The Reticulator

Wow! This may be the best blog discovery of the year: Front Porch Republic. I found it while looking for articles about NCAA basketball and Tom Izzo, of all things.

The subheadline of this blog is “Place. Limits. Liberty.” Where else do you go to find those three words linked together like that? The “About” page has this paragraph to explain itself:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

I was tempted to highlight the words and phrases in that paragraph that push all the right buttons for me, but that would be most of them. I especially like that it links social and political issues to “Place.” That emphasis tempted me to rave about it over at The Spokesrider instead of here.

The only name I recognize in the list of contributing editors and editors-at-large is Rod Dreher — and that’s not someone I’ve paid much attention to.

An article by James Matthew Wilson titled, “Sex, Technocrats, and Technobrats,” suggests that maybe somebody besides myself has actually read Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address. I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to pope-talk, but I’ve read that speech in translation, and have since been amazed at all of the pope’s supporters and enemies who talk as though they’ve read it or heard it but have not. They may have read about it in the newspapers, but they haven’t read what he had to say.

According to this article, the pope has gotten a lot better reception in Africa than on Facebook.

Well, there are probably a lot of other blogs where I can read about pope-things. But this blog ties all these issues to place. If it continues to do that, it’s going to be a keeper.

I will be spending some time in a hospital waiting room tomorrow, so I went to the web site to find out what the policy is on computers and cell phones. For example, I can go to the University of Michigan Health System site to learn that cell phone use is restricted, but wireless access is available for computers.

So I went to bchealth.com, hoping to learn whether the policies and facilities are the same at our local hospital. There is no link on the main page for Visitor Information, but there is one for Patient Info. I clicked on that and found no information, but there are two (2) links.

• Patient Grievance Process Brochure
• Patient Grievance Form

and over on the sidebar:

• Questions or Comments.

That last one is a place where one can e-mail questions. It’s a little late for that now, but I tried using the search function to look up pages about wireless. No help there, either.

Oh, well. I don’t think our local hospital has as much money to spend on web design as the U of Michigan hospital does, but this gave me an idea on how companies that sell electronic products could save a ton of money on their web sites. Under “Support,” instead of providing links to FAQs, manuals, and downloads, they could just provide a link to lawyers who will handle class-action lawsuits. Not only would it eliminate the need to employ a lot of geeky web types, but it would instill confidence in the products — the kind of confidence that comes from knowing that the products require no explanation.

Remember 1983? I do. That’s when Secretary of the Interior James Watt said, “”I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” He had to resign shortly after. I wrote a letter to the Battle Creek Enquirer saying he should have been fired because his policies were repudiated, not because he said that.

Now President Barak Obama does a modern version of a fireside chat and makes a joke about the Special Olympics. Which standard should we hold him to?

First we had the Defenestration of Prague; now we have the Hypovehiculation of Barak. From James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today“:

In an item yesterday, we observed that the White House had done the right thing in “defenestrating” Charles Freeman, the unhinged former ambassador who had been President Obama’s nominee for chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Since Freeman was thrown under the bus rather than out the window, we should have said the White House did the right thing in hypovehiculating him. We regret the error.

It’s about time somebody invented it. It’s going to be an important new word for our political vocabulary. It has been needed for some time — starting at least as far back as when we first heard about Barak’s grandmother.

I need more books like “Wednesdays with Diether.” Maybe the Kalamazoo Gazette will publish another such collection of Diether Haenicke’s columns.

On Monday when I heard of Dr. Haenicke’s passing, I read a few random articles in my copy. But then I discovered it’s a good book for reading while running on our new elliptical machine. The book is small enough and the font large enough that I can read it even when my glasses start to get foggy. In fact, I can read it without glasses. That’s more than I can say for a bilingual Russian book I sometimes use for the purpose. Some combinations of Cyrillic characters get difficult for me to decipher toward the end of a run.

Actually, I’d rather watch a Big Ten basketball game while running, which is what I’ll do tonight. But other times I like to read.

The elliptical machine is a Nordic Track Autostrider 990. I’m mostly pleased with it so far. It would be better if I could attach some sort of articulating arm to hold a book, or a laptop computer to play movies. But I can rest a small book on a little ledge, and still see part of the display over the top. But most books I’d like to read are too big, or have printing that’s too small.

The Haenicke book is especially good in that when the display says “Slow down” I can see the word “Slow” above the book. But “Speed up” and “Speed OK” both look the same. All I can see is the word “Speed”. I definitely don’t want to miss a directive to slow down. If I miss an occcasional speed-up instruction, that’s not so bad.

Actually, I don’t have a lot of trouble with my cadence, probably because I’m used to a relatively high cadence when riding my bicycle. But I think I’ve slowed it down a bit in the last couple of years, so I hate to miss an actual command to do so.

Unfortunately Diether Haenicke’s book is an easy read, good only for two more sessions at the most. It’s a shame in many ways that we won’t be hearing more from him.