Small world

You know how I enjoy our little weekly get-togethers, and normally there would be some topic upon which I could expound for a couple of paragraphs. But this week, the only thing I want to do is light your hair on fire and suck on your foot. That’s right—it’s time to quit smoking—again. I probably shouldn’t whine about such things, but I find that the process requires of me a level of concentration similar to that needed to land the Space Shuttle on manual control.

I would talk about something other than my “mind-forged manacles” if I could, but I clank like the ghost of Marley beneath their weight, and all other considerations seem alike in universal unsatisfactoriness. (A neologism unsatisfactory in itself, I fear.) Instead, I will slip this poem out through the bars of the cage in which I now reside:

Zoo

It was a very small world
for a Kodiak bear—
a narrow sward of grass,
the same old logs to shred—
bringing to mind my own den,
this green rug worn down from pacing.

Looking in the mirror

If you ask somone to describe what they look like, they will usually stare blankly for an uncomfortable number of seconds, then tentatively offer a very few general details. As an organization, we found ourselves in that position recently, having engaged the services of that institutional version of the police sketch artist, a logo design firm. Like many approaching forty, we had decided that our old look was getting harder and harder to pull off, and that something saying "Twenty-First Century Me" was in order. Having worked as a graphic artist, I had some notion what a convoluted process this might become. It takes the sharp ears of a dog to hear the hints of direction, and the armored hide of a rhino to survive the feedback.

We have gone through multiple meetings and two extensive sets of sketches without getting quite there yet. But an unexpected bonus of the process has more than compensated for the angst and crossfire. For the first time in a long time, people all over the station are debating our essential identity, purpose, and meaning as an organization. And not just the usual loudmouths like me. We hope the visual fruit of the process will suit us and suit you as well. And we hope our designers will survive our zig-zagging and contradictory demands without constant recourse to whiskey. But the bull session is going great.

Lurch engine

I've been spending a lot of time the last few months observing your habits. No--that wasn't me following you home in the beige Corolla--but observing your habits as a web visitor to NCPR, as tweaked out by the subtle algorithms of stats analysis. One number that jumped out at me was that 30+% of you come to our pages via an outside search engine. That tells me a couple of things-first, that many people come to NCPR from all over the world, looking for one thing that matched their interest, not to visit a local public radio website per se. This is a good thing; part of our work is to provide a window into the North Country for the world. But it also tells me that large numbers of our local audience are resorting to Google because they can't locate what they are looking for either through our site navigation, or through the poor literal-minded, three-legged site search tool that is built into ncpr.org. And that is, how you say, suboptimal.

After years of looking for a better internal search feature--something cheap, feature-rich and open-source, by preference--after trying to write search tips that are rarely read and only occasionally helpful, after trying to add extra search tools that give the visitor different options, we have decided to break free from our instinctive public radio penny-pinching and solve the problem the old-fashioned way--throw some money at it. In these days, a search engine that doesn't function in the same way that Google or Yahoo or any other big player does is not a search engine, it's a hide engine. So on our immediate shopping list is the Google Mini Search Appliance, one more heat-producing device to compete with the air-conditioner in the web office, but one that will allow visitors to search (and to actually find) whatever they are looking for at NCPR. Also in the works is a retooled site design that will navigate in a more logical and consistent way from page to page. If you have any horror stories about getting lost at NCPR, and any suggestions on smoothing the way, please drop me a line at radio@ncpr.org.

Memento mori

As part of their devotions and meditations, monks are encouraged to contemplate their own mortality. The goal is to develop a perspective that runs deeper than one’s own desires and egoistic concerns. My friend Paul, showing the marks of his Jesuit education, would say “Memento mori,” throwing open first one hand, then the other, to show the “M-M” formed by the creases of the palm. In general society, we rarely give mortality a thought, at least until we begin to reach our personal “best if sold by” date. Until some inexplicable calamity intervenes, such as yesterday’s sudden bridge collapse in Minneapolis, we content ourselves with illusions of immortality. It takes a bolt from the blue to focus the mind.

I was struck this morning by the title of an article on the National Safety Council website: “What are the odds of dying?” In the case of accidental death, the odds for any individual are only 1 in 2,662/year, or 109,277 Americans, but over a lifetime the odds build up to 1 in 34--nearly half related to our love of motorized transport. But death has many tricks up his black sleeve. In 2003, 600 Americans fell from windows and roofs, 838 tripped over furniture, 47 were struck by lightning, 66 were killed by bees, 37 by dogs. 11 were laid low by fireworks, 46 lost to cave-ins; and 332 drowned in the bathtub. I’m not sure what to do with this information, unless it is to consider using scuba gear in the bath. Perhaps I’ll stare at the palms of my hands and meditate upon it for a while.