The Rise of Post-Journalism: Mea Culpa?

I appreciate the irony of this post. And I hope you do too. If you do, it means that you've read Mark Bowden's latest article in The Atlantic describing the collapse of journalism or, if you prefer, the rise of what he calls post-journalism. The central feature of this emerging genre is not the search for the truth but the pursuit of victory. He writes:

I would describe [the] approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

The irony, of course, is that Bowden classifies most bloggers as what's known in the trade as a thumbsucker, "a lazy columnist who rarely stirs from behind his desk, who for material just reacts to the items that cross it."

For me this is an important distinction. In most of my writing, I try to offer thoughtful observations from a common perspective in a way that adds something original to the discussion. I prefer to think of posts like this as serving a slightly different but also important role: raising your awareness of others who are trying to do the same.

Recomended Reading (Part I: Non-Fiction)

I buy many more books than I read. More accurately, I buy many more books than I finish reading. Here are some off-the-beaten-path suggestions that held my attention to the end and have found a permanent place in my library:

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis and Simon Singh :: a narrative that links the people, places and politics of 21st century physics

Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks by Zack Hample :: an easy to read guide that will help anyone enjoy baseball more fully regardless of your current understanding of the game

13 Things that Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time (Vintage) by Michael Brooks :: a detailed yet succinct examination of things that the best minds in the world still don't understand

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson :: who couldn't use this? Bill Bryson is a humorist but this is an extremely well-researched examination of questions that we all have about why the world is the way it is

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink :: a thoughtful thesis on the rising value of creativity and intuition

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner :: like seeing a circus clown in church, Nobel-laureate Steven Levvitt exports his professional talent as an economist into an unconventional setting - daily life

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer :: it turns out that every decision we make is a product of our intuitive, subconscious mind and our conscious "thinking" is really just a rationalization of the decision. Leher makes behavioral psychology both fascinating and accessible to those of us without time to get a PhD

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis :: on the surface a book about baseball but underneath it's an examination of business, psychology and the politics of institutions

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler :: this book will make you a better parent, manager, teacher, leader and person

Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary by Marcus J. Borg :: a profoundly original and ultimately sensible articulation of who Jesus was and what it means to be a Christian

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer :: another selection that sounds as if it belongs in the sports genre but pushes well beyond the boundaries of sports

The MLS Cartogram

This is a Rorschach test. What do you see? To some, it may look like a random distribution of different colored squares. It is actually a cartogram - a map in which another variable is substituted for land area, in this case population. It shows MSAs in the US and Canada with a population over 1M. New York is the large red square in the northeast. Los Angeles is the large red square in the far southwest. Miami is in white in the southeast corner. Chicago, Dallas and Houston are the three red squares in the middle. Portland, Seattle and Vancouver are the three red squares in the northwest.

Each red squares is an MSA with a Major League Soccer franchise. If you look closely at the map, you may notice that there are several large markets like Detroit, Montreal, Atlanta and Miami without franchises. As a matter of fact, there is an entire region - south of DC and east of Houston - that has no franchise at all. You may also notice several unusually small markets like Columbus, Kansas City and Salt Lake that have teams.

Does this distribution pattern make sense? A franchise model is only loosely planned, especially when there is no physical product to distribute. It evolves based on where both franchisees and the owner of the brand are interested in locating a franchise. A purely rational process would put franchises in cities with the greatest potential return on both the franchisee and owner's investment. However, there is lots to consider: how many soccer fans are there in the city? how likely are they to spend on tickets and merchandise? what is the competitive environment (will the team compete with football, baseball or any other local sports and entertainment)?

