Working on Book

Fotos and text today are about entirely different things. The text discusses what I have been doing of late other than updating this blog. The fotos show Christmas decorations in the Ironbound. I had no illustrations for the text, and little text for the illustrations, so just interwove them as two independent streams. People interested in the text can read that; people just interested in pictures can check them. Either is fine with me.

I wondered aloud, December 14th, if the Ironbound's Christmas decorations were more ebullient than those in other parts of the city, aside from the Ivy Hill Park Apartments complex. Those of the main drag of the Ironbound, Ferry Street ("Portugal Avenue") assuredly are.

My not having updated this blog much recently may suggest that I took some time off for the Holidays. I have actually been distracted by other parts of my life, like housework, grocery shopping, fiting the cold, and reorganizing my household; plus working on other topics, such as posting to my other two blogs, political and gay; and, most time-consumingly, drafting exposition and argumentation for my spelling-reform book, plus creating tables of things like abbreviations and contractions, to illustrate principles. I have plenty of topics and pix for this blog (indeed, arguably more than I can deal with), but have been diverted to researching and writing things for my book. I recently turned 65, and older people start to think of what they will leave behind if tomorrow they wake up dead.

I was very struck by the decorations as I drove just past the overpass that carries Newark Penn Station above Market Street, and started up the hill on Ferry Street toward McWhorter Street. But people and cameras see things very differently, so I had to take this picture from closer to the lites.

One day I spent over 9 hours researching and filling in a table of words with more than one spelling. Using mainly just the words from the various tables for my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website, I compiled a list of 175 words with two or more spellings. It took that long because I had to track down all spellings and verify the pronunciations associated with them. I was sure there are many more English words with more than one spelling, but 9 hours on one subject in one day was enuf for me. That day. The next time I addressed that topic, I found 40 more, for a total to date of 215. And that's not counting British spellings of entire categories of word, like -OUR or -ISE endings where Americans write -OR and -IZE but only words like donut/doughnut, gray/grey, judgment/judgement, knickknack/nicknack, and ukulele/ukelele.

The round "Ironbound" sign, with an icon of an old locomotive, appears to the right of this 'Christmas tree' made up only of lites.

A lot of opponents of spelling reform like to pretend that having nonphonetic spellings is a good thing, because it stabilizes the language and allows different dialects to communicate. They grossly understate the chaos of even the written language, but I have to prove that, by showing, with specifics, how many hundreds of words with the same pronunciation have different spellings in Traditional Orthography (T.O.), the chaos they defend.

This closer view of one string of lites shows a sponsor's sign hanging from the central 'snowflake'.

I have, oddly, also thought of new matters to plumb, even tho I created my Fanetik system in about 1972. When you write a book, you have to try to anticipate attacks that people might make and alterations they might suggest, so you find yourself addressing matters that you hadn't thought about.

I didn't set up my tripod to take these pix. It was cold, for one thing. So I was concerned that the fotos might be fuzzy, for the shutter being open longer because of low lite, and my not being able to hold the camera steady during the longer exposure. So I tried using flash to speed the shutter. The result, in this and other pix below, is that yes, the shutter tripped faster and details are crisper, but the pictures are underexposed, too dark. They nonetheless reveal patterns more sharply. Had I known that the briter pictures woldn't be as clear as I wanted, I'd have set up my tripod, without regard to my hands getting very cold in the process. Live and learn.

Now, as I listen to television or read, one word after another reminds me of something I need to address, or a table of sample words I need to add to or even create. So I either make a note on paper or open the relevant electronic file and add to it. As you might imagine, this can be very time-consuming.
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I have also started using Fanetik in the things I write at home, both in handwriting and in WordPerfect, in order to see how people are likely to use a phonetic spelling system and whether important but fine distinctions that my system can make are likely to be used or skipped. For instance, Fanetik can draw distinctions between hundreds of homonyms without sacrificing phoneticity. But, as a practical matter, will people actually draw such distinctions or write everything the same and let context indicate sense?

Here's a foto of Ferry Street from diagonally across from Walgreens, no flash.

For instance, I/eye is a homonymic pair, homophones (words pronounced the same but which have different meanings) that are spelled differently. (There are homophones that both sound the same and are spelled the same, like bow for the thing that propels arrows and the ribbon knot you put on a gift box. There are also homonyms that are not homophones, like bow pronounced bo and which has several different meanings, and bow pronounced bou, which also has different meanings, such as bend from the waist to an audience and the front of a ship.)

