Shrines, Cesspools and Photo Captions

During my daily read of Boing Boing, I ran across this comment from a reader named Mypalmike. He was responding to a post about a YouTube video made by a (probably drunk) young man calling for Obama's impeachment because he advocates banning flavored chewing tobacco.

In response, Mypalmike wrote:

My theory about the internet as being composed of shrines and cesspools is reinforced.

Boingboing is a shrine.

Youtube is a cesspool.

Oversimplified, of course, and an exaggeration about the great breadth of material on YouTube, but it resonates with my experience of much of the web. Reading comment threads on our local daily newspaper sites is definitely part of the cesspool.

I was curious about who Mypalmike was, and found his website, where he runs a photo caption contest. It's worth checking out. Here's a recent sample:


"Damn! Just my luck. My insurance only covers me if I get impaled with one pick!"
(By Tim H.)

Let 10,000 Algaes Bloom

I came close to writing about Ever Cat Fuels a few months ago, but it sounded too preliminary. Well, yesterday the company unveiled biodiesel production at its new plant in Isanti, Minn., and I can't wait any longer.

According to Neal St. Anthony's column in today's Star Tribune, the company's patented process can turn a lot of relatively useless materials into biodiesel -- waste oil from food processing or cooking, waste products from ethanol production, even algae and stinkweed. The people behind Ever Cat call their process "Mcgyan," a combination of the names of three of its inventors.

Potential for Small Scale Use

St. Anthony quoted Greg Mowry, a professor of engineering at the University of St. Thomas, as saying, "The Mcgyan technology uses no water and generates no waste." Mowry's students have already "developed small, mobile plants that can be mounted on a truck bed to produce fuel to power a Minnesota farm or an African village."

Mowry goes on to say, "My wife's family farm uses up to 4,000 gallons of diesel a year to run the trucks and equipment. We have a start-up company that, I think, can produce these [small reactors] for under $10,000 apiece."

Imagine a farm that can generate its own carbon-neutral fuel. If a reactor costs $10,000, and a farm uses 4,000 gallons of fuel a year, that means the cost of the reactor could be recouped in just a year, if the farm would have otherwise been paying $2.50 a gallon. (Assuming the farmers could make the fuel from a source that would have otherwise gone to waste.)

Large-Scale Use, Too

Unlike corn- or soy-based ethanol, "the Mcgyan process yields five units of energy for every one unit of energy used to produce it," according to one of its creators.

Ever Cat is in touch with hundreds of farm co-ops, colleges and sewage-treatment plants who want to get rid of tons of restaurant grease and other accumulated fats that currently are buried, burned, or fed to animals.

The company also complements existing ethanol plants by taking their leftover distillers grain, removing the oil from it, and generating a million gallons of biodiesel from the waste created by producing 25 million gallons of ethanol. The biodiesel sells at a price 10 times the price commanded by distillers grain, which would otherwise be sold as animal feed. And the post-Mcyan byproducts are still salable as animal feed.

And Then There's the 10,000 Algae Blooms

St. Anthony writes, "Algae, particularly high-yield strains, has the potential to yield the equivalent of several thousand gallons of oil per acre, compared with 20 to 100 gallons per acre from corn, soybeans and sunflowers, according to government researchers."

It remains to be seen how anyone could harvest algae and get it to a processing plant, but it's sure an interesting idea! Remember that algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico that's the size of New Jersey? Maybe there's a way to put it to use.

Ever Cat hopes to license its patented process to fuel producers. Now it's time to see if there are companies that are serious about scaling this process up to create sustainable fuels for the masses, while at the same time allowing for a small-scale version that could decentralize production for farmers and other large consumers of fuel.

You can see some video of the Ever Cat plant on WCCO TV.

The Little Co-op Fellow in the Yellow Shirt

A French Flickr user going by the name pilllpat (agence eureka) posted this charming old cut-out figure. Using my rusty high school French, I understand it to mean something like "Little Co-op Fellow Assemblage," or more colloquially, the Co-op Kid Cut-Out Kit. The words on his apron read "Co-op Products Are the Best."

