What Would You Do If Your Daughter (Sister, Wife, Mother) Went Missing

I read about this in the ADN when Valerie first disappeared and was mildly disturbed.  I stopped at Granite Creek campground on my way back from Hope a month ago.

  It's a beautiful spot.  Lots of green and trees along the creek.  It's close enough to the Seward Highway that you can hear the traffic if the wind is going the right way.

But it's one of those places where you can escape from the everyday and surround yourself in nature.

I stopped there because I knew that Valerie disappeared there.  I walked around thinking about people disappearing.  About times when my kids weren't home when they were supposed to be.

Then I got a comment on a post yesterday.  I'm not usually sympathetic to people using comments to post something totally unrelated.

"Great post.
Sorry to hijack your comment section. Post and forward, if you don't mind. Missing person search on Sunday.
http://callanx.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/search-on-sunday/
Thanks."

It takes you to a website of Girdwood snowboarder Callan Chythlook-Sifsof who's aiming for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. 

There are too many women missing in the world.  Too many abused and beaten.  There are so many ills in the world that need our attention, yet we can't focus just on them.  We need to live and enjoy life as well.  Our lives are busy.  But we all need to put aside some time to help make the world a better place.  Like helping Valerie's family. 

We don't know what happened.  If someone else was involved, if she simply got lost and/or hurt.  But you know this family is still hurting badly.  It always seems so far away, until it happens to you.  What would you do?  It doesn't have to be this issue, but if you aren't giving time to others, in some small way, please do.  I'm guessing, most readers here are already giving back more than their fair share.  Thanks.

Fall's Hanging On, But Winter's Already Claimed the Upper Hillside

It's definitely fall in Anchorage, with winter having already made a preview appearance.

The geese are packing meals for their flights south. 

The cottonwood leaves cover our back yard, though, if you look closely, the amur maple leaves are still on the tree (on the right.)  The come out later in the spring too.

Up at Powerline Pass, the snow we had in town stuck.  This was Sunday evening. 

Live Fact Checking, Variations of Facts, Values, and Lies

The New York Times plans to blog live fact checking during tonight's presidential debate.

Here and Now had a segment on retired college professor ,Vicki Meyer, of Sarasota, Florida, who's collected 215,000 signatures with a SignOn.org petition, asking for live fact checking at the debate.

SignOn.org flew Meyer to Washington, D.C., to present her petitions to the Commission on Presidential Debates, but Meyer said they wouldn’t meet with her. She couldn’t even get them to accept the box of petitions.

The plan was to give the fact-checking results to the moderator during commercial breaks and let them do what with them what they chose and to have the results flash on the screen.

The online Oxford Dictionary offers this definition of fact:

"a thing that is known or proved to be true:"

But in more formal debate we have

• factual premises (that theoretically can be prove true or false, i.e. the cost of the U.S. military in Afghanistan for a year, whether Obama was born in Hawaii) and  
• value premises (beliefs about what is good or bad, such as "the death penalty should be abolished" or "the health benefits of no smoking laws outweigh the loss of personal freedom they cause").

Things go downhill from there.

I raise this because fact checkers will probably have some difficulty proving things on the fly.  So let's look at some of the intricacies:

1. Obvious facts that can be proven true or false easily.  This includes things like a candidate's birthplace, whether a candidate said his favorite food was enchiladas in New Mexico and cheese in Wisconsin.  But how fast can these things be found, and what triggers a fact checker to have a doubt that needs checking?
   
2. The hard to prove facts which rely on interpretation.  
1. How much did the US spend on the war in Afghanistan in 2011?  Which numbers do you count?  Just the military budget?  Just for that year?  What about costs of equipment that would have been purchased even if it wasn't used in Iraq?  Or soldiers who spent six months in Iraq and the rest of the time elsewhere?   Is this only about dollars or is it also about the impact on the mental health of soldiers and their families?  About health care to treat problems of Afghanistan vets for the rest of their lives?  Of damage done to Afghan infrastructure?  Or lives lost in Pakistani?  Or the environmental damage of bombing or all the fuel used in the war?  
2. Will the US better better or worse off because of Obama's health care legislation?
   
