Red Rabbit from Egmont Mayer on Vimeo.

Back in the saddle again

Well, I'm employed, or, at least, I will be as soon as the start-up starts up, or, to be more precise, as soon as the spin-off spins off. Which means I can't say too much about what it is yet, in part for reasons of discretion and in part because I don't know all that much yet.

The guy at the head of the company is tied up in meetings with attorneys and accountants and we've only had two phone conversations, each about 45 minutes long -- one to say, "Okay, good, you're just what I'm looking for" and another to say, "The money is here but I don't have a bank account yet. Or a logo."

The latter was a joke, so I told him my theory that, as the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Sioux circled the Seventh Cavalry, someone said to Custer, "We need a new logo." He laughed and said, "You're my kind of guy." Apparently he has also been asked about a mission statement, which he also doesn't have. (And the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator is no longer on-line, unfortunately.)

Now, there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, but this seems solid and it not only does not require me to buy new clothing but doesn't even require me to move, since it all happens on line and can be done from anywhere. We'll get under way in about a month and, in the meantime, I'll quietly contemplate life, play with the dog and try to finish up a serial story promised for the coming school year while I still have the leisure to work on it.

And that's me on the left. In case you had any doubts.

Go-fer wanted. College degree preferred.
(A look at what's out there. At least the job title is honest.)

Position:	Other duties as assigned
Location:	Midwest, United States
Job Status:	Full-time
Salary:	Not Specified
Ad Expires:	August 18, 2009
Job ID:	1046997

Description:
Here’s your chance to use all of your skills for a small daily newspaper in a rural Kansas community close enough to metropolitan areas to feel the competition.

We’re looking for a reporter with the skills to be a jack of all trades. Working a beat or two will be your primary reponsibility, but you'll also be copy editing for fellow reporters, laying out some pages, shooting photos, uploading to the Web site and doing generally anything that needs doing to give our readers all the news they want in a 24-7 multimedia news operation.

The ideal candidate will be someone who follows the stories rather than the clock. We’re looking for someone who recognizes news, understands the need to hustle to beat local and area competition and is willing to step in wherever needed.

A degree in journalism is preferred, but solid work experience will be considered, too. Additional skills, like multimedia and photography, are beneficial.

Evaluations of applicants begins immediately. Please indicate whether clips are online. If not, we will screen resumes and request clips.

(I'm packin' my bags, folks! Nothing I want more than to move to Kansas for a job with no particular pay range in which you are expected to do everyone else's job for a company that won't identify itself. What? Are they afraid the poor exploited idiot currently in this position will see the ad and become disheartened??)

Behind the Laughs

I have long linked Sandra Bell Lundy's blog on the rail, and I know some of my readers are also her readers (and one of my readers even writes the thing!), but here's a reminder, because you won't want to miss the current series of posts.

She's not writing them.

That's kind of a left-handed compliment, but Sandra has gone back to the Old Country (Newfoundland) and, while I can hardly wait for what she posts upon her return, she is, in the meantime, running interviews with other women cartoonist/illustrators, and they are wonderful.

In particular, I got a kick out of the current posting, in which cartoonist Kim Warp talks about her career and her work. Most of my contacts in the cartooning world are with comic strip artists, so hearing about magazine work is branching into unfamiliar territory -- always fun -- but, in addition, the story of how Kim got into cartooning is completely endearing and makes me wish my mother had covered the kitchen table with butcher paper, and that I had done the same for my kids. God knows we were all competitive enough.

Go now. Read the interview. Then read the rest of them. And stick around for when the Mistress of the House returns, because she'll have more cool stuff then, too, I'm quite sure.

Oh, and you should also be reading Sandra's strip, Between Friends.

"Anybody can steer the ship when the sea is calm."

One of the things I have discovered since I was fired six weeks ago is that former editors of the Connecticut Valley Spectator do not constitute a particularly exclusive club and that, within the local community, I was less apt to be asked, "What on earth did you do?" than I was to be asked, "What on earth are they doing?"

