Before I die . . .

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Via AOL’s new & improved front page interface, I found this story today: four guys building a documentary around the concept of “what’s the one thing you want to do before you die.”

They’ve invited people to contribute to a list of 100 things. Then they help the contributors accomplish their respective goals. Film it, etc. etc.

One thing that strikes me is how mundane a lot of the items are. “Plant a tree”? “Take a kid on a toy shopping spree”? Who needs help doing stuff like that? For dog’s sake, people, if “throw a surprise party” or “donate blood” is all that stands between you and a sense of lifelong accomplishment, what are you waiting for?

There are a few items that are a bit meatier, of course. But even some of them are more a question of a little research & planning. “Drive a race car,” for instance. Assuming you’re sound of body, there are car racing training outfits that will deliver you to that dream.

Last category are the “dreams” that require a mix of pluck, work, and an alignment of stars. “Go to space.” “Start a television show.”

Those are the minority. IMHO those are the only sorts of dream that really matter. But I suppose it’s because those are the sorts of ideas that really get me juiced.

So. What’s your dream? What’s the thing that, looking back from your deathbed, you’ll count as the thing that made the difference between a life-well-lived and one not?

And what are you doing about it?

Beware the purple fringe, my son!

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I have just bought a new digital camera. Needed because I wanted something compact to take with me on my trip to London next month.

I debated which brand to go with; after reading a number of praise-filled reviews like this one, I decided on a Canon SD600.

purple fringe

Image quality was the overriding factor, a priority I learned with my last digital camera. The one before it was a Kodak LS443, which I loved. Its replacement, however, burdened me with a couple of irritants. It has a detachable lens cap, instead of a lens cover that opens and closes when you turn the camera on and off. If you forget to remove the cap, it’s catapulted onto the ground when you turn on the camera (by the telescoping of the lens). (The cap has a strap but nothing to attach it to — it’s too short to comfortably reach the hook for the camera’s wrist strap.) Not to mention I’m continually putting it down and then having to remember where I left it.

More damning was the image quality, particularly a color distortion that crops up all too frequently in constrasty images.

Compare that to this, taken with my old LS443:

no purple fringe

When I zoom no this one I can see some very slight fringe where my sister’s teeshirt sleeve is juxtaposed against the lilypads; even at this size you can see a little purplish cast on the shirt itself, but it’s not nearly as pronounced.

I didn’t know this was called purple fringe until I started researching my next camera purchase. Turns out it’s not that uncommon. And while it’s partly due to the properties of light (a messy substance if there ever was one!) “Most of the problems seem to be as a result of individual camera designs.”

So. Here’s a shot out my back door with my old camera this morning:

more purple fringe

I didn’t get a pronounced fringe but you can see the purplish cast. Here’s the same view, with my new Canon:

hardly any purple fringe

Needless to say, I’m thrilled.

Next step: a digital SLR. But that can wait :-)

Look what they done

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To the Wall Street Journal.

wall street journal

I suppose the new format makes it easier to schlep around, but I feel a sense of loss. The old WSJ had a kind of a grandeur about it. It’s like I went to sleep one night with a ’55 Cadillac Coupe DeVille in my garage, woke up the next morning and somebody had swapped it out for a little Hyundai or something. An era’s over, without my permission.

(Yeah, I know, newspapers are dinosaurs, etc. etc. I’m the first one to say so. But I didn’t really view the WSJ as a newspaper, more like a daily magazine. And sometimes I like to read hardcopy, maybe because I work at a computer screen all day long.)

Writing, seriously

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If you’re looking for a Serious Article about Serious Writing, here’s a dish served up by the Guardian [UPDATE, article gone, sorry]  from U.K. writer Zadie Smith.

Smith starts by asking why it’s so difficult to write a perfect novel. She doesn’t try to define “a perfect novel” however, and right off the bat dismisses critics, falling back instead on an assertion that writers aren’t ever satisfied with their own books, ergo, their books can’t be considered “perfect.” This dissatisfaction, she says, can be traced back to dissatisfaction with one’s ability to fully and truthfully capture “the truth of experience”:

There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called “The Great American Novel” and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation, not just of a man … Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible – it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve-

Hmmmmm.

Obviously this refers to literary novels, since a novel’s entertainment value plays no part in the equation. There’s no room here for the perfect “page turner” ha ha ha, nor for the sort of innocent reading my daughter enjoys, where she loves books for the pure pleasure of being lost in their pages.

Literary novels, on the contrary, are Serious; writing them is no less than a moral act, as per part 2 of the piece:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one … This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

A case of morals. Yeah. “I’m a writer, and I’ve come down with a baaad case of morals.”

Interestingly enough, there’s nothing really about craft / writing process in either of these lengthy piece’s two lengthy parts.

Maybe craft is assumed . . .

(RELATED: I’ve shared more thoughts on literary versus commercial/popular fiction here and here.)

Another helping of crow a la Rochester

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Gee, here’s a surprise. A “consultant report, released Tuesday”

recommends city officials abandon a decade-long push to turn High Falls into an entertainment quarter and instead let private investors continue to steer development toward housing and office space . . .

