It is easier to follow the light
In the dark times
Hard to know and understand the path
Walking around, knowing, finding, searching
In dark times
Dark places
There is the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak
But the tunnel, oh the tunnel

It is pleasure
To look into the eyes of the young
Who know somehow
Their feet seek ways unaided
They know the way is always changing
No fear of the forest
Even though we tell them stories

At Christmas
To know
And look into young eyes
Miracles of miracles

Find light in the eyes of friends
And those who walk similar paths

New Operating System Blues M. Wilkie June 2013 Computer users know the feeling of being in front of a machine that ought to do what you tell it to but the machine is absolutely so dumb that it doesn't understand what you are telling it to do. A person needs to upgrade. Old systems become incompatible with the web and with other people's systems. Even if you are not particularly interested in keeping up with latest developments, sooner or later for often unforeseen reasons, almost every one I know has to deal with it. I refer to ( dun dun dunnnn) the dreaded new operating system. Some people are dragged kicking and screaming, some meekly go along, some suffer in silence and some love to update. There are even those who will take the time to read the instructions. But new operating systems are inevitable for us all. Plus with a new operating system, there are clever new ways of doing things that will make the user a thousand times more productive if only they would read the instructions. These instructions are written by people who are not skilled communicators. These young folk work in environments designed to make them feel good, Google and Yahoo offices or other such places. The design of the workplace of the coders and developers does not help the user understand which (darned) button to push to get the thing to work. The instructions of technical writers are comprehensible to 20 percent of the people who read them, tops. Little thought is given to the other 80%. If the writer is recently graduated from an ESL class, the instructions may be impossible. I don't usually read the instructions. Our children have been raised in environments that encourage pushing every button in sight and seeing what happens. People over the age of 50 have the image of the President with his hand on the button that starts a nuclear war embedded in their subconscious somewhere near our brain stems and autonomous nervous systems. Older folk simply do not trust blind button pushing. These button pushing young folk look down on quaint notions that if a device doesn't work, you take it to the repair shop and get it fixed. Or maybe they don't know about repair shops, since repair shops are mighty rare these days. Sometimes, you just have to upgrade and I can't blame you if you don't like it. Getting comfortable with a technology can be hazardous when a new development comes along and we all have to grade. If I get comfortable with a technology that has been around for awhile, then there is a new development and we all have to upgrade. No wonder we have no time, so much keeping-up we have to do. No time to get cranky with the younger generation when we need them to show us which button to push (even though the world is going to hell in a hand basket, as those over 30 know). I wish I knew of a solution. Feeling helpless and frustrated is dues person pays for getting to use the fabulous new machines, I guess. Sometimes I like to fancy that the old typewriter is on the old desk in my old office, but don't tell anybody about that fantasy, especially my children.

For the Gathering of Writers

1. How come you know how to use that device

Where did you learn

I use em

but many days I end up under the table

with my feets stuck out

blowing smoke out of my ears


then some wet behind the ears kid

comes along and shows me

I say thank you

but how did they learn that

I don’t like to complain

feelin left behind here


don’t know how to fit it all into 140 characters

don’t know how to work well with others

don’t know how to download it

no one has any pity




2. I feel like my grandma, when she first came to town and saw a car drive by and it was going 35 mph.

How to say something in under 140 characters, including the spaces. Hmm. Mrs Stewart told me I hadda make expository paragraphs, with the declaritive sentence first, the body and the conclusion. I hadda say things three times. I hadda spell everything just so.

I can talk to anybody in the world and I can find out where I am going, get a map of any place. I don’t have to buy a map at the gas station or get a trip tick over at the automobile club. The auto club branch building is empty anyhow.

I can find restaurants, plus lots more and stores right in my area and I can find my friends.

I can do all of this, plus lots more, with the fine object I hold in my hand.

So, how do you turn it on?

Curb Cuts

Out bike riding today (had to suit up in the cold). I recalled the not too distant past when our sidewalks didn’t have curb cuts and at the end of every block was a hump that pretty much forced a biker into the street.