Pilllpat's Flickr stream is mostly scans of old European commercial lithographic and letterpress printing, from match boxes to cut-outs like this one to whole comics pages from old newspapers.

Pretty fun to browse through for a little while when you're overwhelmed by thinking about all the world's problems.

(Via welovetypography.com)

Living Beyond Our Means

September 25 was Earth Overshoot Day, as declared by a research and advocacy organization called the Global Footprint Network. This was the day when humans had used up 100 percent of the resources the Earth generates in a year. Quoting their website:

Globally, we now require the equivalent of 1.4 planets to support our lifestyles. Put another way, in less than 10 months, humanity will have used ecological services it takes 12 months for the Earth to regenerate.

Humanity first went into overshoot in 1986; before that time the global community consumed resources and produced carbon dioxide at a rate consistent with what the planet could produce and reabsorb. By 1996, however, humanity was using 15 percent more resources in a year than the planet could supply, with Earth Overshoot Day falling in November. This year, more than two decades since we first went into overshoot, we are now demanding resources at a rate of 40 percent faster than the planet can produce them.

Of course, not every part of the planet is using the same amount of resources. Here's an abbreviated list of countries from the media backgrounder document created by the Footprint Network:

Globally, we are using 1.4 Earths’ worth of biocapacity every year. Some nations, however, use a lot less than this, and some use a lot more. Here is how many Earths we would need if everyone lived like a resident of the following countries (as per data from Global Footprint Network’s National Footprint Accounts, 2008 Edition).

• United States 4.6 Earths
• Canada 3.4 Earths
• United Kingdom 2.6 Earths
• Japan 2.4 Earths
• Germany 2.0 Earths
• Russia 1.8 Earths
• Mexico 1.6 Earths
• Costa Rica 1.1 Earths
• India 0.4 Earths

While it's unlikely the Footprint Network has it all definitively proven down to the last ounce of fossil fuel burned (see their methodology paper for details and their staff list for their credentials), there is clearly an imperative truth in their basic argument.

How do we turn those numbers around and get to a sustainable way of living? How long would it take? Clearly, we in the U.S. have the biggest responsibility of all, and the biggest amount of change to make (gulp... and we can't even agree on something as basic as health care).

It has taken us 23 years of increasingly comfortable living to get this far out of whack; I wonder if there's a realistic scenario where we can manage to turn the clock back in another 23 years.

(via The Infrastructurist)

Update: See Paul Krugman's Sept. 27, 2009, column Cassandras of Climate, in which he asks similar questions.

Thoughts from the Book of Ages

I continue to slowly peruse Eric Hanson's A Book of Ages, in which he relays facts about hundreds of historical and fictitious people at every age from 0 to 100. I'm now up to 44.

Here are a few favorites since my last post.

A whiplash juxtaposition at age 13:

• "Malcolm X tells a teacher that his goal in life is to become a lawyer, 1939. She tells him a lawyer is not a realistic goal for a 'nigger' and maybe he'd better try to be a carpenter instead. Malcolm's mother is committed to the state mental hospital in Kalamazoo. He is placed in a juvenile home."
• Followed immediately by: "William F. Buckley Jr. takes up sailing, 1939."

Same year. Same age. And a glimpse of the effect of privilege or the lack thereof.

Age 37: "Songwriter Stephen Foster, the inventor of American popular song, dies in the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital, 1864. He has thirty-eight cents in his pocket, and a piece of paper with the words 'dear friends and gentle hearts' written upon it."

Wondering how that came to be, I found this in the Wikipedia entry about Foster: "Foster attempted to make a living as a professional songwriter and may be considered innovative in this respect, since this field did not yet exist in the modern sense. Consequently, due in part to the limited scope of music copyright and composer royalties at the time, Foster realized very little of the profits which his works generated for sheet music printers. Multiple publishers often printed their own competing editions of Foster's tunes, not paying Foster anything. For 'Oh, Susanna' he received $100."

