This blog isn’t really working. Or at least not how I imagined it would.

I’ve been writing long format essays that start with a personal story and spin it into a business insight. In an effort to concentrate on the ideas, I haven’t included images or hyperlinks. Just words.

I was hoping to get an exchange going and maybe some feedback. I’ve gotten a grand total of a comment and an email.

I’m thinking the no images or hyperlinks part might be part of the problem. This is the Internet after all, the perfect marriage of words, sounds, images, moving pictures. And interaction. And to that point I haven’t done much to promote the blog either.

That changes today with this.

38 things I’ve learned over the past 38 years from Andrew Dickson on Vimeo.

Kate Bingaman Burt asked me to come talk to the Portland State Friends of Graphic Design Show and Tell lecture series. The prompt was broad, do whatever you want.

As you’ll see, I’m not a designer, so I thought about what I could offer the students that would be of most value to them. My gut said advice. Not big idea advice like “what’s the big idea” but practical advice like use coupons and you’ll live a richer life than you’re non-coupon using friends. And I came up with 38 pieces of it, one for every year I’ve been alive.

I gave the lecture to my own students in W+K 12 first a week beforehand, along with the assignment to each present their story in a unique way. Then made a few tweaks and gave it again at PSU.

And before you accuse me of speech recycling let me ask if you expect a stand-up comedian to tell different jokes every night or a rock band to write new songs for every show. I actually find that the second time I give a lecture or deliver a performance I tend to deliver it better than the first. So sorry, 12, but you did get the assignment too.

The lecture is about 40 minutes, as I give an explanation for each slide. But you’ll get the gist if you watch the minute long video I made from my PowerPoint slides.

I love records.

The problem is my young children do as well. And in an effort to allow our records to endure their childhood relatively scratch-free we’ve become a digital music household.

Currently that means we move an iPod touch from room to room plugging it into various docks and speakers as we move throughout our day.

It turns out the iPod touch doesn’t hold much music, so by default we’ve become Pandora listeners. At this point we listen to Pandora a few hours a night and a good half the time on cold weekends like this one. And we like it.

Pandora works particularly well for new music and classic rock. But it’s not perfect. After an epic battle we finally got our Arcade Fire Suburbs station to play songs from years other than the one the Suburbs came out. Literally, it took weeks of giving the thumbs up and down to get the occasional Smiths song to play.

Our current frustration, and one that is making us question continuing to use the service, is our foray into jazz. We’re not huge jazz listeners, but it has it’s time and it’s place. And this dreary three-day weekend, one that celebrates the life of Martin Luther King, is one of them.

So yesterday morning I created a new channel. John Coltrane. More specifically the search bar suggested John Coltrane A Few of My Favorite Things. Perfect.

The first song was a wonderfully melancholy vibraphone track we’d never heard. And then? Power pop. Huh? Thumbs down. Next we heard a punk song. Thumbs down. And then finally some jazz. Thumbs up. And then a song from 90’s indie band Superchunk.

For the last 24 hours the pattern has held. We get a pair of pop, punk or alternative songs for every jazz song. Without fail we give the jazz the thumbs up, the non-jazz the thumbs down, but to no avail.

As I started writing this post it started playing an atrocious song off the soundtrack of the atrocious movie Empire Records. I furiously pounded the thumbs down button but nothing happened. I tried fast forwarding. But it turns out we’ve run up against the Pandora licensing threshold.

So I turned it off. I’m now writing this in silence.

I’m not sure if Pandora is overthinking it, computing that since my other channels are rock of one kind or another that I couldn’t possibly want actual jazz, but instead crave pop songs with some kind of improvisation or rhythm that shares traits with John Coltrane.

I realize, after all, that John Coltrane is the first and sometimes only Jazz musician most hipsters will ever mention.

Or perhaps there just isn’t enough jazz in the Pandora project to fill out a whole jazz section?

A cursory web search tells me that Pandora is not genre specific. So that it doesn’t know jazz from pop punk, it only recognizes the 400 musical attributes of a given song. But given how many slow, irregular time signature jazz songs I thumped up, and how many up tempo 4-4 punk songs I thumbed down, I’m not so sure it’s working.

It also doesn’t explain how during the holidays the various Christmas music channels we created played Christmas music exclusively.

