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Our food editor, Suzanne Podhaizer, is working on a story about virtual cooking, and she needs your help, gamers! Here's her plea:

Are you a whiz at whipping up fried gyoza and meat pies for Cooking Mama, or preparing gooey spider cake and curiously tasty omelettes in WOW? Do you spend hours plucking pumpkins and grapes for your potions in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion? Do you do something fun with food in Second Life?

If you do, I need your help. I'm working on an article about virtual cooking, and would love to chat with a few Vermonters who like to stir things up in cyberspace.

If you're willing, send me an e-mail that includes your name, contact info (phone numbers are very helpful) and the type of virtual cooking you do.

Thanks!

Email Suzanne at [email protected]. Spread the word.

There are several blogs I read on a daily basis. Most of them are about news, politics, technology or journalism. But there's one personal diary-type blog that I read religiously. It's about my partner's cousin (Heather), her husband (Braydon), and the two twin boys they adopted from Haiti (Kyle and Owen).

I haven't linked to it because the Johnson-McCormick family lives in Pennsylvania, and the content isn't necessarily relevant to what I do here. But it would be a shame not to share today's priceless post  about Heather's trip with the boys to the grocery store. It's both unsettling and hilarious.

It begins:

It seems that ever since I started going to the grocery store with K& O (which was, basically, very soon after they came home fromHaiti), there is always a story to tell about each and every trip wemake. For some reason it is in the grocery store that we have our most interesting(read between the lines) experiences. Today was no exception. Today, inaddition to all the normal mundane stuff that occurs when you bring twothree year old boys to the grocery store with you, not just one but twointeresting things happened!

Setting the scene — Hugegrocery store. The boys were in the kind of cart where in between theactual food bin part of the cart and the part that you push, there is asmall bench that fits two kids. K & O are sitting squeezed togetherand with me pushing the cart their heads were just below my head. Thesestories are true stories...

I just spent another couple hours posting stories from our archives. I wanted to take note of three of them, all from the April 11, 2001 issue:

• I saw a story not long ago about Jamiel Terry, son of prominent anti-abortion activist Randall Terry. Jamiel came out — yep, he's gay — in 2004. It reminded me that Peter Freyne had once written about a spat between the Terrys and former Republican State Rep. Nancy Sheltra. During the civil unions debate, the Terrys came to Vermont to lobby against gay marriage. After the Terrys took off, Freyne reported this weird episode, in which Jamiel accuses Sheltra of having had a crush on his dad. Very strange. Whatever happened with this? I guess I have to keep reading in the Freyne archive to find out.

• Remember those clocks that were on display years ago at Burlington International Airport, the ones that hung above the down escalator on the second floor that you'd see after you got off your flight? Here's a profile of the artist responsible. I always loved those clocks.

• Here's a story about Burlington's Poets Mimeo Cooperative. I remember when this one came out. I was one of the organizers who started the Burlington Poetry Slam, and I used to run readings at the Rhombus Gallery. The Poets Mimeo writers were essentially our predecessors. I still have a bunch of their books, including a copy of Robert Caswell's Exiled from North Street. I haven't forgotten you, Michael Breiner, Anna Blackmer, Bud Lawrence and Bill Davis. Even if I have stopped writing poetry.

Just got a call from Will Wiquist, Sen. Bernie Sanders' press secretary, about the Congressional Management Foundation's 2007 Golden Mouse Awards. The CMF analyzes Congressional websites, and has produced a lengthy report detailing the woeful way in which our legislators are failing to grasp the usefulness and importance of the web.

The CMF evaluates websites based on design and layout, constituent services, legislativecontent, press resources, communication tools and state and districtinformation.

According to the report, the most common letter grade earned byCongressional websites was a D. More than half of the sites that got aD last year repeated that dismal performance, or slipped to an F rating. Shame!

Here's one of my favorite findings:

While 98.3% of of Member sites have content about national issues, just63.1% of them included information from the 110th Congress.

The 110th Congress meets from January 2007-January 2009. How hard is it in this day and age to update your website once every few months?

Will Wiquist called me because Bernie won a "Silver Mouse Award," the equivalent of an "A." Both Rep. Peter Welch and Sen. Patrick Leahy won Bronze mice (an "A-"). Leahy slipped from his Gold finish in 2002, 2003 and 2006.

