So, what’s up?  It’s more of a throwaway greeting than an actual question answered plainly.  Yet news stands outside of daily slog and makes things interesting.

A global economy demands global information.  But do you really know what’s happening in Afghanistan right now, a place where we are expending a lot of blood and money? How about the nuclear crisis in Japan?  Or even in Libya, the source of fiery video just a few weeks ago?  There are reasons why these have fallen out of our daily news diet, according to an excellent analysis from NPR’s “On the Media”.  It’s expensive to send journalists all around the world to keep covering stuff that doesn’t change all that much one day to the next as a big event turns into someone else’s daily slog.

There are other ways of handling it, of course.  But that would mean listening to non-US sources.

Continue reading →

Whatever happened to ordinary news?  You know, the plain ol’ boring stuff that your parents watched because they felt more connected to the world, or they were supposed to or … well, they just did.  It was the broccoli of teevee to most kids, and they grew up wanting desert for dinner.  Today, we have that dessert in the form of Infotainment.

There are still real news shows, but a 24 news channel has to fill the time with a lot of Cheez Doodles snack nooze.  Infotainment leaves us bloated but not full, fat but not happy.  And that’s where it gets weird.

Funny infotainment is one thing – there’s always something to laugh at.  But the stuff that makes people angry about nothing?  Jeez.

Continue reading →

Now that my son is 10 it seems that we always wind up talking about cars when we’re driving somewhere.  It’s classic father-son bonding, enhanced by shows like TopGear when we’re not in the car.  “They were talking about the new computer controlled suspensions,” he told me, “But they didn’t like them because when they lose control it happens suddenly and they preferred to use their own skill as drivers on a manual suspension that gives way slowly.”

Several points came to me quickly.  One is that George is definitely just like his Dad on this stuff.  The other is that he was talking about something that comes up an awful lot lately – and not just in cars or other engineering design.  We live in a world where we’ve learned to control just about everything that fits into our pre-designed limits – and then, like a 10-year-old boy, the world seems to race out to test those limits to see what happens.  I don’t even know if there is a good term for this phenom.  I’ll call it a “boundary failure”.

Continue reading →

Haru.  It’s a common name in Japanese anime.  It can be either a boy or a girl, but it’s almost always used for a young character full turmoil that they overcome, gradually developing an inner confidence and a radiance of quiet strength.  That’s because in Japanese “Haru” means “Spring”.

Today, on the first full day of Spring in Japan and across the northern hemisphere the tragedy and anxiety threatens to consume us through our diet of news.  It may not seem particularly fitting for the season of life, but in many ways it is exactly what Spring is all about.

Continue reading →