Campbell’s Field, home of the Camden Riversharks, independent, Atlantic League
Skylands Park, home of the Sussex County Miners, independent, Can-Am League
Victory!
Tour of the Minors
Pt. 1 — Jersey Boys (Little Falls, Trenton, Newark)
FirstEnergy Park, home of the Lakewood Blue Claws, Class A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, South Atlantic League
Coca-Cola Park, home of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, AAA affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, International League
Heading through the Shoshone Rapids on the Colorado River
Hiking trail at Bachelors Gulch
Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater, home of the Vail International Dance Festival
The mountains are alive with music in the summer. Here the Crane Wives play at Creekside Park in Beaver Creek.
Summer skating at Beaver Creek Village
Doc Holiday’s Tavern in Glenwood Springs
The newly renovated Union Station
Techies and futurists are not the only ones who like to spin tales about what the future may hold for us. Telling stories about what a world with way more technology might be like is also a favorite occupation of many novelists.
Two of my favorites are The Circle by Dave Eggers and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. Both of these books raise the issue of transparency vs. privacy in an age of more intrusive technology. Some of their characters embrace the transparency, some are victimized by it. I don’t think either author welcomes it.
(Lode Van de Velde)
Reading these stories recalls the futurist classic 1984 by George Orwell. Most of us have thought of Big Brother as a government entity. But it could in fact be whoever controls the technology. Or the oppression could come peer-to-peer.
It is interesting that a key aspect of the future lifestyle envisioned by both of these novelists is live streaming from personal devices. And these stories were written well before anyone ever heard of Meercat or Periscope. (Super Sad True Love Story was published in 2010, The Circle in 2013.)
Both are great novels that I highly recommend. Here are short reviews:
If George Orwell had written “1984” 60 years later, who would have been Big Brother? Would it still have been the government (think NSA)? How about the marketers who try to track and predict our behavior? Or would it be a corporate Big Brother?
Dave Eggers is going with the latter. The Circle is the Silicon Valley monolith that consumes all the others. If you get creeped out by seeing the Google car with the camera on top cruising your neighborhood you’re likely to find this a tale of horror.
It’s the story of Mae Holland, a young woman one or two jobs out of college, who scores her dream gig in a cube farm at the Circle. What she finds there is an exaggeration of a couple of trends that have become increasingly prevalent in corporate America in the last few years. One is the need to create data to evaluate job performance. Essentially this involves taking subjective information, translating it into numbers, and then pretending it’s objective. At the Circle, Mae gets a real time rating of 1 to 100 after every transaction, every email, every message. She is also stack ranked with the 11,000 other Circle employees on a participation index. That involves how active she is in off-hours company-sponsored events and activities and how much social messaging she does with her colleagues. That’s the other trend I referred to above, the movement toward obliterating the distinction between your professional and personal life.
One man’s transparency and is another’s invasion of privacy. That is the crux of what this novel is about. The Circle represents a quest for total transparency. I stand with Eggers on the other side of the issue. There is one voice of dissent at the Circle, a shadowy character who gets it on with Mae in a bathroom stall (not transparent). He warns that the completion of the circle will mean the end of humanity. I think that is what Orwell would have said.
This Super Sad True Love Story involves 39-year old Lenny Abramov, son of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, and Eunice Park, 20-something second generation Korean-American. It takes place in a rapidly deteriorating United States, with a repressive one-party government, kept afloat by Chinese financing. Central Park has been turned into a shanty town for LNWI’s (low net worth individuals).
Shteyngart creates a world of devices and data. A world where you check your credit score on telephone poles. The devices of the time are called apparats and are worn around the neck. These devices churn out data that goes way beyond telling marketers what to sell you. The apparat guides your personal relationships as well. For example, Lenny’s apparat tells him that he does well with women who were abused. In a bar or at a party the device will point out those who fit that description. It will also rate everyone around on parameters like ‘fuckability,’ personality and income. Lenny’s forte is the latter. Eunice gets high grades only in the first of these.
You can find out someone’s body fat or blood pressure with your apparat but intelligence is not a feature considered of much consequence. The transparency has also found its way to fashion. For young women, onion skin pants have replaced jeans.
In courting Eunice, Lenny treats her to a $10 business class ride on the F train. Eunice is shocked to see Lenny actually read a book, not just scan the text for data. Lenny deodorizes his book shelf so as not to offend his lover with the smell of books.
Shteyngart is easy to read. He has a direct style, no heavy descriptions of the environs or re-jiggering of the timelines. There are lots of “is this what we’re coming to?” moments. Followed for me by the thought that I hope I’m not around to see it.
