Not a good look

I was walking one day in the crowded esplanade of the Danbury Fair Mall. A women in front of me turned to her companion and said, "I didn’t know we were in Connecticut." I have had that feeling over and over the last few days as I have surveyed scores of websites looking for inspiration to fuel the redesign of the NCPR website. Everything seems to look just like everything else--and I gotta tell you--it isn’t a good look. Crowded, chaotic, hard to navigate, hard to read, and little to make you want to stick around. If the media sites on the web comprised a metropolis, they would be the shantytowns of Rio. This is bad news for me; I was hoping for something to rip off--I mean emulate. NCPR's design, now more than six years old, belongs to the hamster-dance era of website fashion, and I am under the gun to roll out something new and fabulous for our 40th anniversary year, 2008.

Since my eyeballs are bleeding from the strain and my progress to date can be measured in microns, I thought I would get with the 21st Century program and tap into "the wisdom of crowds." Send me your candidates for websites that do what they do well and with a little style. And tell me a little about why you think they work. I'll compile a list of favorites and put it back out on the site, and maybe I'll find a few features that I can file the serial numbers off. Email dale@ncpr.org.

Goldfish and radio

With the writers' strike going on in TV land, all the time-sensitive programs have folded their tents for the duration, and the new series episodes that were already in the can are running dry. Since I find the network and cable news impossible to stomach without the antacid of The Daily Show ready at hand, that leaves me thumbing down through the reality shows, the game shows, the one-and-a-half star movies, the obscure team sports, infomercials, and reruns from the 70s. I kind of knew it was this bad, but I never realized it was this much--from 2 to 998 and back to the top again. Fortunately the south wall of the living room has a hundred feet of books, and the east wall another hundred feet. Then there are the shelves in the back room, and the stash of books burying my bedside table. Also, of course, the neglected gems of the CD collection, and that friend who will always talk to you when no one else is around--the radio.

If it is absolutely necessary to stare at something from my rump-shaped depression in the sofa, a goldfish bowl placed on top of the TV will do the trick. Goldfish plus radio. You can get two fish and name one of them Ofabia Quist-Arcton, and the other Mandalit del Barco. You can paste an NPR logo on the lower right portion of the bowl. You can drape a gaily embroidered runner over the darkened TV.

Three Bowls

There had been much talk lately about the so-called "hundred mile diet"--living primarily or completely on foods grown and prepared within 100 miles of where you live. Economy looks very different when one of the factors in the bottom line is "Do I know who grew this? Do I know who made this?"

Lately, my wife and I have been getting a lot of use out of three bowls, survivors of a set of four thrown and fired more than 30 years ago in the house where we lived with our potter friend, Annie. Any vessel would do to keep the soup from our lap, but the feel and the history and the look of these particular bowls add to the savor of anything contained within. The profile is a simple unbroken curve of high-fired stoneware with a milk-white crackled glaze. Each is decorated with a few seemingly offhand brush strokes that suggest a cobalt flower with translucent leaves. And each has an elegant bulb handle, itself a tiny separately-thrown pot, half closed at the top, with its foot smoothly mated to the curve of the body. The notch is a perfect fit for the thumb web when the bowl is cradled in the palm to feel the warmth within. They are not identical as machine ware, but are meticulously consistent, in the way a quality crafter demonstrates focus and integrity.

They were made as gifts for my mother-in-law, and returned to our hutch on her death a few years back. So whenever I use one now, I think of Annie, and I remember my mother-in-law, Betty, as I turn it slowly in my hand to admire. What would we own and what would we pass over, if this was the standard toward which our desires aspired?

Rate of Change

Things happen by fits and starts. There are rumors of change, meetings to plan this and that, and lots of waiting in between. Then--and I'm not sure if it's a fit or a start--everything happens at once, creating a level of chaos that requires, as Hunter Thompson says in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "a real connoisseur of edge work." Such a fearful convergence rules the station today. The long anticipated building renovation is heralded by jackhammers and sawzalls, and the operation of a large orange crawler-thingie that causes the whole structure to shudder and groan as if was being chewed and shaken by a tyranosaurus. The production studio is gutted out to accommodate new gear to serve the next round of the UpNorth Music project. Joel contemplates a stupendous new computer screen that gives one cause to wonder, "How big is God's monitor?" And Radio Bob is teleporting himself back and forth between Waterman Hill, where our new transmitter tower is dragging itself up toward the stratosphere.

Amid this high craziness, more meetings are going on behind the plastic sheets that serve in place of windows in the station kitchen. Whatever comes of this round, it is likely to happen at the same time as everything else.