Here's a flash version.

The spelling I is phonetic; the second, eye, is wildly unphonetic. In Fanetik, you can write both of these words phonetically but still differently. That is because both words end in a long vowel, so you can distinguish between them yet retain absolute phoneticity, by either dropping the silent-E at the end or retaining it: I/ie. In this particular homophone pair, there is an additional distinction that can be made: the capital-I of the first-person singular pronoun, I, vs. lowercase-i for eye. This is an odd feature of the language if you think of it. No other personal pronoun gets a capital (you, he, she, it, we, they — no cap). But of course such a distinction disappears if an area of text is put into BLOCK CAPS, or the reverse, if someone insists on writing everything lowercase, like t.s. elliot. As a practical matter, with this particular word, might a person write i rather than ie for "eye" on the theory that since it is lowercase, that suffices to distinguish it from the personal pronoun?

The remaining fotos today look the opposite direction from those above, west toward Penn Station and Gateway Center.

We have other words of one letter (a vowel, of course; tho we do have at least one word that is all consonants: "psst"), a and O — the latter, again, only capitalized. So why not just a lowercase i for "eye"? Fanetik permits "ie" for "eye", and careful writers in formal writing might spell it that way. But will most people have the patience for it in most contexts? I am certainly not exactly like other people, but if I, the inventor of the system, don't have patience to use fine points of the system, I suspect others won't either.
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With O vs. owe, Fanetik again allows the same kind of distinction, O/oe. But there's another word of that sound, oh. Might people prefer a tripartite distinction, O/o/oe for O/owe/oh? Or will they all be written the same, "o"? Or might O be written with a capital but the other two be spelled just lowercase-o? I don't know (noe).
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We in the oldline English-speaking countries are presently expected to remember THOUSANDS of arbitrary and unreasonable spellings. Will people who use a phonetic orthography be willing to remember HUNDREDS of distinctions between slitely different spellings, all phonetic, in order to distinguish among homonyms? In Fanetik, you can be completely phonetic but still distinguish a great many homophones, some in ways already used in Traditional Orthography: hi/hie, flu/flue, do/doe, be/bee, se/see (for hi/high, flu/flue, dough/doe, be/bee, see/sea). But will people rebel, on the ground that the very point of a completely phonetic orthography is not to have to remember arbitrary spelling distinctions?

Here's a flash version of the same general scene.

In any case, I have been doing a lot of work on my Fanetik book. A lot. And, not surprisingly, since Fanetik and T.O. are very similar, I sometimes find myself writing Fanetik when I'm supposed to be writing T.O., or vice-versa.
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Now I have to put footers into every WordPerfect file to show the filename (auto-text), then print everything out, in order that I can then try to figure out what goes where. When I print these drafts out, I also need to double- or triple-space the hardcopy to allow me to read thru and mark up the text for revisions. It is much easier to shuffle papers than switch between computer screens for purposes of evaluating where things go.

For the last two fotos, let me show the flash version first, for fine detail of the lites.

To show you what goes thru my head when I read and write, this is what the paragraph above would look like in Fanetik.

Nou I haav tu poot footerz intu evre WerdPerfakt fieyal tu sho tha fieyalnaem (auto-tekst), then print evreetthing out, in aurder thaat I kaan then tri tu figyer out hwut goez hwair. Hwen I print theez draafts out, I aulso need tu dubool- aur tripool-spaes tha hordkope tu alou me tu reed tthru aand mork up tha tekst faur reevizhanz. It iz much eezeeyer tu shufool paeperz thaan swich beetween kampyueter skreenz faur perpasaz uv eevaalyuewaeting hwair tthingz go.

You have no idea how hard it is for me to keep from lapsing into Fanetik when I'm supposed to be writing T.O., or into T.O. when I should be writing Fanetik. (Yu haav no iedeeya hou hord it iz faur me tu keep frum laapsing intu Fanetik hwen I'm sapoezd tu be rieting T.A., aur intu T.A. hwen I shood be rieting Fanetik.)

I have yet to decide if I should try to backfill the days when I didn't have time and energy to put up a post for this blog, or just let the skipped days go, and move on. If I decide to backfill, I will put a note to that effect atop the most recent posting. For now, let me simply admit that this post is backfilled for December 30th, but actually uploaded the nite of January 6th. Hey, I've been busy.

