“this election has never been about me. It is about you.”

The Democrats A stirring speech Economist.com: Barack Obama: "“this election has never been about me. It is about you.”"

A critical point for all of us, to take to ourselves, to internalize. This is beyond politics.

perspective: “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.”

Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike - New York Times -- I've spent a good amount of my time over the years noodling over the concept of perspective, trying to see things differently in order to break out of the lockstep that stifles creativity, and progress. Here's a good article on zero-gravity thinking, asking basic questions, and intentionally leaving comfort zones in order to grow. Looking back on it, I got a lot of these analytical techniques from dead Jesuits, but many also from a still-living professor, Maurice Geracht, who specialized in the novel; there's more to Henry James than most people suspect.

Here's the lead-in and the link to a good, quick read:

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.
This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path. (more...)

bringing the band together for a global tour

Chrysler Lures Another Top Executive - washingtonpost.com -- There's a fascinating story playing out here of tactical team-building to push what looks like a global initiative. Isn't Cerberus the multi-headed, multitasking dog who guarded the gates of hell, and do you remember, was he keeping them in, or keeping them out? Did you catch the heads up in Portfolio this past month?

Bloggapalooza 2.0+

We'll have to do this often, and annually.

This is our second run through, and it keeps getting better. This has come to be our annual review: I see things changing in our local community, and I see people undergoing transformations. They are coming together and beginning to trust in and rely on each other. They aren't looking beyond themselves for solutions. They are finding out that they themselves are the answer and hold the secret to finding the new keys.

This has come to be about MeetTheBloggers, and lots more: the NEO and the Ohio blogospheres, CoolCleveland, the new media, BrewedFreshDaily, RealNEO, art, aggregators, politics, community, books, coaching, ideas. Communicating. Integrating. Changing. Becoming healthy and wealthy again.

This entire dynamic is leading to other things. There are new players. There's a new game in town.

I want to let everyone know that I want and appreciate the friendships we've established over these past few years circulating throughout the blogosphere and Ohio; without MeetTheBloggers, the Cleveland Weblogger Meetups, and George, things wouldn't have gone so quickly, or so well.

A confederacy of coaches: Stephen Post on the radar of The Christian Science Monitor, and then comes Jack, and Sarano's in town, too

Researchers say giving leads to a healthier, happier life csmonitor.com -- Last week, The Christian Science Monitor ran a review of Stephen Post's latest book 'Why good things happen to good people.' Stephen recently met the bloggers, back on Flag Day, and we had a great discussion that definitely needs to be continued; we merely scratched the surface. I feel so good when our local writers get noticed in national publications. I get the sense that it's all happening right here, right now, and we're at the epicenter.

At the table that day was our friend and fellow blogger Jack Ricchiuto whose sixth book, Conscious Becoming, subsequently came out in July. Gloria just picked up a copy yesterday, and it's autographed. (as is Stephen's, too, by the way.) I also just got word late last night that Jack will MeetTheBloggers on August 16th, two months and two days after Stephen. Details will follow on Upcoming.org, or whatever those yahoos call it these days.

Finally, after Gloria scored Jack's book yesterday in the early morning, in the mid-morning we hiked on over to The Embassy Suites off Rockside to see our friend and coach Sarano Kelley, from whom we picked up a new copy (3rd printing) of The Game: Win your life in 90 days. This copy will go to Jack, whom, along with Valdis, we must introduce to Sarano. This can be a truly powerful network.

It's all converging. Right here. Right now. In Cleveland and in Columbus and in Pittsburgh. Stay tuned.

hidden amenities: Mayfield Country Club

GolfStyles Ohio Edition -- Private Matters: Mayfield Country Club, An American Classic.

I came across this today when somebody sent me a free magazine subscription, and I thought the story of the course's beginnings was interesting:

Mayfield is one of those great places that’s nearly hidden in the middle of a thriving metropolis. “Most people don’t even know it’s here,” Wood says.

