Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

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A Eulogy for My Mother

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Delivered by Vincent Bartlett Crosbie
Funeral of Lucy May Bartlett Crosbie

Friday, January 6, 2012
St. Joseph’s Church
99 Jackson Street
Willimantic, Connecticut, USA

 

Forgive me if my voice quavers or breaks. Outside as my role as her son, I’ve given perhaps 100 speeches, to up to a thousand people. But this will be the most difficult I’ve ever given: The eulogy for Lucy before her closest friends.

All who knew Lucy knew that she was as integral to Eastern Connecticut as are the Willimantic, Shetucket, and Thames rivers.

And like those rivers, her life was enriched by various streams:

  • The headspring of these streams was the legacy she inherited at a young age: The daily newspaper her great-great-grandfather founded in 1877 and which the family has operated ever since. She never had to find a purpose in life. The Chronicle was the effervescent stream that gave her life purpose.
  • That purpose was to ensure the flows, ebbs, eddies, and course of news and information about the area’s communities. To satisfy the thirsts of people who wanted to know what was going on in the town where they lived.
  • She was the reporter’s reporter. If she couldn’t find a reporter to report the story, she would do it herself. (Indeed, it wasn’t unusual for police or firemen to see the Chronicle’s publisher among the first responders at a blaze or accident. On the day she died I finally disconnected the police/fire radio in her home.)
  • Her standards of journalism were high. Those who worked for her know that she brooked no inaccuracies, never meandered from objectivity.
  • She was a font of local knowledge. The high water marks of her work were probably the 100th and 125th-year commemorative editions of the Chronicle and 275th and 300th-year editions about the founding of the town of Windham, each of which offered a flood of historical information and stories about this community—most written by Lucy. (She even wrote a history book about Groton Long Point, the community where for decades she spent summers.)
  • Her career, which lasted for 66 years, ran a remarkable course. She began working part-time at the Chronicle at age 16, one month after the death of her father, at the time the newspaper’s publisher. She then completed in just three years a B.A. in Management from Boston University, thereafter working for the Chronicle for the rest of her life. In 1954, she became its publisher at age 25. Not only was she among the first women to publish an American daily newspaper, but certainly the youngest.
  • Yet another major stream in her life was her marriage and family. She eloped with a naval officer, who became her partner in her business and purpose, as well in life; raising two children in a household in which I can tell you there was nary a turbulent word ever spoken between Lucy and her Arthur ‘Bud’ Crosbie. His untimely death left her a widow for more than 35 years.
  • Her friends—so many of whom are here today—were the stream of her life that buoyed her those years. She was a loyal, loving, and faithful friend to one and all. Fun to be with, humor bubbled from her.
  • And like a river, she nourished the community in many other ways, in so many fields. She sat on too many local, regional, and state foundations, boards, and charities for me to list. She was an avid local philanthropist, most often anonymously. No worthy cause went unaided if she could help.

Every river must eventually end its course. In her hospital room on New Year’s Day moments after she had breathed her last breath; I watched as the sun rose over Eastern Connecticut and saw the colors of sunrise splash and play over her face. All I could think was that it was as if all the tributaries and streams of her life were saluting and celebrating all she had accomplished in life.

Today, we celebrate and tribute her, a life flowing with dedication, generosity, loyalty, love, humor, and community service. We shall miss her!

Thank you all for celebrating her fulfilling and remarkable life.

 

I Like Tunein Radio

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My local radio stations are OK. Yet I listened to shortwave radio when I was in secondary school. I strung a cheap bit of antenna wire out of the window of my third-story bedroom so I could listen to distant stations at night when their signals bounced off the Ionosphere and were able to reach my small town. That legacy is one of the reasons I love Internet radio. Years ago, I could receive only the FM within about 50 miles (80 km) of my town, only the AM stations within 25 miles (40 km) during the day or within 400 miles (640 km) at night, and only the shortwave signals strong enough to reach North America at night.

 

That’s why I love Internet radio. Every radio stations that broadcasts on the Internet is automatically within range. Over the past years (back in 1997 I authored the business models chapters of Internet World’s Guide to Webcasting), I’ve tried many Internet radio applications and aggregation sites. My favorite has become Tunein Radio. (They aren’t a consulting client of mine nor do I know anyone there, so this isn’t a paid endorsement.)

Tunein let’s me access 50,000 radio stations by genre, language, or location. It let’s me save my favorite channels as ‘presets’. And it synchronizes the Tunein Radio website and the Tunein Radio apps on my iPad and Android phone and on the Roku box connected to my television so that all those devices have my presets. Expansive, convenient, nice service.Tunein Radio

Cue Uma Thurman!

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Quick, get Quentin Tarantino’s scriptwriters on the line! Three hundred Buddhist nuns in Nepal have discovered Kung Fu as a means of self-defense and meditation, the Guardian reports. Gotta be an action movie plot in there somewhere! It comes on the same day that Saudi Arabia announces that its women will be given the right to vote.

Mass Replacement of Workers by Robots Will Cause Massive Chinese Unrest

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Here’s an technology story that portends civil unrest in China during the this and the next decade:

SHENZHEN, July 29 (Xinhua) — Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, late Friday.

The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers’ dance party Friday night.

The company currently has 10,000 robots and the number will be increased to 300,000 next year and 1 million in three years, according to Gou.

Foxconn, the world’s largest maker of computer components which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants, which some blamed on tough working conditions.

The company currently employs 1.2 million people, with about 1 million of them based on the Chinese mainland.

