A few degrees separation between the DMV and the South Pole

I need to go to the DMV today. It's that generally loathsome type of visit - when an emissions check is due for one of our cars, before getting a new license plate sticker thingie. In other words, far from a time capsule moment. But I've decided to combine an obligatory trip across the Town with a much cooler side trip. One that marks an actual historic day. For Norway and the World. Because today is the 100th Anniversary of Roald Amundsen's arrival at the South Pole, becoming the first to do so. Well, along with the four other Norwegians and dozens of sled dogs that accompanied him on the trip. Until a few days ago, I was blissfully unaware of this momentous Norwegian. But then I read a review in the "Seattle Times" of an exhibit at the Nordic Heritage Museum on loan from Norway that features tons of archival Amundsen material. Yesterday I also read an engrossing article describing what's ongoing in Antarctica in terms of scientific research. Combine that with my own family research questions to decipher - I'm looking to the old school staff at that Museum in Ballard for a bit of translation. Because I'm still a bit confused about where we, in particular, come from - Sweden, Finland, Norway, somewhere that doesn't exist any more. So call today part of my own journey out beyond the edge of the known world. Check back if you're curious about what I find there.

Thoughts that come from the Fire.

I'm way out of my league when it comes to picking apart product design. But I'm surely in the vast population of those who know what they like and speak freely about what that is. Recently, I've wandered edge-of-the-puddle deep into dissecting what can really only be called "fashion" from the point of view of design and the resulting way those "products" are marketed. I'm a total newbie in this role. Still, I know what I like. In an age where essentially anonymous opinions can be amplified through comment boards and endless online avenues for venting, the people responsible for such designs seemingly must always be on guard. I bring it up in response to an article in today's NYTimes featuring reactions to Amazon's new Kindle Fire. I can't say much about the Fire. Yet. I do have a prior generation of the Kindle because I consider it essential for any writer who hopes to sell any books electronically to understand how things work with these devices. No one should really care about which devices an individual actually has and uses. Right? Well, if you comment aggressively on certain products and the pluses and minuses of how they are designed, your possession of those objects can indeed be seriously amplified. Today's Times piece was fascinating because it came largely from the spectacle of new Fire owners commenting on Amazon about this new thing they recently bought. As a practice, this is surely nothing new. I am, however, the kind of shopper who looks at reviews rather closely for details - performance, feel, value, all the self-defined metrics without a specific scale other than "feel". Seeing how Amazon is reacting and how that was tagged as "news" today made me instead think about other products. Like the ones I'm considering for this book. Fashion, in all its hard to quantify terms. What if ubiquitous fashion trends had a similar portal for loving or loathing? Ugg boots, for example. Or dyed mink coats. Or trucker hats. This largely nameless, faceless "commentariat" picking apart product designs has power. Maybe it's always been out there somewhere. Maybe I need to find design sites that feature reviews of fashion trends or products - new or way old school. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Then again, maybe it's a collective load of crap. Powerful, disproportionately influential crap.

Deconstructing Lindsay Lohan's throwback style.

I've been clipping newspaper ads this month. Yes, people still do that. Or at least this people is doing that. I don't really know what I'll end up doing with them. My original point has been to look for Holiday ads that feature fur coats and accessories. The NYTimes and the Seattle Times are daily touchstones. I'm sure you can guess which one has a larger number of those ads. As a result, I'm becoming more attuned to look for fur garments featured in print or online. For example, "Vanity Fair" included a mink stole from the designer Akris in "Punch Hutton's Holiday Gift Guide". Which led me to check out Akris - Swiss designers with a boutique in NYC and on the very fashionable and funky Newbury Street in Boston. See how research works? Then I caught sight of (cough!) the newly-leaked Lindsay Lohan spread in "Playboy". I've scrutinized all the photos, of course. As a matter of research, Officer. It's a total throwback - all inspired by Marilyn Monroe's iconic calendar pose that was reprinted in 1953 as the first centerfold of "Playboy". The reason I bring it up before Playboy's roiling tank of lawyers jump all over the folks that leaked them is to deconstruct one picture in particular. In which Lindsay's wearing nothing but a mink stole. Add that to the overall 1950s theme. If you were going to choose one oversexed garment to nail down (again COUGH!) that era, I can't think of a better choice. I'm sure I'm one of less than a carload of people pointing to that part of the pictorial right about now. Still...clip that and put it your ol' briefcase, Professor.

