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In 1998 I declared the delicious, 14-week gap between Memorial Day and Labor Day to be the official "Mini Year" — a bit longer and a bit earlier on the calendar than summer and a thoroughly manageable stretch of time for following mini-resolutions or pursuing mini-goals:
Pick a weakness and see if you can conquer it — not forever, as in those dreaded New Year's resolutions that no one keeps — but only until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in September. Then you can go back to blaspheming, gorging on Pop Tarts, not flossing or whatever your personal weakness might be.
Or resolve to organize the basement, paint the porch, write five letters to old friends, walk a total of 300 miles, finish reading three novels or make those medical appointments you’ve been putting off. Make a list of all your subscriptions and be sure you’re getting the best prices. That kin’s of thing.
Whatever. I’m not telling you what you should do. You know your own goals and weaknesses. I’m just suggesting when you should do it: During the 98 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Less than a third of a year. Hit “reset” on 2022 and vow to enter the fall not feeling as though you've squandered one of the ever-diminishing number of summers — meteorological, astronomical or traditional — allotted you in this life.
My advice: Contra Daniel Burnham, make little plans. Unofficial summer is such a busy, nutty, unpredictable and almost frantic time — particularly in these climes where warmth feels so precious, and particularly for parents of young children — that it may be the most difficult season of all for accomplishment of any sort.
My goals are modest:
Scan 500 archival family photos
Finish putting together the overdue 2021 family album
Find a venue for another live “Mincing Rascals” event.
Enter yours in comments, if you’d like to be held accountable after Labor Day.
Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses
Some of these messages are in reference to items in last Thursday’s Picayune Sentinel.
Diane A. — “ Grass Lawns are an Ecological Catastrophe” offers another advantage to No Mow May: “Estimates vary from 16 billion to 41 billion pounds of CO2 being emitted from lawn mowers every year. Another estimate is that every gallon of gasoline burned by lawnmowers emits 20 pounds of CO2. According to the EPA, one gas lawn mower emits 89 pounds of CO2 and 34 pounds of other pollutants per year.
Peter C. — If you have a pleasure garden — as we do — then the lawn is a key player. My uncle, an avid gardener, once told me, “the most important plant in the garden is the lawn." We plant a garden because we get joy from its aesthetics. Why would we not mow it so that in perhaps the most comely time of the year, the garden looks bad?
Were I in charge I would grant the croquet exception to lawns used to frame and highlight decorative, ornamental gardens. But lawns put to good use aren’t really the issue/problem that No Mow May tries to highlight. It’s the wasteful aesthetic that values monocultural expanses of green over plants, native grasses, wildflowers and other more beneficial landscaping elements.
Full disclosure, though. I left town last Wednesday night and Thursday morning got a text from Johanna that she was done with No Mow May in the front yard and was directing our son to get out the mower. Friday in Ann Arbor I then mowed (at the highest setting!) the rather small yet well overgrown portion of my parents’ yard that is still devoted to grass. Sunday, my son mowed the backyard. So…
Pete P. — I like the approach of not announcing one's virtues, whether from the right or left. Do the right thing? Yes. But put up a sign about it? No. My favorite philosophical take on that is "But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret."
I think it helps to reframe the notion of “virtue signaling” as “value signaling,” and I do think there’s value in that. Flying a rainbow flag, for example, normalizes and even advertises gay acceptance and broadcasts an important message. We express ourselves and communicate and promote through symbols, and I don’t see a whole lot wrong with that.
My conclusion is that when you accuse someone of “virtue signaling” you are merely accusing them of displaying or proclaiming a value that you yourself don’t hold. Which makes it lazy and insincere accusation unless you are consistent and bi-partisan in whining about virtue signaling.
Jake H. — No to armed guards at schools, no to arming teachers, yes to locked doors and yes to, you guessed it, vestibules! I've seen two high schools recently redesign their main entryway so that guests need to be buzzed in from an outside intercom and then get buzzed in through a second set of doors to gain access to the school. It's an unobtrusive, relatively inexpensive way to enhance security. It remains a mystery to me why the shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas — who obviously had no business there and was ostentatiously armed — was able to get at kids.
There’s been a lot of mockery of the idea that more secure doors would help mitigate such tragedies, but while double doors are obviously not a perfect answer and a determined mass murderer could breach vestibule security, they would probably help a little bit. Schools are always going to be fairly soft targets, but better perimeter security would give first responders a bit more time to get to the scene and perhaps allow for “lock your classroom doors!” alerts to go out in a timely way.
Adding vestibules should not be a substitute for meaningful efforts to control guns, of course, but it’s better than nothing.
Robert A. — I disagree with your dismissal of the idea of armed guards at school. Look to Israel. Ever since they posted members of a trained national security force at all schools they’ve had no mass school shootings. Or look to airport security in the U.S. How many airplane hijackings have we had since we decided to quit talking and do something?
The Transportation Security Administration annual budget is $10.3 billion to provide the highly effective but also fairly extreme security measures that have kept U.S. air travel safe from skyjackers since 2001. I couldn’t begin to estimate what it would cost to create that level of security at every school in the U.S. for nine months every year.
Jamie G. — I’m wondering if you or someone else scours Twitter for funny tweets or are they sent to you for ultimate humor judgement?
One of my very first Picayune Extra issues featured a “Behind the Tweets” essay telling all about how I put the poll together each week. The shortanswer, though, is that I do nearly all the scouring and only a few are nominated by readers.