3. The hard to prove facts because the evidence is incomplete or inconsistent.
1. Did the defendant commit the crime?  
2. Is your boyfriend cheating?  (How do you each define cheating?)
3. Is this really organic?
4. Will a glass of red wine three times a weak decrease the likelihood of a heart attack?
   
4. Lies versus Errors  -  Here we get to intent.  
1. Did she believe what she was saying was true?  
2. Is it better to not know you are wrong than to know the truth but lie anyway?  Or said another way:  Is ignorance better than lying?
   
5. Kinds of Lies  -  Let's define a lie as something the speaker knows is not true, but intentionally says it.  There's a wide variety of kinds of lies, starting with "You look great."
1. There are the lies people told the authorities to protect Jews during WW II.
2. The lies undercover agents tell to gain the confidence of drug dealers.
3. There are lies people tell to get sex, to get jobs, to get better grades or to get elected.  

This is just a short list.  Another complication is that each of these categories can overlap with another.


But parsing things out into details like this also makes it easy for liars to find cover in all these clarifications.  Fact checkers, the good ones anyway, do know the difference between big, obvious lies, and those situations that are more ambiguous.


As a final thought, I found the etymology of 'fact' at the Oxford Dictionary online to be an interesting twist:

late 15th century: from Latin factum, neuter past participle of facere 'do'. The original sense was 'an act', later 'a crime', surviving in the phrase before (or after) the fact. The earliest of the current senses ( 'truth, reality') dates from the late 16th century

Dan Bern Songwriting Workshop Anchorage Evening 2

 I took Mariano's digital art class after seeing what he did digitally to photos.  I thought, I can take photos and then play with them.  What I didn't quite realize was that it was an art class and the other students were serious artists.  An early assignment was to use a couple of the photo shop tools to draw a picture.  I started with a very simple round flower with roundish petals and a simple stem.  But I noticed the screen next to me had a perfect cowboy boot with all the details.  The screen on the other side had a great human figure.  I realized I was out of my league.  But Mariano encouraged me saying these people have to adjust from their normal medium (oil, or water colors, or charcoal) to digital and I would be starting with digital.  In the end it worked out reasonably well.

Dan's standing on the left

But at least I believed I had a visual sense, even if I couldn't execute what I had in mind, at least I had something in mind.

Music is different.  I don't think aurally.  Tunes don't pop into my mind.  I'm just not musical.  But the song writing workshop is forcing me to confront one of my own stereotypes about myself.  Don't get me wrong, there are serious song writers and musicians in this class and compared to them, my musical talents are, politely, in the most formative stage.  But I didn't completely bomb in the workshop Monday or last night.

Monday Dan talked about how little children go around merging words and melodies that they spontaneously create.  It got me thinking.  He talked about speech and singing not being that far apart.  Certainly not opposites that some imagine.  He said I should just relax.

I thought about students I've had who told me they were 'just not good at math.'  I'd always ask them, "Which teacher did this to you?"  and 90% could give me a name and a grade without a pause.  I still remember one student holding out his hands for the ruler as he said, "Sister Margarita in 5th grade."

And the light went on that I've been going around saying I'm just not musical.  OK, I admit the oboe and I were not a good match, but I shouldn't have given up on dating music.

All this is preamble to my fortune cookie based song.  (See the previous post.)

This group's work sparkled

I ended up choosing the numbers in the fortune rather than the words.  The first three in the sequence were 03 14 29 which I immediately translated into March 14, 1929.  I googled it and came up with obituaries of people born on March 14, 1929.  The first was just birth and death dates with locations of each.  Toronto and Desert Hot Springs.  I imagined a song that filled in the gap.  I found a woman who was born and died in Lufkin, Texas.  There was a little more about her.  A guy born in England who died in Santa Maria, California with a whole career and family.  Who were these people, did their lives cross paths?  There were all sorts of possibilities.

