Michael B. Duff

My stepmother, Debby DeFee, passed away early this morning, after a brief battle with a very aggressive form of cancer.

Debby was not an emotional person, but she was a good person, and we had developed a healthy adult relationship over the past 30 years, despite living under difficult circumstances when I was a kid.

Debby basically raised me from the age of 8 to the age of 18. I’ll just say we had a difficult relationship, and Debby was under incredible stress trying to manage me and my father and half a dozen small businesses at the same time.

After I left the house, Debby found purpose and satisfaction in her work. She got her doctorate in Nutrition/Food Service Management, assisted by a number of tremendous mentors at Texas Tech and Texas Woman’s University.

This work, and the education she was able to achieve, helped her rise above the difficult domestic circumstances she had lived in and liberated her to be the generous, hard-working person she really was.

She became department chair for the department of Food Service & Culinary Arts at Texas State Technical College and taught RHIM at a variety of colleges and state institutions in Houston and Waco.

She also met the great love of her life, a man named Jerry Gerhardt, whose gentle nature and endless patience gave her a home as he took her into his family.

Jerry’s daughter was with Debby in her final days and I will never be able to properly thank her for her kindness or the help she provided to my mother.

It took a while for her lessons to “kick in,” but Debby taught me the value of hard work and the importance of treating people with respect. She taught me manners and proper behavior and helped me rise above a trailer park background so I could be comfortable in a room with any group of people from any background.

Debby had a tremendous sense of duty. Duty to God, duty to her community, and duty to the institutions that she was part of. Her mother and father were deeply committed to Texas Tech, and the time Debby spent there, learning and working, were some of the happiest times in her life.

Debby specified no memorial and no obituary, so I hope everyone will forgive me for providing this one informally, for everyone who knew and loved her.

I only know a few of her friends from her time in Lubbock, so if you know someone who knew her, please pass this along.

The market is so bad today, I think Glenn Reynolds just told me to buy a helmet.

• The Year America Dissolved
  "As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police."
  (tags: politics libertarian fear conspiracy)
• Welcome To Jane Austen's Fight Club
  You're not your embroidery. You're not how much money your father has set aside for your dowry. You're not the carriage you drive. You're not the contents of your reticule. You're not your fucking pelisse. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the Empire.
  (tags: video humor literature movies culture feminism)

• Europe's future: Can anything perk up Europe? | The Economist
  "All democracies eventually have to grapple with Europe’s Big Problem, that governments and social protection tend to grow until they choke the economies that pay for them."
  (tags: politics economics europe germany france)
• An imaginary city that changed the twentieth century
  If you can't make your dreams of Utopia real, at least you can import a few small objects from that dreamworld into ours. And that's just what Gillette did. Ultimately the scifi entrepreneurialism of The Human Drift paid off for him in real-world money. The Gillette razor empire made him very rich.
  (tags: architecture history futurism business)
• Repeal Religious Freedom at Ground Zero? – Reason Magazine
  Suppose there were a heavily Muslim neighborhood in New York, with mosques, religious schools, and shops with meat prepared according to Islamic dietary rules. Suppose an evangelical church wanted to build a chapel there. And suppose local Muslims tried to block it as a flagrant insult to them. Would Sarah Palin urge the church to retract this "unnecessary provocation" in the "interest of healing"? Would her followers? Or would they scorn this disparagement of Christianity and champion the religious freedom on which America was built?
  (tags: politics religion libertarian islam)

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled “Go Gently into That Good Night.” I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. — Roger Ebert, from his Esquire Interview

I love the coffee shop at the Texas Tech Bookstore. They have these little designer sandwiches you can grab for breakfast or throw in the breakroom fridge for lunch.

There’s something terribly civilized about it, grabbing a latte and a panini on the way to work.

Last week I bought a breakfast sandwich and asked them to toast it for me. But I wasn’t watching to see if they put it in my bag and accidentally walked off without it.

I thought about going back for it a couple times but it wasn’t worth trudging through the snow and slush last week. This morning I went in again and had to decide if I would mention it or not.

I decided I didn’t want to be the kind of guy who complains about a $2 sandwich so I was just going to let it go. (It was basically my fault.) But the person behind the counter remembered me and immediately started toasting a replacement sandwich this morning, without me saying a word.

Such a tiny thing, but life is made up of tiny things, dozens of little transactions that can annoy you or make your day. I took a customer service class last week that encouraged people to bring up examples from their real lives.

People didn’t mention the time they had their mortgage held up for a month or the deal they got on their last car; they mentioned how they were treated at restaurants. The emotions we feel about customer service transactions aren’t related to how big the item is or how much money we spend.

If anything, we’re more critical of the little things because it should be easier to get them right.

The folks at Barnes & Noble got it right today and I’ll remember that $2 sandwich for years.

Friday Dec. 4th will be my last day at the Avalanche-Journal.

Thus ends four and a half great years as webmaster, columnist, and half-assed troubleshooter.

I learned a lot at the A-J, and I’ll always be grateful to the editors there for publishing my work and giving me a chance to grow as a writer. Special thanks to Bill Kerns, Shelly Gonzales, Terry Greenberg and Beth Pratt for reviewing my early work and taking a chance on a guy who was basically hired as a code monkey.

I had a lot of misconceptions about journalism when I walked in the door four years ago. I was a lot more political back then, and like most amateur pundits, I had thrown around the term “mainstream media” until it lost all meaning.

The problem with amateur pundits is that they see everything in black and white, or maybe just red and blue. Everything is taken as proof of some political position. Every story choice, every offhand comment, every random typo is interpreted as an ideological statement.

But as I watched things from the inside, I was struck by how straightforward and workmanlike the whole thing is. Whatever ideological bias you think you see in your local media, the contents of the paper really are determined by what the editors think people want to read.

Those choices may not always be popular, and they may not always be right, but I was struck by how hard these people try, every day, to be honest, helpful and fair.

Eighty percent of my readers are scoffing now. It’s easier to believe in the conspiracy, and it’s certainly more fun, but for the professionals I’ve met, loyalty to journalism becomes a kind of politics in itself. Journalism becomes a kind of third party that they believe in just as fiercely as partisans believe in Obama or the GOP.

Every writer has political opinions and nobody can hide their biases completely, but I was impressed by how hard they try. There really is something sacred about journalism — something religious in the way it captures the hearts and minds of people who devote their lives to it.

Journalists fall short of that ideal sometimes, and of course they make exceptions for the editorial page, but for the average reporter on the street, loyalty to journalism matters more than anything that happens in the political arena.

I don’t expect the average reader to believe that, any more than I believed it four years ago, but I had to give up a lot of prejudices once I saw this process from the inside.

The media is such an easy target these days. Partisan rancor is at such a fever-pitch, journalists are held to extraordinary standards of accuracy and fairness, in a time when budgets are shrinking and the Internet is trying to redefine what news is.

I wish readers could see what I’ve seen, to understand just how much work goes into researching and balancing the content of these stories, to see how much these people have to produce and experience the pressure of writing copy on deadline.

Imagine waking up every day and having your day’s work scrutinized by a hostile audience, having every word interpreted in the most negative way possible and thrown up for ridicule.

I love blogs, but blogs by definition are free from the constraints of objectivity and sourcing that journalists struggle with. Our society may not appreciate the value of objectivity right now, in the mad rush to choose sides and ignore “news” they disagree with, but we’ll definitely miss it when it’s gone.