2001 is the marking on the curb cut at the corner. While I have lived here for over 22 years, I cannot recall if the people who then lived here got their cement done before us or after. Nor can I recall the amount of money each house had added onto their property tax to repave the sidewalks.

Kevin F. Kelly was our supervisor until at least 2004, so he over saw the sidewalk paving and the curb cuts. I imagine the city council had to mandate that this technology be implemented.

I ride on the sidewalk when there are no pedestrians around; could not without the curb cuts at every corner. I recall the days of riding over curbs with a chunk/ bump and am very glad the curbs are gone.

Health Food Race To The Bottom

Is it just me or is there a race to the bottom in the “Heatlh Food Industry”. I shop at a locally owned store that used to carry my favorite brand- Eden Foods. (Full disclosure- I worked at their retail store many years ago) I liked that they went out into the country and got farmers to farm organically. They had standards, still do.

My locally owned store seems to be participating in the large retailer race to the bottom, a kind of wallmartisizaion of health food stores. It would be easy to put the blame on Whole Foods or the economic melt down. I am going, blamewise, with what the young man who works at the local coffee shop said, “Everybody is getting into health foods.” I guess if you don’t have any interest in history or many kinds of quality, and if you have never experienced real fooda, have so much money, less seems like more. The world is on its head, health food people used to pay more for quality.

I found Eden’s wine vinegar (Michigan grown grapes, mother, or starter included in the bottle) replaced by Flieshman’s brand (unrich as grocery store brands, no starter, made in Calif. with organic grapes 6% acidity as opposed to 5% as is legally mandated for vinegar) at my local store.

I used to call this place a health food store. Now I am not so sure. It sources grains and beans from China; Chinese growers can undercut our growers. Few dried beans are being grown in Michigan since the bottom fell out of the Organic market.

Rich, nutritous, home grown products are as hard to come by as they were in the health-food-store-hey-day 70’s.

Librarian's Daughter

Librarian’s Daughter

Old Ben Franklin is turning over in his grave on hearing that Amazon and Microsoft are suing Google for finding ways to digitize our collective culture, distribute out of copyright material for free. Never mind that Google has been scanning for a long time. Never mind that there are many devices and companies set up to co-operate with google and spread said collective culture. Google is visible, there are many others working to digitize our legacy and they ought to be allowed to do so.

There is, for instance, Gutenberg press, you can download out of copyright books straight to your device- Computer, hand held device or if you have a lot of money and buy Amazon’s line, Kindle- more about that later. Open source materials, software, books have been flying, flying, under the radar for some time.

Amazon and Microsoft suddenly realize nobody is making money off of our cultural heritage, send press releases to the media and file a lawsuit. I am not against people making a living and feeding their children and all that, but I do feel that out-of-copyright books are a commons and belong to all of us.

The business model of Gutenberg press is similar to Wikipedia, and public radio. It runs on donations from users. Another publisher of books online is Book Glutton, it has a feature for chatting with other readers inside the books. You can follow Book Glutton’s reading habits on Twitter. There is more than one romance publisher, you can often download romance books for free. Feed books has free content, public domain books, original books, news. You can self-publish online, bypass paper publishing, with Smashwords, free or paid. There are also paid booksellers: BooksonBoard eBookshop, Fictionwise Book store, O’Reilly Ebooks for tech professionals. The field is bursting.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (the organization) has a system for copywright (Find the whole story at Creative Commons. Note:If you see the symbol CC, only on TV does it mean closed caption). See Creative Commons (yes, they have a web sight) for details. The CC copyright ranges from free distribution to monetized offerings, and allows the publisher latitude in selecting copyrights. If the creator wants as many as possible to see their work, say academics, who definitely have a point of view and wish many people to see their work, they would choose open distribution. If an author wants remuneration for their work, they can choose paid distribution. The old copyright system that served us well for many years must now be updated. It seems to me that Microsoft and Amazon are self serving in trying to litigate. They very well know that much work has been done toward making the system fair for all of us, but choose to make money off an outdated system while they can, rather than use their considerable influence to upgrade, in effect, stone walling the future.