Getting further into the google results brought the fact that Mickey Mouse's 4th cartoon was released on March 14, 1929 - The Barn Dance.  Clearly, Disney had no idea who Mickey would become and Minnie ditches him for Pete, when Mickey can't stay off her toes.

And then there was this post on a German Einstein website:

In 1920, after Einstein's achievements had been widely recognized, Ulm also wanted to honour him. Thus, for example, in 1922 the decision was made to name a yet to be constructed street after him. Even though in Nazi-Germany this street was renamed Fichtestrasse (after Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814, a German philosopher), it was named Einsteinstrasse again in 1945. On the occasion of his 50th birthday on March 14, 1929, Einstein was informed in a letter of congratulation by the then mayor that the city of Ulm had named a street in his honour. With respect to the Einsteinstrasse Einstein remarked in his reply: "I have already heard about the street named after me. My comforting thought was that I am not responsible for whatever is going to happen there." Between 1920 and 1929 a lively exchange of notes between Ulm and Albert Einstein developed which, interrupted by the political situation in Germany, was only resumed in 1949.

In 1949 Ulm wanted to grant Einstein the rights of a freeman of the city. Einstein however declined, pointing to the fate of the Jews in Nazi-Germany.

But how to put this all together?  I could focus on the day, but I also wanted to trace the paths, beyond the day, of those born on March 14, 1929.  And I had to try to sing it the next day in the workshop.

I ended up focusing on the Einstein story.  The line about taking comfort knowing he wouldn't be responsible for what happened on the street had a bittersweet sensibility.

Dan had told us Monday, in answer to a question about the problem of writing a song and finding out that someone had already written the melody.  The difference between a real songwriter and everyone else, is that the real songwriter will simply change some things here and there and call it his own.

And using the Mexican hat dance as the tune for our moose encounter songs Monday also showed me 1) how useful it was to have some structure, a skeleton,  like that to hold the words onto and 2) how hard it was to mesh - in my head -  the rhythm of the existing song to the rhythm of my newly created lyrics.

So, I decided to lift a Dan Bern song as my skeleton.  His songs are mostly stories put to music, but they do have melodies.  But I have to listen a few times to get them into my head. I picked Dan's Rome, from the "Dan Bern" album.  I tried to write lyrics, but the words from the Einstein website didn't flow with the music.  I had to start chopping back, finding words that were shorter, that had some rhyme.

I figured with my singing ability and the extra syllables here and there, no one would know where it came from.  Here's part of what I did compared to the lyrics of the original song.  I think I need another week to get this working.   But it's as far as I got before class.

March 14, 1929	Rome
Einstein got a letter from the Mayor of Ulm On the fourteenth of March Nineteen Twenty nine It wished him a happy Fiftieth  Birthday They gave him a street on which kids could play. Ulm was his birthplace Ulm was his past Ulm was the city That’d he’d return to last.	We pulled into Rome With blood in our eyes After days of travelin' Months of lies Taking our various Turns at the wheel Taking booze And pot and cigarettes. . . Rome was a bust Rome was a scream Rome was the final Rapid eye movement To this dream

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The Rome link gets you to the song so you can hear how it goes.

My last lines, which I left out here, just never could capture the Einstein quote.  Again, I need to find a totally different way to say it.

I also tried to throw my inhibitions to the draft and just sing.  Just as I'm doing here posting these lyrics on the blog.  This is a learning activity right?  The only lines that really work for me are the first two.  The rest need lots of massaging.  I stuck in the Ulm lines after listening to the Rome lines and I think musically, that worked best.  Clearly I have to toss the date altogether, it's just too clunky, and rely on it being the title.  But I guess that's part of the evolution of a song.