Property Taxes; Peru Exhibit Closes Thursday

Property Taxes Higher but Not Doubled. I mentioned December 18th that my mortgage company's website says that they paid out $6,186.74 in property taxes on my account, and that seemed wildly high. I found today the notice recently sent by the City of Newark of my final tax bill 2009, and it is 'only' $3,174.50, up from $2,885.91 in 2007, but not anywhere near Bank of America's figure. I'm relieved about the taxes, but when your mortgage company shows figures at variance with what was due, you have to wonder what's going on. So I have to contact them and ask what was actually paid.

In addition to art objects, there are many descriptive plaques with information on highly diverse topics. In this display case the two cylindrical objects are fancy candles of a type used in religious processions.

NPL Peru Show Closes Tomorrow. The Newark Public Library's Hispanic Heritage Celebration 2009 show on the second floor of the Main Branch, "A Journey from Ancient Times: Peruvians in New Jersey", closes December 31st. The Library also closes early tomorrow because of New Year's Eve, but is open until 5:30pm. If you haven't seen this exhibit, you have one more day.

In this case appear various printed matters, mainly humorous. The cartoon on the upper right shows a crewman saying to Columbus (in Spanish) "Psst. Psst. Admiral, it seems this continent is populated only by illegals".

I attended the opening reception for this exhibition on September 17th, where these two kids performed traditional dances.

If you haven't even been inside the Main Branch, a Romanesque, Renaissance palazzo opposite the northern tip of Washington Park with a three story atrium covered by a stained-glass skylite, by all means check it out.

This case, in the top glass of which a reflection of a U.S. flag and the columns of the upper floor mixes with Peruvian weaving, speaks to some things most people may not know about Peru, including a Peruvian astronaut and brain surgery by the Incas.

St. Lucy's Video Also Now on YouTube

Fotos today are screen captures of individual slides in the video slideshow by "charles 1789" about Christmas at St. Lucy's discussed below. (I did not see a way to ask the fotografer for permission to use these pix. If he sees them and objects to this use, I will of course remove them. But I would like to think he'd be glad to know they have been used in this blogpost.)

On December 23rd, I offered readers a wondrous video slideshow of Christmas at St. Lucy's Roman Catholic church in the near North Ward. I first saw it on Blip.tv, a website used by The Star-Ledger that I have also used for some videos. Now I see that the video is now on YouTube. I also sent out, on the 24th, Jacquie Lawson Christmas ecards to almost 50 friends and relatives that included the URL to this video on Blip.tv, tho the text of that URL turned out to be hard to read (small and in a cursive font), so I don't know how many followed up and went to that site. (Jacquie Lawson, by the way, is a British artist whose team makes incomparable animated ecards. A British political colleague introduced me to her wonderful cards, and I have been very happy to subscribe to that service ever since.)

In each of the two Christmas seasons since I found the St. Lucy's video, I have played it in the background, or foreground, many, many times, while working or just sitting, it is so beautiful — to me. As Shakespeare observed, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". But could he have been the first to observe that? Hardly seems likely, does it? I cannot imagine that more than a tiny minority of people, even nonbelievers like myself, could fail to be enchanted by that St. Lucy's video. I am endlessly astonished to see how wonderful Newark is, as against its execrable reputation. The ability of the human race to believe things exactly opposite to reality never ceases to amaze me. And I'm 65 years old. Irration still astounds me, even after 6½ decades of seeing it.

When I checked the Blip.tv. site where the video resides, I was puzzled to see that the only comment was mine from two years ago. (There are more, but not many, at the YouTube site.) So I left this further comment:

Two years later, I am still astonished at how wonderful this video slideshow is, and I have offered it, December 23, 2009, to my readers at http://newarkusa.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-christmas-card-to-readers.html. I am also sadly surprised to see that it had garnered no other comments but mine. The Internet is so immense, and any individual posting so small, that wonderful things fall thru the cracks, but this video slideshow decidedly should not. I urge everyone who, like me, is deeply touched by it, to tell others.

The Twelve Days of Christmas do not end until the Epiphany or Three Kings Day (January 6th), so if you have not yet viewed the St. Lucy's video, or have watched/listened to it but not told others of it, you have time to pass it along this year. As I said in my first comment, in 2007:

Thank you for helping dispel the misperceptions of Newark, the largest and most cultured city of New Jersey. St. Lucy's would grace any city, anywhere in the world. It's in Newark.