Here's the press release from Bernie's site.

“Senator Sanders’ Web site shows that he understands the value ofcreating a virtual office to reach specific audiences who have come toexpect having their needs met online,” [CMF executive director Beverly Bell] added.  “We congratulateSenator Sanders for having a Web site that is among thebest-of-the-best on Capitol Hill.”

Bernie's "Web site" is pretty nice. There's an audio/video archive, a photo gallery and a flash spotlights slideshow. Cool. The Sanders web staff might, however, want to include a link to the report announcement on the CMF site. Just a suggestion.

I've written before about how Seven Days is working to put all of our archives online. It's a long-term project. This week I posted a bunch of articles from 2001, and we're working forward from there, since those records already exist in digital form.

We skipped back a few years this week, though, and put up a story from 1997. It's a profile of former Republican State Rep. Ted Riehle, author of Vermont's anti-billboard law. Riehle died on New Year's Eve. He was 83.

Seven Days co-founder Paula Routly wrote the 1997 piece, and actually typed it into our database herself on Monday night, after spending the day editing this week's stories. It's a more three-dimensional account of Riehle than others I've seen since he died. In it, Paula wrote:

Riehle is out there — physically and politically. Although he jokinglydescribes himself as "an insensitive Republican bastard," he comesacross as a charming eccentric — a Rush Limbaugh listener who went toboth Grateful Dead shows in Vermont and loved them. His eldest son,Ted, sums up his individualistic father as "Jimmy Stewart meets JohnWayne."

Paula visited Riehle and his wife, Ayn, on their island in Lake Champlain. His house there is off the grid. And that wasn't the only thing that was off. Near the beginning of the story, Riehle explains his skinny dipping policy:

"Oh, and by the way, we don't wear bathing suits. I hope that doesn'tmake you uncomfortable. The policy used to be 'no bathing suitsallowed' on the island," he says. "But I've mellowed."

Paula wrote a few comments about typing up this story, which appear in my Web Page column in the newspaper:

There’s only one thing worse than reading the obituary of a fascinating person you’ll never meet: reading one about someone you knew well — and, in my case, wrote about. There was nothing wrong with the final write-up for Ted Riehle, which appeared in last Friday’s Burlington Free Press, five days after he died in the U.S Virgin Islands. But there was none of the irrepressible, skinny-dipping, billboard-bashing Republican I met 10 years ago, when I interviewed him for a profile in Seven Days. The meeting was no “Charlie Rose” affair; I kayaked out to his home on Savage Island  — where he and his wife, Ayn Baldwin, were living year-round — and got a full dose of “Big Ted” for the weekend. He was utterly and totally out there. I can still hear his devilish giggle.

The sad news of Ted’s death moved me to recall the details of my initial visit— which turned into a friendship — by digging up the old story. There was no electronic version of the decade-old article; our encounter predated the digital revolution. But a search through the paper’s morgue turned up a yellowing copy, lost to all but those who happened to remember the issue date. Instead of reading through the story, I felt compelled to type it into my computer, savoring each anecdote as I preserved it in our new online archive. It was my way of honoring Ted’s memory. Thanks to the web, stories don’t die anymore. And old ones can be resurrected. If only the same could be said for the remarkable people we have known, and lost.

Read the article here. The photo is from this summer, and it was taken by Matthew Thorsen.

Just came across an interesting article from Wired that describes a new kind of "homesickness" called solastalgia. It's caused by climate change.

From Clive Thompson's article:

It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia.In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as [Glenn Albrecht]wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form ofhomesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"

It's also a fascinating new way to think about the impact of globalwarming. Everyone's worrying about resource management and the spooky,unpredictable changes in the ecosystem. We fret over which areas willget flooded as sea levels rise. We estimate the odds of wars over cleanwater, and we tally up the species — polar bears, whales, wading birds— that'll go extinct.But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health.In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten howdeeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being.

I haven't been feeling this yet, possibly because I didn't grow up in Vermont and haven't lived here long enough. I came here from southeastern Michigan, which has also changed considerably over time, though not necessarily because of global warming.