Dan asked if I played guitar, then pulled out his and gave me the perfect back up; that helped a lot.  Did he know what I was doing?

I did explain how I got to this point and read the class enough of the Einstein article to understand what I was trying to convey.

I asked Dan during the break if he had any idea what original song was my crutch.   He didn't and when I told him, he more or less congratulated me on a successful steal, "If I couldn't tell, no one else could."  I suspect that means I was so bad, there was no resemblance at all, but I'll humor myself. 

Musically,  mine was the shakiest.  The others in there are real musicians.  But they were kind, and I got credit for being the only one who found a way to use the numbers from the fortunes for the song.  Others were amazing, among them one who used a plastic cup and her hand for great backup percussion. 

Saturday, some of the members of the workshop (not me, I assure you) will present their songs at 2pm at Out North.  It's a pay what you like donation.  There are some gifted folks in the class and it should be fun.  I'm feeling a little like George Plimpton.

We had a series of interesting new exercises, including a group activity as you can see from the pictures.  I've got homework for tomorrow, plus my Chinese class meets again on Thursday.  So good night. 

"Picture Michelangelo with a briefcase and a beeper" - Songwriting With Dan Bern in Anchorage

Click To Enlarge

We had to write and sing a one line song to introduce ourselves.

Then we had to write lyrics in a

2

2

2

7

8

8

8

8

pattern - haiku like, 2 syllables, 2 syllables, etc - about a moose encounter.

And then sing it to the group.

Regular readers know that I can listen to music, but making it?  That stopped when I hung up the oboe in high school.  My talents clearly lay elsewhere.  But Dan Bern is such an incredible songwriter/singer, that I signed up for this songwriting workshop with the expectation that I'd just get to know more about him and where all the songs come from.

He writes and sings in the troubadour style of Woody Gutherie and Bob Dylan.  Long song stories that take you to on  unexpected places where you meet a surprising cast of characters.  And when it's over, you often have to gulp as you realize what it was all about.  He even has a song about Guthrie handing the torch to Dylan from his deathbed and how he (Dan) climbed in to sing to Bruce Springstein on his deathbed.  Here are the lyrics and here's a short audio clip.  He's written about lots of celebrities including Charles Manson, Marilyn Monroe, Tiger Woods, Joe Van Gogh (Vincent's son),

He writes songs about important issues of the day - True Revolutionaries, Gambling in Sports (he's a big baseball fan), Alien Abduction,  AIDS,  or Dan's first ten days as  President. 

Check out any of those songs and you'll see his imagination is not ordinary, and he's got music in his genes.


And Dan was Dan last night and everything he did  - including the introductions - was part of learning songwriting.  So I had no choice but to sing my intro, and while it was more talking than singing at first, I began to realize during the class that I've just had this image of me as not a singer all these years.  And there's no reason why I shouldn't liberate my inner singer.  Songwriter at least.

He also answered questions - about where inspiration comes from, writing groups, - with advice that's good for any creative process, like writing a blog even.  Like, you could write three lines (or three days) and when you hit the fourth, you nail it.  And have to toss all that came before. 

I first heard Dan long, long ago.  I'm not even sure, except it was at Loussac library and it was probably 1997 (When Dan Bern  - the CD came out.)  My son had heard Dan open for Ani DiFranco in Anchorage and essentially told us we had no choice but to go hear Dan Bern who was coming back to Anchorage.

And he was right.  By the last song of the evening - Estelle - I was in the zone. Such a wild and crazy adventure lament. (The link goes to a YouTube of it.  Still one of my very favorites.)  We've gone to quite a few Dan Bern concerts since, including the great pair of shows at Cyrano's November 25 (Mike, there's no year listed on the tickets, just the date).  In the last few years I haven't kept up with Bern's music so I'm looking forward to the Saturday night concert at Out North.  (There are concerts Thursday and Friday night too.  Check at OutNorth 270 8099 X 203.)