Nor, why when I start a new channel titled simply Miles Davis, which I just did, I get nothing but jazz. Did it learn that I actually want? And if so why didn’t it course correct what I now refer to as the Empire Records channel.

Or maybe this is all an effort to get me to upgrade to a paid premium subscription.

Whatever the cause, it’s a problem that could use some fixing.

But I’ve also got a new idea. One for Pandora, or one of their competitors, but one I could use right away. Maybe some other service already has it. If so, do tell.

One of my responsibilities at work is writing the ads for Travel Oregon. It’s the account I was born to work on. I love Oregon and have spent the better part of the last 15 years exploring it. Convincing people to explore Oregon, out-of-state people as well as Oregonians themselves, is an honor and a privilege. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.

For the last year and a half, part of our biannual campaign to increase tourism has involved making a series of 15-second commercials, highlighting different aspects of what makes Oregon great. The idea is rather then do one big epic commercial about Oregon we do lots of little ones. You’re likely to see two in the same commercial break, hopefully eliciting an “I didn’t realize you can do that and that in Oregon” reaction.

For obvious reasons, we’ve only wanted to use songs from Oregon bands as soundtrack. Culture, along with our food and epic outdoors, is among our best selling points. We’re not making bands rich, it’s Oregon Travel after all, but it’s a nice chunk of change, and it’s a mission musicians have been eager to support.

The problem is I don’t get out like I used to, and music isn’t as central to my life as it once was, so it’s harder and harder for me to stay on top of what’s going as far as local music goes. (Please, send any suggestions my way).

I would love to be able to create a Pandora station that played only Oregon music. It would make my job easier. And help me discover bands that I might not otherwise discover.

And I bet other people would appreciate that kind of feature too, perhaps someone moving to Portland, or Austin, or getting ready for a trip to Japan. What better way to get in the mood than to hear the music of the region?

Why stop at geography? How about a channel for songs with epic drum solos? Or songs the feature the theremin, or the sitar.

Or a channel featuring songs Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones played on or arranged, which would include everything from the Rollings Stones to Cat Stevens to Tom Jones. What about a channel that features songs with the word “candy” in them? Or a channel of songs that are exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds?

Pandora should already have all this information, why not use it, or more accurately let it’s users use it.  Either by expanding the search options, or curating and creating these kind of channels. Or even letting users tinker with the genome itself. Maybe some of those 400 musical attributes are more important to me than others.

I get the genius behind the music genome project. It’s smart, but it’s also cerebral. What I’m proposing would make it more useful, but also more fun.

A few years ago I saw Mike Daisy perform Monopoly at the PICA TBA festival. He sat behind a desk and told a two-hour monologue that wove together Nikola Tesla’s battle against Thomas Edison over electricity, the history of the game of Monopoly, his own relationship with Wal-Mart and various anecdotes about Microsoft.

For whatever reason, the Microsoft parts are the parts I remember. He had a funny story about getting cast in an internal Microsoft video and realizing upon showing up that he was acting against Bill Gates. Sure enough Mr. Gates was a horrible actor, but no one felt empowered to let him know how stiff and wooden he was or offer up any kind of direction that would have made him less so.

But the story I remember most vividly and find myself sharing every few months was about a friend of Daisy’s who was hired by Microsoft and was asked to research what was wrong with Microsoft Word. The problem, he not so surprisingly discovered, was that new features and functions kept being added, but they never replaced or were combined with the old ones. So with every update the program became more confusing and unwieldy.

Daisy explained how his friend gave the presentation of his findings to rave reviews, all the way up to Bill Gates himself, who was so impressed he asked the guy to deliver the presentation to everyone who worked on Word. So he spent the next year and a half travelling the globe giving the presentation over and over again.

Finally, a manager of group in charge of one little function tucked inside one of the drop down menus took him aside afterwards and told him, we all know what’s wrong with Word. But I have 15 employees in my group. And if we don’t keep adding new functions and features every update, then what purpose does my group serve? If I followed your advice, and made my tiny slice of the pie simpler, the next thing I’d have to do is fire 14 people.

It seems to me the National Basketball Association has the rare chance to do what Microsoft Word can’t. Change their program in a fundamental way for the better.

Thanks to the strike, this year’s NBA season started Christmas day, rather then late October, and teams will play a dizzying 66 games in 124 days instead of 82 over the course of 170.