The video is not perfect. Andrea Bocelli phrases things wrong in at least two places in "Adeste Fidelis". He says "Venite ador-e-e-mus" rather than "ador-e-mu-us", which everyone else says. I watched much of midnite mass from the Vatican this year, and the choir there sang "ador-e-mu-us", so Bocelli is wrong. They also sang"Be-eth-le-hem", whereas Bocelli says "Beth-le-e-hem". My friend Gaetano will not hear criticisms of Andrea Bocelli, but Bocelli's phrasing is off, and he should be called on it. The Vatican's Midnite Mass choir says "Ador-e-mu-us" and "Be-eth-le-hem". We say the same. Bocelli departs from everyone else's phrasing. That means he is wrong. He should stop being wrong, and conform to everyone else's phrasing.

Sergio Franchi's portion of the video is perfect. Absolutely perfect, and wonderful. Franchi was born in Italy, lived a while in South Africa, and ended his life here, as a U.S. citizen. He was superlative, a tremendous baritone or tenor talent. (Wikipedia terms him a tenor, but he sings baritone in the St. Lucy's video.) That Franchi may not be regarded as an incandescent talent may reflect the tendency of people in the 'high arts' to devalue Americans. Had Franchi remained in Italy his entire life, I suspect he would be regarded today as one of the greatest tenors (or baritones) of all time.

Pavarotti's "Ave Maria" in the St. Lucy's video is also as good as I ever heard him. I have long thought that his reputation was much bigger than his talent, since much of what I had heard sounded like bellowing. But his "Ave Maria" in the St. Lucy's video is extaordinarily fine and touching (while Bocelli seems to be bellowing in portions of his "Adeste Fideles").

Franchi and Pavarotti have both died, but their voices ring on to stir the 'soul'. I don't believe in a supernatural soul, but the word "soul" in the sense of essence or core retains validity for me. Many people who hear the music in this video will find themselves weeping from beauty and caring. That's so much better than crying from grief and hurt. But I suspect it serves the same function, in relieving the heart of wear. Sometimes we, and especially men, of any sexual orientation, go thru much of our lives shielding ourselves from emotional pain. That doesn't stop the hurt from building up inside, it just keeps us from recognizing the pain and letting it out. Little hurts, like every ugly story on the news, register and are felt. We suppress reactions of pain for each and all. Then a personal hurt hits, and we either go into major suppress mode or seemingly overreact, and burst into meltdown or what may seem to others to be exaggerated emotionality, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid. But because we cannot grieve the kid with cancer in Florida we hear about on the news, or the family burned to death in a house fire in Irvington, tho all these myriad little pains are remembered and pile up inside us, when we finally can grieve aloud, and wail in pain, the mourning may seem unreasonably intense. You may recall an episode of the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond in which Ray peeks into a window and sees his wife crying. He doesn't know why she's crying, so thinks it might be something he did, so needs to find out. After Debra gets over indignation about his 'spying' on her, she tells him it's not anything he did at all. It's just that sometimes she needs to cry. Sometimes we all need to cry, not for ourselves, because sometimes we realize we are so lucky, when we hear of terrible things happening to others, but because other people hurt, and there's nothing we can do to help. At Christmastime we are reminded of the good works some people do, and many of us get another thing to mourn: our financial inability to help others. That guilt adds to all the other tiny pains, hundreds of them, thousands of them. Sooner or later we have to weep — or wail. Crying for joy or from perceiving beauty may not arise from pain, but it may nonetheless alleviate emotional pain. Most men in our culture do not want to be seen crying. Fortuitously, the Internet provides a private viewing experience in which men can see and react, without being seen to react.

This statue shows a vision of the Virgin Mary with a circle of five-pointed stars around her head that some Europeans claim is the inspiration for the European Union flag, which to us looks like a copy of the canton of the "Betsy Ross flag" in early U.S. history except with 12 stars rather than 13. Europeanists claim that the similarity to the first U.S. flag is illusory, and they (who do aspire to a "United States of Europe") are displaying a European image, not an American image.

If you like Christmas music of classical sorts, and have not yet taken the time to watch the St. Lucy's video, I recommend you do so. If you like it, you should send friends and family — especially those who have had snide things to say about Newark — a link to it: http://www.blip.tv/file/733465/ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfIodOylH5I.

I don't know what word best describes this video: wonderful, moving, magnificent, touching — stunning. You decide. Whatever word or words seem fitting, this video shows a bit of what made Newark a place that many people so bitterly lost in "having" to leave, that they are angry to this day, more than 40 years later. There's a solution, for those whose heart still, after all these years, has a hole where Newark once was: move back. Newark doesn't hold a grudge, and welcomes every good person, of whole heart, no holes anymore. All-ee all-ee oxen free!