It began with Mayfield’s founder, Samuel Mather. Along with 300 charter members, he acquired a 235-acre plot of forest and farmland along the then-unpaved Mayfield Road in the early 1900s. In 1909, under the leadership of Benjamin E. Bourne, Malcolm B. Johnson and W.H. “Bertie” Way (who was the former Euclid Club head pro and a man who designed several other courses in the area), the building of the golf course began. “Bertie Way was the first golf professional and the architect,” says Wood. “Mayfield was a spin-off of the Euclid Club that was in downtown Cleveland. It had been designed by Bert Way (the first nine) and a second nine belonged to John D. Rockefeller. He wouldn’t let the members play the second nine holes on Sunday because he was religious. So they went to the end of the trolley line and bought a piece of property and hired Way to design and be its first pro.”

On July 15, 1911, Mayfield Country Club opened its doors. Prominent members of the time included Cyrus Eaton, Harvey S. Firestone and Dr. George Crile, co-founder of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. In the next two years, Way’s contemporary, Donald Ross, came to Mayfield to install the bunkering, which largely remains to this day.

Way was head pro at Mayfield for 51 years, during which time the club hosted the 1915 and 1919 Western Opens, the 1920 Women’s National Championship, the 1927 Ohio Women’s Championship and the 1929 Women’s Western Championship. The 1990 Women’s Ohio State Amateur Championship was also held at Mayfield. Legendary professionals such as Chick Evans, Walter Hagen and Byron Nelson all played there.

In 1935, a swimming pool was added, something new for country clubs at the time. With the growing popularity of curling, the club added first an outdoor sheet, and later, a state-of-the-art indoor facility. Platform tennis was added in the 1960s. In 1987, a cross-country skiing program was inaugurated.

Two fires have destroyed Mayfield clubhouses, and the last one was rebuilt in 1948. In 2001, the club added a new dining room and put an addition onto the clubhouse for casual dining and a fitness center. There are locker rooms for men, women, junior boys and junior girls.

But the central lure for Mayfield is the golf course. “It’s an old-style golf course where the nines don’t come back,” Wood says.

clutter & noise on the internet

MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed - Columns by PC Magazine -- Good to hear near-brilliant predictions that run parallel with mine. I fled screaming (virtually) from Second Life and MySpace, then forsook Twitter when I decided I was too weird to report, religiously and meticulously, what I did hour by hour--somebody would have me committed way before my time.

Daryl says PD reporting on Breuer Tower issue is flawed

Over at Save Our Land, Daryl Davis points out a few flaws in the PeeDee's Joan Mazzolini's reporting skills. It does seem like they're stacking the deck by the way they're manipulating public opinion here.

DIME: dense inert metal explosives

CRIMES AND CORRUPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS: Israelis target Palestinians with weapons causing 'burns ... by heat so intense that many cases have required amputation': Here's a link sent to us by an expatriate friend who's spent his life since college in Bangkok. From a unique perspective, he scours the world news looking for evidence of injustice, lies, and political treachery, and here's one of his latest findings, something new to me, something that seems particularly reprehensible: DIME.

"This technology is one of a new range of 'low collateral damage' or LCD weapons designed to minimise the damage to nearby property, by confining its increased lethal effects to a restricted space. So it is 'ideal for densely populated areas' and 'helping the warfighter to prevent the loss of public support,' according to its enthusiastic proponents."

invitation to an exorcism

For a good many years here, we NEO natives have lived in the shadow of fear cast by that cheap shot known as the "Cleveland Joke." So that I don't have to give it further power by speaking its name, henceforth I will refer to this phenomenon merely as the "CJ." I've tried tracing back its origins on Google and failed. My feeling is that there must be some sort of long karmic tail attached to birthing and nurturing a form of humor that gets its sad, sneering little life from making fun of somebody else's origins or affiliations. There must be a name for this sort of lame humor in the comedy world, something like "the takeaway."

