Armchair Travel
Thursday, November 29, 2007
  Newspapers are Committing Suicide
I used to advertise in the paper for tenants. but I don't anymore because Craig's List is free and the newspaper classifieds don't work. And why is that? Could it possibly be that Craig's List is more concerned with meeting the needs of their customers?

The management of newspapers in our country has decided to adopt the policy of King Canute, whose fawning courtiers assured him that the rising tide would obey his commands. Needless to say, he got his feet wet. They refuse to give people what they want, free access to their sites, even though this short-sighted policy is speeding their doom.

Newspaper writers are being betrayed by the lack of imagination of their management, just as American auto workers were betrayed in the 60s and 70s by a management policy of greed and poor quality that has crippled the US auto industry to this day. American cars are finished at 100,000 miles. But don't ask me. Ask Consumer Reports. Ask Click and Clack.

American automakers insisted that it was impossible to put four-wheel drive on a vehicle without requiring the driver to get out and twist the hubs. Toyota developed a system that allowed the driver to make the adjustment from the driver's seat and they ate GM's lunch and put millions of American auto workers out of work because of their bosses' stupidity.

Same with the newspapers. They can't make any money because they're charging people to look at their websites. So the Google spiders can't go there, so they miss out on EIGHTY PERCENT of their customers.

Their thinking, if you could call it that, is that if they open up their websites, no one will buy the paper. In fact this is idiotic. I'm the editor of an international website and I buy the paper. People who are used to buying the paper will buy the paper. But every obituary will be a customer lost, and newspapers should look to the future.

There's a classical concert series in Great Britain called "The Proms." For many years they refused to allow their performances to be broadcast. They reasoned that if the music were available on the radio, no one would come to their concerts. It does sound like reasoning, doesn't it? It's not. It is obstinate idiocy.

Faced with bankruptcy, The Proms finally allowed their performances to be broadcast. Now they are sold out every night for three weeks and they are heard all over the world.

Eighty percent of GoNOMAD readers come to our site through Google searches for specific topics or destinations. Then, hopefully, they come to our home page and look at more GoNOMAD stories. If we charged a fee, we'd be doomed, like a lot of idiotic newspapers. Our only hope is to give web readers what they want. Interesting stories. Not too complicated.

Here's my challenge to US newspapers: If you've got talented writers with information that people might be interested in, get rid of the fee which brings you a miniscule return and open your pages to the Google spiders and get the infusion of readers that they will bring you. If you can't monetize an 80 percent increase in viewers, then you should go back to business school and figure out who moved your cheese.

As for classifieds, make them free, too, and figure out how to monetize the massive infusion of customers. If you can't do that, take some time to study the 'new paradigm' -- that would be Google -- which gives people all over the world information for free and makes lots and lots of money.

I think we'll find that newspaper executives will doom their employees to unemployment from an utter lack of imagination. But that's just an educated guess.
 
  America Without Uncle Sam?
Imagine America without Uncle Sam or Santa or the Easter Bunny or the Brooklyn Bridge. Imagine America without Babe Ruth or Doris Day or Elvis.

Without the contributions of German Americans, America would not be the country it is today. You know that painting of Washington crossing the Delaware at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? It was painted by Emanuel Leutze. The Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey? They were first drawn by Thomas Nast, who was also the first to render Uncle Sam as we know him today.

Eberhardt Anheuser and Adolphus Busch are revered in bars and taverns all across America and Levi Strauss invented the reinforced cotton trousers that were first worn by the 49ers of the California Gold Rush. John Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller, Goldmann Sachs, Oscar Meyer... the list of German Americans who have made their mark on our country goes on and on.

You can find out more about America's German heritage at the German Tourist Office's new website GermanOriginality.com. They see the site as a way of promoting travel to Germany for people who want to trace their ancestral roots.

German tourism has always had a tough row to hoe, what with two world wars and the Holocaust, but anyone who thinks these tragic events happened because Germans are bad people has sadly missed the point.

