Butts In The Seats

The Young Helping The Younger

I was perusing over at SmArts & Culture blog and read an entry Mary Ann posted about a well-intentioned, but not entirely successful attempt to "introduce young professionals...to arts patronage."

It reminded me of another group of young professionals who have successfully raised money to send kids from NYC to arts and music summer camp. Giving Opportunities to Others (GOTO) raises money by essentially having a lot of great parties to support their commitment to send kids to arts camp for at least 3 years. They started in 2001 and not only have expanded the number of kids they send each year, but have also apparently expanded to Boston so they can send kids from that city to camp. (Judging from some of the costumes, it is probably best that the Boston people have their own parties. ;) )

The organization is entirely volunteer run. That's pretty impressive given the size and complexity of the events they are organizing. The other thing I thought was interesting is that while some of the GOTO members went to summer camp when they were younger, none of the NYC group went to the camp they picked to send the NYC campers to.

Bit of disclosure, I worked at the organization that ran the camp when GOTO started sending kids there. It is pretty hard for me to feel guilty about promoting a group that sends kids to arts camp by throwing fun parties. And while the organization acknowledges that many people are motivated to volunteer by the networking opportunities, there many more ways to establish a network without similar time commitments. Even if someone is entirely motivated to participate by a desire to land new business, I will bet that at least some of them having never thought to volunteer their time before will end up doing so for more altruistic reasons throughout their lives.

Grandeur Reduced to A 20 Inch Monitor

Another story from the "Could This Be The Wave of The Future?" file, (and the "Don't Dismiss It Until You Ponder It" subfolder), NPR had a story yesterday about museum collections going online. The story starts out talking about how many smaller museums with interesting collections have had to either scaleback activities or close their bricks and mortar presences due to lack of funding. Now the only way to view the collections of some of these museums are online.

There is, in fact, a website called MoOM--the Museum of Online Museums which lists all these collections. They range from noted museums like the Smithsonian, MoMA and The Art Institute of Chicago to more obscure and interesting sites like The Gallery of International Cigarette Pack Graphics and The Grocery List Collection which boasts the largest collection of found grocery lists.

Now if you are asking how some of these sites qualify as museums and if images existing only as 1s and 0s in the ether of the internet can be considered a collection, you aren't alone. (After all, everyone could boast they had the Mona Lisa in their museum with a little work.) The NPR story tackles the debate about what constitutes a museum and what it means to curate a collection.

The guys who run MoOM absolutely believe that seeing art in a physical museum is often a necessity and can be a transforming experience. But they also believe there are a lot of interesting collections of material out there that people should see, but that they wouldn't necessarily ever want to drive to. They also point out that one would never have the time to visit all the bricks and mortar museums out there either so having the art online provides welcome and needed access.

But does a cool webpage of scanned skatepark passes deserve the appellation "museum"? NPR quotes Wilson O'Donnell, director of the museology program at the University of Washington in Seattle as saying no. His analogy that an online museum is no more a museum than Wikipedia a valid source of information is a little out of touch (Peer review of articles by the journal Nature found it as accurate as Brittanica.), and his reasoning quoted by NPR isn't completely compelling.

My blog and others have countless examples of how being well trained doesn't necessarily ensure the production of a quality product. I think the same could reasonably be said of a curator at a prestigious bricks and mortar institution. The inclusion in the story of a professor of Native American Indian studies saying that mainstream museums haven't done a good job representing Native American cultural groups futher clouds the concept of who is qualified to assemble a collection. (Additionally, the professor is quoted as saying most tribal groups resist the term museum in favor of cultural center because it connotes something that is old and dull.)

If you really start trying to identify the elements that separate a museum from a really neat collection, I suspect you will eventually get frustrated and be reduced to paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it." It is no easier to do than making a similar list comparing a bench and a coffee table. Is the collection of magazine covers featuring the US Flag from one month 1942 more valid than the site featuring steel and coal magazine ads from all of 1966 simply because the former is on the Smithsonian site?

This story encapulates the whole dilemmia of technology and art. In some ways, technology throws open the doors to opportunity enabling possibilities and a reach previously unattainable. Concurrently, technology threatens to dilute or isolate us from the potency and relevance of works.

But damned if you can definitively say where the line between the two is.