Does a weasel by any other name smell as sweet?

I've recently become a consumer of results from various Google Alerts. Much of the time, there's very little worth noting from the obscure searches I've set up. Today, however, I hit the quirky jackpot. Or at least gained new respect for the sort of non-news that gets reported from the truly wide world of weird out there. If you want to know how "mink" and "Washington" showed up in the Google newsy algorithms today, click on through to this little nugget. The title "Acquittal in Dead Weasel Assault" only provides part of the story. I expect the remainder will be left to a team of screenwriters to fully flesh out once the rights are sold. Remember, you heard it here first. Or second, if you read what I read daily.

Laboring to keep kids off the farm?

"I grew up working on a farm." I'd love to see current Census stats that could somehow ballpark the number of people who can say that. These days, I'm sure we're talking a miniscule amount of people who can join me in making that claim. For me and my whole extended family from Wisconsin, this is a badge of honor. A serious percentage of the decent stories I carry with me from those formative years come from that farm life. That's why I'm perplexed by the effort by the Labor Department to limit agribusiness hiring of young people. There's a long list of issues raised. Including the fact that serious accidents do indeed happen on the farm (or on those businesses closely associated with agriculture). But do we really want to keep young people from having those jobs and from gaining those experiences? I'm certainly not embracing the recent classist scoldings coming from Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump - a nation that sends its poor to work as apprentice janitors is a nation on the decline in more ways than the obvious. I'm talking about something entirely different. After all, the roots of this nation are solidly agrarian, even if those roots have grown weak and far fewer in number. I see something utterly valuable in having kids - yes, kids - out there working on farms. Within certain limits, of course. Granted, I grew up on a farm that was unconventional. To say the very least. Yet I remember punching the time clock on that farm as far back as the summer before I started Sixth Grade. I think my first hourly wage was $1.50. Adjust that for inflation, up the ante, and give kids a safe shot at life on the farm. Of all the things to regulate, kids working on the farm doesn't belong near the current top of that list.

I'd love to hear from anyone else with similar experience, no matter what view they take. Especially if they disagree. It's far from idyllic out there. It's real. And necessary.

The Burlesque after Charleston.

We spent the weekend in Charleston, South Carolina. Meaning we spent two days traveling, basically sandwiching one day worth of a lovely wedding. Not exactly restful stuff. But well worth the effort given the good feelings generated by the event. I'd only been to Charleston once before. That was for another wedding over a decade ago - a similarly beautiful occasion, albeit with a totally different crop of folks. I love that place and each time find more than a few quirky stories I hope to someday share here and elsewhere. However, the motivation lag after such a weekend lingered longer than I like. Still, thanks for checking in for new posting action.

Which leads me to show my hand here a bit more. Some of you have surely wondered just what I'm doing with this blog. I plan to let the light shine a bit brighter on that over the coming weeks. If this blog could be seen as a burlesque dance, admittedly it's been mostly feathers and air kisses up to this point. Consider this fair warning that I'm ready to give y'all more of a peek at the goods. Or at least the teasing focus will sharpen. Expect quick flashes of what I find worth showcasing. That means more explanation of the subject areas that relate to my book. Along with more of who I am, where I came from and how this wraps around the work I'm doing on this book. Like any performer - no matter the venue - I think you'll dig the show. No need to gather up a fistful of dollar bills to slip into my garters. Yet.

So please check back. Sign up for my email updates. Keep an eye out for some design revisions. Follow my Twitter feed. And thanks for all of that. Rock on.

Here we go again - "Blame Canada!"