'Holiday Family Fun Week' at NuMu

The Newark Museum has five days of special events coming up in the week between Christmas and New Year's.

Today's fotos are of banners on streetlite stanchions Downtown.

Featuring Art and Science Workshops, Laser and Planetarium Shows, Scavenger Hunts, Puppet Shows, Live Music and a Victorian Christmas Celebration in the Ballantine House.

The Museum is ordinarily closed Mondays and Tuesdays, but is open both those days next week. It's always closed on New Year's Day. I'm not clear about New Year's Eve, but there are no special events scheduled for December 31st.
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At 2:00pm each day, Saturday-Wednesday, there are to be performances, mostly for children, of things like puppet shows and singing, but also a presentation on (the artificial holiday) Kwanzaa. From 12:30-4:30 there are art activities, making decorative snowflakes, clay birds, candles, and collages. Alternatively, there are science activities from 12:30-4:30pm. I particularly like this event description.

Snot My Problem
Saturday only
Learn about mucus and how it helps us keep harmful germs out of our body.

Kids should like that. Parents? Perhaps, perhapsnot.

My Christmas Card to Readers

It's that time again, when I think of a magnificent video slideshow with music, by "charles1789", of many fotos of St. Lucy's Church at Christmas (http://blip.tv/file/733465/ — 8 minutes and 42 seconds long), to music by Andrea Bocelli and by the late Sergio Franchi and Luciano Pavarotti. I embed the video here, but the explanatory text on Blip.tv below the video is worth reading.

Flowers Till Snow

I have mentioned at various times that I have many different types of flowering plants in my yards (front, sides, and back). Different plants perform differently from season to season, and a lot of the tiny star-shaped white flowers on clematis vines that were superabundant last year didn't come up this year. I don't know why. And most of the six or so chrysanthemums I planted late last season either didn't come up at all this year or issued only foliage. One chrysanthemum in my front yard, however, grew very large and rangy (some 3' tall), but didn't flower until late autumn, when it produced rust-red flowers with dark-yellow centers — just before the snow.

As you can see at the upper right of this closer view, there were still some buds that didn't pop before the snow (about 8" in my area) fell. I won't know until the temperatures rise well above freezing for several days whether the leaves that are still green in this foto managed somehow to survive the deep-freeze or were killed and are green only because they were frozen while green.

The two tomato plants I put in my backyard produced not a single tomato, only spindly foliage, and some vine plants (watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkin) that I planted as seeds in the front yard either did not come up at all or were buried by the mass foliage of the clematis vines — which, maddeningly, did not even produce their own flowers this year! I think maybe the seed packets, which I got at a ShopRite in Jersey City near BJ's Discount, might not have been for the current growing season. So next year I will order online direct from Burpee. But my rhododendrons didn't flower this year either. Do they skip a year if they are in low lite?
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The long months of winter give me time to plan my gardens and get seeds started in February under a fluorescent lite in the basement where the cats can't eat the sprouting flowers and veggies. I'll do some online research about what kinds of perennials (no annuals, thanks), and especially wildflowers, will grow in the varying conditions of my four little yards around all sides of my house. I have 70' oak trees and some other trees (black walnut, maple, ash, mulberry) that drastically cut lite to my backyard and one of my side yards. The other side yard gets direct sunlite only during the time when the sun hasn't moved to the other side of my house. So I have to choose wisely.
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It's only things like garden planning that keep an anti-winter person like me going till my spring-flowering bulbs start the parade of flowers that finds something abloom in my yards from just after winter snows end (crocuses) to just after late-autumn snows begin (chrysanthemums).

65; Button Factory Lofts

Long post again, over 3,200 words, with 26 fotos, about a somewhat different topic from the main narrative. The fotos show the renovation of an old manufacturing facility in the Ironbound into dignified loft apartments, nearing completion last August. The ribbon-cutting was during late October's Open Doors 2009 arts whirl. Andrew Wu, one of the principals in creating The Button Factory Lofts, invited me to see how his group has taken a bit of Newark's past and recycled it into a bit of Newark's future. Development like this, which honors our history and shows how new uses respectful of the past can add character that new construction would not have, is precisely the kind of thing Newark and other old cities need.

I am now officially a "senior citizen", eligible for discounts in all kinds of places. I've had a discount for NJTransit buses for a while now, but not, I think, for the train. Now I can get a discount card for the train too.