Age 39: It's startling to realize it was at this relatively young age that John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence (didn't you always assume he was much older?), Thomas Paine published the words "These are the times that try men's souls," and Martin Luther King had accomplished everything he did in his life, since he was killed that year. (Malcolm X was 39 when he was killed also.) What was i doing at 39? What were you?


Age 44: "James Abbott McNeill Whistler files a lawsuit after the critic John Ruskin writes a savage review of his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1877. He wins the case but is given only a farthing in damages, which becomes a comment on his reputation. The cost of bringing the suit ruins him. He loses his house and his famous collection of blue and white porcelain."

While I felt badly for Whistler, I was even more struck by the fact that he would even consider suing a critic, and that (despite the farthing judgment) he actually won instead of being laughed out of court. It's facts like this that make me realize how different U.S. and British laws are, and I'm glad I live in the U.S.

I recently read an article about European companies choosing U.K. courts to sue people who criticize them, because British defamation law is so biased against the defendant. In the age of the interweb, anything published on a website could be subject to U.K. law, since it can be read there. Now that's messed up.

The Joker's on You

One day, the radio presets in my vehicle went kerflooey, and when I punched in the one for MPR I got KTLK instead. This was slightly disorienting, because KTLK is the Twin Cities home of Rush Limbaugh.

The big man himself was on the air at that very moment, talking about the Obama Joker poster. He was crowing that the artwork wasn't created by anyone from the Right after all, but rather was the work of a young Palestinian-American man named Firas Alkhateeb, who considered himself, if anything, a supporter of Dennis Kucinich. I managed to tune the radio to my preferred station just after those words, but promised myself I'd look into the facts of this story later.

Limbaugh had the facts right, at least the ones I heard in my 15 seconds of listening. Alkhateeb created the image "using a tutorial he'd found online about how to 'Jokerize' portraits" during winter break, according to the L.A. Times, which first reported on Alkhateeb's identity and reasons for creating the image. If he had any motivation at all, it was that Obama wasn't his idea of what a progressive leader should be.

The "socialism" label was attached later by someone else, of course, since Mr. Alkhateeb clearly wouldn't consider Obama a socialist. And this mashup makes a much more coherent origins story, because the combination of the image and words never made any sense. What does the Joker have to do with socialism? Huh?

Last night all of this came back to me in a rush -- no pun intended -- when I saw a Flickr photostream by a Chicago art director using the name "lunchbreath." (Since his posts are art, not photos, wouldn't it be better to call it an artstream or a cartoon stream?) All of his works are worth seeing, but I found this series especially resonant:


Here are a few examples of what lunchbreath did with his formula. There are more on Flickr, so check them out!




Absurd, I know. That's the point.

But given Poe's Law, I'm sure there are some people out there who will take lunchbreath up on his offer of free ideas.

My Babies Are Safe!

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge was on the Daily Show last night, promoting his new book and possibly primping for a presidential run in 2012.

Sometimes I think I am the only one who remembers how, back in October 2001 when Ridge was first appointed, someone from the Bush administration was quoted as saying "We want to brand Tom Ridge. When people see him, we want them to think, 'My babies are safe.' " (You can still see the original story in the Washington Post. God bless the Internet.)


Every time I hear the man's name or see his face, I compulsively shriek, "My babies are safe!"

I guess that branding stuff really works.

Digging Out of the Media Goodness Pile

The media goodness pile is getting deep and wide on the messy desk of Daughter Number Three. Here goes:

Michael Massing, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, says that Katie Couric's salary is more than the budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. And not only that, but "NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news." (via BoingBoing guest blogger Jesse Brown)

Today's Star Tribune had a nice package of two reprinted op-eds, both related to the recent ACORN story: Sometimes the News Is Incredible and Congress Really Spit This One Up. "Incredible," by Rex Smith of the Albany Times Union, points out that the mainstream media's slow response to the story wasn't because of some "liberal" bias, but rather that the ACORN video first appeared on the often-suspect Drudge Report, and then on Glenn Beck's show -- not exactly an endorsement of its factualness. "Talk shows, right or left, aren't where reporters look for stories," Smith writes. He closes by saying the media landscape has obviously changed, and "traditional media need to pay attention to nontraditional sources, even those with axes to grind." In "Spit This One Up," Tom Blackburn of Cox Newspapers pointed out the hypocrisy of Congress unfunding ACORN in the blink of an eye, when the Pentagon has all sorts of processes to help defense contractors who rip off the taxpayer for a lot more money.

