Happy Holidays, Family & Friends

It seems that change is everywhere, rocking, if not raising, all boats in wave after wave of events local and global, economic and political, corporate and personal. Whether the tide is rising or falling, turbulent or calm, whether revolutions spiral upward or downward, we send our best wishes for a bright, buoyant holiday season.

This time last year, Gven and Sven went to New York with Jessi, missing a record-setting blizzard by a day. We roamed the Brooklyn Museum, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and some neat shops in Soho, then celebrated our thirty-second anniversary at the coolest little trattoria in the West Village.

In May, the Golly clan gathered in Milwaukee for the wedding of Sven’s nephew (Jeanie Beanie Golly-Gee’s son) Max. The ceremony in an old Presbyterian church included a ritual handfasting with the family tartan, and the reception on the lakefront was memorable.

In June, we all converged at a beautiful winery in Rochester, Michigan, to celebrate the marriage of another nephew (Anna Banana Golly-Gosh’s son) Todd following Todd and Liz’s wedding in Dubuque, Iowa. Gven and Sven then leapfrogged further north for a couple days of camping, horseback riding, and kayaking.

In July, Gven took her sister Annette Funicello Horton and their mother Layla Alexander, who called herself Lill but everyone knew her as Nancy, to the Quilt National exhibit at the Dairy Barn in Athens and the State Fair in Columbus. In August, we went with Nancy to her sixtieth high school reunion in Hillsville, Virginia, and the Alexander family reunion at an idyllic riverside spot outside Sylvatus, Virginia.

Sven’s parents overcame a couple of close calls and continue to amaze us with their hardiness and resilience. Mom didn’t let a little pneumonia and a fractured hip stop her from celebrating her ninetieth birthday in September, with Anna Banana, Jeanie Beanie, Jojo, Sven, Petro, and their spouses in attendance. She has been a real trouper in regaining her mobility by diligent physical therapy, strength of will, and Dad’s patient support. He has decided his driving days are over, but he and Mom are still very independent, maintaining their cozy house and wonderful garden on the scenic Cumberland Plateau.

Zelda decided that it’s time for more formal education, so in January she is starting the Master of Library and Information Science program at Kent State. She will keep her assistant manager’s job at Half Price Books and commute to classes at the State Library of Ohio near downtown Columbus. She and her friend David have a new apartment in North Campus/South Clintonville, strategically located between work and school. Zelda spent Halloween in Chicago exploring new and old haunts with her Kent roommate Megan.

Jessi has worked on art handling projects with a moving company that specializes in fine art, as well as renovating apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan. His baseball team played a home-and-away series with a team from Pittsburgh, complete with live bands, cookout, and friendly competition. In August, he took a week-long bicycle trip along the Maine coast with three friends in the wake of Hurricane Irene. This fall, he shouldered added responsibility as head honcho of the screening shed during the cranberry harvest in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.

Sven’s Mom, Dad, and sister Jojo made the trek north to Central Swing State for our traditional Thanksgiving feast, featuring world-class pies by Gven and Zelda. Jessi and his friend Flora joined us straight from the cranberry farm.

Gven keeps finding creative ways to bring a serious, respectful, personal yoga practice to a broad demographic cross-section of Central Ohioans, with the Yoga Factory in Methodistville as her home base. As soon as our new furnace is installed in the nick of time just before Christmas, she will be back in her studio applying chaos theory to the construction of architecture-themed art quilts.

On weekends, Sven can usually be found in the garden outside Om Shanty, weeding, pruning, planting, watering, or splitting and stacking firewood, his favorite form of fiber art. So far, he has kept his day job at the Hill, the newly independent, downsized, digitized, not-your-grandfather’s-textbook company.

We lost a dear friend in October. Our brother-in-law Bart Badly – Jojo’s husband – died after a battle with cancer. We will miss his wit and passion for life.

Jessi and Zelda are home for the holidays; the tree is up; a fire is in the hearth; lutefisk, potatoes, and peas are on the table. I guess some things don’t change so much. Have an energetic, dynamic Year of the Dragon.

Realignment, continued (indefinitely)

The world being what it is - always in flux and constantly shifting in the winds of economic necessity - it is time to revisit the realignment of college sports, the congressional districts of Central Swing State, the map of Europe, and most volatile of all, the publishing industry. Common sense occasionally plays a role in this process, but that depends entirely on whose common sense you are considering. I propose the following alignments based on physical and cultural geography, historical alliances and rivalries, and my personal bias as a sexagenarian with letters after my name, which means you have to listen to my opinions.

First and foremost, the Big Ten needs to expand further east to include Syracuse and Pittsburgh and further west to include Kansas and Oklahoma. The Southeastern Conference, you know, the NFL subsidiary with colleges attached, can have Missouri, Texas A&M, whatever. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which at one time was comprised of universities in close proximity to the Atlantic coast, should look at a map and consider adding Rutgers and Connecticut. The remnants of the Big 12, including Texas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Baylor, and Texas Tech, might want to return to its Southwest Conference roots by incorporating New Mexico, Colorado State, Utah, Brigham Young, and UNLV. If the various commissioners and/or university presidents would like me to join the conference calls in which these arrangements are made, I would be happy to fit them into my schedule.

Those agreements will be child's play compared to getting a couple dozen Ohio legislators to agree on a map of the state's reduced number of congressional districts. I suggest that they think the unthinkable, and simply look at the de facto demographics of the state county-by-county, and draw the new lines to balance district populations. Although it will take all the fun out of the ruling party's celebratory gerrymandering, redrawing lines to create 17 districts from the existing 18 should not be rocket science, and these state legislators are NOT rocket scientists. If they can wrap their parochial podunk minds around groups of contiguous counties forming a district, I think the white, rural counties would elect a member of Congress they can live with, and the multi-ethnic urban counties would elect a member of Congress they can live with. This will happen when hell freezes over.


Across the pond, where tribes have fought for longer and made progress toward civilized coexistence, the EU should just excise the UK, which can form its own economic community - perhaps with Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, and - thinking outside the box just a bit - Russia. Britain has never been part of Europe anyway, and the Norman conquest didn't make it so. The European Union can then become a true continental entity by building around the core nation states of France, Germany, and Italy and the historical inner ring of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Spain, and Portugal. Given sufficient democratic and capitalist development, the EU will then extend eastward to include Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and yes, Greece. That hole in the middle, of course, is Switzerland, which someday should take its place as the Eurozone's official banker and protector of the Euro.

The neighboring league across the Bosporus will eventually become a friendly, or at least non-hostile rival, a Southwest Asian Union (SWAU) that includes Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kurdistan, Iran, and Pakistan, with Israel as its Switzerland. We're talking long-term. Next door to the aforementioned Shekelzone will be the Rupeezone, based in India but also including Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. You can guess what rival league looms across the Himalayas: the Yuanzone, otherwise known as China, along with its regional trading partners Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Okay, so the socio-economic map of the world has been settled. Now comes the hard part, reorganizing the industry that collects, compiles, composes, and disseminates information to the aforementioned markets. Call it the knowledge business, if you will, or the content management business, or educational products and services, or some other five-dollar phrase that hasn't been coined yet. This is an economic entity in flux if there ever was one, and the only thinking that even addresses reality occurs outside a box that isn't made of paper. Printing on paper will continue, of course, but as a small appendage of the real publishing action, which is already occurring in pixels, not pages.