Cesar Chavez Day

Today was a holiday, Cesar Chavez Day. I do not wish to delve into the political nuances of the holiday; I want to investigate our uses of the holiday.

        Personally, I went to lunch and saw a movie. (Batman vs Superman, not worth evening prices, maybe not even matinee, but a free showing is OK, i.e. you can wait.) My mother has recollections of her and my dad doing some sort of organizing with Chavez. Both being liberals in the valley, I certainly grew up with positive views of Chavez, so my lack of honor/celebrating him on the recognized day to do so is not from political standpoint. I just used it as a goof-off day.

       

I think that is true for all of our holidays, even the most religious. We just celebrated Easter and even the fervent observant do not attend religious services all day (well, of course, there are some who do, but aren’t we on the edge of cult then?) They attend their service and then take time to break bread with one another and they do relax.

Christmas, well, reams have been written about the commercialization of the holiday and how it has drifted from its religious roots. In addition to the pagan elements of a Santa Claus and snowman, skiing and shopping are part of the Pantheon of the holiday’s meaning. All these ordinary activities could, and do, take place at any other time. A special holiday is not required to do the activities, we just choose to use the free time that way.

Should we have more time off? Would that motivate us to celebrate whatever we are supposed to be honoring, be it Christ or Chavez? If the three day weekend was a regular occurrence would the Fourth of July recover some of its civic importance for the hot dog gorging fest it currently is? I don’t know. But it might have allowed me to see a second movie today.

At the Fair, The Big Fresno Fair

     Time for a little desperation, last minute, not going to slip again, lazy ass, cheat by using pictures post. The following are pictures of roses from the Fresno Fair, ops, my bad, The Big Fresno Fair. It's there in the title, I better be accurate.

     Actually, there are hundreds of categories one can enter for judging. Most have a nominal entry free with the chance to be known as the "best" in the county. The pictures below even represent sub-categories within roses, so there is no excuse not to find something to enter. I've perfected my carrot cake, so save your money there and find something else.

Mine or Reddit?

I’ve been running late on this blog all week long. Ideally, I would like to have something ready the night before and then schedule it to post first thing in the morning. Hasn’t happened in a long time. I’m kind of stuck at the moment, but I don’t want another late night, just before midnight, barely counts type of thing, so I am forcing myself to write. I will do this post in response to the fourteenth story listed on my yahoo front page. Let’s go see what it is.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/fast-food-workers-reveal-items-153407514.html

As a long time restaurant employee, I could probably add a bunch of comments to this story. My own little suggestions, comments on proper procedure, other Anthony Bourdain type tips. But, let’s ask the question, is this really a “story?”

If you read the link, it is actually a rehashing (pardon the pun) of a Ask Reddit question. For those of you who don’t know what Reddit is, perhaps it is better not to know. It can be a huge time suck of web browsing and probably costs companies billions of dollars in lost productivity. For our purposes, you can think of it as an electronic water cooler where people will gossip, make comments or longer stories on various topics and, sometimes, offer productive advice.

To create this content for Yahoo, this person took comments from the Reddit site and wrote a little article with them. The author does credit each comment to its original poster, albeit with the Reddit user name rather than the legal name. Since the internet provides some sense of anonymity, perhaps this is the proper citation to make.

But how much of an effort does it really take to cherry pick the best comments and call it a “story” or “article?” Shouldn’t there just be a link to the Reddit site and let the readers view the material first hand?

In the era of easily distributable material, where you can grab content with just a thin device in your pocket, the demand for content is unquenchable. Everyone can have their own channel, website, (blog!) and they need to have something, anything, to put on it. As the time required to share news shortens, so does its shelf life.

When a newspaper was a once a week occurrence, topics would the public’s attention span for a month. With the telegraph and daily newspapers, the race for scoops began in earnest, with publishers going so far as to CREATE the news. With today’s instant forms of communication, our demand is so immediate, we don’t even wait for it to be printed. Is it any wonder that we can’t even write it quick enough? Thus the relisting of someone else’s’ bullet points becomes worthy of “publishing” with a byline.

Creating fresh content is hard. Anyone reading more than a couple of these posts will certainly affirm that frequency can hurt quality. AND, I’ve resorted to posting a link of a clip or pictures when crushed for time. (So, a little case of the pot talking to the kettle here.) But I haven’t resorted to copying Reddit, yet. That’s another good goal to have.

Of the Past

In my Richert Letters project, I came across a “Del Vaniman” mentioned in one of the letters from Julius. This was from his time in a forestry work camp during the war as a conscientious objector. These individuals, who took a moral stance against war, where put to work in projects like the CCC during the depression. An interesting footnote in our history of World War II.

As a lark, I started doing some research and found a photo of Del in a collection in the Lewis and Clark College Special Collections and Archive. It’s always such a rush to find something when doing research like this. The collection had photos from the actual camp my great-uncle Julius worked at for part of his time. I’ve already matched a couple of pictures to probable locations he mentioned and am excited at the prospect of more.

Which leads me to wonder, how much historical material is waiting to be discovered and put into context? The listing for this set of photos states that there are over 1300 individual pictures and just a fraction of them are online and available to those without physical access to the archive.  How many letters like ours could have added context and told a story using those pictures, but were discarded and lost for all time? Will future generations be able to recover more?

I think today’s forms of electronic communication will create new problems for the historians and researchers of the future. Many private communications will be lost as the medium used is not conducive to long term storage, but the numbers of records that ARE stored, like the thousands of governmental emails, could make finding the interesting kernels more difficult to find amongst the chaff. Hopefully, the computerization that stores them will help to search them.

I hope to find a descendant of Del to share the letter with and maybe fill in a little tidbit that might have escaped their family history. Though, I realize not all get very excited about genealogical details like that. Perhaps they have their own archive with a stash of similar letters and I have nothing new for them. In that case, I would love to see what they have about my relative.  

Eggs and More

“Easter egg dyes certainly aren’t as good as they were when I was a child! All I could get out of my red dye was a pale pink egg ─ so I got out the bright red fingernail polish and now I have a beauty of a red egg.”

The above quote might have been said earlier this week as some parent was helping to create colored eggs for use today. I think anyone can read that and hear it in their parents’ voice, too. But it is actually from a letter my great-wrote to my great-uncle 1945. Did they even have dye back then? Of course they did, the letter says so.

But it is easy to imagine our quality complaints are solely this generation’s issue. The “they don’t make them like they used to,” lament is sure to garner a sympathetic nod of agreement, no matter what the product. Funny how the user’s skill level is never called into question. Maybe, the product is not faulty, you’re just an idiot.

The reverse of this thought is “I had to walk X miles through Y conditions to do the same thing you’re doing now,” boast. Yes, your school might have been farther way than mine, but did it have metal detectors? Security guards? Different challenges doesn’t equate to different levels of difficulty, just different experiences.

So that is why I love finding little tidbits like the above quote from an older generation. This was in a letter over 80 years old, yet expresses a sentiment we hear today. Because their pictures are in black and white, we often assume they were flat colorless people incapable of understanding the modern world. What a mistake. They laughed, cried, made jokes, made out just like we do today. And they complained about today’s stuff being crap just like we do today. No doubt the laser egg dyes of tomorrow will be a piece of crap, too.