Well, Blackburn may get his wish. Ryan Grim writing on the Huffington Post says the anti-ACORN bill Congress passed "applies to 'any organization' that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency.... In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops." A quick analysis of companies that would be caught in the same net included Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, with 20 fraud cases against them collectively. Grim also reports that if the law only applies to ACORN and not other companies, it would probably be illegal because that would be a bill of attainder -- specifically barred in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.

The Sept. 20 Pioneer Press had a troubling article by Mara Gottfried on the Ramsey County gang database. Much as we all want gang members to be arrested when they break the law, this database sounds a bit too much like the old saying, "First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a socialist" etc., until they came for me and there was no one left to speak. The county uses a list of 10 criteria, and if a person meets just one of them, he (and it is primarily he) is put on a list of gang members. According to defense attorney Bruce Nestor, "There [is] no way to find out why they made the claim. There's no way to challenge it once you're in the database." One of the criteria is being photographed with gang members. Who are in turn defined by the same database... and the circle starts over.

A moving op-ed in the Sept. 20 Star Tribune told the story of Julia Barton, a St. Paul mom with a child born with a heart defect. In Documents Mounted. Good Thing I Kept Them, Barton tells about the box of paper she keeps in the basement to document everything about her child's near-death, hospitalizations, and the incredible hassles with getting her insurance company to pay for it. She writes, "We have private insurance, but it is not enough, since some of the specialists who treated him were 'out of network.' Who knew we were supposed to check the credentials of the person running the heart-lung bypass machine during the surgery?" Two years later she was still getting bills from an air ambulance company, despite faxing them and sending them registered mail with proof of payment.

The same issue of the Strib had a very even-handed review of the Massachusetts health care model by reporter Chen May Yee. Significantly, Yee reported, "A poll last year by the Harvard School of Public Health found that 69 percent of Massachusetts residents supported the health reform law, up from 61 percent just after it was enacted" in 2006. So it seems the more people know the new system, the better they like it.

Finally, I got quite a laugh from this graphic on the Colbert Report last night (Sept. 22). It seems Ridley Scott is making a movie based on Monopoly:



Whew. That's enough for one night. And now it can all go into the recycling pile!

Incredible Plants at Como Park

If you're anywhere in the vicinity of Como Park in St. Paul this week, be sure to go see the tropical outdoor water plants near the entrance of the new wing of the Conservatory.

Most famous is the Victoria Water Platter, Victoria 'Longwood Hybrid'. This plant is at least 20 feet across, and each of the full-sized leaves is 3 to 4 feet across. I believe I read that they're strong enough for a child to sit on (although no one should do that, of course!).



Originally from Bolivia, the leaf structure inspired the design of the Crystal Palace at the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851 in London. Here's a close-up of one of the leaves.



And what was that I saw at the center of the plant last week? Are those buds of giant flowers?



Another fascinating and well-named plant is the Mosaic Plant, Ludwigia sediodes:



And don't miss the incandescent Lotus blooms (Nelumbo nucifera):



The Lotus leaves are fun as well -- kind of like giant nasturtiums:



I'm not sure how much longer these plants will be outside. Since none of them are anywhere near hardy in Minnesota, they spend the later fall and winter in greenhouses at the park. So get over there now! If you're lucky, the Victoria will be blooming.

Kirk Lyttle's Food Fight

Another nice illustration by Kirk Lyttle in Sunday's Pioneer Press for a business section article about changes in market share among Twin Cities grocery stores since Target, WalMart and Aldi have entered the market.

Active composition, mixed media and intermingled type -- it just jumped off the page!

Bad Spellers of the World, Untie!

Photos of handmade signs (many of them from the 912 march in Washington, but some from other gatherings) are floating around the interweb. I saw a collection on a Facebook page today and couldn't help laughing at many of them.