The result? So, far a much more exciting season. Granted, the Blazers marvelous start has something to do with it. But beyond that, each game means more this season, each win and loss that much more relevant to making or not making the playoffs. And the frequency of the games means that players are rewarded for being in shape. Sure there will be the occasional sloppy game, a few more injuries, and older players taking the last night of a back to back to back off. But that also means more opportunities for new stars to shine. I think this year will see the emergence of a half dozen of new superstars, and a slew of new household names.

Best of all, this season is going to actually keep fans attention. A normal NBA season is a bloated October to June. That means there are only 3 months out of the year without an NBA game. Christmas to June feels infinitely more manageable.

So why not keep it this way moving forward? Tighten it up?

I know, the business interests probably wouldn’t allow it. Too much money is at stake. And I’m not unaware that a 66 game season means 8 less home games for ushers, parking lot attendants, trainers, security guards, food vendors and the thousands of other people who don’t make millions but depend on the NBA to make their living.

But I can’t help wonder what Microsoft would do if Word somehow went on strike and they had the opportunity to remake the program with half as many features.

Tonight, I’m auctioneering Disjecta’s annual fundraiser to benefit their curator in residence program. I’ll be auctioning off 20 or so pieces of art live, with another 30 or so available through the silent auction. This is the fifth year I’ve done it and it’s always a lot of fun.

I love auctioneering, I love Disjecta, especially now that they’re in their new space, and I love the art they curate for their auctions. This year my wife is actually in one of the photographs. A few years ago I walked home with another photograph taken during a party at our house.

Every year, in fact, I walk home with a piece or two. We’ve also started to buy a piece of art from a gallery here and there. And friends who are artists have given or traded work with us. And then there’s the recent explosion of affordable posters and prints. Not to mention the occasional estate store treasure.

Slowly but surely I’m becoming an art collector.

It’s gotten to the point where we don’t have enough wall space to showcase everything we own.

And it got me thinking, isn’t there a better way to honor our art then by keeping half of it leaning against each other in our basement?

The online art gallery I’m most familiar with is 20×20. It’s a great concept, twice a week or so they release two or three images from an artist. They sell a bunch of prints in a small size, some in a medium size, and just a few in a large size. It’s art for everyone.

I bought a piece a few years back. A photograph of a baseball that was buried in dirt so long it now looks like a planet, especially floating against a pink background.

But how about a gallery where people can display the art they already own?

I’m imaging an online platform where you could upload images of your entire collection. Maybe it’s for anyone. Maybe it’s by invitation only, for collectors within a particular community. But the idea is it would showcase a person’s entire collection so that anyone, or just friends if you wanted to kept it private, could check it out.

I think this would benefit collectors in that they could see their work all in once place. I bet themes would emerge. Some pieces might seem out of place. As art is increasingly available to preview or even buy online new pieces could be judged as far as how well they fit into a collector’s existing collection.

Perhaps there could even be a part of the site that allows users to size their art in relation to each other and in relation to walls and rooms in their house. Imagine if this site could help you not just see your entire collection, but plan how to hang it without having to drag the sometimes heavy, sometimes awkward, sometimes delicate pieces from room to room.

Assuming the collections were public, collectors and potential collectors would benefit from seeing each other collections. Imagine searching collections that have work from an artist you like. Chances are those collections would also have lots of art you like from artists you’ve never heard of before.

Which is why artists would love the site. Rather then selling a piece of art to a collector, only to have it be seen by their guests alone, these images are suddenly out there, being seen and appreciated by new audiences.

Could be cool. I’d use it. Maybe it’s a something Flickr or Instagram needs to get on.  Or even Google or Facebook. As with any of the ideas I post here maybe there’s already something out there I’m not aware of. Let me know if that’s the case.

In the meantime, if you’re in Portland and free tonight, come by.

Something is going on in America, and it’s exciting. Things have finally come to a point where citizens are angry, and we’re finally channeling our anger outwards and upwards.

What’s especially interesting is that out of very similar senses of frustrations have come both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements. They have similar complaints, and yet wildly different ideas on how to improve things.

Naturally, I’m throwing my weight behind the Occupy movement. But it’s been a little difficult for me to figure out where I fit it.

