WordCamps are my favorite events to go to because there’s something about the core WordPress community that attracts smart folks with good philosophies that are fun to hang out with. In this post I’ve collated the upcoming WordCamps we know about, including the one in San Francisco. Hopefully there will be one nearby so you can meet other WordPressers in your area.

WordCamp San Francisco will be August 16 at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

WordCamp Paris will be on May 3rd. Here’s their official site.

WordCamp Italy in Milan will be May 10th. (And I believe I’ll be there.)

WordCamp Birmingham UK will be July 19-20.

WordCamp Toronto will be October 4th.

There are people in the planning stages in Australia, Philippines, Beijing, Utah, Hawaii, UK, NYC, and possibly others, so if you live in one of those areas and would like to help set up a WordCamp in your area Google around or connect with bloggers in your area.

You can always find out more at WordCamp Central.

How disappointing it is to learn that the Law School of Northwestern University has invited Jerry Springer to give the commencement address. I say this not only as an alumnus of Northwestern (the undergraduate school, not Law) but as a citizen.

Commencement addresses are expected at every university and college and high school every spring, so the demand is high. On the other side of the equation, the supply of speakers with anything interesting, let alone challenging, to say is limited. Hence there is constant downward pressure on the traditional notions of what qualifies a candidate speaker. This is simple economics. The predictable result until recent years has been nothing more worrisome than the blandness that characterizes nearly all of these performances. More could not reasonably be expected.

At my graduation we were addressed by the Hon. Willard Wirtz, a former professor in the Law School in question and at the time the U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Johnson. He was well qualified in point of association and life accomplishment, and so far as anyone knew free of any criminal or moral taint. So he spoke, and we students dozed or chatted quietly. I have no idea what he said, and I very much doubt than any of my classmates remembers, either. Well and good.

Just a few years ago my son graduated from Northwestern, and we were addressed by Tom Brokaw. (Mr. Brokaw was a television news reader and, for what it’s worth, a quite competent one.) Though more recent than Mr. Wirtz’s by nearly forty years, his talk has also left no permanent mark on me, though I do seem to recall that he referred to his book more than once. But again, no harm, no foul.

But Jerry Springer? Yes, he has “inspired” an opera. This only deepens one’s despair of the state of the arts. There really ought to be some sort of countervailing force to keep standards from sinking this low. The one we used to have was called “good sense” or possibly “taste,” if memory serves.

In his defense it is argued that he has served in public office and that he is a highly successful member of the entertainment industry. As to the first, he was, one gathers, obliged to resign his office in a scandal. (I realize that this is less and less a distinction as times goes by.) As to the second, well….

The precipitous decline in standards of public deportment and private behavior that has been so prominent a feature of American culture in recent decades can be laid to a very great degree at the feet of this “industry,” and within that sector of the economy few have taken so leading a role in the process as Springer.

When it comes to what Daniel Patrick Moynihan dubbed “defining deviance down,” Springer has been among the nation’s chief lexicographers. For this he has been amply rewarded in the appropriate coin. How is it a good idea to offer him the trappings of respectability as well?

Yes, yes, I’m a testy old poop. I’m also available for commencements; here’s my speech.

Of the many kinds of pollution that we contend with today, perhaps the most pervasive is noise. Sonic pollution is everywhere, from the idiot kid blasting hip-hop (or, to be fair, Shania Twain) from a superamped car stereo to the grinding of motors, the whir of turbines, and the whine of jet engines. The din of the cities has extended into suburbia and the countryside, so much so that you have to travel deep into wilderness primeval in order to hear—nothing, the rarest sound of all.

Writing in Men’s Health magazine a couple of years ago, Tom McGrath observed that his neighborhood coffee shop clocked in at 82 decibels, a crowded restaurant 86 decibels, a movie theater between 85 and 130 decibels. Given that the fight-or-flight stress response kicks in at 80 decibels, about the level that low-level hearing damage occurs, it is small wonder that one in every ten Americans suffers from some form of hearing loss—and that so many of us suffer from stress-related ailments as well.

This may all be by design, and certainly some places, particularly eateries, are deliberately noisy, as if to suggest vibrancy and bustle. Emily Thompson, a historian of soundscapes, has suggested that the noise of public spaces such as shops and restaurants irritates us subliminally, and since we can do nothing about the noise, we console ourselves by buying things. It would be interesting to test that out in the face of the current recession, when high gas prices may quiet the streets by a decibel or two and reduce the number of restaurant-goers.

Noise costs us in terms of health. It also costs us in terms of money; studies have shown that noisy workspaces are less efficient than quiet ones, measured in such quantifiable terms as typing speed and absenteeism. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg rightly observes, ”Complaints about noise are not frivolous. Noise disturbs our sleep, prevents people from enjoying their time off work and too often leads to altercations when the police are called in. It can also produce serious hearing impairment, especially for those who work in noisy jobs.”

It has always been so: as historian Peter Coates writes in the journal Environmental History, “The racket generated by iron-rimmed cart and carriage wheels trundling over cobblestones and by horseshoes striking them had been an intermittent source of complaint since colonial days. a strong argument for replacing the horse with the horseless carriage in American and British cities in the late 1890s was the alleviation of noise. Scientific American warmly welcomed trams and automobiles as harbingers of a new age of urban tranquillity: ‘The noise and clatter which makes conversation almost impossible on many streets of New York at the present time will be done away with, for horseless vehicles of all kinds are always noiseless or nearly so.’” The Scientific American writer was referring to the electric car, a far cry from today’s gas-powered (and otherwise superamplified) behemoths.

Bloomberg has made efforts to reduce noise in his city through an active program of incentives and disincentives (the latter including large fines for noise violations). Elsewhere, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has initiated an ambitious noise-mapping project across Great Britain. And in 2003, the European Union established April 30 as International Anti-Noise Day—a commemoration that, beg pardon, would seem to be in need of a slightly noisier program of publicity.