Father and grandfather

I had a date Wednesday afternoon in Hyde Park, New York.

My granddaughter Megan had a softball game, and I wanted to see it. Her brother Ryan agreed to come to the game on the promise of food.

Ryan and Megan are the children of my older son, Todd, who has had such great fun with his lively comments to the blog. You might wonder why I put in photos that didn't show anyone's face. No, they are not in the witness protection program. The kids couldn't be persuaded to stand still long enough to pose, and who takes picgtures of their kids when their grandkids are around?

The ride to Hyde Park was perfect. For the first time since Los Angeles I didn't have to wear my electric jacket. In fact, I took out the fleece liner to my riding jacket and changed into my lightweight gloves. When I napped in the shade of a tree in a service plaza on the turnpike I was comfortable without any jacket at all. A vast improvement over the weather I faced on most of the trip.

As I left Rob and Karen Gips they mentioned that two people had recently been killed in the Portland area after colliding with moose. I didn't see any moose heading south and the moose warning signs were replaced by deer warning signs. On the Massachusetts Turnpike I passed an area where that had been a serious accident involving one now dead deer and several vehicles. I'm guessing that someone swerved after hitting the deer and that set off a chain reaction that in the grand style of a NASCAR race "collected" several cars. Something serious had happened because there was a wheel with tire in the middle of the road just before the gathering of vehicles on the right side of the highway. From the position of people standing by the road, one vehicle may have left the road gone into a deep ditch.

Most of the deer signs warn of deer over the next several miles. Going to Megan's softball game I noticed deer warning signs that were much narrower in their scope warning of deer in the next 1/4 mile. Was the deer someone's pet not allowed to roam too far from home?

The sky was blue, the wind and the traffic were light, and the GPS routed me along some back roads that had enough hills and curves to make the ride interesting. Riding from the Berkshires region of Massachusetts into New York's Hudson Valley the terrain features rolling hills and hardwood forests. The New York part of the journey goes through many small villages with names like Clinton's Corner and Crum Elbow. The roads are narrow and the woods thick, but every now and then you can catch a glimpse of mountains in the distance.

This part of the world has many stone walls left from an earlier time when the Europeans who displaced the natives here were Dutch. Hundreds of years later, the walls, usually about two to three feet high and built without masonry, are still standing. The Town of Hyde Park has a wall preservation program to make sure that this unique feature of the region doesn't disappear. Had the Scots come along after the Dutch they might have taken the stones to construct their houses. I'm told that the Scots in Scotland dismantled the Roman wall, Hadrian's wall, and used it to build houses. A similar fate befell sections of China's Great Wall although it wasn't the Scots to took the stones. It was an inside job.

The softball game was exciting with Megan's team holding off a last inning rally to win by two runs. Megan caught this game, and on other days pitches. The pitcher in today's game was very good, and with Megan I suspect the team has more pitching talent than other teams in the league. Going to a softball game with teams of pre-teen girls is to get a reminder that these games are played for fun. The girls play hard, but they have practiced cheers when on offense, and there is a great deal of giggling. And nobody yelled at the umpire.

Ryan has a baseball doubleheader this weekend, but I don't think I'll be able to stay to see it. I think this experiment in multimedia, transient journalism is about at the end. I have certainly gained a new perspective on blogger as journalist, and now the trick is to figure out how to work the problems I see into the courses I teach. Convergence has been a buzz word in journalism circles for more than 10 years now, and for the most part means the combining of traditional forms of journalism so that there is not necessarily a divide between print and electronic journalism. Of course the Internet is playing a significant role in convergence.

I worry that journalists diminish the value of their product when they allow blogs by volunteers to be treated on an equal footing with the stories reported, written and edited by trained professionals. The most readily identifiable shortcoming that I see in bloggers as reporters is the absence of editing. Editing to make the story more focused as well as to catch the grammatical and spelling errors that pop up in blogs, e.g., my blog. Along with those issues, there is the question of how media law, libel, invasion of privacy and similar concepts, will be adapted to the new forms of communications. That is what people like me who teach media law around the country are trying to figure out.