David L. — White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson compared himself to the legendary Jackie Robinson back in 2019. And when someone says that they kind of feel like a very famous person from the past, it seems clear to me that they’re presenting themselves as a contemporary version of the famous person, something that certainly invites ribbing or even mockery of the sort Yankee DH Josh Donaldson administered. Those who try to turn these sorts of exchanges into racial issues are simply tiresome.
I’ve got to say I was very disappointed in the low quality of most of the print punditry on this story. Writers who are generally quite smart were quick to want to fit Donaldson with a Klan hood. The usually insightful Rick Morrissey had a terrible take:
It really doesn’t matter what Donaldson’s intent was in calling Anderson “Jackie.” … When it feels like our country is being burned down in new ways every day, words matter greatly. You’d have to be a special kind of idiot not to understand that calling a Black baseball player “Jackie” would be offensive, unless, I don’t know, that was your goal. In the same way that most people of sound mind understand that throwing Hitler’s name around isn’t a good idea, ever, most people understand that teasing a person of color about a Black hero would be incredibly stupid and insensitive.
First of all, the slogan “intent doesn’t matter” needs to be retired. Intent always matters — legally, ethically and morally — when passing judgment on the misdeeds others. Second of all, you have to be a special kind of idiot not to understand that the genesis of Donaldson’s taunt was not obviously or even arguably rooted in race. If Anderson had said he felt like the next Joe DiMaggio, Donaldson, who is known to be an aggravating jerk, would have mockingly called him “Joe.” And finally… Hitler?
Jeff P. — You speculated that an abortion rights regime in Illinois might attract corporate and small business interest. Color me skeptical. “Illinois…come for the abortion, stay for the tax burden and truly awful governance” doesn’t sound like attractive messaging for potential permanent residents or businesses.
Meh. The tax burden in Illinois ain’t great — this estimate has us 10th, this one 7th — but my guess is not many prospective employees look at that when being recruited. Forget that job, I’m holding out for a job in Alaska! And that the message “Illinois, where we trust you, your daughters, your sisters and your wives to make decisions about whether to continue an unwanted pregnancy” would, in fact, resonate.
Jake H. — I dream of starting a newsletter titled “The Wall Street Journal Is Full of Shit” to methodically take down every example of GOP talking points masquerading as responsible persuasion.
This sounds like a mini-year goal to me!
Just when it looks like progressives are getting some momentum on such issues as abortion right and guns, the lefty language police wades in to ruin it for everyone
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
The word “chief” will no longer be used in reference to job titles in the San Francisco Unified School District in an effort, school officials said, to avoid the word’s connotation with Native Americans.
It's an Anglo-French word that dates back to the 14th century and used in literally tens of thousands of contexts that have nothing to do with American Indian culture. No one thinks about indigenous people when referring to a “chief financial officer” or the “editor-in-chief,” or, jeez, I don’t really have to explain this to you, do I?
Similarly insufferable extreme sensitivity posing as enlightenment gave us an attempted ban on the use of the word “master” as in “master bedroom” and is helping provoke the cultural backlash that will hamper the ability of the progressive movement to win the converts and votes necessary to realize important change.
On my Facebook wall, a commenter responded “If it offends Native Americans, get rid of it. I, as a white person, don't get a vote,” which grossly oversimplifies this and any other language dispute.
The story quotes school officials saying, “Native American members of our community have expressed concerns over the use of the title.” But before I simply bend the knee to an alleged “concern” I’d like to know the size of this contingent of “members” and their reasoning. I would like to see research that shows a significant number of people think of American Indians when hearing “chief operating officer,” “police chief” and so on; that the word is culturally analogous in that respect to, say, “pow-wow” or “peace pipe” or “teepee.”
After all, some subset of people are always going to express “concerns” about something in the language. For example, some folks are offended by the word “women” and argue that the suffix should be “-myn” and not “-men.” Others are offended by “folks” and argue for the spelling “folx” because, even though “folks” is gender neutral,“to be inclusive of the gender spectrum requires additional intention in our everyday systems, practices and language.”
Usage evolves, but not by fiat and not at the behest of small, loud group of opportunists and scolds. Maybe San Franciscans are celebrating this putatively sensitive accommodation, but I can all but guarantee you that most Americans are rolling their eyes and sidling just a bit more to the right at this news.
Ya gotta see these tweets!
I often run across tweets that are too visual in nature to include in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently:
Finally, I first saw this video on Twitter, but I’ll embed the YouTube for your enjoyment. It shows Phoenix TV weathercaster Cory McCloskey (formerly of Quincy!) improvising his way through a glitchy map in 2015.
There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll. And please don’t forget to check out my special “Bleak Peanuts” poll.
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I was reading your Tues morning edition after dinner, sitting on my small deck overlooking a scrubby yet recently mown backyard. I was intrigued by your suggestion to make a mini-resolution for the next 98 days and started to consider some. But then realized I was doing exactly what wanted to do all summer. I was sitting on my deck on a beautiful summer evening enjoying a good read. Whether it is your words or whatever book I am reading—this is when life feels perfect.
Hi Eric. Yesterday, Memorial Day, I put out our flag. My husband is a veteran and Memorial Day is a national flag display day. I was and still am disappointed to find that ours was the only flag flying. Up and down the block and one over, same thing. I’m wondering if flying a flag is no longer a sign of patriotism but rather a political statement. I sure don’t like the idea of being branded as anything but a patriot and it bugs me to think that like-minded neighbors may be intimidated. Maybe I can talk a few into joining me on Flag Day (June 14) or Independence Day (July 4).