BEWARE OF SURVEY CONCLUSIONS

February 28, 2014March 19, 2013 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Relying on survey results alone can be dangerous. One paper I worked for launched a very successful Sunday edition after a survey had told them, Don’t do it, it will be a disaster. Instead, the publisher trusted her gut – and won.

Around the same time, when Doonesbury was the hottest comic strip across the country, another paper’s survey told them it was the most hated item in the paper. Fortunately, another survey found that it was also the most popular.

I’ve learned to regard an intensity factor – not just whether something is popular, but how high in ranks on a scale. Yes, in those days, everybody read Peanuts, when you were looking at your top ten comics, but when you weighted for top-three intensity, it was easily topped by Garfield, Far Side, and Cathy.

So when it comes down to most hated or most loved, if you listen to the complaints, you turn boring and bland. There’s nothing to excite anyone.

I can look to symphonic programming with the same message. Yes, works by living composers upset a lot of listeners. But when you rely on the chestnut classics, you quickly turn stale.

REGARDING A GRANDFATHER CLOCK

February 24, 2014February 21, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I was growing up, “going to the farm” meant a trip to my grandmother’s sister and brother-in-law in the other corner of our county. One of my memories was of the grandfather clock that stood at the top of the stairs and Aunt Edna’s mentioning that it had been carried over the mountains in a Conestoga wagon “from the place where Conestoga wagons were made.”

As a history buff, I eventually realized that was Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, now famed for its Amish population. The plot thickens, as I explain at my genealogy blog, The Orphan George Chronicles.

Decades after the farm had been sold and I began working on the genealogy puzzle, I received a few photographs of the clock, and a few days ago I scanned them into my computer. You can’t see many of the details, but I remember the small moon and sun that would rotate in the clock face. A few years ago, back in Ohio, I was surprised by how short the clock itself is. We think of grandfather clocks as large, but this one is probably shoulder-high to me.

Most amazing, though, is the sweet ringing it issues in singing its quarterly rounds. Not a gonging sound at all, but more like the clinking of crystal stemware.

And to think, the clock itself had been rediscovered, hidden away on its side in a loft of one of the barns. Just goes to show, you never know quite what to expect when you go rooting around in an old barn now, do you?

EARLIER OWNERS AND THEIR IMPRINT

February 20, 2014February 25, 2013 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Every time we undertake another repair or remodeling project with our old house, I’m reminded why I don’t do it myself. Yes, I’ll assist our carpenter/electrician or even keep an eyeball on the plumbers, but the earlier work we encounter always presents something inexplicable.

When we were stripping the walls and ceiling of the kitchen, for instance, Rick looked up and said, “I don’t like that.”

“Don’t like what?” I replied, looking at the weird angles of the two-by-fours running to the ridgeline. I could have as easily said, “Now what?”

“The roof’s not attached to the walls,” he replied. Oh? We both calculated it had been that way eighty years or so, however miraculously. “I’ll do what I can to strap it down.”

It’s a long list, actually, of guys who thought they knew how to fix things. But they weren’t pros or even skilled. Makes me wonder about a lot of the construction guys at work today. So I’ve become ever so grateful to turn to people who are truly capable. The best ones are worth every penny.

BEWARE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

February 18, 2014February 2, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Reporters and editors live in dread of accidentally publishing a lewd expression. It’s not just the list of four-letter words themselves or the inevitable typographical errors. (You know, the embarrassing “pubic” for “public.”) The innocent double-meaning can be the worst. The famous “Colonel Screws guest at banquet” headline that went through five or six editions before getting caught. Or the caption for the Supreme Court justice about to climb the staircase to a second-floor dinner: “Justice Douglas prepares to mount women” instead of “mount stairs with women.”

As one of our colleagues would remind us, quoting one of his mentors, “It takes a dirty mind to put out a clean newspaper.”

(Oh, the stories we could tell.)

BOBHOUSES

February 16, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

When they lived way up in Maine, with a large lake just down their road, I remember hearing Eric tell about the morning he looked out the window and saw a traffic jam. Miles and miles from the nearest traffic light, here were bumper to bumper pickup trucks heading to and from the lake. Soon, he realized they were removing their bobhouses before the ice melted.

Bobhouses, of course, are part of the male culture of northern New England and many other frozen parts of the world. Since I don’t fish, no matter how much I admire fly fishermen and their skills, I really don’t appreciate the special savvy of landing one’s meal from under the ice. You can do it, of course, by drilling a hole in the thickness underfoot and then sitting or standing out in the cold. But the really serious guys build or buy their own little houses for the tradition – some are quite basic, while others, I’m told, come with TVs and Web connections. Still, I’m curious about what draws men from their warm homes to spend long days or evenings in a very cold environment. One of the answers is that it’s an excuse to drink with your buddies. Another is that it’s just to get away from the women. Except that it turns out some very adventurous women join in on the expedition. Are the fresh fish really worth this much effort?