Many German Americans had reason to stop speaking German and celebrating their national heritage during the world wars, and this is one reason their contributions to our way of life have been less visible than other nationalities, but fully one fourth of all Americans are of German ancestry, and our countries have been closely linked since the first German immigrants came to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608.
 
  A Real Treat




It's always a treat to have lunch at the Four Seasons in Boston and to meet with Victoria Larson of the German National Tourist Office and Kirsten Schmidt of Berlin Tourism. Last year I went with GoNOMAD Senior Travel Editor Kent St. John, and this year I went with GoNOMAD Staff Writer Shady Hartshorne. We got caught up on the latest developments in German tourism and learned about their new website GermanOriginality.com.
 
  Smart Car

That's Royal Ford of the Boston Globe driving the new Daimler-Benz Smart Car. I want one, but you can't buy them here in the US. I snapped this photo in Boston yesterday and Royal stopped to chat with me and my brother Shady. Watch for us in the Globe this Sunday!
 
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
  To Whom Are You Writing?
Since I spend my days editing brilliant stories from all over the world, once in a while I offer advice for writers. Writers and editors have always had a love-hate relationship without the love, and since I was a writer for a lot more years than I've been an editor, I think a lot of our writers feel I'm on their side -- and I am!



I know what it's like to have some butthead editor ruin a piece I worked hard on so badly that I didn't even want to show it to friends. But, as a writer, I had some really talented editors, too, the ones like Dirk Ruemenapp of the New Hampshire Sunday News,who laid out most of the stories I used in my portfolio.



I wrote a story about a New Hampshire couple who identified the work of itinerant stencilers in colonial houses, work that had long ago been painted or papered over. Dirk's title was "Searching Out Hidden Artistry."



So this bit of advice comes from an editor who is sympathetic to those poor souls who have to write for a living: consider the person or persons to whom you are writing.



At the Associated Press they tell you to write for your grandmother, and that worked for me because my grandmother happened to be an author and a true cosmopolitan, but that might not be true for everyone.



An essential part of finding your true voice is identifying and understanding the person you have in mind when you're composing. Your voice and your listener are part and parcel of the same process.



As evidence of this I adduce the works of Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, aka "Dame Shirley," who wrote "The Shirley Letters" to an adopted sister whom she adored and with whom she shared a dry sense of humor and a million funny anecdotes. In a way it is the sensibilities of the brilliant listener, as much as the sensibilities of the brilliant author that make this collection of letters such a luscious literary find.



If you're just starting out and trying to find you voice, or if you're seasoned writer looking for new energy, consider directing your writing to a brilliant listener like Dame Shirley's sister.
 
Monday, November 26, 2007
  What is a Paradigm, Anyway?
What is a paradigm? I'm so glad you asked. I have seen this word used so many times by know-it-alls and I'm sick of it.

The guy at the meeting that says, "We need to invent a new paradigm," and everybody nods because they won't admit that they don't know what he's talking about. William F. Buckley made a career of this.

A paradigm is an illustrative schematic diagram employed in learning languages, which shows all the forms of a verb or a noun (conjugations and declensions). For example "I jump, you jump, he/she/it jumps. we jump, they jump, you (plural) jump, they jump. I have jumped, they have jumped, we are jumping, she had jumped (the pluperfect), etc., etc., right up to the future perfect, "We shall have jumped."

This paradigm is supposed to help people learn lots of other verbs that behave like the verb jump.

Sometimes a paradigm is not illustrative, but applies only to a single word, like the verb "to be."
That's because this verb, like the verb to go, is a combination of several other verbs:

I am, you are, he/she it/is, we are, you are, they are. Or: I go, she went, they shall have gone.

From this language learning meaning, 'paradigm' has been elevated to a higher plane, meaning a new pattern likely to be duplicated by others because of its success.

So that's what it means. But in the future, when buttheads like William F. Buckley come up with words like this and wave them around like a badge of superiority, go look them up. Don't pretend you know. That's the way buttheads like him get the edge on people. That's what gratifies these sad souls.

Don't be a part of their pathetic game. First, admit you don't know what the world means. Then use Merriam-Webster.com. It's not rocket science. Then you can evaluate someone's ideas on their merits instead of their skills with buzzwords.
 
