Legacy cities
Legacy Cities and the Changing Nature of the Good Life, Ethan Zuckerman blog, Aug. 2022
I will leave this article on top because it speaks for itself. I have been reading Ethan Zuckerman's blog for many many years - surprisingly he is still writing even twenty or thirty years after he started - he spent many years in Ghana, and frankly part of the reason I followed him was that part of me loved the idea of simply moving there, calling it home, and doing whatever was possible to improve life. Now he is applying those skills to the rust-belt cities I grew up in - Buffalo, Toledo, Cleveland, among others - and I could totally understand what he was seeing and saying.
Now by the way he's married (congratulations!), and lives in Pittsfield, Mass. There are worse fates. Read the article and tell me what you think. And, know that I am seeing Galesburg, and all of Illinois, in the same light - as one who has come back, still wondering how to make this area more livable and sustainable. It's everyone's business.
MLB get your act together
I got sucked into the baseball playoffs this fall, and in fact I'm watching the Astros-Yankees series, game 2, as I write. Astros are winning. It's good to see them win since the Yankees beat my team, the Guardians, but at least the Guardians wore them down so they couldn't keep on winning. What I'm saying is that because of the Guardians, I got drawn into watching the later playoffs, even after the Guardians have been eliminated.
But this post is really about MLB and its schedule. Why are we trying to watch the best of baseball
after it's become too cold? The world series won't even
start until about Hallowe'en, and by then it's too late; we're bundled up; we have the car scrapers out; we're figuring out how to plow snow. This is not a time to watch baseball. Northern teams like New York have to ask people to stand out in the cold to watch them. This may be ok for Green Bay football, but it's not ok for baseball.
How did this happen? Greed, basically. Their season was too long. They made the playoffs longer. They couldn't cut off time at the beginning, couldn't cut the season's length. Why not? They needed the money, I guess. Everyone was ok with longer playoffs but nobody was ok with fewer games. So, now baseball goes through Souls' Day. And the ironic thing is, this being peak of football season, people care a lot less the later it gets. Baseball is a summer game and they just can't keep up their concentration while they're cutting wood.
There are three natural solutions: Make the season shorter; start earlier, and cut the playoffs back to where they were. Of the three, I like the first two better than the third, as playoff baseball is pretty good; I just don't want to be watching it when it's snowing. Actually the best solution would be
both of the first two, making the season
slightly shorter and starting
slightly earlier. Maybe the hotels in Florida and Arizona would be opposed to that, but, for baseball's survival, they have to do
something.
If you think about it, there's a metabolism factor going on in late October. We're either fanatically running around cutting wood and plasticking windows, or we're getting a book and crawling in bed preparing for a long hibernation. Football does ok with this. It's like it feeds off the energy of the first and relies on the couch-potato nature of the second; it's made for television. Baseball is not, so much. When we watch baseball it's because we want to be there, at the stadium. But we don't want that in late October.
Choose among the solutions above, MLB. Your survival depends on it.
general report
As many of you know, I've been steadily more and more sucked into the publishing business. I'm at 27 books on Amazon (
https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Leverett/e/B00HCOJ882) - and that's down from a while ago, but I'm still working on more. It's marketing them that really takes most of my time. I've had a pretty good reception - in spite of being entirely 100 percent indie, I still do ok out in the world. But that's another post or two.
Things on the personal scene have convinced me that I should finish my "Language is a self-organizing system" book sooner rather than later. My wife and I are both getting older and most of our kids, but not all, will be achieving some measure of independence in the coming years. I, however, may never have the time or clarity of mind if I don't get to it pretty quickly. So I've been moving that to the front of the to-do list and even copied it out to read critically - I've actually written about 80 pages of it. My brother has been teaching linguistics so he may be helping me pull it together.
Some things on my bucket list, I may never get to. This includes learning Scottish Gaelic, which I think would be a perfect retirement occupation. I am retired and should theoretically be able to do whatever I want in this regard. My father began learning Chinese when he retired. But here's a difference: He never found enough people to speak it with. I am convinced that I can find enough, and that getting online and
finding them is part of the challenge.
I am now in the area of central Illinois where my grandchildren - well, step-grandchildren, actually, live - this means I should really start up the quilt that they are in line for. I have actually made three. But I have nine grandchildren now, so six more are waiting. And I'm actually spending more time with them. It's getting harder to tell them to "hold your horses" and wait!
On the book front, there are really several more that are dying to be finished. One is a continuation of the Leverett series: Prairie Leveretts. One is a book of Quaker plays. There is also a book of ESL reading exercises, but whenever I get close to it, I think, this is too much like work, and I put it down. Such is retirement. If you worked as hard as I did, you don't want to remember it every time you turn around.
That self-organizing book has to be written, though. It's called
Vowels in an Elevator. Keep your eyes open for it. One of these days you'll turn around, and it'll be done.
