Downtown Peoria, Wednesday evening: winter is still alive and well.

These two things are the same.

two weeks ago…

A typewriter! A bearded young man just entered my tea haunt and set down his machine. It seems broken, as he guzzles his coffee and probes it with sharp objects. And in the end, he spontaneously gave it away to another person in the shop.

this week….

There’s a sharply dressed man, with fashionable scruff and black-rimmed glasses, flipping madly through his reporter’s notebook and jamming on his laptop keyboard. Is he here for a basketball player fallen from grace? Or a beagle named Uno? Surely there’s a deadline involved somewhere…

I’ve been meaning to mention an op-ed published in the Feb. 17 edition of the Washington Post titled “The Dumbing Of America.” That’s a weighty headline as-is, but it was followed with this subhead: “Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces.”

Author Susan Jacoby makes the case that we’re entering an age of “anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.” A large portion of her argument rests on the concept that video/interactive mediums have clobbered the printed page. As such, attention spans have atrophied. “The inability to concentrate for long periods of time — as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events,” she reasons. That’s a scary proposition, one I seem to find plenty of evidence for when I venture out for a drink at downtown watering holes.

Further evidence is given in a Harvard University study finding that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news of a presidential candidate’s voice dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds. Those mere seven seconds are what we’re basing our entire democracy on, for we all know that an average American will not go further than a television to find their news.

She continues: “The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place.” This, my friends, should shoot a fear so deep into your hearts that you deadbolt your door at night while sweating in a dark bedroom. If our arrogance truly has no boundaries, will even the word “mistake” soon be erased from the rarely opened dictionary?

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wrote a rebuttal to Ms. Jacoby titled “We’re Smarter Than You Think.” Unfortunately, his response generally comes across as flimsy and meaningless. Knowledge and learning rarely takes place from an encyclopedia, online or gathering dust in a library. Sure, it’s a great place to start… but that interest must make the same leap electricity makes in your car’s spark plugs.

Alas, none of these pieces have solutions. The Post hosted a chat session on the article that yielded some decent reader feedback. Perhaps an unbundling of education and knowledge needs to be attempted; many confuse the two to be the same. The last question posed to Ms. Jacoby regarded her credentials. “My credentials, as you put it, are that I’m interested in almost everything. I’m a generalist in an era of specialization, and I like it that way.”

Discuss.

Rivermen enforcer Eric Neilson swings at Manitoba’s Zack FitzGerald during the second period of Sunday’s 4-2 loss at Carver Arena. FitzGerald suffered a broken jaw from the fight. [Adam / Journal Star] (more photos) (video of the fight)

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Something was rotten in the Arbor District this last week. We’d be warned about our local cable company being traded or swapped with media behemoth Comcast. So it wasn’t completely surprising that we were left high and dry Internet-style one day… then two days slid right into three. It was time to call. Comcast claimed we were special for such an outage and said that it should be fixed in 48 hours. One additional call and we finally had that great expanse of world wide web at our beck and call again.

I felt slightly paranoid when I couldn’t access nytimes.com AND ebay.com this whole week. Is this a joke? Did someone find out how much time I spend on the NYT and calculate that I’d live a much fuller life without it? Photo uploads to various sites were also affected, but I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. This morning I woke up feeling vengeful and enacted some physical violence on the cable modem that involved voodoo networking practices that I cannot mention and a paperclip jammed into various orifices. The old Grey Lady is back in action… and so is my creepy obsession with buying serial killer memorabilia.*

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Total lunar eclipse, 9pm Wednesday evening (photo by Adam)

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I should have taken my sick days last week as time to read, ponder and reflect. Instead, I hunched over my laptop wasting countless of hazy hours on the interwebs like a fiend as I coughed up phlegm from my dirty bedroom. It was as vile as it sounds and I hope to never mention it again.

Two separate (but equal?) projects at work have all but removed me from the daily newspaper grind. I’ve relegated myself to rambling video interviews with Robertson Field House subjects and to hitting the blacktop visiting downtrodden single-screen theaters that still somehow exist in central Illinois. I’ll speak more on this later; just know that next-day satisfaction is a hard drug to give up, rolled up at the front door each morning. As far as Peoria is concerned, this man has disappeared.

Let us close with a tidbit on journalism in 1973; things have been on the decline ever since:

There was not a hell of a lot of room for a Gonzo journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere. For the first time in memory, the Washington press corps was working very close to the peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The Washington Post has a half-dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection. The New York Times, badly blitzed on the story at first, called in hotrods from its bureaus all over the country to overcome the Post’s early lead. Both Time’s and Newsweek’s Washington bureaus began scrambling feverishly to find new angles, new connections, new leaks and leads in this story that was unraveling so fast that nobody could stay on top of it…

– Hunter S. Thompson, “The Great Shark Hunt”

Treaty of Paris, Northern Room and Jack’s Mannequin… alone, this trifecta of shit would be enough to make anyone sick. And although spending hours in an old airplane hanger with thousands of teenagers only aggravated it, I’m sure this virus wouldn’t have cared if I was witnessing Felix Mendelssohn himself performing Sunday night.

No chicken noodle soup in the cupboard, so I settled on tomato. After spending most of Monday fitfully sleeping and heavily medicated, I awoke this morning completely drenched in sweat yet feeling fantastic. The fever had broken overnight, leaving me with a brilliantly vivid dream as some sort of odd calling card.

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I believe I saw bare ground one week ago, a brief respite from the thick and never-ending snow that’s permeated our lives for the past 3 months. Snow, no more! We’re all tired of taking the photos you expect in your city newspaper: kids playing in snow, persons shoveling or snow-blowing, snowplows circling in packs as they rip up pavement in an effort to clear the streets. The latitude difference between my Kansas childhood and my Illinois post-college life is minimal, but enough.

The latest storm brought brilliant flashes of pink/red lightning, known as “thundersnow.” Although more common in the north, it seemed slightly less common than a volcano erupting and spilling lava all over our front yard. Each strike magnifies twenty times, the reflecting snow turning the world into a giant flashbulb. The next day brought us suffocating fog, a nauseating scene that leaves you stumbling through the whiteness like a drunken sailor. If you are foolishly brave enough to travel in it, as I was forced to, fingers are crossed and prayers are said as you propel your car toward an unknown destination beyond. Will it be safe pavement or an errant bovine? Nerve-wracking, to say the least.

And so I find it appropriate to remember my childhood, when my father would read me and my sister Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” I remember him reciting it from memory at bedtime (right, dad?) It’s not a winter poem, per say, yet fits rather well. According to Wikipedia, “Jabberwocky” was meant by Carroll as a parody designed to show how not to write a poem. That original purpose was lost, obviously.

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