I’m in the midst of moving our banking to a credit union, which feels very liberating.  And my wife was instrumental in the recent passage of the Multnomah Country ban that ends selling baby bottles, kids’ sippy cups and water bottles containing the toxic chemical BPA. It’s been inspiring to watch her testify against the chemical industry and make herself heard to the Oregonian, local news channels and our elected officials here in Portland and Salem.

But where do I fit in?

I’m not prepared or even particularly interested in camping out in a park across the street from a very sympathetic mayor.

So when I heard about the rally Pink Martini recently organized in Pioneer Square that felt like a better fit. While the music was nice, and it was awesome to see such a big crowd, the speakers are what really inspired me. Imam Mikal Shabazz was particularly stirring.

He’s a very, very good speaker. But what made his message particularly impactful is that while he echoed the familiar charge that Corporate America is capable of great evil, he took pains to remind us that it’s also capable of good.

I think that’s a really important point to make if this movement is truly going to represent the 99%.  After all, a majority of us work for or indirectly for corporations. Hell, I bet a good number of the 99% run corporations. Not huge multi-national corporations, but incorporated compaines nonetheless.

If the movement fails to incorporate those of us who for whatever reason aren’t living outside of Corporate America, it will fail to resonate beyond a thin sliver of the left. And even that thin sliver, I’d argue, can’t escape Corporate America when it comes to purchasing things. After all, there are very few DIY tent and blue tarp manufacturers that I’m aware of.

So the point I really took away from Imam Shabazz’s speech is that we each have a personal responsibility to spend our money with companies who are doing good and conducting business in a way we want to support.

It made me think of a website I loved back when Kerry was squaring off against Bush. I think it was called Buy Blue.

The site broke down, by category, how much money every major corporation had given to each campaign.

So you could look at gas stations and see that Exxon, Mobile and BP all had given 100% of their campaign contributions to Bush, whereas Shell was the lone gas station hedging their bets by giving equally to both campaigns. To this day I seek out a Shell station whenever I need to fill up.

But after the election the site went down. Or I could never find it again. And I’ve wondered every since why someone hasn’t filled the vacuum.

So here’s the pitch. Someone should create a website that shows us where companies are spending their money. Not just on presidential elections, but on senate races, ballot measures, and tax levies.

And why stop at percentages? Let’s publicize how much companies are spending to affect elections and whose paying for which lobbyists. Let’s see what the CEO’s, VP’s and Board of Directors are doing with their personal campaign contributions.

It would also be nice to know when companies are hiring new workers, becoming more sustainable and building manufacturing plants in America. And whose giving money to support education, the arts, cancer research and all the good things companies do but feel sheepish about promoting.

Not only would it provide a much-needed service to Americans desperate to send a clear message to corporations that corporate actions matter. It would be also be a one hell of a start-up.

Surely there must be something in the works, or perhaps a site that does some of this already out there that I’ve missed. I’ve seen maplight dot org, which focuses on where politicians are getting their money. But nothing that focuses on corporations.

So I’m toying with the idea of starting something, perhaps just a tumblr for now to promote some of these facts. So please comment or reach out by email if you have any thoughts as to what something like this might called, how it could be built or organized, or if you’re a designer that would like to take a crack at turning a statement into a poster that might tumblr to other tumblrs.

Or take the idea and run with it. I think there’s a huge idea in here somewhere. Just remember to send me an invite to your IPO party and let me buy a few shares before the Wall Street fat cats get in there first and drive up the price.

Not too long ago I wrote about newspapers and why a big part of the reason I still subscribe to a physical newsprint paper is the editorial page. In short, I love that editors choose the very best letters to publish, whereas online the same papers let anyone say anything. I don’t have time or the stomach for anyone saying anything. I want someone to curate the good ones.

But I’ve been thinking about a new reason I think subscribing to an actual newspaper is a better way to stay informed about the world versus the online edition. It goes like this.

The Internet is a rabbit hole. It’s infinite. It’s not something you read or look at in a linear manner.

Because of its vastness, the money to be made online is increasingly in giving people what they want faster. There are services that help us find music we might like. Banners ads follow us around once we’ve demonstrated our purchasing preferences.

