Because I Need Something Else to Do...

I've kind of resolved this year to try to go without using plastic bags. And just in general to be more eco-conscious as I go through my days, consuming less, making and reusing more. It's a subject I'm really interested in and want to share with others, but I'm not sure it fits on this blog. I'm not really sure what fits on this blog, and see it probably going away pretty soon.

(I also want to turn my main website into a crafty blog, soon as I ask Nick to install WordPress over there for me.)

Anyway, I started a new blog today called Ecoish. Probably should have been Greenish, but ecoish is what popped into my head when I was driving around this morning (errands, not just random driving, of course!), so that's what it is.

I hope it will be a place where people can share ideas on what they're doing to green up their lives. If that's something that interests you, hop on over and add a comment on your green resolutions for 2009.

Detroit Papers May Stop Home Editions

I know, more newspaper news, but you can't take it out of the girl, for one, and second, this is pretty amazing. The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News which are operated together by Detroit Media in a joint operating agreement (sort of like what we have in Northwest Arkansas with the Times and the Democrat-Gazette) are apparently talking about eliminating home delivery of print editions on all days except Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

Instead, they'd offer a small print edition that could be purchased on the newsstand and that would direct readers to the larger digital edition.

The papers would be the first major metro dailies to so significantly cut back their print editions (the Christian Science Monitor is going web only for the daily and will have a print product on Sundays only).

The Freep, as it's known in the biz, is the twentieth largest newspaper in the country by circulation. Seems like a pretty drastic step in such a big market, but of course the economy in Michigan has tanked and circulation numbers are down.

Even so it's a very risky move, because if readers don't have Internet access, or don't get into the habit of visiting your website on a daily basis, you've lost them entirely.

We get the newspaper on weekends, and I never read the local paper's website during the week. If I need news I go to one of the big newspaper sites, and I watch the local news if I feel the need for local news during the week. I imagine a lot of people who get a daily paper now will react in a similar way when they're cut down to a few days a week.

Nothing's official yet, but it seems like a bad, desperate cost-cutting move that's just going to make things worse. Of course I could be wrong and we could learn that this is the way for newspapers to stay alive in the future. We'll see.

Farther Along

It's been an age since I've actually written about a book on this site. I actually have kind of stopped doing book reviews other than for About and CalorieLab when they come up, not because I don't want to do them, mostly just because they're time consuming, often don't pay all that well and I think my local paper that I used to write for would rather save the money.

But I did read a book this weekend that wasn't related to one of those websites (and it feels like it's been an age since I've done that, too) so I thought I'd share. It was Farther Along by Donald Harington (Toby Books, 2008), who maybe you've never heard of if you're not from Arkansas. Heck, maybe you've never heard of him if you are from Arkansas. Either way, you should get to know him.

But by all means, do not start with this book. Start like I did, with The Cockroaches of Stay More or even with Lightning Bug, which is probably my favorite.

This one is mostly set in Stay More, a fictional town in the hill country of north Arkansas, and it has some of the same characters as some of the earlier books, but only one character in the book has an actual name: Eliza Cunningham, a historian from a college in Missouri who also has the same name as (and may be the reincarnation of) the daughter of an anti-slavery governor of the state who once lived in the same small town.

The book focuses on the Cliffdweller, who was raised in Arkansas but made his fortune out east where he was the curator of a collection of American antiquities. He leaves it all behind to live in a cavern in the woods above what used to be Stay More and is now just a collection of mostly falling apart buildings where one woman still lives.

There are other characters, including a moonshiner whose fingers also represent characters in the book. There are allusions to the characters as musical instruments as well. Each section of the book is in a different person's point of view (and a different verb tense!), and the last section is letters written by various people to a colleague at the college.

Confused yet? Me, too, and I actually read it. Even with the strangeness and confusion I enjoyed the book just because Harington is a great storyteller, even when the story's not so great, if that makes any sense. You still want to know where he's going even if you're still not sure where you are when you get there.

While I can't give an unqualified thumbs up to this particular book, I think reading it will probably motivate me to read some other of his books that I've never gotten to, which can only be a good thing.

In Which Sarah Ends a Long Silence to Mention a Topic No One's Interested in

Yes, I've been away. No real excuse for it. Life gets in the way of the fun stuff sometimes. My pal Jessica says everyone should blog every day this month (after she blogged every day last month). I don't think I'll go that wild, but I will try to be more in touch, and actually talk about books and journalism and the sorts of things I intended to talk about when I started this blog.

