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50 words or less: "thoughts" is the personal blog of Kevin D. Hendricks and has covered writing, pop culture, technology, spirituality and navel-gazing since 1998. Kevin does writing and editing with his company, Monkey Outta Nowhere, and in case you couldn't tell these thoughts reflect his personal views. Social: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn Media: Flickr (photos) | Vimeo / YouTube (video) | del.iciou.us (links) |
It’s been a brutal few weeks on Wall Street. But what do all these record-breaking drops really look like? This calls for some graphs!
In the Last Month:
Down 23.6% in one month. Ouch. Yeah, that’s a brutal looking graph. But we need more perspective. Read the rest of this entry »
PRI’s The World has a fascinating series of stories on how wars end. The series is looking at past wars to give insight into how the Iraq war might end. Yesterday’s story covered the end of the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction.
What’s so interesting is the assertion that the Civil War didn’t end at Appomattox. The battle continued, though it wasn’t always a military battle (though people still died):
Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations says it helps him understand how it’s possible to win the war, capture the capital but still lose the peace. He notes the North won the big military contest between 1861 and 1865, but that didn’t end the struggle. And over time, Biddle points out, Southern resistance paid off. In 1877 President Rutherford Hayes withdrew Northern troops from the South.
“And the South proceeds to essentially run out the Northern installed governments of the remaining Southern states, institutes what amounted to white one-party rule, removed blacks from voter rolls throughout the South and established a system of segregation, and that system remains to a significant degree all the way up until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
Biddle says if you look at in political terms, it’s possible to construct an argument that the South actually won the war.
That’s quite a claim, but it’s interesting to consider. If the Civil War was fought to bring freedom to blacks, you could argue that freedom wasn’t fully achieved until Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. How’s that for a long view of the conflict? Never thought I’d consider MLK a Civil War hero. That’s probably taking it a bit far, but it’s interesting to consider and is a strong counter to the myth that the Civil War ended amicably at Appomattox.
Let’s revisit a good theme: Top 100 Book Cover Designs from the AIGA. The flash navigation is atrocious and the Stephen Colbert design seems kind of pedestrian (hence the top 99), but otherwise there are some incredible book covers here. (via kottke.org)
Tonight is the second presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. I’m not sure if I want to watch. Having watched the first presidential debate and the only vice presidential debate I came away with the conclusion that debates are broken.
Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Columbus, Reno, Fresno, Chattanooga. They’re all home to homeless encampments, tent cities springing up of people who have lost their homes. It’s a startling story, reminiscent of the Hoovervilles of the 1930s (though clearly we’re not to that extreme yet). What’s perhaps most frightening about this story is that it’s dated Sept. 18. These tent cities don’t appear to be a result of the current economic meltdown, but have been the result of foreclosures and rising prices we’ve seen all year.
These kinds of stories further my resolve to spend a night outside experiencing homelessness (and the reality is setting in how freaking cold it’s going to be sleeping out in October in Minnesota). As the economy continues to worsen, more and more people will turn to increasingly crowded homeless shelters. They need help. When times get tough there’s an understandable temptation to turn inward and take care of your own. But that’s when I think it’s all the more important to help each other. It’s easy to be generous when your stock options are up and your 401K is growing.
On Oct. 16, 2008 I’m participating in Cardboard Box City and will be sleeping outside to experience homelessness firsthand. I’ll be sleeping out in a tent, tarp or cardboard box at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds with a group from my church and others from around the Twin Cities. The event will be raising money and awareness for two local organizations that provide emergency shelter and affordable housing, Families Moving Forward and Project Home.
About 80% of homeless people are in need of short term, immediate help. They find themselves on the street for a number of reasons, but the vast majority get help and get back on their feet in a short time. Project Home offers that help as an overflow shelter hosted at local churches that provides added capacity when the county service center is full. My church hosts Project Home every June (our recent building project included a shower facility specifically for Project Home).
Everyone attending Cardboard Box City is trying to raise money for Families Moving Forward and Project Home to help homeless families. I’m shooting to raise $100 in “rent”. I hope you’ll consider donating to support my effort.