The designers have taken great care to vary key features to appeal to different tastes. Altho most units have some features in common, such as exposed beams, wood columns, and ductwork, for a modern take on condo living, the kitchens and bathrooms seem all to be a little different.

I have an awful lot of reading to do about Medicare, which is apparently preposterously complicated. It is also extremely unfair, as I mentioned a couple of days ago. The rich get Medicare, and do not pay proportionately more for it than do the poor and middle class. Why isn't Medicare means-tested? Medicare also, apparently, does not cover everything, probably because in order to cover the rich and upper middle class, benefits for the poor and lower middle class had to be cut. And if I read one thing right, I have to decide upon a Medicare plan by December 31st. Everyone has to decide by the same date? So if you're born January 1st, you have a whole year, but if you're born on December 31st, you have to decide the same day? Craziness.

Most of these pix appear in the order I took them as I wandered thru the building, so I'm not going to try to rearrange most for thematic unity, tho the fotos about access and safety features are grouped together.

I started my New Year's Resolutions for my 66th year — which starts 11 days before the regular New Year's Day — and encountered one of my worst problems. I am so bad at prioritizing that I might with little exaggeration admit that I just can't prioritize. Almost everything I want to do seems equally important to me. I can put a few things way down a list, but not nearly enuf. With WordPerfect, I can create a To Do List (my Resolutions document is just a years'-overview To Do List), with a column for Priority/Importance, where 100 is highest, then use WordPerfect to sort on that column, so the finished list appears in order of importance. But I have trouble assigning anything less than 100 to many of the items on the list.

Half-bath.

What I need to do is think about which item may have to precede which other, such that I cannot accomplish the second until I have done the first. But there aren't many such items. Most are entirely separate matters that seem to me to demand equal attention.

I don't know why the ceiling of this unit is different from the others, finished rather than with exposed beams. But it does have exposed sprinkler pipes.

People who can't prioritize subvert their long-term effectiveness, and fritter away their time doing things that people who can prioritize would dismiss as a bad use of this particular time, better done after X, Y, or Z. We non-prioritizers feel that if we're always doing something, we will gradually chip away at the mass, so are doing useful work no matter which task we work on at any given time. We see our Master To Do List, "Life's Work", as a gigantic block of stone that we chip away at from various angles, and when our life is done, the shape of that block, or the broken-off chips (problems) that we can credit ourselves with removing from society, family, or community, show our life's worth.

For instance, when I was young, I thought I wanted to work in government, and eventually run for President. But I also knew that I was homosexual, and the Nation was not going to elect a homosexual President. So I joined the homosexual-rights movement to try to change attitudes toward homosexuality, and made minor contributions in the NYC area and a major contribution in the area of gay self-esteem in putting forth the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I have been irritated that I am not given credit for that, in, for instance, Wikipedia. You see, I made enemies in The Movement for not toeing the line on various issues (such as giving lesbians everything they wanted, even if that should involve serious adverse consequences to gay men), and those enemies do not want the world to know of my contributions.

Workers were finishing up this tiled common courtyard the day I was there.

But my December 12th Google Alert directed me to an acknowledgment of my "claim" to having coined the term "Gay Pride", in a hardcopy book that is also now online at Google Books, Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, edited by John Michael Francis. That makes it a little harder for those enemies to assign the credit for "Gay Pride" to someone else, which they haven't yet dared to try, much tho they might like to, since I'm still alive to set the record, um, straight.

That same Google Alert also showed a link to a passage where I am quoted in the bestseller Conduct Unbecoming by (the late) Randy Shilts, which is also now on Google Books.

At present, the only building in this view is the Prudential Center. In the future, there are supposed to be office towers and a hotel around a new Triangle Park. If you see an interference pattern in this foto (or some others), it is the effect of a screen (to keep out insects) built into the window.

My poor enemies. They hoped that all mention of me would be lost to history as old books crumble in libraries, and then Google has to come along and digitize them, whereupon millions of people all over the planet can see them anew. Now, in order to suppress all record of my having made contributions to the Movement, not only will they have to purge gay archives, including some in public universities, but they will also have to persuade Google to redact my name out of Google Books. I imagine it is far easier to edit me out of Wikipedia than out of Google Books.

This floor is different from the others. Perhaps the hardwood boards had not been laid down yet.

