving the issues that divide and therefore limit us.   We hope that a century from now that wisdom and peace are more certain parts of life, that bigotry toward some is no longer masked as the protection of rights for others, that rediscovered and vigorously exercised voter responsibility has long ago replaced the deleterious effects of term limits on our political system, that you still value and protect the outdoors as a breathing place for the public lungs, a place  where the different species that give beauty and perspective to our own existence still flourish, and where the sights and sounds of running streams still calm a stressed spirit.  We hope that a century of medical and scientific developments have destroyed diseases that lessen and shorten life, and that society has found a way to make longer lives valuable and beneficial to those who live them. We hope children and families are no longer uncertain about their next meal, their opportunity for education, their chances for meaningful work and loving families, the safety of their streets and homes. We hope this great building remains the Temple of Democracy that its designers and builders intended for it to be, the symbol of the best that we can be to one another, a structure symbolizing the hope that all may share for fruitful lives.  Our generation has sometimes let the building fall into a disrepair that regretfully represents our state as a place of sometimes unmet needs, unfulfilled responsibilities, ignored conditions, and reduced hopes. We hope your generation honors and strives for the good that this building represents. We hope that you have learned the virtue of looking outside yourselves, and that Americans have again discovered the spirit that nothing seems impossible.

There would have to be a theme of optimism in our message, wouldn’t there?   If there isn’t, why would we want to send a message to the future?    And if we do send one, why can’t we begin to live it now?