I was all set to write a brief little ditty about those sexy new PETA postage stamps ("Pamela Anderson AND Bob Barker? Consider my Holidaze shopping done, baby). Then I unfolded my clutch of daily dead tree to see a serious looking banner headline. "Canada Kept Salmon Threat Secret" For those just now checking in, I got hooked by that story breakthrough last month while looking at other viruses attacking specific agribusinesses with similarly devastating effects. The prospect of this salmon-targeting disease (named Infectious Salmon Anemia or "ISA") packed the added punch of possibly making the leap from farmed salmon populations to the much more valuable and previously safe-seeming wild salmon populations. Today's headline alludes to the fact that Canadian researchers have actually known about ISA being in wild salmon for a decade. One pesky research fellow found it present in tested fish back in 2002. The good news is that it may be a harmless natural variation of ISA that's always been out there. Where the story gets sexy is when the push to publish the findings maybe encountered the faint possibility that Canada's regulatory bureaucracy kept it hidden. This small tempest must nonetheless be swirling around the fishing taverns and coffeeshops today. Yarrr! For me, the takeaway jibes with my experience that emerging viral threats to an agribusiness leave those farmers feeling almost totally powerless. The teachable moment being that if researchers and bureaucrats dink around with that research because of some unseen benefit for keeping things silent...well, that's just a disservice to everyone.

Thinking about Newt? Ow, that hurts.

Newt Gingrich has me thinking about my ancestry. The stepping off point for that bit of randomness was his performance in last week's GOP debate on CNN. I watched it while in Wisconsin, where my family's roots were firmly set over 130 years ago thanks to the Homestead Act. All those people who live perfectly good lives without ever manifesting the troubling signs of political obsessive disorder surely missed it. Specifically, I'm pointing at when Newt waded into unusual waters for a GOP candidate by responding to a question about immigration with a measured embrace of amnesty for non-citizens. For my almost entirely Scandinavian family, it brought up something I now find fascinating that I'd never given much thought. I'm now aware that one of my grandmothers never became a citizen. It just wasn't that big of a deal way back when - especially since women couldn't vote prior to 1920. To up the ante of weirdness, I'm now focused upon the fact that the trippy little country she came from in Scandinavia ceased to exist in the late 1930s. Blame the Soviets, I think. Her husband naturalized, which was the norm to afford the benefits of citizenship to the whole family. Her kids were all born here. She lived into her 90s, and died in the 1980s surrounded by family and property. But in terms of our modern view of citizenship, she was effectively a woman without a country for most of her life. I'm still sussing this all out. I can't even find the country she came from listed anywhere to make sense of what citizenship she might have been able to claim. Say what you will about Newt. Loudly. I, for one, have never been a fan. Even though he married a former small-town girl from Sconnie on his third try at, um, lifelong party affiliation. But the guy's politics inspired me to take a new look at my own past. Now if you'll excuse me, I think my irony bladder just exploded.

Thanksgiving in Sconnie, post scriptum

I'm back home after a weeklong visit to the land of deer hunting and Packer loving. The things I saw in - or, rather, near - the woods opened the memory gates in ways grand and teeny tiny. One of my everyday urban activities that I brought with me was to go out running in the mornings, before the sun had risen. One time along my daily route, I saw a bald eagle perched in the highest branches of a tree right next to the prevailing county highway in my childhood neighborhood. Old Glorious swiveled her head to look down at me, passing a brief judgment before returning to all things otherwise more interesting far above the forest line. Another day, what could have only been a bat flew directly into me, striking the iPod earbud anchored in my right ear. As of now I see no need for rabies shots since not a mark was made on anything other than my previous sense of species superiority. My last morning conjured a memory like a lightning strike of the first season I was counted among the ranks of official hunterdom. I passed by the spot where I'd seen a truly majestic buck three decades ago. I told that story of the deer's nonplussed and safe run across an open field to my daughter as we drove back to the Twin Cities on our way out of the Northwoods. There were copious other lessons learned or at least hinted at during the past week - some for this book, others just for the sake of what might be humility. For example, I struggled with how to best cook a surprisingly decent hunk of fresh bear loin given to us by a family friend to add to our Thanksgiving bounty. No, it tasted nothing like chicken. The whole visit went something like that. Amidst nearly constant reminders to grasp anew things I've long since forgotten. Being reminded of that is one of the things I'm humbly thankful for this year.