Google, I’m told, scans Gmail accounts and offers up news stories based on what you write in your emails. Iraq is in the news, so Google News is going to serve everyone up new stories about Iraq. But if you write your friends about religion, you’ll see news stories about religion in Iraq. If you write your friends about soccer, you might instead see an article about the Iraq national soccer team

Makes sense, right? If you like soccer, you’ll probably like articles about soccer more than religion.

Or would you? Given what’s going in Iraq perhaps the article about religion would be of more interest.

What I like about the physical newspaper is everyone gets the same thing. There on your kitchen table, or at the foot of your bed, or on the coffee table is everything a very experienced and vast staff of professionals think people should know about as far as what’s going on in the community, country and the world that day.

Sure, you might not read it cover to cover. But if you go down a rabbit hole, you can still climb out and see the whole picture in its entirety.

I think this ability to get the full story, or the entire picture is increasingly important as people spend more time online.

Through our social networks, the blogs we read, the online communities we choose to be a part of it’s easier then ever to interact with like-minded people.

If you like cats you can share online space with fellow cat lovers. If you are part of the Tea Party you can hang out in online spaces where anyone who doesn’t agree with the Tea Party is shouted down. And so it goes for any political or social bent.

I think that’s the drawback to the “long tail” theory. As we move closer to communities of like-minded people we get farther away from other points of view.

It reminds me when I went from High School to College. I was incredibly political near the end of High School. The first gulf war started, Bush was elected, and the short bus I rode was evenly split between liberals and conservatives. We debated politics every morning and afternoon.

Then I went to a college so liberal a Republican wrote the newspaper saying he was in the closet politically for fear his views would cost him any chance at dating for the next four years.

With no one around to disagree with, I settled into a political complacency. Yes there were people out there I disagreed with; I just didn’t know any of them.

I’m not arguing that everyone getting a paper delivered would solve this problem. And certainly the kind of paper you subscribe to determines which kind of articles and views you read. But I think it would help. And it’s yet another reason why I’m going to continue to get the paper every morning.

More, given that people are going to continue to spend more and more time online, how do we foster online communities that both let people get the full picture? How do enable people with different interests and points of views to interact in non-polarizing ways?

Or put more simply, how about a website or social network where the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street can hear and talk to each other and realize maybe there are some things they agree on. Or at very least hear each other out without F bombs being dropped by comment number three.

Thoughts?

When my parents went to college in the 60s four years of private higher education cost around 5k. When I went in the nineties the same degree ran 100k. Today, it’s around 225k. When my two-year old daughter is ready to go off to school, it’s liable to be 500k

For those of you saying serves those elitist rights, let’s look at the much cheaper option of a public state university. What was once practically free was up to 25k in the nineties. It’s now in the neighborhood of 100k, which puts it on track to be around 200-250k when my kids are ready to matriculate. That is still an ungodly amount of money for a piece of paper that no longer guartuntees anything except that your tuition loans are now due.

Then there’s the curious case of the disappearing school year. Over the years summers have started earlier and ended later. Many schools shut down for a full month for winter break. Others have invented something called fall break that shuts school down in October.  Apparently spring break was making the school year asymmetrical.

My parents used to attend classes on Saturday. By the time I went to college it was pretty easy to avoid Friday classes and possible to limit classes to three days a week and still graduate on time. Today the two-day weekend has become the exception to the rule. The weekend starts Thursday night and many students can spend a mere 12 or 15 hours a week in class and honestly say they’re taking a full course load. By the time my daughter is in college I can only assume classes will be restricted to every second Monday on months with 30 days except June and September which are part of summer break.

No doubt some will insist the college they work for, teach at, send their kids to or attend is not like that. Fine, these are generalizations. And yes, community colleges remain an inexpensive alternative and probably will continue to remain so for the foreseeable future. But by and large kids are paying more for less education then they used to. Which is particularly worrisome given the economy students are graduating into.

I have an idea on how to fix it. Or more exactly, I have two people who should have some ideas on how to fix it. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Both smart, both successful, both dropped out of Harvard because it didn’t offer then what they need. I’m not sure what, if anything would of. And I bet they didn’t know at the time. But I suspect if you caught either of those guys at the right moment, in the right mood, they’d complete the sentence “I would have stuck around if…”

And that would be the basis for a very interesting conversation on how to create a new kind of college. Gates University probably wouldn’t be a four-year college on a campus with professional professors. Zuckerberg Tech probably wouldn’t have sports teams, or a student body government, or ever classes as we think of them today.