MPR’s Bob Collins covers a story of teens being abandoned at Nebraska hospitals, much like unwanted newborns. The new safe haven law in Nebraska allows parents to drop off any child, regardless of age. These unruly teens usually go into an already-stressed foster care system.
The whole thing is kind of bizarre. And heart-breaking.
On one hand it’s good that teens in abusive situations can find a way out, right? Though it’s really a way out for parents. Most teens who want a way out don’t wait for their parents to give them up.
On the other hand, how would that conversation go? I can’t even imagine how that conversation ends with dropping your kid off at a hospital or police station. I get being at the end of your rope (hello, I spend my days alone with a two-year-old), but wow.
It all reminds me of the show Brat Camp from a few years ago (the one that made me cry). I guess I’m the kind of person who thinks you give people a second chance. And a third chance. And a fourth chance ( … and a 490th chance, as Jesus advocated). Especially when we’re talking about your own kid. Certainly there are rare times when you have to draw the line. I’ve done that. But I’m not sure that happens at 13. And I don’t think the solution is you abandon the kid. Get some help, call in the pros—heck, call in the National Guard. But you’re a parent. You can’t give up. As a society we need some kind of help for people in these situations, something we’re clearly not offering.
This is a double whammy for me as I’m a sucker for well-designed book covers and post-apocalyptic fiction.
Penguin Books and Creativity have partnered to do a cover design contest for Sam Taylor’s forthcoming book, The Island at the End of the World. They solicited 300 cover designs, picked the top 25 and are sharing those online, and will pick the winner on Thursday. The winning design will be used when the book is published in 2009.
Perhaps I’m biased because it came up first, but I think the very first one is the very best one. It has a simple beauty to it. Love it. What do you think? (via kottke.org)
In the past few weeks I’ve been working on editing my novel. Yes, the one I said I was starting to edit a year ago. The one I finished writing almost two years ago. It’s called Turn Left at the Blacktop and you can read a woefully unedited version online (I blogged it as I went, which means it’s not in a very readable format—don’t say I didn’t warn you).
It needs a fair amount of work, from re-working plot lines to making characters stronger to making descriptions more memorable and less cringe-worthy (my default for showing emotion seems to be: “She smiled.”). It’s hard work, especially when you spend days writing a 5-page scene full of sharp dialog that really hums, only to realize you need to rip the scene in half and move the dialog around. It eventually feels like improvement, but it’s that eventual part that’s hard.
At this point I’m dedicated to finishing this thing. I have a vague goal of finishing it before November so I can take part in NaNoWriMo 2008, both to meet my wife’s stipulation that I can’t start a third novel without finishing one of my first two, and to continue a tradition of writing a novel in even numbered years. But I’m not sure how realistic that is.
With a month and a half to go before the election, the campaigns are getting pretty intense (no matter who you’re voting for I hope we can disagree well). New accusations, gaffes and bizarre stories seem to surface every day. It’s hard to know who to believe, so I offer three fact checking resources:
Truth-O-Meter
Offers a ratings for ‘True,’ ‘Mostly True,’ ‘Half True,’ ‘Barely True,’ ‘False,’ and ‘Pants on Fire.’ In investigating 114 of Obama’s statements and 113 of McCain’s, Obama gets 18 ‘false’ claims and 0 ‘pants on fire’ claims, while McCain gets 22 ‘false’ claims and 6 ‘pants on fire’ claims. It’s run by the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly.
Lie Count
I came across this one today and it offers a straight count of outright lies from each campaign. As of right now the tally is Democrats: 6 lies, Republicans: 11 lies. This one is run by two web guys with some spare time.
FactCheck.org
This one is the most thorough and has the least spin. They don’t have any counters of who’s “winning” and sometimes they’re overly careful in their fact-checking and statement splicing. The one downside is all that careful truth-finding takes time. They’re backed by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. (Curiously, FactCheck was even used in a McCain ad, which they then fact-checked and called a distortion.)
Also of interest, though not for fact-checking, is Every Moment Now, which shows the level of media coverage of both candidates. Perspctv is another good visualizer of McCain/Obama coverage, though it’s much wider in scope (web searches, blog mentions, etc.). Both links via two cents.
It’s sad that we have to call out either candidate for lying or stretching the truth, but that’s the reality. Boo politics.