I didn't know about Google Alerts until someone complained about being mentioned in this blog, which she indicated she learned about via "Google Alerts". I assured her that I would never mention her again. Many people mentioned here seem to appreciate it, and in fact yesterday I received an express "thank you" from Bernard L. Rawls, the Senior Pastor of New Day Ministries, for having mentioned his church December 13th. His email answered a question I had implied, in saying that their website is being redesigned, which is why I couldn't get to it, and I asked him to send me the URL when that website is back up. But this other person didn't want to be mentioned here, so won't be again.

There is an elevator, and you can see fire-detection devices and/or alarms in the hallway.

In any case, I looked up "Google Alerts" and found out that it is a service from Google that sends email when it comes across a mention of the name or phrase you want to be alerted about. The mention in the Iberia book, which I hadn't known about, came to my attention thru Google Alerts. Google Alerts has also found some other things by or about me that I had forgotten.

There's also a stairwell, with metal steps.

For instance, on the 18th, Google alerted me to a letter to the editor that The New York Times published (with a drawing as illustration, which is not included in the online version but which showed the U.S. Capitol with the dome elongated upwards, to represent increasing the size of the House of Representatives) on December 31, 1990. That was actually the second letter of mine on that topic that the Times published, the other having been a few years earlier.

This unit has a fire exit, marked by the red doors.

In any case, a Google Alert arrives pretty often, whenever Google runs across something with my name in it (which name is shared by some other people that are occasionally included in these alerts). My updates to this blog are found, as are some much older items. So being told by that one woman that she doesn't want to see in Google Alerts that she was mentioned in this blog, actually ended up doing me some good.

Access for guests and deliveries is controlled by intercom.

Another Google service I didn't know about was brought to my attention by artist Rebecca Jampol of City Without Walls when I spoke with her at the "Theater Town" exhibit at NJIT, which exhibited one of her works. When I mentioned that I have no idea how many people see this blog (in which I had mentioned cWOW or something we were talking about), she said that there are services that can track that information, and I remembered one she mentioned, "Google Analytics".

I saw this water heater in one unit and dare to assume that each condo has its own water heater, adjustable by the owner.

So I recently signed up for that for this blog, put the requisite HTML text into the template, and began tracking visits. The number of visitors is not huge, but even more than how many visitors this blog gets, I find interesting where those visitors come from. The summary report shows a world map, and this blog gets visits from a whole bunch of countries, probably just people looking for a particular Newark topic, so who visit once, find what they wanted to see, and who may not return for other Newark topics they are not interested in. But it's nice to see the diffusion.

I am gradually writing a book about my spelling-reform proposal, and when it is finished will probably try to offer it in electronic form via Amazon.com, whether I can find a hardcopy publisher or not. My brother Alan, who has had a number of books published in hardcopy, encouraged me to check Amazon for what's involved, and I have bookmarked the site I found, to review when I'm done writing. He also urged me not just to think about writing a book but actually to DO IT! (Picture the long-ago FedEx commercial in which an old guy pours thick, mostly boiled-away coffee from a coffeemaker carafe and says, sloooowly, "Any day now. Any day. [pause] Any day.")

Writing a book is a big task, and I asked my brother if he works from a formal outline, because creating outlines is something else I have trouble doing. He said no, but organizing materials is the toughest part of creating a book. As a w.p. temp I used to work with was fond of saying, "I hear that!" My mother, who worked as a legal and executive secretary, told me of a principle from filing. If something might logically go in more than one place, rather than agonize over which one you should put it in, just make a copy for each place. So that's how I am likely to handle the organization issue. Discuss something at length once, and then do cross-references in other places where the same point is also important.

In any case, I have done a lot of work on tables or appendixes for the book, with long lists of basic words as respelled, homonyms respelled to show where useful distinctions are and are not lost, or even made clearer, etc. I was concerned about losing those materials to a hard-disk crash or a disaster, like a fire that burns my house to the ground, so I put those most crucial materials into online storage. People who have an office to go to could stash copies on CD's in that offsite location, but I am retired. The only offsite storage I have available is online, and I have still to put up less crucial materials for my book that I could recover from, albeit with difficulty, if they were lost. But why lose anything if you can back it up online?

In this and some other pictures, the floors are dull, showing their natural appearance before application of a stain or sealant.

The other issue I'm aware of in a book-length presentation is maintaining a consistent style and tone. You don't want material written at one time to be so different in approach and use of language from material written at other times as to be jarring. But I've been writing for a very long time, so probably already have a reasonably consistent style. Whether it is a style that will keep people reading thru an entire book's length remains to be seen. (Actually, my advocacy style is a little more pointed than my expository style. Reconciling the different types of material in different parts of the book is the only challenge I see as regards tone.)