Speaking of, CNN is floating a new wire service as a cheaper (and hopefully less totalitarian) version of the Associated Press. Thirty newspaper editors will be traveling to Atlanta to get a detailed pitch on the service, which aims to cover at least national and international events for less than the AP charges (which is a lot).

I think this kind of competition for newsgathering could be great, but I wonder about using journalists trained for television to write stories for newspapers. There's a big difference between relying on video and sound bites and painting a story with words. Also, CNN so far doesn't plan to offer still photography, so the plan may be better suited for the newspapers' websites (where video would be useful) rather than the print editions.

But at the same time I've been mad at the AP since they decided bloggers should have to pay for citing their stories, and that using just a few words of a story would require a website to pay a fee. In any case, it's great to see that anyone has the money to expand their newsgathering operations these days, and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Joy

I know pretty much every blogger in America is writing about the election today, and there's probably nothing I can add except I am so proud of us as a nation.

That and the four most beautiful words in the English language today:

President-elect Barak Obama.

President Obama. Yes we can. We did, and we will continue to.

I have a lot of hope that the change we are longing for is more than a pretty speech, that our nation really is going to heal. But it's going to take more than Obama to get us there. My dream is that everyone who got involved this year, whether it was their first time or they're old pros, will stay involved and do what needs to be done to make this nation and this world as beautiful as our dreams for it.

These will be the longest two months ever.

Wanted: A Happy Ending

Last night Nick and I did an appropriate thing for the night before the election: we watched "Slacker Uprising," Michael Moore's movie about trying to get young people mobilized to vote against Bush in 2004. (You can download it and watch it for free, and it's well worth it.)

We all know how well that turned out, and watching the movie made me profoundly sad to think about all the time we've lost. Even if you assume we couldn't change the history of 2000, what ugliness of the past four years might we have missed with a Kerry-Edwards administration?

Would we still be in Iraq? Would we have seen the economic crisis coming and done something about it before it was too late? Would we have started a green movement that would actually be making progress by now? Would there be less divisiveness, less biterness, less of a feeling that the rest of the world thinks we're crazy, unstable and dangerous?

Maybe none of those things would have come to pass, but I still can't help thinking that we've lost so much time -- wasted so much time -- that everything is going to be harder now.

But I fervently hope that we're going to change things, that we're going to get our happy ending. It starts today.

I've had this Cat Stevens song in my head all morning, "100 I Dream," which seems kind of appropriate for today.



And speaking of Cat Stevens, one of the clips you can see for free from "Slacker Uprising" is Eddie Vedder doing "Don't Be Shy," another beauty that pretty well epitomizes what we all need to do these days, and today.



Peace and happy voting to you all.

Hooray for Leftie Movies!

Nick and I have actually been to see a couple of movies over the last couple of weeks, which is really rare for us (I think the last movie we saw in the theater before our vacation a couple of weeks ago was "Iron Man").

First we caught "Religulous" down in Little Rock, when I think it may have been the only place in the state you could see it (it's now at Fiesta Square in Fayetteville, if anyone's interested). We really enjoyed it and pretty much agree completely with his premise that it's dangerous for any country in the world to be run by people who believe in talking snakes or that the rapture is going to happen in their lifetime (though the movie isn't entirely about Christians, they bear the brunt of his criticism).

What I don't agree with, or at least don't think is really constructive, is his final argument that religion needs to be destroyed if our nation is to prosper. That's just unrealistic. I'd have enjoyed it more if he'd ended on a more positive note, encouraging people who lack faith to make themselves more vocal and visible without suggesting that either group needs to destroy the other.

Then on Friday we went to "W." This movie is really brilliant and well done, and will leave viewers wondering how much of it is real (the film's website has a helpful guide with sources for true events and notations of when things were made up or changed -- like Ari Fleisher being the press secretary throughout the movie when he wasn't there the whole time).

I think there's enough truth to it for this movie to provide really interesting insights into W.'s real-life behavior, why he did the things he did and how the war went down. Watching them use the shoddy evidence that was available to justify actions they already knew they wanted to take was pretty painful, knowing where it got us, but I also think it's important for us to see it.

The parts with Bush Sr. interacting with W. are particularly enlightening; though it's probably too much to say that we got W. as president because he was a child always trying to live up to his father's expectations may be a bit of a stretch, but not too much. Check this one out if you get a chance.