Pledges for Your Pledges

I received a thank you letter for a donation I made that is something of a testament to just how important customer service is in the non-profit sector. I made a donation to a public radio station about 5,000 miles away from where I live. I like the music and while I don't listen all the time, I do so enough that I feel obliged to help support the cost of the high speed internet stream I am using.

(By the way, I am willing to wager that my relationship with the station represents a strong possible future of radio listenership.)

Anyhow, I received a nice thank you letter and noticed that there were about 2 paragraphs thanking me, 4 telling me what my benefits would be and seven paragraphs making pledges to me.

The first pledge is prompt service by phone or email rendered personally to me by the person whose business card was inserted in my letter. The first thing I wondered was if the station was well enough organized to make transitions appear seamless as staff turned over. There are going to be some people who never call their rep and others who will establish a relationship with the staff member. A well-kept database will make donors love the station forever if donors feel important to whomever they speak.

The second and third pledges promise my contribution will be processed as quickly and accurately as possible and my thank you gifts will be sent out promptly.

The fourth pledge is that "All appeals for contributions will be honest and straightforward." (I guess I have quoted and summarized to an extent that I need to cite WXPN as my source.)

The fifth pledge is to "raise funds in the most efficient way we can, assuring that as much of your contribution goes to supporting the music you love."

These last two pledges are a real acknowledgment of the negative perceptions about fundraising that have emerged in recently years in reaction to outright scandals and stories of how funds have been used for purposes barely connected to the ones solicited.

The final pledge is to continue to bring me the music and programming I rely on them for. While general and vague, this pledge might be important to some people in light of the controversy at WDET this past year. They changed their format and angry donors threatened to sue saying they were solicited under false pretenses since the station knew they were going to change.

As I read over the letter, I wonder if my own acknowledgment letters need to do less thanking and citing of specific instances donations have helped and promise more fidelity and honesty. I don't know that these latter issues are as important to donors in my community as they are in others. I do think that the the letter portends a possible change in what people will value in the organizations they give to. If nothing else, I will be keeping my eyes open for other signals.

What Lies Beneath

Via an entry at Neill Archer Roan's blog on PR, I came across a great entry on a blog called Bad Language regarding writing press releases well. In past entries I have written on the subject urging people not to use the trite phrases everyone uses in press releases and brochure copy. (spectacular, tour de force, illustrating what it means to be human, etc.)

Matthew Stibbe, who writes Bad Language, makes many of the same points and his simple list of how to make releases better is worth reading.

I almost left his blog without following a link to an even more interesting topic, however. Stibbe points out that unless you take the proper steps, every press release you send out electronically contains a record of all the changes you made to that document.

What might really be interesting to media outlets might not be what you wrote, but what you took out. So if you happen to not like a performer and to air your frustrations, you write "his pedantic lyrics and bombastic stage presence only serve as a facade for his inadequacies in other areas," before writing something more appropriate, your true feelings will be available for any who are interested to see.

Certainly that might be a little embarassing at most. What happens though if you are copying and pasting information from a newspaper article and accidently drop a sentence about the new president of your organization being cleared of fiscal malfeasance at his previous job after a two year investigation? A record of that information being deleted has a good chance of being included and will be of much greater interest to the local paper than how happy you are that he has accepted the position.

"Yeah," you say, "but who uses those settings and is anyone going to really turn them on to see what secrets my museum might be hiding?" Well actually, probably not. But then they don't have to intentionally turn them on. Editors and reporters are the most likely group to have those settings active on their word processors by default. They send stories with changes and comments included in the document back and forth to each other all day long. They are probably turning all those things off while reading your press release so they don't have to bear witness to your agonizing search for the right wording.

But if they just happen to see something interesting before they deactivate that view....

So how do you avoid broadcasting your dirty laundry? Fortunately, Mr. Stibbe has found a solution provided by those who get paid to poke through our dirty laundry...the NSA.

As amusing as it is to think of yourself adopting NSA anti-espionage techniques, it is a pretty through guide and worth employing to avoid a faux pas or two.

Take A Friend..The Book!

Drew McManus, the brains behind the Take A Friend To the Orchestra project, has compiled the contributions, (including yours truly's) for the 2006 version into a book.

To purchase it, click on the button below:

I will be adding the button to the sidebar of my blog soon.