But something makes me think these institutions would do a lot better job of getting our best and brightest and even our mediocre and moderately bright for life after school for a lot less money. Hell, they might even come up with a model that puts money in student’s pockets. Imagine a school where you could not just come up with new ideas or practice writing a business plan but actually get to pitch them to real investors.

You might argue, those guys didn’t need college, why would they want to start one. Vanity. There is no better way to leave a legacy than to create an institution of higher learning. It’s better than a highway, an airport, or even a museum. It’s almost as good as a theme park.

So if anyone reading this knows Bill or Mark send them my way. I happen to run a very interesting, unconventional, real world experience based school inside an ad agency.

After talking it about for close to a decade, I bought a bike.

I used to bike everywhere. Then one day I stopped. If memory serves my tire got stolen and I never bothered to replace it. Life got busy and I drove.

This summer I went on a work retreat to Sun River. The house we stayed in had a garage full of bikes. I got on one and immediately knew I would buy a bike as soon as I got back to Portland.

That was two months ago. I got a pretty basic road bike. Nothing fancy.

My plan was to bike around the neighborhood and work up to riding to work in a week or two. I biked to work the very next day.

Being on a bike again after so long is exhilarating. The weather has been nice, I work just shy of 4 miles from my house, and the morning is mostly downhill.

I’ve biked to work roughly 4 out of every 5 workdays since.

But it wasn’t until last Friday that I became a real bike commuter.

Last Friday a driver told me to fuck off.

Rather than get into the tit for tat I’ll say I could have accommodated him, but choose not to. And after traveling in front and then beside him for 6 blocks he told me to fuck off just as he was turning and I was going straight.

It was not a heat of the moment fuck off. It was a now that I’ll never see you again, I will tell you to fuck off as I veer the other way.

I did nothing.

This might not surprise folks who know me. I’m not known for losing control.

But it surprised me, because like many even-keeled people when I do get pushed over the edge I freak out.

Getting yelled at by a driver while on a bike would normally be one of those situations.

But it wasn’t.

Here’s why.

He was an aging once handsome probably on his second marriage dude in his late 40s smoking a cigarette racing home in his once cool now falling apart early 90s sedan.

So immediately I could feel a little superior.

He was slowly killing himself with cigarette smoke and stress while I was getting exercise.

His car was polluting the environment while my bike was not.

But I said nothing, smiled actually, when he told me to fuck off for a very different reason.

I was having fun. And he was not.

And that is what any group, company, governmental body or lobbyist involved with promoting biking to work or biking to work should focus on.

Biking to work is fun.

Yes it’s good for your body. But you can’t guilt trip someone into exercise. They have to want to exercise.

And you can guilt trip people about destroying the planet until you’re blue in the face, but people are selfish. As a progressive lefty who went bike free for 10 years, I can tell you from personal experience it doesn’t work.

You can throw doom and gloom, statistics, images of obesity plus dying streams and trees and all it will do is make people think they should bike. But they won’t.

Because fear and guilt might motivate someone to skip a second helping of dinner, but it won’t make someone go to a bike store that feels like a foreign land with it’s own customs and language and shell out hundreds it not thousands of dollars for a bike and then actually ride it much less ride it to work.

People who want other people to bike should focus on how much fun biking is, because it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

At least it has been during a wonderful balmy Portland late summer. Check back in with me this winter.

Extra thought: because I write ads for a living, but am increasingly teaching students how to write good ads instead of writing ads myself here’s a good share the road ad.

Open on a driver bitching about bikers. Cut to a biker bitching about pedestrians. Cut to a pedestrian bitching about drivers.

Or you could have pedestrians bitching about bikers, bikers bitching about drivers and pedestrians bitching about drivers.

Doesn’t matter how you do it. We all hate each other, at least in the heat of a stressful commute. That’s a fact.

But here’s how you do it. It’s the same person driving, biking and walking. He or she goes from walking to biking to driving.

Because we all do two, if not all three of those things, and when we go from one to another real quick we realize how absurd it is to get mad at people who are doing the thing we were just doing a little bit ago.

Wind, it’s generally accepted, is an important part of our energy future.

Here in Oregon we have fields of 60-foot white wind turbines that provide clean green power for much of the state. But there are some downsides. They kill birds, they make a lot of noise, and quite frankly they’re ugly.

