Survey Says
Dunkirk NY – For those of you interested in weather phenomena, yes, I do live right in the heart of the upstate NY snow belt that got walloped over Thursday and Friday. How bad was it? Bad enough for Paul Goodloe of the Weather Channel to be reporting from right down in the harbor. There were some impressive totals in the area, but right here on the Lake Erie shoreline there was only about 8 inches or so. The 40-60MPH winds did push it around a lot, though. My snowblower did not start. I have little luck with machinery.
Of course, Mother Nature can’t whip up a storm anything the likes of what the theatrical blogosphere can when it wants to. Isaac Butler tweeted a statistic about the educational background of playwrights, and there was a lot of commentary from all quarters about that stat (you can read the comments on his blog and follow an assorted variety of links from there). The statistic came on the heels of the forum on diversity held by Arena Stage last week, as well as an NEA Cultural Workforce Forum. All these issues seem to have stirred much heat.
And there was a livecast on Dec. 10th from the NEA concerning its recent release of its latest survey, the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Ian Moss at Createquity has the remnants of the tweetcast on his blog. This survey has been around for some time, since 1982 I believe, but few people ever paid attention to them. Until now. I’ve read all of them and actually wrote about some of them in earlier posts. I am sure this latest one will get more attention than any of the other surveys ever received.
