Mitch Gann’s

Reading over my previous post, I realize that it sounds as if I am promoting life in Alaska, with its wide open but largely uninhabited spaces, over life in big city America, with its teeming millions all trying to get somewhere at the same time you are.  This is not the case at all. Mitch Gann is a city boy, through and through.  I love having neighbors.  I don’t interact with them much; I just love having them around, in case I need something.  I love city conveniences, such as paved streets and cable TV.  I love the cultural opportunities, such as libraries, theaters and cable TV.  I love the big-box stores where I can buy a 65 inch plasma TV, cable-ready, any time I want to. I’ve never bought such a TV; I just love knowing I could drive to a store and in ten minutes live out the American dream of big-screen plasma ownership.

I am not into roughing it. The wide open spaces give me the hebee-geebees.   The sad truth is, I feel at home in the lonely crowd.

So, it is perhaps to be expected that my two big trips this summer were to major cities — indeed, great cities — Chicago and New York.

I enjoyed my time in both cities, even though the hotels in both were relying on satellite TV, which just is not as reliable as cable; I don’t care what anyone says.   I would return to either Chicago or New York in an instant, especially if someone else were paying the fare and offering a generous per-diem.

And yet, I felt far more at home in Chicago than I did in New York.  Well, I have visited Chicago many more times than New York, so that is a big part of it.  But there was something else, too.

New Yorkers walk faster and there are more of them on a given stretch of sidewalk.  In Manhattan, I felt like I was merging onto the high-speed lanes of an interstate — even when I was merely walking out the door of our hotel.  “Fast-paced New York” is a cliche, and an over-generalization, but nevertheless it’s my dominate impression of the place.  The crowds on Manhattan’s sidewalks, at almost any time of the day or night, are thick and fast flowing.  An abrupt stop in the middle of the sidewalk is not advisable. Get into a doorway or off to the side somewhere.  But exit with care.

Chicago has its crowds, too, of course, and people aren’t exactly lolly-gagging around there.  But on foot, at least, I felt more comfortable with the Chicago pace. (The cabs were another story.)

Maybe Chicago just has wider sidewalks to accomodate the famous broad-shoulders.

Like most Americans, I was surprised by John McCain’s choice yesterday of Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, to be his running mate. I was not “surprised and delighted” the way people on the far right of the Republican Party seem to be.  Just surprised.

I guess McCain is trying to shore up the support of his party’s conservative base, especially the evangelical Christians, and that may well work. Some think he is also trying to attract disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters.  That doesn’t seem as likely to happen.  I don’t know a lot about Sarah Palin, but at first impression, she seems to be more than a tad to the right of Hillary Clinton.  If both women were facing north and Sarah Palin were standing on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, Hillary Clinton would be treading water somewhere between LA and Honolulu.

Palin at least gives us a candidate in the race with some executive experience.  True, all of her experience has come in Alaska, a state with 640,000 people crammed into a mere 570,000 square miles. That’s over one human being per square mile, so during the course of a day you could expect to catch a glimpse of another person off in the distance, stalking a moose or chopping wood for the cook fire.  In contrast, on our recent vacation to New York City, my family and I stood in a cab line outside of Penn Station that was 640,000 people long.  We’d still be in line, but finally decided to walk.

Delaware, the state that Joe Biden represents in the U.S. Senate, is as small as Alaska is big; at 2,500 square miles, Delaware has 0.44% of Alaska’s area.  However, Delaware has a couple hundred thousand more residents than Alaska, and a population density of over 400 per square mile. According to U.S. Census data from the year 2000, Delaware is 6th among states in population density. Alaska is 50th.

The District of Columbia — the ultimate goal for all the candidates — is more densely packed than any of the states, and by a huge margin.  Yes, the Capitol and White House police do their best to keep us ordinary citizens away from our elected leadership, and that’s a good thing for both sides.  And, yes, many D.C. residents are poor people whom politicians can and do safely ignore after the election.  But, at least psychologically, sharing a square mile with nearly 10,000 other residents has to feel much different than having the whole thing to yourself.   All of a sudden, you’ve got neighbors, and lots of them.  Some of them smell funny.  Some of them are nuts.

Oddly, having all those neighbors can make you feel lonelier, and at the same time, more put upon.  In Alaska, if you happen to encounter a neighbor while you are out inspecting your line of beaver traps, you will probably stop and chew the caribou fat for a while.  If you try to do that in a busy place like New York City or D.C., your bustling neighbors (and a couple thousand tourists) are apt to stamp you into the sidewalk like a wad of  gum.  Of course, on the positive side, it is much less likely that you’d be inspecting a line of beaver traps in New York or D.C..

Anyway, I just think someone ought to point all this out to Sarah Palin.  She may not know how good she has it.

Ah, late summer. The season of  tomatoes, sweet corn, and ragweed pollen.  An article in Science News discusses the genetic basis of allergies. I definitely have the gene.

Saturday was terrible. I stayed inside, with the windows closed and a new pollen-proof filter on the AC. Didn’t help.  The house is apparently not air-tight.  Medications didn’t help much either.

Then finally it rained.  The rain washed the pollen out of the air.

God bless the rain.

I guess Barack Obama really is going all out to court the college-age voters. Who the hell else was up at three in the morning to get his VP text message? Not old guys like me, that’s for sure.

Did I say “old”? I meant, “mature.”  Which reminds me — the other day my wife and I had breakfast at a chain restaurant with a meal-club for “seniors,” meaning anybody 55 and over. “You should join,” my wife said.  I told her I didn’t want to go through the hassle of being carded.  “Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that,” she said. Turned out she was right. But, then, even when I was 21, nobody ever carded me.  I just have always looked . . . mature.

Of course, when Obama’s VP announcement went out, it was only midnight on the West Coast; maybe he was trying to nail down California. Yeah, that’s a toss-up state there.

What bugs me the most is that I had signed up for his email notice, and then never got it.  I did receive some other junk mail from the campaign, so I know I gave the right address.  Oh well. I guess Barack figures he has the senior vote in Michigan in the bag.

I do like Joe Biden. For one thing, he’s 65.  He and McCain and I could all enjoy the senior breakfast special down at the Big Boy some morning.

Barack will have to pay full price.

OK, it’s time to start writing again. Like the French, I took off most of August.

I discovered something new in the world of micro-blogging yesterday. Everyone knows about Twitter and its 140 character posts.  But some open-source developers have created a platform called “Laconica” that can be installed on any server to create custom micro-blogs. They also feature a 140 character limit to posts.  The great thing about Laconica (and any similar open source systems that might come along) is that the micro-blogs will be able to communicate with each other. You can establish an identity on one micro-blog site, and use it on others.  Right now, online communities tend to be “silos” unto themselves.

At the same time, a micro-blog could have its own special focus and specialized audience.  For instance, I have joined Leo Laporte’s micro-blog on his “This Week in Technology (TWiT)” site.  He just set it up a couple days ago, using Laconica, for the community that watches his video-casts at twitlive. Laporte calls his micro-blog “the Twit Army Canteen.” The community is mostly male and all technology junkie.  All Twits, in other words.

Broadway, looking south from 49th Street toward Times Square, on the evening of Saturday August 2, 2008.

We have returned from a six day family trip to NYC — the kind of vacation you need to rest up from. This is especially true if you go by train and are too cheap to pay for a sleeper berth.

I’ll blog more when I wake up.