In its report, the Center for Governmental Research concluded that the city should sell off the buildings it owns, halt its operating subsidies and clean up public spaces it has allowed to languish.

No private property remains available for renovation or redevelopment, the report says — thus turning the focus to the city and Rochester Gas and Electric-controlled land and buildings. The city owns the Center at High Falls/Brown’s Race Market complex. RG&E owns the land below the falls, the Beebee plant and other, smaller buildings.

Since 1992, the city has dumped $41 million of our tax money into the High Falls district. The bright idea: subsidize a bunch of bars because, ya know, that would make the place so cool people would flock to it after work, get real smashed, and, uh, revitalize downtown.

The plan was launched during Bill “Fast Ferry” Johnson’s administration.

Creating a housing and office district was the directive from an initial city-commissioned financial and market study in 1990. R. Carlos Carballada, the city’s commissioner for economic development, said that despite the city pushing in another direction, “the market has sort of evolved itself.”

“The market has sort of evolved itself.” Funny thing, that.

Maybe it’s time for our politicians to recognize that they shouldn’t be risking our money in these schemes.

Ah, don’t hold your breath. The next course is already slowly browning in the oven: buying Midtown Plaza, because what else does the city have to do with our money besides develop 1.2 million square feet of abandoned retail space?

(I’m not just being a crank, here, either. Yes, I believe it’s foolish for the city to own hard assets that it has to maintain, at taxpayer expense, for extended periods of time — particularly when local economic conditions suggest the chances of a decent return are not all that great. But I have constructive suggestions, too. I think the city should focus on making our community more livable and affordable for families, as per this post, and perhaps fund events to attract tourists, because that’s been demonstrated as a less risky way to stimulate economic development.)

Still raining

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ice storm
On and off. But the ice doesn’t seem to be building up any more.

Channel 10 says about 50,000 Upstate New York homes are without power as of this afternoon.

It’s probably a good thing that it was a holiday today — fewer commuters than normal — although I went out at lunch time and the roads had been salted and were fine for driving.

I took this photo looking up my street about 3:30 p.m. I’d been working, glanced out, and was struck again by how winter renders the world in monochromatic colors. It sure is easy on the eyes, isn’t it.

The downside of mild winter weather

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freezing rain

If, like me, you lived through 1991 ice storm in these parts — it crippled the Rochester, New York area for weeks — you can appreciate the trepidation I feel in waking up and seeing this.

That’s a river birch in my front yard. I took the picture three hours ago. Rain is still falling, and the ice is building up. Birches are particularly susceptible to permanent damage from this stuff. The only downside to using them as an ornamental.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves;
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

Birches, Robert Frost.

The morning’s paper says we could get as much as 3/4 inches of ice before it’s over.

Let’s hope it warms up or switches to snow.

This is not a “fortune”

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Has anyone else noticed that Chinese fortune cookies have become a huge disappointment over the past few years?

They never have actual fortunes in them any more.

I got this one last night:

Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire.

That’s not a fortune. That’s an aphorism.

What’s going on? Have the Chinese fortune cookie companies been advised by their attorneys to get out of the fortune-telling business? “We have to switch to aphorisms and ‘learn Chinese.’ Otherwise, someone will get squashed by a falling piano and we’ll be sued because his cookie said he was going to win the lottery instead of ‘avoid walking past open fourth story windows.'”

Or maybe they have been pressured by the astrology columnist lobby? “Get off our turf, Chinese fortune cookie company!”

Another possibility: fortunes are too difficult to write. Burn-out sets in. Everyone’s just a hack these days, durnit.

Or maybe it’s easier to avoid printing gaffes like the ones published here if you stick to sayings instead of fortunes . . .

Kodak sells health imaging division

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Here’s the announcement as carried on Bloomberg [Update, link no longer good]:

Eastman Kodak Co., the world’s largest photography company, agreed to sell its health-care imaging unit to Onex Corp. for as much as $2.55 billion to help focus on its transition to digital products.

There’s also this:

The health group’s approximately 8,100 employees will stay with the unit after the completion of the sale, expected in the first half of this year, Kodak said. The transaction includes manufacturing operations and an office building in Rochester.

I know that office building well . . .

The people I’ve worked with at Kodak are, virtually without exception, such great individuals. Salt of the earth, dedicated, intelligent, decent people. I wish them the absolute best as they ride out this new wave of change.

It’s for the children

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bench

There’s been much lamenting at the bus stop over the last month. Not from the parents. We parents are in general agreement that a mild winter is a good thing. But the kids have been outraged, outraged!

Here it is, Christmas already come and gone, and where’s the snow?

Denver, I guess. In Rochester, the official snowfall tally for December was 4.3 inches. Our average for that month is 21.9 inches. December 2006 was also our warmest on record. Links to the National Weather Service reports here.

Yeah, much lamenting. Until today. Almost an inch already this morning, with more on the way. Actually had to break out the snowpants and boots . . .