On a related note, as long time readers may know I have been occasionally checking in on the Honolulu Symphony since attending a concert as part of my participation in Take A Friend to the Orchestra Month. I am happy to say they have noted the new executive director hire as well as the new board membership on their web page. I have been somewhat critical of them on this blog before so it is only fair that I recognize positive steps as well.

The Most Unimaginative Form of Flattery

I often read about how restrictive copyright law is stifling creativity, but recently I have begun wondering if people are stifling themselves. We have all heard or read the arguments against Top 40 music artists who sample the work of predecessors and about how Broadway and Hollywood are reviving, remaking or adapting works.

In a way you can understand how these people are slaves to whatever will have wide appeal so they can make money. Lately though, I have been seeing a similar trend in shows that don't have that concern because the primary audience is family and friends and will show up and pay any price no matter what the quality. There is almost free license to trump predecessors with ones originality. Instead, they are borrowing heavily from them.

The trend is starting to worry me because it is beginning to look something akin to everyone expressing their individuality by getting a tattoo. (In many cases, employing the same motif they were impressed by inked on someone else.)

In the past year, we have had three beauty pagaents by three different organizations. Two of them serve as qualifiers for the same national pagaent so you would think there might be some competition between them to be viewed as the more prestigious or attracting women who go on to earn the most titles.

Instead the organizer of the second one (who has been in the business 14 years) asked the organizer of the first one for help which included all the choreography. The third organizer (also a long time in the field) asked us to keep the entire set and props from the second pagaent. Except for different draping fabrics, it will look pretty much the same as pagaent number two.

It is the same situation with a hip-hop dance group coming in soon. We had a taiko drum group use our orchestra lift to make a grand entrance emerging from the pit during a closed recital six weeks ago. This dance group is doing the exact same thing. The fact they are using the same taiko group is something of a mixed blessing in my eyes. They might be copying someone else's idea, but at least the originator is getting credit for the performance.

In the month after this dance group performs, two of their rivals will be renting my theatre. In the past they have often asked or expected the same things their rivals had. (Including moving light effects which the rival groups rent since we have none in stock.) This is rather ironic since one of the groups splintered off from one of the others. There are some hard feelings, but not so much that they can't be derivative.

I have been considering booking some touring hip-hop dance groups in because I know there is definite interest in the genre and I would get a good turn out. In one part of my mind, I am pretty sure I will also be influencing the next wave of choreographic choices being made by bringing fresh ideas in despite the available material on cable, internet, etc.

I just wonder what the base cause of this trend might be. Are people so afraid of failure, even in the face of a guaranteed sell out audience that they feel it necessary to mine another's ideas? If anyone has some insight I would certainly love an explanation.

Search For Sitar Video, Book the Sengalese Singer

I noticed something very interesting yesterday. As I was looking around for some final acts to round out next season, I happened upon an agents website and clicked on the link for video.

I was taken to the Google Video site. The agent had been clever on two counts. First, he doesn't have to pay to maintain or store the video on a server. Second, now whenever someone looks up a topic related to one of the groups he represents (World music, for example) the video of his client will show up and perhaps garner some additional business for him.

I suspect we will begin to see more of this sort of attempt to position performances as video services like Google and YouTube.com become more prevalent and easy to use..and as it gets easier to make videos.

St. Benjamin

I am just finishing up Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin. As we all know, he should pretty much be a patron saint to non-profit organizations for his lessons in frugality and thrift in Poor Richard's Almanack.

One thing you may not be aware of is that after founding what was to become the University of Pennsylvania in 1751, he decided it was important to build a hospital. Since he was having trouble raising money, according to Isaacson he "got the [PA] Assembly to agree that if £2,000 could be raised privately, it would be matched by £2,000 from the public purse."

According to Isaacson, he was the person who introduced the concept of matching grants to what was to become the United States. (Which by the way is one of the situations the studies I mentioned two days ago noted males are likely to be more generous.)

Why you ask, with a gentleman with such standing and influence in the policy as to have a hand in the writing of the Declaration of Independance, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and the peace accord with Britian, supporting the idea of matching grants did it take nearly 200 years for organizations like the Ford Foundation to employ it as a funding scheme?

Well for one, political opponents felt the move was too conniving. I suppose it was because they didn't believe he could raise the money and had tricked the Assembly. Franklin noted that knowing that their money would essentially doubled, they gave more.