So, to exorcise the CJ, the pathetic little insecurity that seems to plague our community, I guess we have to call it out, and to call it out, we have to know its origins and all its sources. These are the things of which I am unsure.

Did it start with Bing Crosby's razzing Bob Hope about his Cleveland origins?

Was it perpetuated by Maynard G. Krebs character (Valdis, did your family have any part in this?) on the Dobie Gillis show, when they trotted out "The Monster That Devoured Cleveland" routines, and did "Cleveland" become a one-word punchline, much as the word "work" did?

Did Lenny Bruce add to the mix? What about the radio jocks of the '60s & 70s, things like Mad Daddy and Wild Child? MAD Magazine? Cracked?

How about Ghoulardi, Ernie Anderson--did he get the laugh-o-meter mileage out of "Cleveland" as he did out of "Dorothy [Fuldheim]" and "Parma" and "Oxnard"? What about Tim Conway? David Letterman? Johnny Carson?

What screenwriters from Cleveland used the CJ when they couldn't think of what else to do?

Who continues to use the CJ today? Do any of our elected officials still toss out an offhand CJ apologetically, to make up for a deficit of friends and well-wishers? Is there anybody at all out there who actually thinks the CJ is funny or even remotely useful?

Finally, are any of us responsible for letting this play on and on? Aren't we all getting sort of tired of hearing about it?

I think what perturbs me most about the CJ is that, from my perspective, it just isn't so, it's never been so, and it's never been fair or honest. I've tolerated it thinking it would go away, and for me, it has. The requisites for the CJ to be real humor were never there in the first place. I'm going to consign the CJ to that quite place, where lie other nerdily clever phrases like "yo' momma" and it's sibling "your mother wears combat boots," "I know you are but what am I," and "so funny I forgot to laugh."

So far as I'm concerned, it's exorcised. I'm done.

alternative investments and a moral imperative

For Yale’s Money Man, a Higher Calling - New York Times -- Here's a good read about a guy who revolutionized portfolio management in general by looking beyond the traditional mix of stocks and bonds, making Yale's endowment the standard against which all others are measured. The article also gives you a glimpse of the philosophy behind Yale, and an idea of why so many Yale graduates focus on quality of life issues and wind up in positions of public service. Around here, a cataloguing of Yalies who serve includes the Morrison brothers, Ed and Hunter; David Pogue; Sherrod Brown; and Oliver "Pudge" Henkel. On a national level, we have Garry Trudeau and Sir John Templeton, William F. Buckley and Bill Clinton, George Pataki, and the current president and his most recent competitor. It seems to be an interesting school, and Mr. Swenson has made it possible for everybody who qualifies to receive an education there. It's a long article, but take time to read the whole thing. Here's the section on the move to alternative investments:

Yale has every reason to want him to stay. After joining the university’s investment office when he was just 31, Mr. Swensen moved Yale’s portfolio away from a strict menu of stocks and bonds, favoring instead more diverse instruments like hedge funds, commodities like oil and timber, and private company investments.

That strategy revolutionized endowment investing, and other schools have followed suit. Mr. Swensen’s track record and his growing cachet have helped Yale attract donors who believe that their gifts to the university will be well deployed. Although his two books, “Pioneering Portfolio Management” and the more recent “Unconventional Success,” have helped raise his profile as an investment guru, he remains ambivalent about promoting himself. He notes that there are thousands of university professors who have also forgone more lucrative careers to put their skills to work in the academic world.

Tim Ryan and some "loud umbrage"

OPENERS: Ryan creates stir on House floor--from the PD political blog, here's some more good stuff from Tim Ryan (MTB 08/19/2006), who has a take on things that aligns fairly closely with what I consider proper and in the best interests of all of us.

Insomniacs seeking some ZZZs watching last night's House debate over
Iraq were in for a jolt when Niles Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan got hold of the mike
at around 11:40 PM.

