Best pie chart ever

It's a pie chart! Get it? A PIE chart! C'mon, you know it's funny. I may just post this a few more times, whenever I feel like giving myself a laugh.

The problem with vacations

I'm kidding, there's really no problem with vacations. The only problem is when they're over.

Yes, when they're over and you arrive, exhausted, at your stuffy, too-familiar home. You have mere hours before your daily routine starts taking you down like quicksand.

Nearly any place is wonderful when you're on vacation. The people are nice and everything is different. Of course the people are nice: They don't get time to learn why people at home dislike you. Everything is different because you're looking through minty-fresh, touristy eyes. Even the strip malls are fascinating.

Scott Simon's essay on tourists is a good reminder that where you live is someone else's vacation spot. Hard to believe, but the precise location where you are becoming fossilized by your daily routine is in fact the very same latitude and longitude where other people are having the time of their lives.

Don't ever think you should move somewhere because it made for a good vacation.

I fell into that trap once.

As a tourist in Santa Fe, I took one look at the Scottish Rite Temple at dusk and believed New Mexico was my destiny. The pink stone and the soft curves of the building against the intense blue sky as the sun was setting were too much for my vacation-addled brain. Seven difficult years as an Albuquerque resident extended the point that Scott Simon made: Once you have to work, a fabulous vacation destination just becomes.... where you live and work.

Luckily, Albuquerque taught me a lesson. That's why I haven't moved to a small beach town south of Tarragona, Spain. While it's tempting – it was so beautiful; and all the people were so nice! – I remind myself that once I'd have to find a way to make a living (the only idea I have is to open a Jewish-style deli right off the beach), that small town would lose its vacation patina.

Albuquerque is also the reason why I haven't moved to a cabin in Sitka, Alaska. Sure, the salmon was delicious – and did I mention how nice all the people were? But I keep in mind that eating fresh salmon on vacation is one thing; gutting it every day to make a living is quite another.

The best cure for believing that one particular vacation destination is the place where you absolutely must live is to take more vacations.

Arizona Republic's latest layoffs

While the mainstream media was busy beating Michael Jackson's death and funeral to death (if such a thing is possible), here's what went largely unreported:

• President Obama's first meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin;

• Missiles fired by North Korea into the Sea of Japan;

• Overthrow of Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya ;

• Ethnic riots in China;

• Congress's debate over changes to health care and energy policy; and

• Our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Thanks to Bob Garfield of "On the Media" for this rundown.]

With journalism in such a sorry state, I'm not surprised that my local newspaper, the Arizona Republic, just announced another round of layoffs – 100 people, including 20 from the newsroom. Not surprised, though sad.

What does surprise me, though, is the lack of public comment or observation from ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. From the outside looking in, it's business as usual at our local J school: Teaching students how to become journalists.

That's fine, but unless someone starts teaching non-journalists why they should value news, access to information, and the First Amendment, pretty soon we're going to have way more journalists than we need.

Wouldn't it be great if the Cronkite School expanded its involvement with the community? Right now there's the annual Paul J. Schatt Memorial Lecture, and outreach to high school students. What about something more daring? How about taking on the challenge of creating a state-wide program to raise the news literacy of citizens?

Why not a project that educates citizens on the value of journalism, the difference between news and opinion, the importance of fact checking, what makes a source reliable, figuring out where information originates, and on and on. Let's include news judgment in there: Why would a newspaper or TV news report lead off with one story and not another? Why might one event be covered in depth (or to appalling excess), while another event might be ignored? What are the ramifications of corporate ownership of media?

Journalism needs more than practitioners to thrive; it needs critical consumers. It's like Broadway: Not everyone can be on stage; someone's got to be part of the audience.

If the Cronkite School can figure out a way to get Arizona's citizens talking about what's news and what isn't, maybe there's a chance that today's working journalists can learn the difference, too. And if we're lucky, they'll learn it before the next big celebrity death.

Reading update

I'm in one of my periodic reading logjams – books are piling up by the side of my bed and I'm not connecting well with any of them. I feel out of whack without a book to return to at the end of the day. During a magazine binge, I'm fine without a book. But this is not one of those times. 

Current logjam started with City Room, by Arthur Gelb. I'll definitely get back to it, but it wasn't the right book at the right time. After only 20 pages of City Room, I tried Maimonides by Sherwin B. Nuland. Loved holding it (it's from the Jewish Encounters series published by Schocken and Nextbook, nice & compact); reading it, not so much. More like Maimonides' travel itinerary than about him and his work, which is what I was really hoping for. I'm bummed, because I liked Sherwin Nuland's other books: How We Die (I wouldn't recommend this for everyone!) and Lost in America. Hey, maybe that's a clue to why he focused on Maimonides' whereabouts.

Dropped Maimonides only 60 pages from the end & picked up Arthur Hertzberg's A Jew in America for only a page or two. I do want to read this & will try it again, but I couldn't focus on his family tree from the old country. (I'm not especially good at figuring out my relationships with my own relatives.)  

Now here's the really odd part. Next I picked up Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Bestseller, a must read, wonderful, brilliant, funny, insightful, etc. No interest whatsoever! Why is this? Can someone explain this to me? You'd have to know me, and have read the book, to have some inkling as to why I'm totally not interested in reading it. Read about 20 pages and flipped through the rest. It's true that I sometimes resist getting swept up in trends (one look at my shoe collection and you'd know that), but I'm ready to love reading anything, whether it's popular or not. 

Now I'm reading The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, by Robert Kaplan. The author comes out with some odd comments every so often, and it's not an easy read. But I've had the book on my shelves for two years and its time has arrived. So I guess right now I'm reading a book about nothing. 

Why blog?

I was telling a long, involved but very interesting story to my friend J recently, during one of our morning coffees. Suddenly she burst out and commanded me: "Blog! Blog! Blog!" I thought about it some, and decided I would! After all, one more blogger is not going to break the Internet (unless that blogger is from North Korea). 

When I told J about my exciting decision, and how I came to it, she pointed out that she had not in fact said "Blog! Blog! Blog!" What she said was actually "Blah! Blah! Blah!" 

Sometimes I mishear things.