Monday, November 19, 2007
  A Return to Faith-Based Learning
You know you're in for a good time when you see a work by Hugh Trevor-Roper. He was dispatched by the Allied Command to make sure Hitler was dead. I was entralled by his work, The Last Days of Hitler.

He had also written an essay about witchcraft which is equally enthralling. Witchcraft, he observes, really didn't exist during the Middle Ages. The belief in witchcraft was considered to be a vestige of paganism.

It was the 1500s, the Renaissance, and the 1600s, the Age of Enlightenment, that saw the heyday of withcraft prosecutions, with thousands of witches being burned alive every year. The Catholic Church, and all the Protestant denominations shared in these prosecutions.

This could be an important lesson for you young people, as we see a greater emphasis on faith-based learning as opposed to the Godless empiricism that has tyrannized the world of science for so many centuries -- people relying on their eyes and ears, scientists performing experiments, confirming or disproving results. That's all part of the past. Hallelujah!

Make no mistake, the Bible states that there are witches and they have to be destroyed. But don't take my word for it, ask St. Thomas Aquinas, ask Jean Calvin. Thousands of witches have confessed, and they have betrayed their fellow witches. We have their sworn statements that they attended the Devil's Sabbath and kissed him beneath his tail!

By their own admission they have poisoned wells, killed sheep and caused widespread impotence among Republican bridgegrooms. (Democats are still horny as hell.)

But because of the Godless empiricists, we are denied the tools we need to identify witches, the tools that worked so well in exposing witches in the 15 and 1600s: the implements of torture.

During those days of faith-based learning, thousands of witches confessed and identified their accomplices. All the countries of Europe and even their New England colonies had action-based anti-witchcraft administrations that weren't hindered by the Godless empiricists.

That's why the Bush Administration, always advocating for true Christians, strongly endorses torture as an instrument of justice.

Just give us the tools we need and we'll get confessions and burn these witches alive.
 
Thursday, November 15, 2007
  Great Reads for a Dime
I got six issues of Archaeology magazine for a dime each, and I must say I've been thinking about subscribing. Whenever I see an article in the paper about an archaeological discovery I have to read the whole thing. I've always been fascinated by early humans and how they developed the knowledge and skills that created the modern world.

And archaeology is such a new science, with technigues and methodology established very recently, in the mid-twentieth century. There is so much more to learn.

Thumbing through these issues, I found out all about the hoax of Jesus' brother's coffin, and lots of other interesting information. I was happy to find out that Kennewick Man, a 9,300-year-old skeleton discovered in Washington State, is not going to be reburied -- I didn't see that in the news.

A group of archaeologists filed a brief in the interests of science, and the court rightly found that there was no cultural connection between the remains of Kennewich Man and any of the tribes seeking reburial. His skull was described by a modern forensics expert as "caucasoid."

Where is Caucasia, anyway?

Turns out Kennewick Man's closest living relatives are the Ainu, a tribe of aborigines in Japan, who share his caucasoid features. Ironically or not, they now live on a reservation.

In the May/June 2003 issue I ran into my friend Garrett Fagan of Penn State. I have listened to his 24 brilliant half-hour lectures on Roman history twice, so I consider him an old buddy. He writes about why 'pseudo-archaeology' on television is so much more fun to watch than archaeology. Archaeologists are so cautious and respectful of the facts...

Nowhere is pseudo archaeology more in evidence than at Stonehenge at the solstice. I'm not an expert here, but I think it's pretty obvious that the people who built Stonehenge had no cultural connection with the Celts, who came much later, or with Druidic religion.

The magazine had a pithy comment from an unnamed archaeologist about modern solstice celebrations:

"I have no problem if someone wants to worship fire hydrants if they feel the need, but I do get annoyed when visiting stone circles where fires have been lit. In some places the soil cover over the archaeology is only a few centimeters thick, so fires can damage the underlying deposits."
 
Monday, November 12, 2007
  My Latest Loot
I've been tag sailing and flea marketing to beat the band in these last days of fall, and I've picked up some great loot. Lots of great reads and 'great listens' for a quarter.

