The Boneyard:

Big changes have been going on at NCPR Online--where nobody will ever notice, under the hood of the content management system. Invisible labor seldom garners glory, but it does have its satisfactions. When renovating my parent's home in Potsdam, the first major job involved bringing in a steel beam and jacks to stabilize the center of the span. You would never know it was there unless you bumped your head rooting in the basement, but it squared the walls and insured that the rest of the work would last. Most of the world's work seems to work in the same way, whether one labors on buildings, or services, or programs, or gardens, or relationships. It is the foundation work that requires the closest attention, that has the most potential. From the bone, the skin can be known.

In my five-pound bag:

Before I came to work at NCPR, my office was Radio Bob's workshop--stacked to the ceiling tiles with gutted equipment chassis, transmitter components, clapped out reel-to-reel recorders, a snake's nest of cables and plugs, all liberally salted with the dust of the ages. Old tech. And what a change after it became the home of online media services--slick new gear, cozy furniture and visible floor space. But places seem to have a certain momentum. The entire universe, some say, is winding down toward random distribution, heat death. So it is with my office--stacked once again to the ceiling tiles, but now with dead hard drives, superannuated printers, a cat's cradle of keyboards and mice, empty toner cartridges, unlabeled CDs and diskettes, unstable glaciers of unfiled papers creeping slowly over every visible surface. Under Bob's reign, I snarkily referred to the room as the "radio doll hospital," now David Sommerstein calls it the "web hovel." The high-tech future is here, and it's a freaking disaster.

Cutting Through:

Many people find that cutting and hauling brush is a good way to banish cares and to get some thinking done. By the time I finally finish clearing my four acres from the devastation left by ice storm '98, I ought to be a cross between Buddha and Einstein. This week, while clearing out dead wood and invading saplings in a row of cedars, I was thinking how at that very moment, President Bush could be clearing brush on his Crawford ranch, too--that he could be thinking about the same things we both probably think about every day. And then there was this little song that wouldn't stop running through my head--an old-time tune--and I thought that maybe President Bush, rumored to be an old-time fan, just might, at the same moment, be having the same song running though his head. After all, subtract a couple thousand acres and those guys in the bulgy black suits and Ray-Bans, our situations are basically the same.

Oh, little blackbird on my wire line
Dark as trouble in this heart of mine
Oh, little blackbird sings a worried song
Dark as trouble 'til the winter has come and gone...

Got Cheese?

I inherited the bad photographer gene from my father, who was rarely seen outside the house without one or more of a succession of tempermental German twin-lens reflex cameras, and who never missed an opportunity to terrorize guests, family or classes with a closetfull of slide carousels. My own, less maniacal efforts all seem to feature food-chewing or squints, or sullen, long-suffering faces, or 1000-watt smiles of stunning insincerity. They showcase distant blurry dots lost in bland landscapes, or surgically-sharp closeups of "what the hell did you take a picture of that for?" It's a gift. So I am amazed (and sick with envy) at the vast selection of interesting, attractive, in-focus, lively and well-composed photos people have submitted to our Photo of the Day feature. It must be like playing jazz saxophone--the evidence all says that it can be done, but none of it tells how it can be done.