Franklin himself referred to his innovative idea as a political maneuver so he might have felt a little uneasy about it himself. The success of his plan eased any troubled thoughts he might have had. "...after thinking about it I more easily excused myself for having made use of cunning."

Like so many of the institutions, inventions and concepts Franklin had a hand in creating or developing, we regard the matching grant arrangement as a common tool for accomplishing our work. It is hard to conceive of it as being controversial.

Starting To Play The Right Notes

I was happy to see an interview last week with the new Honolulu Symphony executive director, Tom Gulick and hear an interview with new symphony board chair Curtis Lee last week where both men acknowledged that the situation with the sale of balcony seats has been ill-advised. (Discussed in earlier entry)

They also acknowledged that the musicians need to be paid better and utilized more efficiently. (We got our fingers crossed for you guys

There is still no mention of Tom Gulick as the new ED on the Symphony website though. He isn't even included on the administrative staff list. I am somewhat bemused at this situation since the Symphony Musicians have linked to every bit of news about Tom Gulick on their website. It would probably serve the musicians better in salary negotiations if the public didn't know so much about Gulick. The less people know about him, the less sympathetic public opinion will be for him if negotiations go sour and the issue begins to play out in the press.

Of course, it is more in their interest if things go well and the concert hall fills with optimistic people who donate lots of money. So they are disseminating the good news and contributing to the general optimism.

The one thing Gulick said in his interview that I took some slight exception to was that "New York is the only cultural and artistic destination in the country." I'd say that Boston, Philly, Washington DC and Chicago can hold their own with NY when it comes to attracting artists and cultural tourists. Not to mention that some people might want to visit Minneapolis and check out the new Guthrie Theater. And in the summer, people are happy to make cross country treks to places like Ashland, OR and Cedar City, UT for the Shakespeare Festivals or Charleston, SC for the Spoleto Festival. There are some who might say Nashville is the true center of American culture.

New York might be near the top of the list of very important locales in the artistic and cultural scene, but it ain't the only one! As a guy who grew up in NY and proudly identifies the state as his origin, even I have to admit the country has a lot of important cultural and artistic destinations.

Gender Generosity

Via Arts and Letters Daily was an article by Christina Hoff Sommers that appears in In Character, "Men or Women: Which is the More Generous Sex?"

The short answer is, it matters on the situation. The long answer, which will give you some guidance in how you make your donor appeals, is contained in the article.

Depending on how laboratory experiments are designed either men or women end up emerging as more generous. When the design rewards risk taking, men come to the fore. When the design was purely about generousity, women were kinder.

This latter situation was also borne out by surveys where women's answers about their generousity outstripped those of men.

However, outside of the lab and away from questionaries, things are quite different. In a 2003 survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center it was determined that when it came to actually doing something for others, "gender is not noticably related to altruistic behaviors."

As the article points out, women and men are different in the way they express their concern for others. Society places women in a nuturing role and men in risk taking roles. Men become firefighters and jump into burning buildings, women become nurses and tend to the burns. The article notes there is nothing wrong with men or women fulfilling either of these roles.

But what about when it comes to donating money and not saving or soothing lives? Well, it looks like in practical terms, men are more willing to part with money than women.

A 2005 analysis of federal tax data by NewTithing Group, a philanthropy research institute in San Francisco, shows that even when you control for income and assets, males still write larger checks than females. As the New York Times summarized the NewTithing findings: “The study found that single men, generally, are more generous than single women. Among the wealthiest singles, men gave 1.5 percent of assets compared with 1.1 percent for women. Wealth does not explain the disparity.”

If this isn't what you want to hear or doesn't mesh with your experience, then read the article. It goes into more detail and cites specific examples from fundraisers.

A couple things to pay attention to though--1) All people quoted as saying women don't give enough are in higher education fundraising, not arts or social charities. The article alludes to this as a weakness in the argument in regard to a UCLA quote by acknowledging the female graduates might be sending their money elsewhere, but it could as easily apply to the whole article.

2) Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the right of center American Enterprise Institute which may or may not have an interest in portraying males in a positive light for giving $10,000 while saying the wife who only donates $500 can afford to give more.