Even so, that afternoon, Eric looked out again and saw another traffic jam, this time with trailers hauling their boats to the water. Presumably for more fishing.

How did they know this was the day the ice would go? What clues am I missing?

DEAREST MADAMOISELLE, LOVELY AND EVER CHARMING

February 14, 2014February 2, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time: Hey! Somewhere along the line, the Postal Service lost a letter, it seems. At any rate, I’ve been wondering about you, how you’re doing, whether you decided to run off to New Mexico or Arizona and start having babies one-two-three or whatever. Even whether I’d said something that offended terribly. (So much for self-esteem, right?)

At least, thanks to the wonders of Computer Era (or, too often, Computer Error) I be able (that, I’m told, reflects Chicago schooling regarding the conjugation of the verb to be) to resurrect my last letter to you. Is this the one you responded to, meaning I never got your last letter? Or did you not get this one? And the poems in the new Indigo, um, are they the two you didn’t know you had or, surprise, are they the ones I sent in July? Mysteries, mysteries!

At any rate, I’m anxiously awaiting the new issue – and all the news – and maybe even the missing letter!

On this end, to update from what’s there: Am still waiting for the chapbook … the usual unexpected delays and complications; in this case, a near-fatal blood clot suffered by the editor’s wife.

As you can see, I’m in the midst of a major computer conversion – from a fourteen-year-old XPC II system and nearly 300 five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks (Word Perfect 4.1) to a 6.4-gigabyte Pentium II Windows 98 Word 97 unit with both HP scanner and inkjet printer. It’s taking much longer than I anticipated; am still not on-line (one step at a time!) It’s like household he-man repairs and remodeling: everything takes three times longer than you believe it will, should, or can. Just ask your Italian father: if he’s anything like my ex-father-in-law, the one I miss greatly, these jobs are just that. (One of Sam’s great lessons to me, by the way: be sure to leave something undone for tomorrow!)

So I built, from kits, a new credenza and hutch, plus a “utilities cart,” projects that proved the timing theory: the credenza that took the salesman two hours to assemble took me six or eight, in part because the instructions are written in three languages but proficient, from what I could determine, in none. Ditto for the printed illustrations. Then, when the electronic goodies came, there were all the boxes to unpack and the new wiring to figure out (and whatever you need for the big rebates seems to get lost with the trash). Guess I’ll never purchase again where there’s a rebate involved! Just give me the discount, now! To say nothing of the software to install, nearly wrecking my Windows 98 in the process. (A Sunday morning phone call to Hewlett Packard nearly averted that!) At least much of the software installation is so much easier than it was a decade ago! My computer guru, the one I’ve “hired” for a bottle of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels, has been a big help, dropping on me a stack of magazines that could be used instead as the coffee table; his real challenge is in rigging the system that will allow me to convert and transfer a dozen or so novels and tons of other writings from the old system to the new. All this must seem foreign to you, who appear so much at ease with stylish desktop publishing! (So when did you first delve into cyberland – and desktop and all of the great touches you display?)

Hmm, that’s interesting, the date on the page break and all. One more thing to figure out, eventually – modifying these damn templates to my own style! (Spent a couple of hours a few weeks ago trying to do that, only to finally learn I couldn’t do it – see now there are other ways to go about it, thanks to a $40 book that tells me what Microsoft’s can’t.)

Did get away for a week in a small cabin in the Maine woods – no heat and no glass in the windows, but there was a fireplace as well as sliding shutters across the screened windows: good thing, too, with the nights getting down to freezing! Snuggled in with a stack of novels to read, learned to canoe solo on the five-mile-long lake and winding river, and even drafted some decent poetry.

* * *

How long ago all that seems! Well, it does come from a few years before I acquired the barn and everything that’s gone with it … including a great wife and family. Which makes it ancient history, indeed, even without the computer updates.

A SINKING FEELING

February 10, 2014January 28, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

This is not where I envisioned sinking roots after so many years adrift.

Sinking, as a feeling of being lost or losing, after so many of feeling being lost or losing (or at least losing out). It’s not that I don’t like where I’ve finally landed – far from it. Rather, the sinking feeling comes from the battle with rot and squirrels and flaking paint and plumbing and, well, all the stuff about home ownership you never hear from a Realtor. All the stuff, too, that comes on top of what you’re supposed to be saving by owning rather than renting. (Ha!)

Still, there are other sides. For instance, at last, after so many years, I await asparagus and ferns rising from beds I’ve built from detritus. It may still be the depth of winter here, but I can practically hear what’s already happening in the soil, especially as our years in this spot gain layers.

I think, too, of the generations of families we follow, as if walking on a mosaic of bones.