In the forecast

It may be 60 here today, but it's 17 in Minnesota, heading east, and you know what that means. It means you can finally relax. All those fall chores that have been piling up and hanging over your head—you've put them off just long enough. Now you don't have to sweat about the unraked leaves, the unpicked rock scattered around the bare new leach field, the last few months of blow-down. Touching up the house trim, edging the walk, digging under the squalor left in the flower beds—Fahgedabowdit! Snow hides all sins. Focus instead on the hot chocolate and the knit cozy on the sofa. Trade in the rabbit food for pasta and potatoes. Hunker down. Your spring may be insanely busy, but it probably would have been anyway. And besides—it's months from now. Wonder what's new on the Sci-Fi Channel?

Made redundant

While visiting my daughter Elena a few weeks ago in Boston, I had her place to myself for a few hours while she and my wife left to engage in the retail form of mother-daughter bonding. I thought I would take the opportunity to check out some major-market public radio and tune in WBUR or WGBH and see what they were up to. At first I thought there were just too many buttons and doohickeys on her stereo for me to find the fm tuner—but it turns out there wasn't one. And no clock/radio in the bedroom—and no kitchen radio/CD combo, no boom box, no shower radio. No radio! If she hadn't stolen my favorite Django Reinhart CD when she left town, I'd worry that I had raised some kind of changeling cultural mutant.

As it turns out, she does listen to a little radio--even NCPR—on her laptop. Back when Al Gore and I invented the internet, we had theorized that one consequence might be that people would want to listen to what they wanted to listen to, when they wanted to. But no radio?—ouch! She gets the news from websites and headlines email—she gets music from sharing and download sites; she gets recommendations via web and IM and the murmur network of an active urban scene. In other words, she gets what I get from radio, elsewhere. Just as living a block from the Davis Square T has replaced her need for a car, broadband in the home coupled with an iPod Nano has replaced most of the need for a radio. And she is one of a growing legion. Hang it up with the buggy whip?—I don't think so. But it does underscore the necessity for anyone who is serious about having a future in broadcasting to provide services that are not duplicated or available in the growing elsewhere of new media. The next generation does not listen to network pass-through stations. The network content is—well—on the network, anytime they want it. In the new world, you have to be making your own. And you have to put it where they want it, when they want it. But just for luck, I've put an iPod fm tuner add-on on Elena's stocking-stuffer list.

A mountain view

There could be a whole subspecialty of psychology that focuses on the images people choose to adorn the desktops of their computers. I tend to pick paintings. For the last few months, in idle moments, I have rested my eyes on a Rockwell Kent rendition of his AuSable home, farm and studio, Asgaard. The view is across a long meadow to the barns, which are well removed from the house. Both are up against the shoulder of forested hills that rise up into the soft signature lines of Adirondack peaks. The foreground is in cloudshadow, deep green peppered with clover in bloom. The midground is flooded with sun, lambent upon the tidy miniature white barns and their lesser satellite, the home. Behind them the deep green returns, going up into dappled hills and shadowed summits. The sky is mostly overcast, with sun rays striking through.

One of the satisfactions of the piece is in its unmistakability--this is one place, in one moment, and nowhere else. And the way the landscape dominates the works of man should be pleasing to one of modest demeanor, but the way those works shine out in the sun speaks also of love and pride of hand. The foreground is dimmed to lead the eye on, the background soft to draw the eye down. The farmstead is a buttery island of work well done and rest well deserved.

--Dale Hobson, NCPR Online

Small Change

I am privileged to work with some pretty bright people at NCPR, and none brighter than Adirondack Bureau Chief Brian Mann, whose op-ed, "Winning Small," in today's New York Times highlights the critical role voters in rural areas such as ours will play in next Tuesday's election. Control of Congress and the near-term course of US politics at home and abroad will be determined in large degree by whether a relative handful of Americans in small towns and rural counties turns out to support or to challenge the status quo. While winds of change are certainly in evidence, it remains to be seen if the trend can be translated into a redrawing of the political map after Election Day. As in many areas, the politics of the North Country are running hot, and often ugly. In part, this speaks to the even division and polarization of the electorate, and in part to the size of the pot at stake. In any case, this is one hand that nobody should be inclined to sit out.