The large markets like NYC, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia and Houston are big enough to support multiple professional sports teams. Those unusually small markets like Columbus and Salt Lake City do not have significant competition from baseball, professional football or other summer/fall sports that would compete with soccer (yes, the Buckeyes are like religion in Ohio but Columbus has a significant enough soccer population to offset the Buckeye effect). Kansas City is a curious market for MLS since it must compete with both the Chiefs and the Royals. But what about those mid-size markets without teams like Detroit, Montreal, Minneapolis, Phoenix and the entire southeast? SEC Football may explain why the southeast doesn't have an MLS franchise but Atlanta and Miami are the seventh and eighth largest MSAs in the US. So if Kansas City - with the Chiefs and Royals - and Columbus - with its Big 10 Buckeyes - can support MLS franchises, why couldn't Atlanta or Miami?

The four markets the MLS has either entered or announced upcoming entry are Seattle, Philadelphia, Portland and Vancouver. Seattle and Philly both have football and baseball teams but are large enough markets to support a soccer franchise. Portland and Vancouver look more like SLC and Columbus - small but without any competition from baseball and football. Also, both Vancouver and Portland have teams currently playing in the USL that are moving up to MLS. Philly did not have an existing team but built a new stadium as part of their pitch.

So, where would you put the next franchise? If the two (implicit) strategies are (i) large markets and (ii) small, less competitive markets with existing teams, then the most likely choices are (i) Miami or Atlanta and (ii) Charlotte, Montreal, Raleigh, San Antonio or Austin.

The Organic Fallacy

The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals by Blake Hurst in The American, reminded me of a friend I've known for almost 25 years. She's a physician that specializes in alternative medicine. On more than one occasion she's scolded me for serving my family (gasp) non-organic foods. She is convinced that genetically altered foods, synthetic fertilizers and herbicides are slowly polluting our bodies. It's not clear if this is really true. To be sure, some chemicals - like DDT - have contributed to significant ecological and human damage in the past. But there is science supporting both sides of the argument. For example, worldwide life expectancy has more than doubled and the population has increased by 4 times since 1900 in part because of advances in genetically altered foods, synthetic fertilizers and herbicides.

This leads to the real question: would the world be better without industrial agriculture? The answer is: clearly no. The Nobel Laureate and father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, estimates that there is only enough natural nitrogen available on earth to feed 4 billion people (fertilizer is basically nitrogen and it turns out that nitrogen is the most scarce resource for farming). That means that almost 40% of the global population would not be alive today without synthetic sources of nitrogen (i.e. - synthetic fertilizers). Moreover, Hurst, who is a real farmer, argues convincingly that organic farming is more expensive and more harmful to the environment.

We embrace advances in technology in almost every other industry but "expect farmers to use 1930s techniques to raise food." Advanced technology in food production has allowed more people to live and those people to live longer. Insisting on organic foods is asking farmers to produce less at a higher cost, do more damage to the environment, under serve demand and drive worldwide food prices beyond the reach of a third of the world population (clearly the poorest will bear the burden). If we demand more organic foods, farmers will certainly supply them. But should we?

Imprimatur

Word of the week: Imprimatur.

My friend Ben McAllister (one of the 'X or So') suggested this one. Latin words used in English, like et cetera, ad hoc and de facto, are often printed in italics, as if to say "we have no equivalent so we're just borrowing this from Latin." I'm not sure why we don't similarly acknowledge words we borrow from French or Farsi with italics. In any event, according to Merriam-Webster, Imprimatur is defined as: a license to print or publish; a mark of approval or distinction.

After further exploration (i.e. - Wikipedia), this word has an even more intriguing context. According to Wikipedia, an Imprimatur is an official declaration from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church that a literary or similar work is free from error in matters of Roman Catholic doctrine, and hence acceptable reading for faithful Roman Catholics. No implication is contained therin that those who have granded the Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed. The term is also used more generally to mean any official endorsement (not necessarily by a church).

Where'd All The Good People Go?

The melodic Jack Johnson song of the same title asks “Where’d all the good people go?” After reading Inside The Great American Bubble Machine, I am left asking the same questions and coming to the same conclusions. In Johnson’s words: Where did all the good people go? How many train wrecks do we need to see? We have heaps and heaps of what we sow.