Still the article provides enough generally unbiased information to perhaps illuminate and guide fundraising campaigns and direct asking strategies. For example, a study by economists James Andreoni and Lise Vesterlund: (remembering this is in a controlled lab situation)

“When altruism is expensive, women are kinder, when it is cheap, men are more altruistic.” They also showed how their findings (along with several other studies they cite) could have important implications for fund-raising as well as tax policy. For example, if the Internal Revenue Service were to increase the price of donating to charity by no longer allowing deductions, it is quite likely that men would react more negatively than women. (On the other hand, women could object that the present system favors male styles of giving.)

Listen, The Business of the Arts

I was frankly quite surprised as I drove around this past Sunday to hear a radio program on the business end of the arts. The program is a pretty new one for the local public radio station.

Called, appropriately enough, The Business of the Arts, the show's goal is to shed a little light on the concerns organizations face that are mostly invisible to the public until there is trouble.

Financing of the arts is a mystery to most people. People complain that the cost of tickets keeps going up, whether it’s for the Opera, the Symphony, or the Academy of Arts. But if you tell someone that the cost of that ticket does not come close to paying for the event or exhibition, they are surprised.

Host Bob Sandla talks to representatives of arts organizations on Oahu that are attempting to be fiscally prudent and responsible while providing high quality services to their audiences. Bob and his guests discuss individual companies to pinpoint their specific challenges and achievements and explore the misunderstandings and difficulties they face.

I don't know what the listenership is on Sundays at 6 pm, but I figure they may not be educating their largest audience segment. Still, it is really gratifying to see the program is on at all and their episodes are available online.

In the segment I heard, the host made sure the guest discussed where every percentage of the budget went, what things were and were not covered, what the goals of the organization were, how things were planned, what the dream situation for the organization would be.

I found it interesting. But then I am in the business, am familiar with the terminology and wasn't really thinking critically about the effectiveness of the format and presentation because I was so grateful to have the subject tackled at all.

So if you think it is a good idea, go bug your local public radio station. If they are smart, they can turn it into a case for supporting the station as well. In an intro to the program I was listening to the station's president talked about how the challenges the organization being interviewed faced were the same ones the station dealt with.

Getting Soft In Your Head

Have you ever driven by a new store and seen people going in and out and wonder how you could have missed the hoopla that surrounds a Grand Opening? Well chances are the Grand Opening hasn't happened yet and what you see is a soft opening.

A soft opening is an unannounced opening of a store that allows for the evaluation of operations in order to correct them before a highly publicized grand opening which might highly publicize said problems. It also helps an entire staff of new employees put their training into effect under less stressful circumstances.

If you have the patience to take part in the exercise as a customer, it can be rewarding. I got a free meal when a restaurant did a soft opening and there are tales of the lucky amusement park attendees who have been offered a chance to ride hot new rides before the offical opening date.

It occurred to me this weekend that the practice would be helpful for new performing arts facilities. On July 1st the new center at Bethel Woods opened with the New York Philharmonic. Most readers may be more familiar with the locale as the site of Woodstock after the folks in Woodstock, NY in Ulster County withdrew their permission for the 1969 performance. (That hasn't kept you from cashing in on the name though has it, Woodstock :P)

Bethel Woods had a good opportunity to do a soft opening on June 21 when the Mid-Hudson Philharmonic played there to allow the pavillon and orchestra shell designers to make adjustments. They did have employees there for training in preparation for the opening that night. However, given that access to the site is by narrow winding roads (I am from that part of NY, I have driven to the grounds) and the fact that weeks of torrential rains have battered Sullivan County there were a lot of details that a soft opening could have brought to the fore. (As a guy who ran a few outdoor music festivals in a rural environment upon which it had rained before and during, I can speak with some authority. Boy, do they have my empathy!)

I know someone who worked the opening day and she was fairly critical of the disorganization that she saw. To be fair, some of it was going to happen even with the benefit of the soft opening. Short of implanting mind control chips in the concert goers, some of it will still be happening in 5 years. (And it was certainly more organized than Woodstock was!)

But there were a lot of avoidable problems that a soft opening would have certainly revealed and there were a lot of people who said they would never come back again as they left. That probably won't impact the Ashlee Simpson concert on Sunday since there most likely isn't a big audience overlap. You also can't please everyone even under the best conditions. It just seems a shame to make such a poor first impression to such a large audience of people who, lets face it, tend to be influential.