A Republican, identified by Ryan staffers as Indiana's Steve Buyer, took loud umbrage at several points when Ryan attacked Republicans for calling his party's distaste for the war "unpatriotic." Buyer was gavelled down several times as he attempted to object to Ryan statements such as these:

"We never called the other side unpatriotic ... We've called you incompetent. We said you're incapable. And we've said you're derelict of your oversight responsiblity. But never, Mr. Speaker, have we called anyone in this House unpatriotic." When Ryan was asked whether he'd yield the floor to a parliamentary inquiry from Buyer, he snapped "I don't yield" with belligerence reminiscent of his congressional predecessor and former mentor, Jim
Traficant.

"We've heard a lot over the last couple of days about the American
Revolution, and the Civil War and World War II," Ryan concluded. "Well, Mr. Speaker, our president today is not Washington, he is not Lincoln, and he is not Roosevelt. And so I think our Republican colleagues should take the advice of the Secretary of Defense. And that's: You go to war with the president you have, you don't go to war with the president you wish you had."

To view video of his speech, click here.

"the fish rots from the head down"

I was just thinking, given the messes we have in governments, in corporations, their boardrooms, and hierarchical systems in general, might it be possible to name a blog "the fish rots from the head down" and keep it full of content effortlessly?

revisiting Flannery O'Connor country

In Search of Flannery O’Connor - New York Times--One of my favorite writers gets play in the TIMES today. I found Mary Flannery O'Connor fascinating in the middle '60s, first reading her right after she died and before I ever lived in Georgia, and then even more trenchant after my "tours of duty" in Columbus/Phenix City and Atlanta. This is a long article, but worth it. Here's a sample:

Somewhere outside Toomsboro is where, in O’Connor’s best-known short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a family has a car accident and a tiresome old grandmother has an epiphany. The fog of petty selfishness that has shrouded her life clears when she feels a sudden spasm of kindness for a stranger, a brooding prison escapee who calls himself the Misfit.

Of course, that’s also the moment that he shoots her in the chest, but in O’Connor’s world, where good and evil are as real as a spreading puddle of blood, it amounts to a happy ending. The grandmother is touched by grace at the last possible moment, and she dies smiling.

“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

I don't quite get it

The Chris Matthews Show--I got up early this Saturday morning, 0630, zero dark thirty, to watch the Chris Matthews show; I've been watching Chris perform since I arrived at Holy Cross in the fall of 1964, finding him a year ahead of me and holding forth daily in raucous and impassioned discussions in what we called "the caf." The 1967 Purple Patcher tells me that--

"Caf" is an abbreviation for

a) a place to sit and watch other people sitting and watching,

b) a room where you can hear lunch-room theologians, boasting casanovas, budding leftists, and "Caf rats" discuss the importance of Polynesian Frog Worship,

c) an enameled chamber designed by the architect of Madison Square Garden's washrooms,

d) all or none or some or any of these

Most don't know that Chris owes much of his style to dead Jesuits. But, I've digressed. But, what the heck, it's Saturday. Anyway, what struck me as I listened to this week's gathered pundits extrapolate political data in order to game the primaries in February of 2008, a full year away, was that we were focusing on something that's a mere whistle stop on the way to the main event in November of 2008, and that's a very long time to be talking about these same aspirants, and a long time for them to be playing to the audience of potential voters. Can't we talk about something else for a while, like what is do-able and achievable here and now, and not after somebody gets elected in 2008 and into office in 2009?

The other, more pernicious aspect of these campaign-horse-race shows is that the candidates, whom we've not yet elected and may never elect, have more ability to form the public dialogue and to sway public opinion than the people we've elected already. Are we being fair to ourselves to take ourselves out of the present and focus on a hypothetical future? Let's get some work done for a change, and stop talking about what might happen, if only somebody gets a chance to implement their ideas, and if only they work out as advertised. Let the aspirants be known by their deeds, not by their promises. Let them be known by their works.