But I'm rushing this post out, even though it reflects my being tired, because there are still a few spots in the song writing workshop Tuesday night and Wednesday night.  While people are going to all three, you can go to just one or two.  Call Out North at 279-8099 extension 203 to get your space.  This guy is the real deal. 

If you look carefully at the second picture, you'll see we all got fortune cookies.  Our homework is to take something from the fortune and make a short song - use the fortune itself, or just one word, or the thought. 

I've put a lot of links to song lyrics (many of which have a 30 second audio clip and Estelle to a video and a lot can be found on YouTube) but this one - Art on the Run - seemed appropriate for a blogger who is trying to get this up so people can see it while they can still act on it. 

Take the best idea you got sprouting from your brain like cauliflower
Stick it in the microwave leave it for a quarter of an hour
Write poems on the freeway, write screenplays in between submitting faxes
Draw pictures at the Wendy's drive through window, on your way to do your taxes

Because you're not a child you're not a child
Days flash by, like numbers on a TV dial
Forget that novel, man; could be haiku is more your style

Making art on the run, art on the run, art on the run
Art on the run, art on the run, art on the run
Chopin in his Chevrolet and digital machine
Singing melodies while pumping gasoline
Picture Michelangelo with a briefcase and a beeper
When's the last time that you had a really good night's
SLEEEEEEP?   (All of Art on the Run is here.)

For those of you outside of Anchorage, he'll be in Palmer on Sunday.  And if you're Outside (of Alaska), here's his tour schedule.

Barbara, he'll be in Toronto October 18. 

It's late.  I'm going to open my fortune cookie now.

Let's see, do I write about loyalty or should I do one on numbers?

". . .a major socially conscious artist whose works would be far more visible if he resided in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago"

On Mariano Gonzales in Tikkun:

M. Gonzales - posted with artist's permission

"Rarely do we imagine Alaska as a major center of art and culture, save for its well-recognized tradition of exceptional Native sculpture, painting, and printmaking.

These generalizations are largely accurate* but incomplete. Alaska is also the residence of a major socially conscious artist whose works would be far more visible if he resided in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or indeed, in any major urban center in the “lower 48,” especially one with a substantial Latino population."

So begins a long article by Paul Von Blum, UCLA Senior Lecurer,  on Anchorage artist and UAA art professor Mariano Gonzales in the influential national Jewish magazine Tikkun that regularly takes on difficult topics.  (Tikkun olam, in Hebrew, means "to repair the world.")  Mariano is a true local boy here, having grown up in Anchorage. 

M. Gonzales -Collateral Damage - with artist's permission

I've known Mariano as a colleague at UAA and as a student in his digital art class**.  He's a self-effacing man in person and dedicated to his art and his students.  He's not big on promoting his work. (He told me that Von Blum saw his work and contacted him.)  But as you can see from the pictures I've posted here - with permission from Mariano - he has some strong feelings and he thrusts his artistic knife right into the heart of an issue.

There are other examples with the Tikkun article.

He told me he's working on new images now for a solo exhibit at the Anchorage Museum of Art and History in 2014. I should mention the images I have up here are much lower resolution than they deserve. But you can click on them to see them a little better.



*I should also counter Von Blum's image of Anchorage as a cultural desert.  Mariano is by no means the only impressive member of the Anchorage cultural scene.  Given our small population (under 300,000), we have a constant variety of local art, music, and theater events to take up one's time every night of the week in great venues small and large.  This blog regularly mentions just a few of the many.  And Outside performers seem to  enjoy the small town hospitality and the chance to share their talents in the school system and with other locals, as well as to enjoy all the natural beauty Paul Van Bloom did mention.  Tonight, for example I'm going to the first of a three evening songwriting workshop with the amazing singer Dan Bern.

Mariano Gonzales - Carousel - Posted with Permission of the Artist

**He's not responsible for my weak photoshop attempts, but whenever I actually do get something right, it can be traced back to things I learned from Mariano.  You can see other posts that mention Mariano - particularly the class - here.