Within and near the Button Factory, you are keenly aware of why Newark is called "Brick City".

In any case, a birthday or New Year's Day is a good time to step back from the daily grind and short-term demands to think about things like "legacy" or "life's work". For most people, their children are their legacy, proof that they were here. Childless people, like me, don't have that. It would be nice to accomplish something for others that goes on after I don't. I've done some things that are recorded in permanent places, like a few books (in addition to the two I mention above, and even more of which may be put online by Google over time), and life for gay men is indeed better in many regards because of work by my generation (tho worse in others, something the Movement won't talk about).

Modern air-conditioning units contrast with historic brick on the roof.

I would, however, really like to persuade people around the world that the present spelling of English causes enormous problems, and get them to issue a worldwide recall, accept my redesign, and start fresh, with spelling that everybody can use because it doesn't require you to memorize thousands of arbitrary forms. All you have to do is sound out what you want to say and write those sounds in the single way almost all of them can be written in my system, et voilà! Everybody knows what you mean to say.

Even Hamilton Street, which the Button Factory fronts on, is brick-paved.

Naturally, there is opposition to change. Defenders of traditional spelling will oppose even the most modest reform, such as removing the W from "answer" or "wrestle" and the initial-K from "knack" and "knock", or changing the G in "aspergill" to J. I never cease to be amazed that the most indefensible spellings are defended by traditionalists.

The very large brick building beyond the tracks is the Central Graphic Arts Building. I don't know if it is currently in use or is available for, and amenable to, conversion to residential lofts, artists studios, a temporary new site for the Newark Museum, or what. And of course the two tallest buildings in Newark, whose tops are seen above the Graphic Arts Building, are also brick.

I do not aspire to change their minds, just drive a steamroller over them to save the world from their madness, end functional illiteracy in English-speaking countries, allow quick detection of dyslexia (at present we can't know if people cannot perceive things right or cannot remember arbitrary spellings; but when spelling is absolutely consistent, dyslexia jumps out), and empower billions of people to learn the world's most useful language without needless years wasted on trying to remember absurd inconsistencies, like "neck" and "nick" but "knack", "knock", and "knuckle"; "cancer" but "answer"; and "gills" with a G-sound but "aspergill" with a J-sound.

Even much of the Prudential Center is brick. In this foto, you can see a concrete structure that used to be a railroad bridge, I think, that some people have suggested be used for a pedestrian bridge from Penn Station, one of the platforms for which is in the foreground, to Triangle Park and thence PruCenter. The street to its left is a continuation of Hamilton Street, which is interrupted by the railroad tracks and McCarter Highway.

It amazes me that Americans who have not one iota of British ancestry, but are Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Brazilian, Pakistani, Cherokee, and dozens of other ethnicities have been suckered into putting up with insane spelling because of the ethnic pride of an ethnicity they do not share.

The Button Factory is 2½ blocks from the Raymond Plaza East entrance to Newark Penn Station, with its Amtrak, NJTransit, and PATH trains for people who work in Manhattan; and street passageways under the elevated tracks allow people who work in Downtown Newark to walk there without impediment. Indeed, in bad weather, the enclosed skyways allow you to walk from Raymond Plaza East all the way to Mulberry Street safe from rain, snow, cold, and heat. By the way, the horns of trains are quite loud on New Jersey Railroad Avenue, which runs between the Button Factory and the tracks, but the windows in the Button Factory cut the sound down remarkably well.

Chinese in Communist China and Taiwan, Iranians in Iran, Russians in Russia, etc., have no such patience with spelling idiocy, and would be very happy to ditch traditional English spelling in favor of something sensible and consistent. Electronic publishing would enable me to reach people overseas much more readily than would hardcopy publishing. So perhaps pressure for change has to come from people outside the present English-speaking countries whose only interest in English is its usefulness, not its convoluted history. They don't care why some words are spelled laughter, calf, cough, gnat, through/though/bough, night, and sigh, while others are spelled after, staff, coffee, natty, blue/mow/how, site, and my. They just want the nonsense to stop.

"Gay Pride" (rather than shame, "The Love that Dare[d] Not Speak Its Name" in those days) made a significant change in the lives of scores of millions of people around the world. Phoneticizing English would make a huge impact on the lives of billions.