This article reminded me of an interaction I had with my dad last week. I was visiting my parents, who moved to North Carolina last year from the Detroit area.

The transition has been kinda difficult for my father, who grew up in Detroit. While I was in NC, he took me aside and showed me a Detroit News blog he's been following lately, called Going Home. It's written by a guy from Dad's old neighborhood.

I had seen the blog before, but my dad pointed out a new audio slideshow. As we looked at photo after photo of abandoned buildings with broken windows, he pointed to a house still standing across the street from Fletcher Field and said, sadly, "that's where I grew up."

Is there a different word for that kind of homesickness? 

I just searched YouTube for Vermont videos of the weekend's storm, but I had a hard time finding any. There seem to be lots of videos from Canada though.

This one's my favorite. Some guys in an apartment above an icy road in Toronto put their camera on traffic. I feel a little guilty about laughing at this video, but it is funny. And there don't appear to have been any fatalities...

Here's a longish video from Vermont, called Vermont Storm, or "We Come From the Land of the Ice and Snow."

Here's a very short video from somewhere in Canada. I call it, "We Love You, MySpace Friends!"

It's refreshing to read an articulate defense of citizen journalism from someone with legitimate Old Media cred.

The relationship between "citizen media" and "traditional media" is complicated and evolving. I think it's an exciting time to be a professional journalist. It's important for us to be engaged in the evolution of our craft.

But I still see many traditional media-types — in both the mainstream and the alternative press — instinctively take a defensive stance every time the subject comes up. I think they have some legitimate concerns, but I often see those concerns obscured by anger and fear. It's disheartening. And frustrating.

Thanks, Dan, for having an open mind, and for being a kindred spirit.

Not sure if anyone else around here is paying attention to this, but there have been a bunch of staffing cuts recently at Creative Loafing-owned alt-weeklies, including the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper.

Creative Loafing Atlanta Editor Ken Edelstein gives an overview of the carnage:

In Atlanta, we laid off four sales people, a marketing assistant, asales assistant and our wonderful assistant distribution manager —seven employees total. No Edit staff member was among those cuts, butthat’s partly because we have a couple of open positions right now.

The edit departments at the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper – altweeklies that Creative Loafing Inc. bought last August — were hit a bit harder. Reader Editor Alison True had to lay off John Conroy and three other highly respected, longtime staff writers on Friday. City Paper Erik Wemple laid off four writers and an editorial assistant.

Ouch.

At the Reader, the cuts included Steve Bogira, who was on leave working on a book.

I'm pretty sure I saw Steve Bogira speak at an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference a few years ago. He wrote Courtroom 302, a widely-acclaimed account of a year in the life of a Chicago courtroom. 

If memory serves, he talked about investigative reporting, about the importance of developing sources and building a sound fundamental understanding of your beat, about how there are lots and lots of important stories out there in the world for reporters who take the time to find them.

I remember that he advised the writers in the audience to spend time in courthouses, to spend the day watching trial proceedings, even if we didn't necessarily have a story to cover. He said that's how he found some of his best stories.

I remember thinking, Yeah right, like I have the time to just hang out in a courthouse. I don't have the luxury of being able to do all of this background research.

Now, I guess, neither does he.

It's too bad. He's a great reporter.

I want to point out that the editorial staff at Seven Days is growing — we added a 2nd Staff Writer and a Food Editor in 2005, an Online Editor, a Videographer and a News Editor in 2007 —  but I have to admit that it's still hard for us to do the kind of research that Bogira recommended. I wonder how he'll subsidize his reporting from now on?

I was just poking around on the Valley News website and found these slideshows.

This is good stuff!

I'm particularly fond of Cow Tipping and Farm Auction. Nice job, James Patterson.

Beautiful photos. And the audio editing on this cow slideshow makes me jealous. I really need to hone my Audacity skills.

Too bad I can't read more of the Valley News articles online. I actually went to the site trying to find an article. The article was linked from another website, but the link was broken. I went to the site to find the story, then I realized that they don't archive anything. And they don't post the entire paper online. What a bummer! Also a bummer that I can't tell when these slideshows appeared. And there's no contact info or masthead. So I don't really know what James Patterson does at the Valley News.

But his slideshows look great!