How To Live Your Life And Blog Too

I early on learned that if I blogged what I was doing, I could find time to do all the things I want to do and keep the blog alive.  Writing about things forced me to think about them more, do some research about them, and generally learn a lot more.  And all that helped me remember things.

But blogging seems to be taking a lot more time away these days.  Partly my standards for myself have gotten higher and I spend more time documenting and cleaning up.  Partly, though, I'm involved in more things, plus things show up to interrupt me - lots of things around the house that need attention, etc.

Some things I'm reluctant to burden you with, but we are taking a Chinese class through the UAA Confucius Institute and if I'm going to keep up, I'm going to have to do some sharing here.

I've studied Chinese on and off since about 1989 when I taught in Hong Kong for a year and we took a once a week Cantonese class so we could talk to the vendors in the markets  and things like that.  Then I got involved with a research project in Beijing and decided I needed to study Mandarin just to get a little more sense of what was going on around me.  (Having spent a year as an undergraduate in Germany, I was able to get my German good enough to keep up with my classes and to discover how liberating it was to be able to escape my native language.  Nothing wrong with English, but your language limits you in subtle and not so subtle ways.  [Go here for a post on color in different languages and a link to a post on whether language affects how you think.]

There were a couple of years of serious study.  Then I was distracted by other things for about ten years before getting serious again.  And that lapsed and I spent time in Thailand reviving my old Peace Corps Thai and seemingly painting over the brain cells that stored Chinese words.

I came to believe, through my experiences, that if you ever get to the point where you can speak a language pretty fluently, without thinking about translating from your own language at all, but actually thinking and even dreaming in the other language, then you basically have it for life.  You'll lose a lot of vocabulary if you stop, but most of the stuff you really knew is buried in there and will come back.  Often when you speak, words just pop out of your mouth, that you couldn't have retrieved if you'd have been asked, say,  "What's the Thai word for butterfly?"    That's been the case for German and for Thai for me.  They're there and I just need to get my brain to shift to them and those brain cells slowly start to warm up and get where I can communicate - not like a native - but effectively enough.

But I never got to that point in Chinese.  And so my return visits have been painful exercises of trying to revive weak braincells and creating new ones to replace the ones that have simply died.  Chinese is also harder than German or Thai.

I thought German was hard after junior high Spanish.  The grammar has all sorts of twists and turns to trip you up, but it does use a Latin based alphabet, and there is an enormous overlap between English and German words - swim and schwimmem, house and haus, speak and sprechen, etc.

Thai added a totally new alphabet, few shared words (ie Pepsi) and, even more daunting, tones.  We have tones in English - but they are related to whole sentences, such as questions ending higher pitched than statements.  In Thai, the tones go with the individual syllables and it's better to get the sounds of the consonants and vowels a little off than to mess up the tones if you want someone to understand you.

Chinese has tones like Thai, though slightly different ones, but the killer part of Chinese is that there's no alphabet.  With a phonetic alphabet, you can figure out words you've never seen before.  But not with characters.  Each character represents a word.  Yes, they have created a Western style alphabet - pinyin - but that's to help people struggling to learn the characters.  And yes, the characters aren't all completely unique.  They share different elements that are in other characters, but you do have to remember each character   individually.  And that's been my biggest problem - keeping the characters straight.  Writing them without checking is, for the most part, a futile exercise if you don't do it for several years. 

But it's coming back easier this time.  In part because I went further along in the past and we are going back to almost beginning.  I recognize more characters and after being like the deer in the headlights the first night, my Chinese brain cells are coming back to life.

And the teachers at the Confucius Institute are terrific.  That's partly because they use what I think is the right method for teaching a foreign language, very similar to how the Peace Corps taught us Thai and taught us how to teach English.  Lots of oral repetition and good progression in a class session from the sounds to the vocabulary to the sentences each building on the other.  Here's an example of some of the vocabulary I'm carrying around.  These are from lesson 6 - there were 31 characters in one list, 12 in a second one, and 22 supplementary words.