These photos were taken at the Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, N.J. The non-profit Wetlands Institute is an educational and research facility dedicated to the preservation of the salt marsh and coastal ecosystem.
You can get a live look at an osprey nest at the Wetlands Institute here.
A summer series of lunchtime jazz performances on the grounds of the Newark Museum. 2015 is the 50th year of Jazz in the Garden.
Cocomama
Eric Reed
David Gibson Quintet with Josh Evans on trumpet
The Industrial Revolution, which most historians date back to the 18th century, had a profound and lasting effect on the way we live. It was a defining stimulant of urbanization, capitalism and consumerism.
It profoundly changed where and how we work. Artisans, craftsmen and growers became factory workers. We left the home, the yard, the garage or shed and made our living in factories, mills or office buildlngs.
It ushered in an era of mass production of products by giant organizations. Originally that meant making goods available to a far broader segment of the world’s population at affordable prices. As the Western world moved toward a more service oriented economy, the same model was followed: massive organizations providing cookie-cutter services.
The producer/provider organizations grew their business by becoming larger yet, merging with or swallowing up competitors. And they grew their profitability by outsourcing, by automating, by using cheaper materials, less expensive labor and generally providing less for more.
There has been a simmering backlash in some quarters. Many have chosen to celebrate the local, the organic, the artisan. The purchase of food is one example, with more and more Americans choosing to buy what they can at local farmers’ markets rather than going to giant chain stores to consume the products of agri-business conglomerates. It’s why coffee drinkers search out the local roaster rather than buying a can of Maxwell House. Why some opt for a growler of local craft beer instead of a six-pack of Bud.
While it was nascent technology that fueled the early Industrial Revolution, it may well be technology that puts an end to the cultural, business and labor environment that the Industrial Revolution created. There are two trends which ultimately may have an equally profound effect on what we consume, how we work and our overall lifestyle. One is the peer-to-peer sharing economy. The other is the DIY maker movement.
Most of us are familiar with some of the early success stories of the sharing or on-demand economy. Uber instead of taxis. Airbnb instead of hotels. Zipcar instead of private car ownership. These services have been wildly successful because of the cost or poor quality or lack of convenience or availability of the products or services they are replacing. There are many others that are not as widely known, services delivered through apps for dog walkers, tutors or grocery deliveries.
Many decades ago the renowned American architect R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, espoused the philosophy that we need to do more with less. By doing so, he believed that there were enough resources in the world for everyone. The shared economy does just that. It utilizes excess capacity, whether that is an unused car seat or bedroom or maybe it is knowledge. The world’s greatest information resource has become Wikipedia, which is put together by volunteers and has wiped out the encyclopedia industry.
Peer to peer shared services fundamentally change the nature of work. What is cut out is the massive organizational provider, replaced instead by an app. NYU professor Arun Sundararajan describes this as a “transition from institutions to communities. What it also means is that people put together work based on their available time, knowledge and resources, providing it directly to the consumer peer outside the boundaries of a full-time job as we know it.”
And while peer-to-peer sharing has the potential to revolutionize the service economy, there are other new technologies, the best known of which is 3-D printing, which could completely disrupt the world of manufacturing.
(Kaboompics_com)
There are some amazing things that have been done with 3-D printers:
Will we reach a point at which there is a 3D printer in every home? It has been suggested that these DIY home manufacturing units could create everything from car parts to hearing aids. And the Chicago example shows that even before that happens most of us may have access to DIY manufacturing through our local public library. What this offers is exactly the opposite of what came out of the Industrial Revolution. It’s local, it’s customizable and it can be done in your home or neighborhood.
Writing in the Guardian, Paul Masur, economics editor of Channel 4 News in the UK, describes this as the era of post-capitalism. (The End of Capitalism Has Begun.) “The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.”
Some of these visions may be pretty far off, like on-demand driverless cars that eliminate the need to have one in your driveway, or home production units that create your own dental implant. But these are irreversible trends that are going to change the way we live. Maybe as radically as the Industrial Revolution did.
Stone Harbor is the southern half of the Seven Mile Island that sits between Sea Isle City and Wildwood. No more than three or four blocks at its widest, it is flanked by the ocean on one side and the intercoastal waterway on the other. In addition to the standard Jersey Shore features of beach, ocean, pizza and seafood, Stone Harbor also offers up a healthy dose of nature. There’s the Wetlands Institute, the Bird Sanctuary and Stone Harbor Point, the habitat at the very end of the island.
81st Street Surfers’ Beach
The Wetlands Institute