When you go to a web sight and have to interpret unshapely letters and type them in, you are helping download books. Downloading-software can be mistaken, humans are helping proofread. You are also proving you are human, and not a bot trying to fill mailboxes with spam. It is a big job to digitize written knowledge, nice to know we all are helping with the work. We humans know a lot of things, language can be useful and subtle. Doing multiple jobs at once: priceless.

About Kindle: It costs too much and the pages go to black before replenishing. It fades in sunlight, making it a good indicator for too many UV rays and when sunscreen ought to be applied, but an undependable beach reader, or so I have read. (Newyorker.com Aug 24) Amazon can recall books, the reader is connected to the source. Connectivity can be both good and bad, what will Amazon do? Amazon doesn’t have a stellar reputation. Kindle is pricy. On the plus side, Kindle has a book sized screen and can store a lot of books, it doesn’t weigh much, while it doesn’t work well on a beach, would work well in an airport, say.

Libraries were meant for everyone, they are organized so people can participate in culture building. This is a fine, democratic idea that can enrich our lives. The world wide web has and can have similar principles in the future. For a few corporations to dominate the web and use the law to bend the use of it for profit is very evil indeed. And we all know google’s moto: “don’t be evil”. Google has copied mostly out of copyright books. It’s people are efficient; they will scan now, find out the copyright later. Scan away google, but give copyright where copyright is due.

Recession Skills

Skills Worth Aquireing

Living in and through a resession takes a skill set. These skills are used by some all of the time, moreso of we grew up with parents who lived through the great deppression. I graduated hs. in 1970 and will explain to all who will listen; I have learned to stop short of stopping people on the street, about how different it was for those of us that had no job prospects in the great US economy. We had the gift of time. The war (in V) was winding down and most of the great battles -here and abroad- had been fought. By then the draft was a lottery, potential draftees difinitely went to college, or shot themselves in the foot.

All of the jobs in the Great Society had been gobbled up by older sibs, teaching jobs were backed up for years (I have a friend who, having gone to college, worked 11 years as a substitute before getting hired.) It was over time that the WW2 vets retired and Korean War vets found retirement communities in Fla. Those of us boomers who had been crowded out of positions found it was our time again, just before this latest ressession.

Some of us love irony and will find it wherever we can. Some are not interested. Living with irony I find wholesome and useful most of the time, but it is an essential skill during times of a contracting economy. I suspect the universe or God or what ever of plotting these mass economic contractions so that we will all become ironic. Otherwise we remain such dreadful bores.

Also, in a ressesion, household economic skills become must aquire. Articles on cooking and canning and using herbs will appear like magic in the paper. Okay, I date myself; newspapers are looking for readership these days. Try looking in the internet. Recipes will be essential, as many will be cooking for the first time, or the first time in a long time. Young folks will have skinned knucles from learning to repair autos that would have spent time in the shop in better times, or been dispatched to the junk yards. If anyone can find junk yards anymore; try center cities or extreme exurbia.

For those not working three jobs, entertainment can be found most everywhere, with young folks flocking to the center cities where they all have condos in refurbished factories.

Opportunity for making a living can be found in the most confounded places. our economy is maturing, finally growing up, I should say. Uneasiness and opportunity go together in retooling.

There is Only so Much Oil in the Earth by the Tower of Power, was a great hit in the 70’s (ToP had a wonderful horn section). I guess not everyone listened to FM radio back then, or didn’t care if they did, feeding your children does tend to take front and center. It was a great song, though.

Harwick Pines is a state park now, it is the only stand of old growth trees left in Michigan lower penninsula. Those trees, standing the lumber Barron’s Day, worth visiting now. Does the pattern have to go that we will mine shale oil (dirty) and the sea (off shore in the Gulf) and Alaska and Canada before it is all over. Like Michigan denuded- even of even fine shade trees on the village green; if there is money to be made, the writing on the wall is too hard to read.

Bank accounts speak loudly. They have a bottom line that cannot be disputed, or maybe it can (always hopeful, irony doesn’t have to go too deep). We have been here before. Biggest ressesion skill of them all; we must cultivate our sence of irony, we’re going to need it.