Most of us won't be involved with the opening of new facilities but those that are would do well to at least consider a soft opening. I will confess though that I did have a hand in the opening of a new facility. We didn't have a soft opening and everything went very well.

But as I said, I was there.

Music to My Eyes

It has long been a custom to have music accompany fireworks displays. The 1812 Overture is probably the song most often pressed into this service.

However, I came across this bit on Slate noting that famed fireworks expert Takeo Shimizu used musical notation to plan his luminous displays.

The pyrotechnics expert Takeo Shimizu used a musical score to represent his designs: Each stave corresponded to a different firing location, and each note represented a particular kind of shell fired at a particular time.

A symphony of sight and sound indeed!

More There Be Sea Monsters...

I set out to answer the comment made to my last entry with a comment of my own. But as I am wont to do, a short response morphed into bloviation and by the third or fourth paragraph I decided it was better as an entry.

If you haven't already catch up with the preceding entry and join me in my answer to Heidi. (I promise, there is some wheat to sift from the chaff.)

Heidi-
Interesting comment and probably one that would take multiple entries to answer. The main concern I had when I wrote the entry you prove somewhat by being a UH Theatre grad living on the mainland. UH graduates students and they have no option to ply their craft but to leave or find a job in another industry and rehearse for Diamond Head and Manoa Valley at night.

That might be why the quality is so good--a large pool of well trained actors who didn't leave when they graduated. I just feel bad that there isn't even one company in the state with which dancers and actors can aspire to perform and be forced to go elsewhere because it is so difficult to break in to the company. Classically trained musicians at least have the symphony to gaze longingly at.

As for combating local perceptions. I think the solution differs from community to community. For example, what is the real scale by which shows are measured in Hawaii?-- Las Vegas. For those who have always wondered where people in paradise go on vacation, it is Vegas. Before the recent inter-island airfare wars, it was often cheaper to vacation in Vegas than on a Neighbor Island. So many Hawaiians visit and live there that local cable shows are rebroadcast in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas definitely sets a standard much the same as Broadway sets the standard in other places. One of the tourist focused shows in Waikiki is Cirque Hawaii unabashedly modeled after Cirque de Soleil. I neglected to mention it in my post because honestly, I didn’t know it was an on going concern. I thought it was just an event that happened this past winter because I have heard no mention if it since. (I am guessing they focusing marketing on tourists.) On Maui there is a Cirque inspired show as well, ‘Ulalena. It has more of a local feel though because it employs Hawaiian dress and chant. (Don't know if you were around when it started.)

But getting back to the question of how does one combat local perceptions that such fine work is par for the course. Ultimately, I am not sure you can or if is imperative to do so. If people are lucky enough to get good quality stuff cheaply and the volunteers are willing to invest the time and energy to maintain the high quality over the years, then the folks in that community are damned lucky. That is the power of the arts made manifest right there.

While I have certainly seen better than what Diamond Head, Manoa Valley and Army Community Theatre have produced, I don’t necessarily think there needs to be an Equity acting company or full time professional dance company (other than the hula hālau) for the sole purpose of bringing a higher quality product to the state. I am just really surprised that nothing has sprung up given the available opportunities. Though, as I mentioned I think the lack means the state exports creative minds and provides no incentive for such people to migrate in.

Ultimately I think it comes down to the value a community places on the experience. One of two episodes of Little House on the Prairie I remember from when I was a kid featured Pa making furniture by hand for the shop in town. The problem was, the shop owner could sell factory made furniture cheaper and the factory could make them fast enough to keep up with demand. He acknowledged that Pa’s chairs were much better than the factory ones but customers found the factory ones suitable for their needs and didn’t need such well-made chairs.

If people find the community theatre performances suitable to their needs because they lack the experience to discern between the quality of that performance and one at the local regional theatre, (or don’t think the disparity is great enough to pay more for the difference if they do perceive it), then the only option is to appeal to them with other criteria than performance quality.

In some respects, we should be happy that people are attending and participating in community theatre at all. My Little House example could as easily be applied to community theatre vs. DVD/Internet/movie/cable. This is not to say we should content ourselves with the successes of community theatres and count our blessings. We should always be raising the bar of expectations in every endeavor be it entertainment or education, (and if I may wax a little political, fuel efficiency and energy production.)