Character	English	pinyin
给	to; for	gěi
打电话	to make a phone call	dǎ diàn huà
话	speech; talk words	huà
喂	(on phone) Hello, Hey	wèi；wéi
哪	which	nǎ
上午	morning	shàngwǔ

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I've got to run.  I've got a book club meeting tonight and some errands to run and maybe I can get a little time at Powerline Pass before the book club which is meeting on the hillside.

Winter Preview

It looked like this when I got up this morning. Light snow was still falling.

But by the afternoon it was back to fall. Our first snowfall in Anchorage 35 years ago was on September 29. I remember it because it's my father's birthday. He'd be 101 today. Happy Birthday Dad.

I remember back then getting in the car and deciding to test the brakes while I was going slow. We'd moved up from LA and I only remember driving on snow once - in Yosemite with chains on. So I pushed down on the brake hard to test them - I wasn't going more than 4 or 5 mph - and the back end went in one direction and the front in the other. I was ready to drive down to Western Airlines and get tickets back to California right then. I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to push down so hard on the brakes. That first year we soon had studded tires on the van and learned to go with the snow. Eventually driving in snow and anticipating which way the car would skid became fun. And then came ABS (anti-lock breaking system) which changed everything.

Be Careful Texting While Smoking Near a Cliff - And How To Waste Time Blogging

The Anchorage Daily News had a short piece in the paper Thursday: 

"The home of the woman . . . sits on the cliff. While texting on Sept. 17, she walked close to the edge to discard a cigarette butt. She slipped on wet grass and fell. . ."

She went, it says, sixty feet down into rocks with the tide coming in. 

"She was in the rocks between the boulders and she was calling for help," Burke said. "She was screaming in agony."

Bayside Fire Department received the first call for help. Chief Bob Himes said the Kodiak Fire Department was quickly summoned for its expertise in rope rescues.

The online report has more details.   This happened almost two weeks ago and it reports she's recovering in an Anchorage hospital.   I wish her a speedy recovery.


I admit the snark section of my brain lit up first when I read the headline.  After all, we have a law against texting while driving.  Do we need one about texting while walking?   And if you've ever picked up litter, you know that the most common single item of city litter is the cigarette butt.  (There was no mention of the person she was texting or even what happened to the phone.)

But the punishment here is a little severe.  It is a reminder that most dangers lurk, not in the exotic situation, but right near home.  And we've all done dumb things that could have gotten us seriously injured or killed, but we were lucky.  Rather than smirk, we should reflect.

Then I tried to find a source for the 'injuries happening near home' thought.  Ah, the curse of verification and why many (most?) bloggers skip it.  There were a lot of posts repeating the meme from those internet  "Ask" sites like WikiAnswer:

"More than half of the crashes that cause injury or death happen at speeds less than 40 MPH and within 25 miles from home."

But without a reference.  And you find it in the many self-appointed internet expert essays used as website filler such as this one from Living With My Home: 

"Preventing the Top 5 Most Fatal Home Accidents

We like to think of our "home sweet home" as our haven of safety and security. However, home accidents are responsible for more fatal injuries than any other cause except motor vehicle accidents. Although home accidents are often caused by human error and typically can be prevented, they amount to 18,000 deaths and nearly 13 million injuries a year.

The 5 leading causes of death from home accidents are:

• Falls
• Poisonings
• Fires
• Suffocation and choking
• Drowning"

This one even referenced a source from which the whole essay (there's a lot more) was taken, but gives no sources for the data.  The data is so precise that one is tempted to assume it was lifted from somewhere legit.  The author is listed:

Courtney Kreuzwiesner has 11 years' experience working in the public relations and communications fields.