I don’t want to sound like a nostalgic Pollyanna. But the Kennedys, Goldwater, even the reviled Joseph McCarthy held serving the public good as their highest aspirations (even if it was misguided at times). They served the public with vastly different ideologies but none placed the pursuit of wealth above their belief in the public good. Sure, wealth was nice, but the pursuit of obscene wealth at the expense of the public good was regarded as almost ignoble in the 50s and 60s. But what's happened since then?

Between 1966 and 2006, the median household income increased roughly 30%. However, the total output of our nation (real GDP per capita) more than doubled. So where did all the money go? It is a complicated answer but the biggest contributor is an explosion in income inequality. In 1978, for example, the top 1% of households earned 8 times the average household. In 2006, it was 23 times. Moreover, for the top 0.1% the increase was from 86 times to 546 times the average. The rich are getting richer - and at a faster pace. I have nothing against wealth or the super-rich unless the pursuit of wealth supplants the pursuit of public good. And in the case of Goldman Sachs, according to Inside The Great American Bubble Machine, it has.

This blind pursuit of wealth at the expense of the public good is nothing new. Goldman Sachs is simply the latest and perhaps the grandest example of greed. What’s horrifying about Goldman is that they carry the Gordon Gecko torch unapologetically - as if they are incapable of understanding why anyone would pursue anything other than wealth. After a quarter of record profits and bonuses, despite a sputtering economy that they helped to create, Goldman is now locked in a battle with the US Government to actually reduce the value of the government’s (read: your and my) stake in the company. And even more horrifying, Goldman has now spread itself so deeply into the recesses of power within government and politics that is has insulated itself against its only two threats: competition and regulation.

Is wealth wrong? No. But the pursuit of wealth above the public good is antithetical to American ideals. Where'd all the good people go? They certainly aren't at Goldman.

The Greatest Sports Rivalry Ever

What would come to mind if I asked you to name the greatest rivalries in sports? Go ahead, give it some thought.

I've noticed that there are two types of people when it comes to sports rivalries. The first group immediately begins to list rivalries. Some will start with their own rivalry: New Englanders will overwhelm you with their disgust for the Yankees, Duke alumni will begin to recite their numerous victories on Tobacco Road. Others, maybe those without a personal connection to a great rivalry, will ponder the question more deeply to identify a list of rivalries with real gravitas. These "listers" can be found simply enough. Just google "greatest sports rivalries" and a myriad of lists appear. Listers, I would guess, comprise 80% of the population.

The other 20% is more circumspect. They avoid the urge to begin with individual rivalries. They start with criteria. They ask: what makes a great rivalry? And then they apply this criteria to find rivalries that meet their standards. I am in this minority. So, what makes a great sports rivalry? Here are my criteria:

1. Joy-heartbreak quotient (JHQ). The joy-heartbreak quotient is simply the difference between the joy created in the world when a team wins and the heartbreak created when a team losses. It is the number of people who feel joy multiplied by the intensity of their joy less the number of people who feel heartbreak multiplied by the intensity of their heartbreak. In great rivalries, more people care about the outcome and there is more intensity. Army-Navy is certainly a rivalry but not many people outside the armed forces care much about the game so the JHQ for an Army-Navy game is certainly less than, say, Michigan-Ohio State.

2. Durable. I respect and in many ways admire the old days. Football without helmets. Baseball without lights. Hockey without teeth. Uphill both ways in the snow and all. But I am more interested in rivalries that have withstood the test of time. The JHQ calculus is magnified by years of fans experiencing both sides of the equation as their team flows through the crests and troughs of winning and losing. Steelers-Cowboys and Giants-Dodgers were surely great rivalries in their heyday. But they have faded.

3. Frequency. The best rivalries are forged from frequent battles. Many of the best rivals are in the same division or conference, play each other several times a season and then have to meet in the playoffs where the stakes are even higher. Sure the Cowboys-49ers battles were great games but nothing compared the year-in and year-out Redskins-Cowboys rivalry. Frequency multiples the JHQ.

