The Buck and Mike Blog

It’s foggy today in Portland, as evidenced by this snapshot I took of our street this morning. I love the hush of the fog, how it quiets everything and gives the world soft edges. I was immediately reminded of a Carl Sandburg poem I learned many years ago in high school.

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

This poem is from Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, published in 1916. Digitized by Google, you can read the entire book here.

Carl Sandburg

Americans have been accused of not being interested in our own past. The much-heralded remodeling of the National Museum of American History could have been a step forward in helping us understand and appreciate our history. Unfortunately, it falls way short.

The museum has always been my favorite and I have recommended it to visitors as a good, accessible start to their explorations of the many Smithsonian museums. My recent visit to check out the new digs left me sorely disappointed. It needed some help before, but after being closed about two years and sucking up millions of dollars in donations, it needs even more help.

Rather than a museum of American History, it has become mostly a museum of American pop culture. I realize that the Smithsonian Institution has been nicknamed “The Nation’s Attic,” but you have to be selective about what you drag downstairs to exhibit in the name of History.
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“It’s true. Your Platinum MaterCard card from First PREMIER Bank is Pre-Approved.” At a 9.9% interest rate, I could go out and spend, spend, spend all day!

You’ve gotta love it when you get such mail. Then comes the fine print (exact quotes):

Yes, you got it right. Your first credit card bill will be $199 if you don’t spend anything and you will have a total of $51 left to spend. At only 9.9% interest. What a deal! You could max out your credit card with dinner for two at Appleby’s and a movie and your credit card bill would be $250.
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First PREMIER Bank

You didn’t see Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson’s invocation at Sunday’s wonderful We Are One concert at the Lincoln Memorial because HBO didn’t air it. The network said it was on instructions from the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC), and that the invocation was part of the pre-show activities. (The invocation a “pre-show activity”?) The Committee finally responded today to the question:

“We had always intended and planned for Rt. Rev. Robinson’s invocation to be included in the televised portion of yesterday’s program. We regret the error in executing this plan - but are gratified that hundreds of thousands of people who gathered on the mall heard his eloquent prayer for our nation that was a fitting start to our event.” —PIC communications director Josh Earnest

Anyway, despite the reasons for not airing the prayer by the first openly gay bishop of a major Christian denomination while openly inviting Rick Warren, a major foe of gay rights, to pray at Tuesday’s inauguration itself, it was a moving prayer:

“O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears - tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger - anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
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Gene Robinson, Rick Warren

I love the title of President-Elect Barack Obama’s autobiography, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. In his case, it describes how a young African-American boy growing up in a single-parent household headed by a white woman, reached for his dreams time after time and never stopped. He had some difficult times, few role models, and hardly any resources. But he kept going. When he had achieved the level of success most of us can only dream about, he stayed the course and helped those around him to keep hoping. That’s an audacious act.

It is so easy for us to blame our surroundings, our families, and society for our failures while taking full credit for our successes. Obama has proven that in America we really do look inside at the quality of a person’s character and his ability when we choose our leaders, just as we do when we choose our friends and associates. There are no more excuses for any of us. Yes, circumstances will occasionally slap us down, but we can’t be held down there by anyone but ourselves.

Hope is the driving force for us all. It brought Obama to where he is, but hope can do much more for this country. If we let go of fear and predjudice, mistrust and suspicion, paranoia and negative thinking, and open ourselves to the belief that we are all fundamentally good people at our core, trying to do our best, then the country can have that hope.

“The audacity of hope” is a great phrase. I wish I had thought of it! The phrase describes my feelings—and I believe the feelings of most of us—so perfectly. Hope takes courage, and that’s what the country needs right now and what we all need to make the country great again after this period of medieval darkness.

Barack Obama

I am an ardent fan of artist Jean-Luc Cornec, whose sculptures and works on paper usually include, or are constructed entirely of, found objects or surplus items. His most famous work is “Telephone Sheep” in the Museum für Kommunikation in Frankfurt, Germany. The sheep are constructed entirely out of old rotary dial phones and cables.

His web site is meager, but has some other examples. http://www.cornec.de

An amazing video of birds flying in formation, forming patterns. At times, the scene becomes almost threatening.

I am reminded of how flocks of humans follow a leader, shift direction on a dime when the leader shifts, and only really have identity through the flock. It’s a shame, because that singular personal identity is what separates us from birds and sheep in their flocks.

The video:

Innovative Dutch design company SPRANQ has a strong environmental ethic behind all its product designs and creations. To foster awareness, SPRANQ has created a computer font designed to reduce by 20% the amount of ink used by printers.

Called Ecofont, the type face has small spaces spread throughout the body of each letter, but leaves the outlines intact to aid readability. The spaces are perceptible in large sizes, but I have found that in regular-sized printing it’s fine. Great idea. Even better is that the font is offered as a free download for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux.

Go HERE to download your own copy. While you are there, consider making a small donation toward improving this and other fonts. Developing a font is a costly, time-consuming endeavor and you’ll be saving money by not buying too much ink. SPRANQ deserves recognition for their efforts.

The 3 Rs: REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE.

SPRANQ, Ecofont

Granddaughter Sydney will be 3 years old in March. During the family’s visit to Portland for Christmas, she demonstrated her talent for showing her multiple faces on demand.

Anything to entertain the Grandpas.

Happy Face	Sad Face	Mad Face
Surprised Face	Pirate Face	Zombie Face

Just for fun, consider the following statistics for the year 1909 and imagine life just 100 years ago:

The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years old. (That’s the age of Jim Carrey, Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jody Foster.)

Only 14% of the homes in the U.S had a bathtub.

Only 8% of the homes had a telephone and a three-minute call from Denver to New York City Cost $11.

There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

Hudson Motor Car Company was founded.

Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more
heavily populated than California; with a mere 1.4 million
people, California was only the 21st most populous state in
the Union.
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We visited Multnomah Falls with a friend in the fall and again last week, just as snow from the massive storms that paralyzed much of the Northwest began to melt. Below are two photos I took to compare.