Googling "The five leading causes . . ." brings up a whole slew of websites that have the list.  Including "Safe Haven" a report from the Home Safety Council which says this comes from one of their studies, The State of Home Safety in America™, which I decided not to spend time looking for after the first couple of pages of Google.  But I did find out why the website - http://www.homesafetycouncil.org/ - says "Save Kids, USA" when you get to the site.  They merged.

In any case, here's what they say about falls around the house:

Every year, nearly 5.1 million people in America are injured by falls occurring in and around the home.  As the leading cause of home injury,  falls account for one-third of all unintended home injury deaths, and more than 40 percent of all nonfatal home injuries.

While the circumstances surrounding the majority of falls in the home are unknown, research indicates that falls from stairs and steps are responsible for almost 20 percent of fatal falls.1 The survey found that only about half of adults have taken any of the recommended actions to help prevent falls on the stairs in their own homes. Half of the adults surveyed indicated that they clear clutter from stairs; a little less than half indicated having lighting at the top and bottom of the stairs (48 percent); and less than one quarter have handrails on both sides of the stairs (22 percent).

But none of their recommendations would have prevented this fall.  In fact the woman seems to be following one of their fire prevention recommendations:

If you smoke, smoke outside. 

The Center for Disease Control  (CDC) wants to change how people even think about accidents, by saying they are NOT accidents.

Injuries at home and at play are not accidents. They can be prevented. CDC focuses on the science behind making people safe – working to prevent leading causes of injuries, including drowning, falls, fires, and poisoning. Home and recreation-related injuries affect people of all ages, from infants to older adults, and account for about a third of all injury-related emergency department visits. CDC works to ensure that all people have safe and healthy homes and places to play. Preventing unintentional injuries is a step toward ensuring that all Americans live to their full potential.

My son pointed this out to me years ago.  He would talk about crashes because he thought 'accidents' made it sound like they were unpreventable.

I never did find the source of "unintentional injuries mostly occurring within 25 miles of home," though I did see a lot of websites saying something like that.  It does, of course, make sense, because I would guess that we spend most of our time within 25 miles of home.

I left this wandering post like this to reflect my writing path, so you can see how I bounce from site to site trying to write these blog posts.  Usually, I throw out most of what I find, (and most sites I visited are not mentioned here either)  but I thought I'd leave some of this up because it's useful to look behind the scenes now and then and because I don't want to lose any readers, so I want them all to avoid any injuries if at all possible. 

Save Kids USA has a bunch of reports on Kids Safety you can find here.

Denali Exhibits At The Museum

All the pictures get bigger and clearer if you click 'em

I dropped by the museum last week to see what was there and found myself looking at a model of the mountain showing climbing routes. 










Next to it was a video explaining the whole process of getting up the mountain - gear, routes, acclimatizing to the altitude, storms, sanitation, etc.  I got pulled into and wondered why I'd never wanted to climb the mountain.  But only briefly.

Then displays of gear.

I started thinking about the days hanging out at the Air and Space Museum 

in DC with my son looking at the gear astronauts took into space.

And some old photos - here's Bradford Washburn, legendary Denali photographer, doing a movie about scientific research on the mountain in 1951.

The exhibit was interesting, but not as eye-catching as the Tim Remick exhibit of stunning giant photographs of climbers' faces as they get down the mountain that was up last March.  There was also an exhibit then of George Browne paintings with a picture of Browne painting on Denali taken by Washburn.  Both exhibits are highlighted here.

Here's a photo of Dr. Peter Hackett who set up a high altitude medical research program on the mountain in the 1980s and also treated climbers while he was there.

And two Denali paintings in the permanent collection.

Somehow, Sydney Laurance doesn't excite me all that much.  It's nice, but it doesn't tell me anything about the mountain that I don't get more of from looking at it directly.  It's more like a souvenir so you can remember the mountain when it's not around.   

You can read more about all this in Mike Dunham's ADN piece last May.