4. No "I" in Team. This is less a rule and more a caveat. There are terrific rivalries among individuals: Ali & Frazier. Arnie & Jack. Nadal & Federer. These are certainly rivalries but they have no durable anchor beyond the individual contestants. They have no longevity beyond the individuals themselves. Sure, 78-year-old barbers still argue about the greatest boxer that ever lived but choosing sides is often a matter of personal preference rather than allegiance to the home team. The great rivalries transcend individuals because the enemy never goes away. New Yorkers despised the Red Sox with Cy Young just as much as with Roger Clemens.

With these guidelines in mind, I humbly offer my thoughts on the The Greatest Sports Rivalry Ever. But first, the honorable mentions: Redskins-Cowboys, Oklahoma-Texas, Auburn-Alabama, Patriots-Colts, Pepsi-Coke and Mac-PC. These are all worth a Saturday afternoon on the couch. But for real passion, intensity and JHQ, not many rivalries can create the adrenaline as these five:

#5 Maple Leafs-Canadiens. This is your basic French vs English rivalry. But it's hockey, it's Canada and it's faded recently so fifth place may even be generous.

#4 Michigan-Ohio State. This is the best institutional rivalry in the world. They are competitive in football, basketball, and probably even water polo. But it's the football that makes this a great rivalry.

#3 Red Sox-Yankees. This is almost the definition of rivalry. I almost got mobbed once for wearing a Red Sox hat at Yankee Stadium (and the Red Sox weren't even playing).

#2 Tar Heels-Blue Devils. This is purely a basketball rivalry but when HBO makes a documentary about your rivalry, it must be serious.

#1 Tie: Rangers-Celtic and Boca Juniors-River Plate. Surprised? I know what you are thinking: soccer, really? Actually, these two rivalries exceed the rest of the list by orders of magnitude. Fans are separated by riot police. They exit the stadium in opposite directions and walk a mile before being allowed to turn back. Boca-River is class warfare. It is the "millionaires" vs the "people's team." Rangers-Celtic is religious warfare. This cross-city Glasgow rivalry is Protestants versus Irish Catholics. What these two rivalries lack in market size they make up with intensity. They are ancient (1888 and 1931 respectively) and both sets of teams meet at least twice or more a year and then again (usually) to determine the league championship. Nothing in football, baseball or hockey here in the US compares to these two rivalries.

On second thought, what's so great about rivalries so intensely savage that they require riot police and incite not joy and heartbreak but rather perpetuate hatred and even more hatred?

The Road

Critics often use the word "haunting" to describe films that permeate our subconscious deeply. Even the blinding midday sun that washes over us when we leave the theater is powerless to rinse away the most acrid scences. These disquieting memories resurface in slow, contemplative moments. They settle on our minds and demand attention while we sleep. These films are rare.
It is even more rare that a book, without the benefit of surround sound and digital effects, can grip our minds as relentlessly. But haunting may not be adequate enough to describe Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Get past a stream-of-consciousness style that Faulkner would envy (read: sentences without verbs) and it is a truly haunting story. It will bury itself deeply in the recessses of your mind. It will horrify you and yet, in the end, it will renew your faith - not in the world but in yourself. It will remind you, in your own quiet contemplations, that we live by the grace of God alone. And that may be the most haunting quality of all.

Land Of The Free

A betting man would not have put money on a group of criminals winning a struggle against the largest and most powerful military on earth. In truth, it was more that the British lost the war than we won it. We were simply more determined and more willing to meet any hardship than the British. As much as any other ethic we embrace, the willingness to meet hardship has been a constant hallmark of our American Spirit. This is true from Montezuma to Tripoli no less than from immigrants enduring the hardship of starting with nothing or pioneers braving the wilderness of our manifest destiny.

