No comment necessary

Well, boo: NPR has announced that they’re discontinuing comments on stories published on their website as of 23 August. Instead, if you have a burning need to add your insight to stories, you’ll have to go to Facebook or Twitter, or Snapchat, Instagram or Tumblr.

Partly, it seems, the move is due to the increasingly lowered civility we’ve seen pretty much everywhere, no doubt exacerbated by the current election campaigns. It’s certainly been my observation that even the most seemingly innocuous stories (about, say, ice cream, or gravitational waves, or The Sopranos) get splattered with “Benghazi!”, “TrumpU” or variants on “only a moron with tertiary syphilis would espouse that opinion” within the first three hours of posting.

Then there’s the cost of moderating the comments, which even though out-sourced, has been running much higher than budgeted.

NPR extrapolated some insights from running their comments data: Last month their site logged nearly 33 million unique visitors and almost 500,000 comments. But those comments came from fewer than 20,000 users. In May, June and July, more than half of all comments came from just 2,600 users.

As a regular reader, I could probably name at least 100 of them, because you come to recognize not only the names but also the content and style of the comments. Some people get blocked for repeated abuse, then return under new user names. Other regulars suss them out pretty quickly.

Another interesting statistic is that this small number of commenters preponderantly arrives at the site via the desktop, which skews older (younger users favor mobile), and they appear to be more than 80 percent male, while overall NPR.org users are 52 percent male. (This may account for the number of attempted thread hijackings by men’s rights advocates trolls.)

Moving to social media will no doubt engage those younger users. It will probably also mean that the language will be more colorful, at least on the platforms that favor anonymity in registration. And when I say “more colorful”, I mean more profane, vicious and badly-spelt. That’s the nature of the beast.

One more interesting thing about the announcement: in response to both the announcement of the changing of the guard, and the NPR Ombudsman explanation of the rationale, long-time commenters who have engaged in extended “no, you’re a poopy-head” exchanges over the years, have been bidding each other farewell and Godspeed.

It’s like the last day of school after graduation.

Body politic

I’ve known Rodolfo, the guy who cuts my hair, for about 20 years now. Our conversations generally run to his latest trip somewhere, or where to find various foodstuffs, or—you know—hair stuff. In all the time I’ve known him, I don’t think we’ve ever talked politics. You don’t with clients, and even if you discover someone’s views agree with yours, in a salon you don’t know whether other clients agree with you, and everything's public in a salon.

But this time we very carefully worked our way to the elections—because, seriously, who’s not going to talk about the Groundhog Day of train wrecks? Plus, as a naturalized citizen, Rodolfo is fully cognizant of how the Founding Fathers built the framework of our government’s intended checks and balances; he knows how things were supposed to work so we can get to the realities.

He said two things that I think are good to pass on:

First, he described how, when he first came here in the 80s, US government seemed like a shining city upon a hill (not his actual words, but his intent)—so different from the corruption all up and down the spectrum in Mexico. But now, it’s pretty much the same; the transactions are just done in English.

Well, I certainly can’t argue with that. Sadly.

The other thing cracked me up. Evidently a lot of clients are bringing up the current candidates, and one of his long-timers, a Republican, asked Rodolfo whom he’s voting for. He replied, “I’m a Mexican. Who do you think?”

Stormy weather

Here’s something you don’t see in the Valley They Call Silicon: an un-freaking-believable light show of a summer storm:

And yes—that was me out on my balcony shooting video like an idiot. Because: lightning.

Well played, gentlemen

Even though I love track and field, I lost a lot of my interest in Olympic sport when NBC got the contract to broadcast the Games in the 1980s. Over the decades their coverage has descended further into crapdom at every Olympiad, and the merger with Comcast has only meant that if you want to see some actual sporting events in real time where the US isn’t a lock to medal, you have to VPN out of the country. (They have such a lock that you can't even see video unless you're on one of their properties.)

Not for nothing do #ShutUpMattLauer and #NBCfail trend every two years.

When you factor in the general corporatization of the Games and the commercial hype of a few select athletes, it produces in me a full-throated meh. The world, in my opinion, really does not need more drama queens, particularly in a presidential election year.

So this summer I’m pleasantly surprised to hear of actual graciousness and sportsmanship, coming out of—of all places—the tennis court, which ever since John McEnroe has been the home of toddler-grade toy-tossing tantrums.

First, we have the American Jack Sock, who competed despite a diagnosis of walking pneumonia just before the opening ceremony. He lost early in the singles event, but still pulled a bronze in men’s doubles (with Steve Johnson) and a gold in mixed doubles (with Bethanie Mattek-Sands).

Now, that’s an achievement in anyone’s books, but you get a measure of the young man’s sense of sportsmanship from a competition earlier this year. He was playing Australia’s Lleyton Hewitt in the Hopman Cup match in January when the umpire ruled one of Hewitt’s serves out. Sock told Hewitt that it was in, actually, and he should challenge the call.

The disbelief on Hewitt’s face is evident. But Sock was right, and the point went to Hewitt, who went on to win the match.

But the audience went wild.

My other example of an Olympic champion whose ego does not require constant feeding is Andy Murray. The Scotsman was the first athlete to win back-to-back gold medals in men’s singles. Naturally one of the approximately 12,342 BBC sport reporters sent to Rio interviewed him and fed him a line you’d expect many competitors to lap up, a fulsome “you’re so amazing, two golds in tennis, a first ever.”

Murray never hesitated, pointing out that the Williams sisters “have about four each”.

Boom.

Gratitude Monday: Dog days

You know you’re in Northern Virginia when you get out of your air conditioned car any time during daylight hours and your glasses fog up. It’s that combination of temperatures above 90 degrees and humidity that rivals the Amazon. (This means that about a month ago I reconciled myself to the fact that I was going to have a bad hair day that lasts through mid-September.)

Saturday I returned a book to the library around 0800, and from the moment I got out of the car, walked ten yards to dump it in the book return slot and then got back into the car, I was functionally blind.

There’s also that sense that every time you leave an air conditioned building you feel like you’ve walked into a blast furnace, and it’s sucking the air right out of your lungs. On days like these I wonder at the fortitude of men who met in battle within an hour’s drive of here in July, August and September. Their uniforms were wool, their rifles and packs were heavy and the only water they had was what they carried in their canteens.

Every time I’ve walked the fields of Manassas and Sharpsburg I’ve thought about them, wondering how they managed to form ranks, much less fight for hours, in that heat and humidity. It reminds me that what we enjoy today has been paid for over and over across the years.

It makes me grateful for clean water coming from the taps; for air conditioning in offices, residences and transportation; for peace in my neighborhood; for opticians; for cotton clothing; for construction workers, first responders, crossing guards, and everyone who does their job out in this God-awful heat. And for the prospect of fall.