I've got enough Sherlock Holmes stories on tape for my next eight car trips, plus Dragnet and Green Hornet radio shows.

I found mint condition LPs by Little Richard, The Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakets, and Leslie Gore (You Don't Own Me!) plus some great Sinatra, plus my fourth mint LP by Les Paul and Mary Ford, plus an LP (also mint) of Marlene Dietrich in Brazil.

I actually found a volume called "Dr. Doolittle on the Moon," and felt compelled to read it. I'd have to say in my view it was an utter waste of time, but somebody else might want it. It is rather obscure.

I found books by Jack Paar and Steve Allen, vintage paperbacks, two new Tony Hillerman books, an Oxford Edition of Moll Flanders, and possibly best of all, a book called "Topper" by Thorne Smith, which purports to be "a ribald adventure."

Does anyone remember that old TV show? Topper? I loved that show. It had the funny old guy and his dog and the glamorous gal, who were all ghosts. I can't wait to read the book.
 
  A Prototype for the Future
They say when you start out blogging you have all kinds of wonderful ideas and pretty soon you're writing about what you had for dinner.

I guess that might apply to me with my mailbox video. Actually, it was a prototype that we're going to use on GoNOMAD and on the GoNOMAD blogs -- a little snatch of video to enhance the story.

I'm seeing the wave of the future, and I'm so glad I have friends like Max Hartshorne and Kent St. John and Sony Stark and Cindy Lou Dale and David Rich and Matthew Kadey and Jackie Stevenson and so many others to advise me on this. We need to find a place for video on our site, and I believe we can do it in our tried and true GoNOMAD way.

That would mean opening it up to all the writers in the world and saying, "Write us a great story, with great pictures, and then add a short video that gives the reader an added insight into what your story is all about."

To give credit where it is due, I got the idea from Mridula Dwivedi and Suruchi Dumpawar, who added videos to their stories that gave the reader a new perspective.

In fact GoNOMAD has always been on the cutting edge of travel videos. I must ask, "Are we, or are we not, the only website in the world with video images of the sacred catfish of Burkina Faso?"

If you look into it, I think you'll find that we are. That particular breakthrough in the history of multimedia presentations was brought to you by our most intrepid nomad David Rich and our brilliant webmaster, Joe O'Beng.

These are the guys who keep us on the cutting edge, and we intend to stay there.
 
Friday, November 09, 2007
  My Mailbox Rocks
Every morning and every evening, I get a big kick out of my mailbox, which was created by John Sendelbach of Amherst. I got the idea from his famous "bobble rocks."

For years I had a stack of cinderblocks with two-by-fours tucked in them, and every time the plow went by the whole thing got knocked over, even when I reinforced it with iron stakes pounded three feet in the ground. I'm thinking this new design will stand up to the beating.


 
Thursday, November 08, 2007
  My Buddy Brown Bear


Well it happened at last, Sarah was voted off the island on America's Next Top Model. As she closed the door on the way out, she was holding my old pal Brown Bear, also known as Softy, her lifelong companion. I was glad that old Softy got to be on national TV.

Then she said, "Goodbye, House" and I remembered her in her PJs reading "Goodnight Moon."

All her fans here in Franklin County were crushed. So was I. I thought she was sure to win. But since the program was taped back in July, Sarah is way over it.

In fact her getting voted off means she can find an agent (We're thinking her friend Twiggy might help her with that) and with all the folderol about her body size, I think she'll really be in demand if she feels like modeling.

Don't you think there's a clothing maker out there who makes clothes for regular-size people? We'll see.

Anyway, Sarah's off in Los Angeles being interviewed for a bunch of television and radio shows who all want to talk about the show. Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern Time she'll be on Access Hollywood on NBC.

Brown Bear is back in the dorm at Drew, where Sarah is taking a bunch of great courses and acting in student productions. She has a single!