A young woman not more than a few years out of college is standing the midwatch tonight on the quiet, darkened bridge of a warship in the Persian Gulf. She has slept only a few hours and has responsibility for the lives of over 200 shipmates tonight. Another man, only a few days beyond boyhood really, just stumbled off a bus onto the hard asphalt near Cape May, New Jersey to endure the shockingly loud indoctrination rites of Coast Guard basic training. Both know that there are ways to earn a living that allow more sleep and less "indoctrination." But they are willing to meet these hardships.

I am proud that both of my brothers and my cousin and uncles served in the military. If asked, they would have endured the hardships of Valley Forge, Gettysburg, The Ardennes, or (as my cousin did) Fallujah. So today I celebrate both our Independence and the willingness of Americans to, as John Kennedy put it, meet any hardship to assure the survival and success of liberty.

What Is "The Word of the Week?"

I want a broader vocabulary. Words are tools. They can express big thoughts as well as subtleties. I don't want a vocabulary of fancy words to impress my friends at cocktail parties. I simply to more directly, more accurately express my own thoughts.

I love finding a word that concisely describes an entire thought. But arcane words are useless (no one will actually know what thought I am trying to concisely articulate). The Word of the Week is meant to highlight words that strike a balance. They are on the fringes of our daily vocabulary. They can be found in newspapers and novels but are not commonly used in conversation. These words are useful because they are used by professionals to directly and accurately convey an idea. It is good to know some of these words.

The Word of the Week is also meant to highlight words that are just plain interesting. They are less useful in conversation but their history, derivation and usage tell a good tale.

Pyrrhic is a great example. It means "costly to the point of negating or outweighing expected benefits." It comes from King Pyrrhus of Epirus who sustained heavy losses in defeating the Romans. Pyrrhic is a concise expression of an idea. It is used infrequently but I've seen it twice in the last month. And it has an interesting story.

The Real College Rankings

I got bored one night a few months ago and decided to see if there were any value in investing in a top-tier private college over a decent in-state college. The rankings provided by US News and other sources are all based on test scores, graduation rates, something called "selectivity" and several other variables all equally unrelated to an actual return on investment. I wondered if there would be a difference in the rankings if I treated the investment in an education like, say, an investment.

Just like any investment, I wanted to know the cost of the education and the return. (Technically, I should also include risk but I assume the risk is the same across all colleges. That is, there is just as good a chance that my daughter ends up moving to Australia with a tattooed surfer regardless of whether she attends UNC or Cal Tech.)

I calculated cost as the total tuition plus room and board less the average financial aid award (not loans, actual aid that would reduce the cost). For the return, I looked at salary information at 3 and 15 years after graduation, assumed a straight-line growth rate and then calculated the NPV of the entire 19 years.

The results are better aligned with intuition than with US News. In general, engineering schools and the traditional top-tier Ivy League schools provide the best return on investment. With the exception of Rice and Georgia Tech, the top 10 is not a surprise. But there are a few surprises. Columbia, Duke and Chicago sink in the NPV rankings. Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Washington University, Cornell and Johns Hopkins drop from the top 25 altogether. Also, if in-state tuition is used, Georgia Tech jumps ahead of Harvard and Georgia lands on the list somewhere near UCLA and University of Chicago. In general, residents of Virginia, Georgia, Michigan, California, Illinois, Texas and Florida have a significant incentive to stay in state. The top 25 are listed below - normalized against the highest NPV school, Cal Tech.