Given the beating your self-confidence takes when you are unemployed, it is some comfort now to be confirmed in my sense that the owner/publisher should not have gone into the business without a background in newspapers.

Owning this tiny group of small newspapers was a retirement gig for a smart, genial, retired paper mill owner but his lack of experience made communications between us a constant problem -- things that should have gone without saying not only had to be spelled out but then were not necessarily accepted. Decisions were made that someone with "ink in his blood" would not have made.

Well, I guess good-natured dabbling worked in the good times. Now, however, is not good times. As the video below suggests, when the seas are angry, you really need a tillerman who knows how to ride the waves.

When the "crisis" is in our attitude

"The culture of aid treats Africans like they're idiots, like they don't know what's best for themselves. We treat Africans as if, if we weren't there, they'd starve to death, because they couldn't figure out how to get food themselves."

Recently, I added a blog from Africa to the rail on the side. It had come to my attention by a sort of backdoor referral -- My mother found it through Xtreme English, a blogger who is a frequent visitor at Ronniecat's blog, and she passed it on because the young woman who runs the blog had featured several pictures of her Rhodesian ridgeback Sheba. (above)

As I poked around the blog, however, I was delighted and inspired by what this Norwegian-Swedish family is doing in Niger, helping local farmers to cultivate the food plants that naturally grow in the arid conditions of the region.

I have often read of the need to avoid making native populations aid-dependent, but always in the context of "Does aid work?" and not often in the context of "How can you help people without making them dependent?" The Garvi family's life work, The Eden Foundation, provides an answer to the latter question.

It begins with assuming -- not "accepting" -- the normalcy of their lives. Not "normal for them" but simply "normal."

We in the West have not yet left behind the cultural racism of the 19th century, in which we assume that non-Western people need to adopt our lifestyles in order to be whole. We see people living in mud or wattle huts, living a pre-industrial life, and assume that they would be better off if they had homes and tools and clothing like ours.

This toxic colonial attitude works in two ways: It is as condescending to assume that others should be like us as it is to assume that they should remain in their "picturesque" pre-industrial state, as if they were characters in a theme park that we should preserve for historic purposes. In either case, we are looking at them with the assumption that what they do is in some sense substandard and inappropriate when perhaps it is simply different.

At which point, our rush to help becomes not only a display of condescension but potentially harmful to those who we think need the intervention of the industrial world. And the attitude brings with it a sense of self-congratulatory self-promotion that is particularly galling to those who can see the situation from a point of view other than the height of a "superior culture."

In this documentary -- edited for YouTube into six 9-minute segments -- a Norwegian TV crew looks at the supposed famine in Niger in 2005, which both the BBC and the UN found shocking but which the local people, including the Garvi family, did not recognize as having occurred.

A couple of quotes from the documentary:

From Esther Garvi, on close-ups of dying children covered with flies (who, according to Doctors Without Borders, are dying of malaria, not starvation) : It's difficult to see dying children. It's not pretty. You can't think "This didn't happen. This child didn't die." You can feel the children's suffering in your heart. That reality isn't pretty, but it deserves some dignity. Not to show death right in your face. The flies and the disease. We wouldn't do this to our own children. There are limits to what journalists are allowed to do to our own people. But when it's Africans, it's okay. They can't read or write, so it doesn't matter.

And from journalist Michael Maren: The culture of aid treats Africans like they're idiots, like they don't know what's best for themselves. We treat Africans as if, if we weren't there, they'd starve to death, because they couldn't figure out how to get food themselves.

I realize 45 minutes is a major investment in the on-line world, but I think when you get about three minutes into the first segment, you'll want to finish the process.

Timothy Leary's Dead

(No, no, no, no -- he's outside, with the fish)

Maybe you have to watch a lot of cable to have this Visa commercial come up over and over and over and over and over. But I've had enough of it.

Thing is, I've got nothing against the Moody Blues, and I like aquariums and I like little girls, too. But when I think of fluorescent fish, fire-breathing seahorses and kaleidoscopic krill, set to "The Search for the Lost Chord," my associations don't involve being a good daddy.

(Candy, little girl?)