For more than 60 years, the Chinese Communist Party has been carefully (some say dictatorially) trying to grow the Chinese economy without creating civil unrest resulting from first industrialization and lately a conversion to a capitalistic economy. How to keep the country fed when farmers are tempted to quit the plows for higher paying factory work? How to keep the factory workers happy without slowing down production or causing economic inflation? Etc. The bloody Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 showed just how close to boiling over social unrest is in the People’s Republic of China.

If Foxconn, whose workforce is already anxious (some suicidally so), plans to replace a large number of workers with millions of robots, how soon before other Chinese factories similarly replace their own workers. What will such conversions means to the hundreds of millions of factory workers in China. Unemployment. Perhaps there employee retraining programs will be offered, but for hundreds of millions of workers? And to do what?

During the early 1800s in Britain, textile workers who were replaced by machines protested and rioted. They were called Luddites, after a figure from English myth. I wonder what will we call the Chinese software factory workers who will be replaced by robots and who will surely protest and riot?

Lack of Enforcement is the Real Problem With Nuclear Power

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Nuclear power

Most of the world’s most controversial subjects tend to polarize people’s opinions: people not only disagree about the subject, but do so by being either completely for or against the subject. Generating electricity from nuclear power is one of these subjects.

Too bad, because it’s people’s polarization itself that prevents a solution. Yes, nuclear power is environmentally clean and therefore nuclear power should be used. Yes, nuclear accidents will happen and therefore nuclear power shouldn’t be used. However, the reality of the subject isn’t at all that polar.

Among the people who know that is the board of editors of Scientific American magazine. They include people who not only understand both sides of the issues, but realize that the ultimate problem about nuclear power generation isn’t nuclear power but the cases of duplicity, corruption, and incompetence about it. Here is their editorial about it, which appeared in the June issue of their magazine. I applauded the editorial when I first read it earlier this summer:

 “…If we gave it up, what would replace it? Pollution from fossil-fueled power plants shortens the life span of as many as 30,000 Americans a year. Coal companies lop off mountaintops, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas threatens water supplies, and oil dependence undermines the nation’s energy security. Then there is the small matter of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean renewable technologies will take years to reach the scale needed to replace the power we get from splitting atoms….

“…The industry and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) claim that nuclear power is safe, but their lack of transparency does not inspire confidence. For example, an Associated Press investigation in March revealed 24 cases from December 2009 to September 2010 in which plant operators did not report equipment defects to the NRC….

“…The trouble is that regulations are not being enforced rigorously. The NRC has to mete out stiff penalties for violations and make every action transparent to us all….

“…If exercises showed that residents around a plant could not leave quickly enough, the NRC should consider shutting it down. A good test case is the Indian Point plant 38 miles north of New York City. Evacuating the 20 million people who live within 50 miles staggers belief….

“…If an operator proposes a site that is too close to an earthquake fault, or too close to oceanfront that is vulnerable to a tsunami or hurricane storm surge, or downriver from a huge dam that could burst, then the NRC should reject the bid. Similarly, if the utility could not protect spent fuel pools or casks from being breached during a severe accident, which happened in Japan, the NRC should not license it. Saying no to a suspect plant would do more than anything else to restore public confidence….

“…The 22 new reactors proposed in the U.S. use so-called Gen III+ designs that are safer than today’s reactors, which date to the 1970s or earlier…. Manufacturers should pursue even safer, meltdown-proof designs that they have experimented with but shelved, such as liquid fluoride thorium reactors and pebble bed reactors. China is developing both….

“…Reactors across the country have accumulated 72,000 tons of spent fuel. Some utilities have packed four times as many spent fuel rods into temporary holding pools than the structures were designed to contain. The government poured $9 billion and decades of effort into the planned permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, with little to show for it. Then President Barack Obama scuttled the project. The waste continues to pile up. At some point, officials will have to face down the citizen refrain of “not in my backyard.”

Nuclear power has a good safety record, but when it fails it can fail catastrophically. Now is the time to make tough, transparent decisions that could regain public trust. Otherwise, the public might make the ultimate call: “no more nukes.”

 

Barcelona: Adri Brothers’ Open Cocktail Tapas Bar

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For much of the past decade, El Bulli in Catalonia has been considered the best restaurant in the world. Restaurant Magazine ranked it Number One on its  Top 50 list of the world’s best restaurants for a record five times — in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009, and #2 in 2010. Now, El Bulli’s owners, Ferran and Albert Adrià, have opened a cocktail bar in Barcelona, our favorite city. The seven-minute video above from The Guardian will give you an idea.

When Emma and I think about our eventual retirements, we think of Barcelona. That shouldn’t be surprising about her, a Spaniard (although our Catalan friends maintain that the autonomous community of Catalonia isn’t really part of Spain). My own experiences in Barcelona started late for me, beginning in the late 1990s: primarilyspeaking the NetMedia conferences held there, at Pompeu Fabra University, and at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Vilanova y la Geltrú 50 kilometers south, plus friends at La Vanguardia.

I remember waking one morning after arriving, and hearing the sounds of roaring motorcycles outside. I saw hundreds of leather- or denim-clad riders astride Harley-Davidsons passing by my hotel. Badly jet-lagged, I wondered if I was still in the States. Hundreds and hundreds of Harleys. But they were speaking French, Hungarian, Finnish, or Greek, etc. I’d arrived in Barcelona when it was hosting the continent’s annual Harley-Davidson riders’ conference. The next day, once I’d gotten used to the all that, I was walking across a crosswalk on a street near Pompeu Fabra when Jay Leno, at the wheel of a Smart Car, pulled up at the stoplight (turns out he was in Barcelona on vacation for Harley conference). That’s Barcelona−surreal, delicious, and always unexpected. Just like the Adriàs’ new cocktail bar.