 
Monday, November 05, 2007
  Izzy Feinstein Rocks My World
I already mentioned I.F. Stone's "Trial of Socrates," an astonishing work of classical scholarship that in a few well-crafted chapters obliterated my lifelong admiration for Socrates. What I didn't mention was that Stone (born Isidor "Izzy" Feinstein) had never written anything in this field before.

People are always telling me things that completely reverse everything I thought I knew about the modern world; it's a confusing place that I never purported to understand.

But when someone rattles my view of the ancient world, in this case literally turning it upside down, well, that's a lot tougher on an old guy like me.

Socrates taught me that the greatest barrier to gaining knowledge is thinking that you already know. Ironically, that now applies to everything I thought I knew about Socrates.

When ill health and failing eyesight forced him to give up publication of his famous weekly, Stone began researching a book about freedom of speech. He studied the English revolutions and then had to go back to the Reformation, then to the Renaissance, then, via the few and far between free spirits of the Middle Ages, he came upon ancient Athens...

It was a pretty amazing place when you think about it, birthplace of tragedy, comedy, philosophy, geometry, medicine and history, and a place where sculpture, architecture and literature reached artistic heights unsurpassed in any age.

Izzy and I believe these amazing achievements were due to the level of intellectual freedom that was achieved in Athens, and not in other city states, for a number of complicated reasons.

Stone was always bothered by the verdict against Socrates. "It shook my Jeffersonian faith in the common man," he writes. "It was a black mark for Athens and the freedom it symbolized. How could the trial of Socrates have happened in so free a society? How could Athens have been so untrue to itself?"

So Izzy learned Greek and started examining and analyzing all the available sources. He points out that Socrates' followers were the leaders of "The Thirty," a group that collaborated with the Spartans to overthrow the democracy in Athens and then executed more than 1,500 of their enemies.

Even Plato was sickened by the carnage, though he was too polite to say so at the time. He still wrote adoringly about Critias, the leader of The Thirty.

And if you read about the ideal states that Plato and Socrates envisoned in The Republic and other works, they were authoritarian regimes where foreign ideas (and visitors) were forbidden and free thinkers were brutally suppressed.

When the Athenians raised an army in the countryside and took their city back, they did not intiate a second blood bath. In the interests of moving on, they voted a general amnesty. But if they got a little sick of Socrates talking about Spartan virtues, well who can really blame them for telling the old windbag to shut up or get out of town?

They gave him plenty of chances to scoot, but he wouldn't. And shutting up, for a guy like Socrates, was completely out of the question.
 
Thursday, November 01, 2007
  "You're Not Him"
Despite all the odious people who wave it around, the Bible really is a good book. I particularly like the Gospel of Mark. The other gospels are based on lore -- their authors had no additional sources beyond Mark, and Mark begins with the baptism of Jesus and ends with the empty tomb. No virgin birth, no three wiseguys.

Except for Chapter 13, which, we hear, was altered later, the Gospel of Mark is the best and only historical source for those who want to know what Jesus actually said. There are lots of people who want to worship Jesus, but unfortunately, there aren't too many who want to live by his teachings.

Jesus once said, "I was hungry and you didn't give me food. I was cold and you didn't give me clothes." And his followers said, "When did we do this, Lord?"

And he said, in a 16th century English rendering of the Aramaic language, "Insomuch as ye have done this unto the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me," or something like that.

This is all a long drawn-out set-up for this excerpt from "Bob Dylan's 113th Dream." You don't usually think of Bob Dylan reading the Bible, but this passage makes it pretty clear he did, way back then:

I went into a house with a US flag upon display.
I said, "Could you help me out? I've got some friends down the way."
A man said, "Get out of here. I'll tear you limb from limb."
I said, "You know they refused Jesus, too."
He said, "You're not him."

That cracks me up every time I hear it.
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Location: Sunderland, Massachusetts, United States

Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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MOST RECENT POSTS
Cool Houseguests
Kimball Chen -- Small Steps
Let's Hear It For Snail Mail
House of Cards
New Visitors to the Back Porch
Sunshine, My Mom, and the Goodness of Life
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
The Goodrich Foundation
The Lady Cardinal
The Dearly Departed


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