Which begs the question: Does any real work ever get done by people in the political arenas, or do we all just talk about it, as we slide into an abyss we refuse to talk about?

noosphere vs. cyberspace

Noosphere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia--I'd noticed in grazing through Chris Corrigan's material that he has a fondness for the term "noosphere," as did Teilhard de Chardin. The wikipedia entry is a good place to start on a refresher, or an introduction, as the case may be. I find it comforting to find people who have similar ideas on their back burners.

The noosphere can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from the Greek νους ("nous") meaning "mind" in the style of "atmosphere" and "biosphere". In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky's noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.
The word is also sometimes used to refer to a transhuman consciousness emerging from the interactions of human minds. This is the view proposed by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who added that the noosphere is evolving towards an ever greater integration, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the ultimate goal of history. The noosphere concept of 'unification' was elaborated in popular science fiction by Julian May in the Galactic Milieu Series. (more)

I missed this in November: Frank Mills and the Urban Paradox

CATALYST CLEVELAND :: Viewpoints--Frank Mills wrote this viewpoint a few months ago, and it did not get into my purview until just now. It's a good read for anybody interested in basic talk and cutting to the chase, actually getting something done instead of just talking about it. I also see in COOL Cleveland that Frank is over at David Allen Moss' FUTURE Center on January 30th.

Urban Paradoxes founder Frank A. Mills invites anyone who is a "graffiti artist, psycho-geographer, urban explorer or interested in public art, urban planning or are an urban social worker" to join him at CIA's FUTURE Center for Design and Technology Transfer for Tuesdays@FUTURE on Tue 1/30 at 4:30-6:15PM Info and Info and Info.

Here's the lead-in thesis to the November piece:

The problem in Cleveland is that our Community Development Corporations (CDCs) are quasi-public agencies funded by block grants administered by individual City Council members. But the mayor's appointees in the city administration also control funding and directly influence what CDCs can do.Given the history of CDC funding in Cleveland and how it has driven some CDCs to poach in other CDC territories for funding, I do not believe you will find any CDC willing to demand that politicians or developers address the real quality of life issues that revitalize neighborhoods, including the creation of strong neighborhood schools.As I work in neighborhood revitalization around the country, I see strong neighborhoods and schools emerging in cities where CDCs are (1) grassroots initiatives, both adult and student, (2) funded privately, usually by a combination of resident and neighborhood business dollars, and where (3) businesses are willing to become directly involved. When foundation or public funds are used, they almost always come after a strong grassroots plan has been put in place.

how James Brown kept Boston from burning

Features : Radar Online--by David Gates, an event I'd forgotten about, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, in which James Brown saves Boston. These were some intense times. Check out the link ( James Brown, Boston Garden, April 5, 1968) in the Gates story to the recent Boston Globe article , as well.

Robert Anton Wilson: never rule out any possibility

The Blog Paul Krassner: Literary Loss The Huffington Post from Paul Krassner, on the death of Robert Anton Wilson: In 1964, I ran another front-cover story by him, "Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb," which began: "The future may decide that the two greatest thinkers of the 20th Century were Albert Einstein, who showed how to create atomic fission in the physical world, and Timothy Leary, who showed how to create atomic fission in the psychological world. The latter discovery may be more important than the former; there are some reasons for thinking that it was made necessary by the former....Leary may have shown how our habits of thought can be changed...."

And from The New York TIMES:

Mr. Wilson contended that people should never rule out any possibility, including that lasagna might fly. On Jan. 6, in his last post on his personal blog, he wrote: “I don’t see how to take death seriously. I look forward without dogmatic optimism, but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.”

Two good articles about a fascinating fellow help to begin to put our culture into perspective, finally. Tune in.

Schlesinger shows us the way: Folly's Antidote

Arthur, in his New Year's Day piece in the New York TIMES, may be showing us the way we need to proceed from here on in, as citizens who promote and maintain the civic dialogues for the benefit of all of us.

The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing — the search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.

History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation’s history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens.