Soldier waits his turn to speak at Memorial Day observances in Canton. Archive Photo of the Day (5/26/09) by Lizette Haenel

Monday is Memorial Day, and this weekend is the traditional beginning of the summer vacation season. It might be time to open camp for the season, to put in the boat, to have the first barbecue of the year, or (if you are so fortunate) to do all three.

Memorial Day is also, of course, a solemn civic holiday devoted to remembering our soldiers who died in war. It was initiated as a national occasion three years after the end of the Civil War and was then called Decoration Day, after the traditional observance of visiting and decorating soldier cemeteries.

I recall it as a major celebration in Potsdam when I was a child, and memories of the great national struggle of WW II were still fresh in the minds of its veterans, the survivors of the fallen, and the civilians who sacrificed to the war effort. Somewhere I still have a shell casing ejected from one of the M-1 rifles fired in salute over the Raquette River at the end of each year’s parade. Schoolboys like me, fascinated with the uniforms, the guns, and the war stories always scrambled in to get the prized brass.

The holiday may be less well-observed now. I think that’s a natural consequence when today, most people are more distant from the experience of war. Wars such as the Civil War and the two World Wars left few families untouched, and no communities unaffected. The wars of the last few decades have not been as all-absorbing to the nation, except of course to the relatively small percentage of Americans who have fought and died in them, and the families who love and support them. But for most of us, it has been possible to go about our business as usual.

I can’t say that this is a bad thing; who would wish our wars to have been bigger? Yet memory is strongest where you have some skin in the game. Fewer of us may feel that immediacy now. Despite my good fortune in never having to experience war face to face, I try to take a little time to remember the skin and kin of mine who have. My father and his brothers and cousins who all survived WWII somehow, though not unchanged. Or my childhood neighbors, disabled by trench warfare nearly a century ago now. My mother, who cranked out tungsten in a defense plant, or my college classmates still haunted by the jungles of Vietnam.

Who will you be remembering on Monday and why? Let us know in a comment below.

Times Square, New York: JasonParis and Bourbon Street, New Orleans: Kyle Monohan, Creative Commons, some rights reserved

There are two kinds of people… no, no–not beer or wine, not Yankees or Sox, not Star Wars or Star Trek. I mean Met Opera listeners or American Routes listeners. In the interests of democracy, NCPR serves both in their proper season, but personally, one of my “Signs of Spring” is the voice of Nick Spitzer and the sounds of his roots show from New Orleans.

Maybe there are two kinds of people–New York City or New Orleans. New York is too big and too fast and thinks too well of itself for my comfort. I feel a little out of place there, a little in the way of business–like a flock of sheep crossing the Thruway. And the Met Opera is a little too grandiose for me–great music, high drama, spectacle–it’s a little exhausting. Plus, I mostly dress up for weddings and funerals. I prefer to witness music performances with my blue-jeaned backside planted in a folding chair on the lawn.

Though I haven’t been there yet, New Orleans seems more like my kind of town, a little slower, a little unbuttoned, even a little unglued. A town obsessed with good food and good music has its priorities in order. For example, I can’t think of a single Fortune 500 company headquartered in New Orleans. My kind of town.

The North Country is my home, but like most people, I have been to other places that made an impact on me–Portland, Oregon felt homey to me; Seattle did not. San Francisco here I come–but San Diego, not so much. Albuquerque, yes–Phoenix, no. Miami Beach, hola!–Orlando, where’s the exit?

Where do you fall on the opera/roots spectrum? What are some of the towns and cities you love and why? Spill it in a comment below.

In this neck of the woods, the Spring Equinox is just there to get your hopes up that winter may someday be over. But the first week of spring?–that’s the first week of May. On May Day, the leaves are just a yellow-green haze beginning to soften the harsh outline of bare limbs, stretching back into the distance. By the end of the week, the border of the woods is a fully opaque verdant green.

Archive Artwork of the Day from last May: “Trillium,” acryic on canvas. Artist: Marion Bradish. facebook.com/riverflowstudio

On May Day, there is a daffodil or two in the yard, scattered hyacinth and snowdrop. By the end of the week, the shaded riverbank is thick with trillium–white, purple and lavender. On May Day–no lilac blooms. Today the air that comes in  the kitchen window is thick with their perfume. On May Day, the rhododendron had hard green buds. Today–full bloom. The apple trees on May Day–barely budded. Today–festooned with white and pink petals.

The slightly icy reek of thawing soil has given way to the funk of busy worms. Turtles galumph along the road shoulder and bask on logs in shallow water. The herons are back in their rookery and are stilting along on the sandbar, hunting fish. And sun–sun that finally does more than promise warmth to come.

The season wants nothing but a full day of drenching rain punctuated with a thunderstorm or two, to kick the whole shebang up into its highest gear. I love it when world goes nuts, when it just can’t contain all that energy. Deer leaping, colts rolling in the grass, the daily yammer of birds at dawn. It’s been a long time coming.

I’ve been a fan of the New York Times daily headlines email for many years. It’s the first stop on my morning news beat, because (I confess) I check email in bed with my first cup of morning coffee. I don’t always click through to an article, but sometimes I click through to more than one, and I always give the newsletter at least a good scan.  I’m listening, of course, to Todd Moe and Morning Edition at the same time. Between them, I feel I have the start to a well-informed day.

My love of the NYT email newsletter led me years ago to create a weekdaily email  for NCPR, but it seems to be a well-guarded secret–only 400 subscribers, compared to more than 4,000 for this weekly Listening Post. At first, I thought, maybe not everyone gobbles down news like I do. But then I realized, probably most of you don’t even know it exists.

And that’s because the most common way to become subscribed to the Listening Post is to make a donation to NCPR, and to check the box that gives us permission to send you email on the donation form. We’ve always just signed you up for the Listening Post, but only because the Daily Regional News Brief didn’t exist when we started doing this. To get the News Brief, you have had to scout out the location of our subscription page in the clutter of our website and sign yourself up. Oh the weight of habit.

For those who have never seen it, it has all of the news stories from The Eight O’clock Hour, plus the Photo of the Day, plus the top NPR news stories at the time of sending, plus all the events in today’s Community Calendar. Tomorrow’s edition will also carry the three most recent posts from our In Box news blog. Basically, it’s our home page and our calendar, delivered to you every day. Free, of course.

This is by far the easiest and most comprehensive way to keep up with the full range of what’s happening in the region and at NCPR. I encourage all of you to sign up. Go here, enter your email address, check the box next to “Daily Headlines.” Click submit. Done.

It will come to you every weekday, just in time for your mid-morning coffee break.

Many of you have already met BOB, the Big Orange Box, which occasionally fills up part of the screen at ncpr.org, before settling down in a few seconds over in the right-hand column. BOB is a one-trick pony–only has one thing to say–”Give Now.” BOB was born a few weeks before our Spring fundraiser, and since the drive ended I’ve begun to hear from a few visitors asking:

“What gives? I already gave. The fundraiser is over. You made your goal. Why are you punishing me?”

In response, we have put BOB on a diet–he has slimmed down a little, disappeared from page one, has been dressed up with better graphics, and doesn’t appear quite so frequently.

But BOB is not going to go away, even though we are done with the week-long radio drive. Why? It’s not because we are greedy, or are punishing our fundraiser donors for doing the right thing.  We are more grateful than you know. Because you radio listeners have been paying almost all the freight for building and maintaining ncpr.org.

Over the last twelve years, NCPR has built up a whole second audience that rarely or never listens to NCPR on the radio. They don’t ever hear the radio fundraiser, and few of them contribute. The “ask” for contributions on our website has been pretty quiet, too quiet.  We’ve concluded that our online-only audience needs some kind of regular high-profile reminder that NCPR is paid for with voluntary contributions by its users. We certainly aren’t shy about asking for donations on the radio.

Hence BOB. He’s big and a little annoying, but necessary. BOB can make a big difference to us and to our radio audience. While 40-50,000 people are regular radio listeners to NCPR, more than a million different individuals used our online services last year. It would take only a small percentage of them, giving a little bit each, to really change the sustainability math at NCPR. As changing media technologies cause more and more people to move online, the art of raising money online will determine whether this service survives.

So, if you are one of the folks who regularly do your bit for NCPR, thank you. Just ignore BOB when he turns up. He’ll get out of your way in 3.5 seconds. If you are one of those who can’t quite remember whether you are reading USA Today, Huffington Post or NCPR at the moment, BOB will set you straight. Click on him to win a free ride to our donation page.

Like many of you, I have been swept up in the coverage of the recent events in Boston, obsessively checking websites, my email and the tube for the latest updates. It’s been a grim week, creating an all-too-familiar combination of anxiety, anger and bewilderment that so marked the days immediately following the 9-11 attacks. The follow-on incidents of poison-by-mail brought back to mind the anthrax attacks that came on the heels of 9-11.

Then yesterday, we saw an echo closer to home of the besieged mindset, when the St. Lawrence County Community Services Building was evacuated following the discovery of an unattended backpack. (It turned out it was left behind briefly while its owner went to get some paperwork from his car.)

Morning Edition yesterday had a great feature examining the psychology of post-attack thinking: “Boston Blasts A Reminder Of ‘The Fragility Of Life” by Alix Spiegel. I had just heard the piece when the news came from the county building, and I wondered whether the same situation would have triggered such a response had it happened last week, before the Boston bombing.

Skull and crossbones mug. Photo: Michael Marusin, CC some rights reserved

Probably not, according to Spiegel’s thinking. He cites psychologist Jeff Greenberg, who did an interesting study in the aftermath of 9-11, using a technique called incomplete word stems. You give subjects the beginning of a word and ask them to complete it:

“You could fill it out with a death-related word or a nondeath-related word — so, for example, coff- could be either ‘coffee’ or ‘coffin,’ ” he says.

For a long time after Sept. 11, the probability that people would choose “coffin” instead of “coffee” was higher than normal.

Besides random jumpiness and morbid associations, the mindset may have important consequences in the national life, as well as the individual’s:

“When death is percolating close to consciousness, people become more ‘us vs. them’ — they become defensive of their belief system, positive toward those they identify with and more negative to those who espouse a different belief system,” he says.

This explains in part, he asserts, why the country became so polarized after the 2001 attacks. The immediate instinct to rally together was overwhelmed by the anxiety-strengthened differences among us.

As I sit and sip my cup of “coffin,” I think of Boston, New York and Washington, Oklahoma City and Newtown. If these experiences, in the end, only drive us further apart–what experience can bring us together?

Not quite how I pictured the weasel/kangaroo thing working out. Art: Andree Prigent, Nouvelle Images

Sometimes Thursday comes along during fundraiser week and I have that gratefully complacent feeling–we’re on track to our goal and everything is going smoothly. And then there are times when I look at the countdown timer on the front page and see “Just 1 day, 21 hours and 23 minutes left, with $66,985 to go!” Eek!

That’s right–this is the Eek! hour. Somebody pump up the volume. Somebody throw me a lifeline. Somebody cut me a deuce! I start to come up with schemes to raise the energy level. What if we throw a weasel and a kangaroo in with the pitch crew and shut the door? What if we blat into the microphone with a vuvuzela every time we get a pledge? What if we have a giveaway drawing for a Tesla Roadster?

This is why they don’t have me running the fundraiser. I’m a little excitable. I’m a worrier. This is a tough time for fundraising, just like it’s a tough time everywhere in the North Country. Families have to watch the budget and we do, too. That being said, things cost what they cost, and our budget is pretty spare in the best of times.

Despite my nervous disposition, we’ll find a way to get by with whatever level of support the community can provide. We live a shared experience with our listeners, and our fortunes rise and fall with yours. We wouldn’t have it any other way. Many of you have already given, and I’m sorry to keep banging the gong in your ear when you’ve already done your part. But if you’ve been holding back to see if we really do need your help this year, we do. Simple as that.

Make the call to 1-800-677-3606 (which is now staffed 24 hours), or do the deed online.

Thanks. I needed that.

The expression used to be “Time is money.” But lately it seems more like “Data is money.” Connections, feeds, subscriptions, services–there’s the cable bill and the broadband bill, the land line and the cell phone, Pandora and Netflix, premium channels and pay-per-view, satellite radio and tablet data plans. Staying connected to the wired world and the unwired world can cost a fortune. This leaves broadcast fm and non-subscription online service as nearly the last places where you can be connected to the world without paying through the nose for the privilege first.

Just a little slice. Photo: Pernilla Rydmark, CC some rights reserved

The temptation, of course, is to just enjoy it. Haven’t you paid enough? Fortunately, enough people have resisted that temptation to keep North Country Public Radio strong and growing for 45 years–a fantastic longevity for a modern day media operation.

I read recently about a performer who adopted the public radio business model. He put his new collection of songs up online and allowed people to choose what they would pay to download it. Many took it for free, many took it for what they considered to be a standard price, and some paid more than one would expect to pay in the store. It all averaged out to enough revenue to cover the bills. Not a killing, but a living.

At NCPR, we make our living the same way, relying on you to place some value on the services we offer, just enough to sustain those services from one year to the next. And you have always come through. All next week, we will be encouraging you to support us again, to carry us through to the fall. The commercial media giants are all doing battle with each other, looking to gobble up the whole pie, if they can. We just ask you to save a little slice of the pie for public radio. We won’t wolf it down. And we always say please and thank-you.

Please.

Thank you.

With this week’s 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there’s been a lot of focus on the spring of 2003. At my age, ten years ago seems like only yesterday–or it did until I visited a site known as the WayBack Machine, which archives older versions of almost any large website, including NCPR.

NCPR home page, March 26, 2003, somewhere between 3-5 pm. Click image for full size version.

Here’s the front page at ncpr.org for March 26, 2003. That’s a long time ago in internet years. It’s small, because most computer monitors at the time had a smaller display area (in pixels) than many of today’s smart phones and handheld devices. It has very few images, because more than 90% of the North Country connected via phone modem–really really slow phone modem.

But still, most of what we do now, we did then. String Fever is on the air Thursday from 3-5. And you can subscribe to the Listening Post, which was just starting its second year of weekly publication in 2003, written then as now by yours truly. Karen DeWitt was reporting on the NY state budget–late that year. And we had the top NPR news stories–war news that week. You could listen to our live stream–very low-fi so you could get it over a phone modem. And you could search the site–sort of.

Facebook and twitter didn’t exist. The word blog had just come into common parlance, a worn-down version of the older geeks-only term “weblog.” In 2003 I began using blog software as a means to archive my (then briefer) spiels in the Listening Post.

Reading what I said 10 years ago yesterday…

Floating World

I was on the way back from Burlington when the war news began to break. I had gone as Connie Meng’s sidekick to the opening of O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music at FlynnSpace. We sat in her car riding the Grand Isle Ferry through ice floes and dark water, listening to the calm voices say the terrible things. How many times in my life I’ve driven through the night, listening to war news on the radio. This war, that war, the next war… the headlights only illuminate the few yards ahead.

…it really does feel like only yesterday, no matter how many years it’s been in internet years.

I’m always interested in news from the world of physics for the same reason I read writers about Zen–it’s not that I get it–it’s that I almost, but don’t quite get it in so many different ways. I back up and take another run at understanding, fail, back up and try again. It’s great exercise. When physics get stale, I can always take a stab at the unity of the Trinity. It’s a bogglement. So when Mark Memmot, in The Two-Way blog today, posts that “Scientists Think They’ve Pinned Down The Higgs Boson,” he’s singing my song.

In some way that eludes me at the moment, this graphical representation of the Higgs boson is intended to add to your understanding.

For your review, the Higgs boson is a subatomic particle long-predicted in the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, that would account for why things have mass. Experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland provided sufficient evidence for the existence of the Higgs particle that the discovery could be announced back in July. Additional data accumulated since then only confirms that observations fit the theory. That makes this a great time to trot out one of the “Nine Types of Stories That Drive Engagement,” as our most recent webinar put it–a “News Explainer.”

Except that I can’t explain it. In the 13.7 blog last year, Adam Frank cited Fermilab’s Don Lincoln, who said the energy field made by the Higgs is like water:

“Depending on your mass you’ll move through the water with ease — like a barracuda — or slowly, like a big, fat man.”

His 13.7 colleague Eyder Peralta says,

“The real important thing for me is that fundamental particles are, as far as we can tell, zero-dimensional particles. They have no radius. You can’t think of fundamental particles as being glass marbles. They literally have no extension in space. They can never bump into anything else.”

Huh? If everything is made of these particles, and none of them have any extension in space, what the heck takes up all this space? And what collides in the collider? Is it like it says in the Heart Sutra?

“form is no other than emptiness; emptiness no other than form”

If so, Avalokiteshvara could have saved them a couple billion euros. Much more likely is that I just don’t get it at all. It’s an old familiar feeling.