1. California Institute of Technology (CIT) 1.00
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 0.96
3. Stanford University 0.96
4. Princeton University 0.93
5. Harvard University 0.87
6. Rice University 0.86
7. Dartmouth College 0.85
8. Georgia Institute of Technology 0.84
9. Yale University 0.84
10. University of Pennsylvania 0.82
11. University of California, Berkeley 0.80
12. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) 0.79
13. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) 0.78
14. University of Notre Dame 0.76
15. Lehigh University 0.75
16. Duke University 0.75
17. Columbia University 0.75
18. Brown University 0.73
19. University of Virginia (UVA) 0.73
20. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) 0.72
21. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) 0.71
22. University of Chicago 0.71
23. Georgetown University 0.71
24. University of California, Davis 0.70
25. Case Western Reserve University 0.70

Before you send emails outlining the faults in my model, let me admit them. First, this model assumes your kid is average in almost every way: average financial aid award, average salary, average salary growth, etc. It also assumes that your kid will get the "average" degree, which is to say an engineering degree from an engineering school. The only assumption this is not average is that your kid will graduate in 4 years. Most schools' average graduation rates are longer but the model does not include 5 or 6 years of tuition and the cost of the lost wages from those years. Also, the salary data does not include those who went on to get advanced degrees. It only compares investments across colleges, not alternatives to college. Lastly, this is a purely financial analysis that does not accommodate the qualitative aspects of the experience at each school (e.g. - who has better beer pong skills at graduation).

There are other flaws, I'm sure. But even if my calculations are only mostly right, it turns out that an in-state education in Georgia (and several other states) is a terrific investment. For now, I'm off to tell my girls that classic bedtime story about the Bulldog and the Yellow Jacket.

An Intellectual Who Can Probably Take You In A Bar Fight

I read The Week almost cover-to-cover each weekend. I consume it like a terrific meal, gulping it down and only too late wishing I had savored it. I'm convinced it was conceived specifically for me (I could do without the "Reviews of Art" section but, then again, maybe the universe is telling me something). It is presented in bite-sized columns and summary-length features. Somewhere near the end, I begin to yearn for something thicker to sink my teeth into. The Week always delivers. The last section, appropriately called The Last Word, is usually the perfect finale.

This week's issue highlights Matthew Crawford, who holds a PhD in Political Theory from University of Chicago, spent time as the executive director of a policy organization in Washington, DC and also runs a small motorcycle repair shop in Virginia. Described as "an intellectual who can probably take you in a bar fight," Matthew writes eloquently about the virtues of the craftsman. Far beyond being too dumb for any other work, he expresses the intellectual rewards and challenges available from working with your hands, in his case motorcycle repair:

"Some diagnostic situations contain so many variables that there comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt - have a cigarette and walk around the lift. At that moment, the gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules."

His book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, will be on my summer reading list.

Colin's First Feature

My brother, who is a Public Affairs specialist with the Coast Guard in Seattle, wrote his first feature article last week.

I am a fan of thoughtful opening lines...

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Unlike these classics, Colin resisted the urge to use "it" as the first word in his first opening line: Starched white chef coats offset the team members from the background surfaces of the stainless steel counters, charred gas stovetops and an array of cooking pots, pans and utensils scattered throughout the room.

Bravo, Colin!

The Playoff Beard

It only took a mere two weeks to find something else worth blogging about (and the time to actually write about it). I have Andrew Potter's column in Maclean's to thank for my inspiration.


My take on Potter's column: men risk being gelded by a cultural pendulum swinging unchecked toward feminism unless they strike a balance between "archetypal wild men" and "metrosexual." For some time I have felt a unatriculated connection between my beard and my masculinity. Eventhough I don't play hockey, I have a playoff beard.

Colin Starts Blogging For The USCG

My little brother started his new gig as a Public Affairs Specialist with the US Coast Guard in Seattle this week. Check out his blog posts at http://uscgd13.blogspot.com/

The Zen of Blogging

I started this blog over a year ago with the intention of posting my observations on the world for all to read (well, all three of you). But I never really got to the first post. I've now realized that the problem was not knowing where to start. There is a passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that sums it up:

“Getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So separate them out. Just make a list of the things that you want to say in any old order. Then later we’ll figure out the right order.”

So, there we have it. The problem of what to say first has now been solved. Let's see if it takes me any less than 15-months to get to my next post.