If there were a contest held for the machine that looks most likely to turn into a robot and wipe out humanity the modern day wind turbine would be shortlisted. Even the word turbine has a clinical utilitarian sound to it.

I was watching a cheesy sounding but incredibly enthralling Smithsonian show called Aerial Oregon and had a thought as I watched the epic HD helicopter footage tracking over one such field.

Aren’t these just windmills? Modern, slick windmills, but windmills. Like the Dutch used to make and still do for all I know.

Windmills are awesome. Everyone likes windmills.

So why not make some of those turbines more like windmills.

Make them colorful, put lights on them, adorn them but make them art.

That would solve the ugly problem. And while still noisy they might at least make different noise, or even music. Colorful musical windmills would probably even save some birds lives.

Yes, they would likely be less effective if they were weighed down with some decoration. If altering them at all would slow them down too much or decrease the wind harvested too substantially at the very least put a design on them.

Let Murakami and Philip Glass have at a field of 200 of them and see what happens.

Imagine a hillside covered in them. I’d want those in my backyard. And I bet local businesses would love the tourist that would flock to the see the world’s only sculpture garden that is also providing renewable energy.

So there you go turbine makers, energy gurus, environmentalists, and policy makers, politicians looking for reelection. Get in touch with some artists, or an organization who can and let’s make windmills out of turbines.

I still get the paper. It comes to my doorstep every morning except for Sunday when I get two of them.

For this privilege I pay $388 a year, $20 a month to the Oregonian and another $12 a month to the New York Times. As much as I had no idea it was this much until I just added it up, I still think it’s worth every penny.

Every morning I wake up, get the paper, make a cup of coffee, and then enjoy them both lying in bed. It’s a wonderful way to start the day.

I could, in theory, do the same thing for substantially less money reading the paper on my phone, computer or iPad and spare a few trees in the process. But I won’t. Not yet.

As much as I love the ritual of the morning paper, my apprehension has more to do with my favorite section, the editorial page.

I like the editorials, but I like the letters to the editor even better. I like the idea that anyone with a well-worded point of view can have their opinion published side by side with paid columnists.

What’s makes these opinions so enjoyable to read is there are so few of them. The paper only selects the very best. Sure it’s a matter of saving on paper costs, but it’s also a matter of leaving repetition, misspellings, incorrect facts, and drunken ramblings out.

Yet when it comes to publishing the exact same newspaper online, anything goes. Anyone with an email can sign up for an account and write whatever they want as often as they want about whatever they want in the comment section of any article. All but the very worst hate speech is tolerated.

An article that might not garner a single letter to the editor that merits being published in the print edition might get dozens if not hundreds of comments online.

Sure I could skip the comments. But I can’t. When I read an interesting article and I see there are 157 comments I am compelled to start reading them.

The economics of this situation seem crazy to me. As a paying customer of the newspaper I get zero preferential treatment as far as getting my letter to the editor printed. And yet I can post just about anything I want to any online paper for free.

So here’s an idea. Why not treat the comment sections of online newspapers with the same scrutiny as their print counterparts? Only publish the best, most well written comments.

Sure there will be howls of protest. Any paper that dares take away people’s ability to rant and rave as often as they see fit will be subject to accusations of censorship if not worse.

And it’s going to cost a lot. Extra editorial staff will have to be hired to review the ten of thousands of comments even a regional online gets every day.

But you know what? I’m willing to pay for it. Don’t even charge for the online edition of the paper as the New York Times has started to do, just charge for access to the comments.

I’d be willing to pay $5 or $10 a month to be part of a community of online readers who are held to a higher quality standard of conversation.

It’s risky. Any paper that dares take away what we’ve come to think as our right to comment with restriction will suffer consequences. Subscribers will unsubscribe. Page views will diminish. It will feel like a bad decision, at least at first.

But my bet is readers like myself will slowly but surely pay our money and join the conversation. We’ll enjoy reading the similar if not the same articles published everyone else, but we’ll keep coming back for the mere handful of thoughtful, well argued comments on each piece.

My guess is that the first paper to adopt this model will eventually become a national player. Right up there with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post and the other handful of newspapers that will still be around 50 years from now.

So how about it The Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Sacramento Bee?

Who wants my money?