Clearly, we are all capable of making mistakes, but I wanted to share a few because of the patterns I noted among them.

Clever, with a Chance of Errors


A two-fer!


Which leads me to my next category...

Anti-Immigration and English-Only Activists Who Can't Write English


Is this how you spell it? No.


How about this? No.


I can't help thinking it's fair to hold these people to a higher standard of spelling and usage.


Perhaps this is the alternate version called Engalish.

Darn Those Latinate Words, They're Just Too Hard to Spell


"Stimulus" has been used in the news constantly for close to a year, but can he spell it correctly? Nope.


I believe the word was meant to be "mediocrity." Or maybe "mediocracy," as in government by the media? Who knows. But it's sad to see someone holding up a completely unintelligible sign with so much enthusiasm.


Perhaps this is the first time he had to write a four-syllable word.


Someone has a crisis of competence, but the immediate evidence would indicate it's you, dear.

Letters Gone Wild


I like the little "YES GOD" in the upper left corner.


Perhaps they are stunned.


Who is Hugh? Is he related to "Not Me," the invisible creature who was responsible for all the trouble in "The Family Circus" cartoons?


The classic "pubic" error -- good to see that it still happens.


Geez, you can't even pronounce this one.

What Were They Thinking?


No spelling or grammatical error here, just a bad case of banging together multiple historical references. Plus a really painful drawing of a snake.


Probably my favorite among all the signs, despite the steep competition! One can only wonder if this sign writer believes Muslins worship Satin.

Do You Know What "Dolphin-Safe" Means?

Aaaagh! Another example of the law of unintended consequences.

Read all about it in The Ecological Disaster That Is Dolphin-Safe Tuna on Southern Fried Science. It's written by Dave Shiffman, a marine biology grad student who goes by the name WhySharksMatter. (via kottke.org)

To summarize, the practice of commercial tuna fishing is based on catching large groups of mature tuna all at once in a "purse seine net," controlled by a bunch of small boats that work with a larger parent ship. There are two ways to find a large group of tuna:

1. Find a group of dolphins (when they come up for air) and you will often find a large group of tuna, because for some reason, dolphins follow tuna.
   
2. Put a floating object on the ocean surface. This will attract large groups of tuna, as well as large groups of many other ocean species. Then catch the tuna (and a lot of "bycatch" of the other species at the same time, including dolphins and immature tuna).

Tuna fishermen traditionally used the first method, but, as we all remember, there was an outcry a number of years ago about how many dolphins are killed while catching tuna, so that method has been abandoned in favor of the second option, which is marketed as "dolphin-safe tuna."

Here's the key point, though: it's not actually dolphin-safe, and and it's even less safe for the other species in the vicinity. Quoting from the article, these are the comparative results of the two methods:

Ten thousand sets of purse seine nets around immature tuna swimming under logs and other debris will cause the deaths of 25 dolphins; 130 million small tunas; 513,870 mahi mahi; 139,580 sharks; 118,660 wahoo; 30,050 rainbow runners; 12,680 other small fish; 6540 billfish; 2980 yellowtail; 200 other large fish; 1020 sea turtles; and 50 triggerfish.”

Ten thousand sets of purse seine nets around mature yellowfin, swimming in association with dolphins, will cause the deaths of 4000 dolphins (0.04 percent of a population that replenishes itself at the rate of two to six percent per year); 70,000 small tunas; 100 mahi mahi; 3 other small fish; 520 billfish; 30 other large fish; and 100 sea turtles. No sharks, no wahoo, no rainbow runners, no yellowtail, and no triggerfish and dramatic reductions in all other species but dolphins.

The article goes on to point out that while dolphins are not an endangered or threatened species, many of the others caught with the floating object method are, such as sea turtles and sharks. (See the recent coverage of damage to shark populations from fishing specifically for their fins, often discarding the rest of the animal.)

The article concludes with these thoughts about dolphin-safe tuna:

this is a classic example of the false value our society places on marine mammals.... I think to wipe out the populations of so many other species in order to save a few individual dolphins (recall, dolphin populations aren’t threatened by dolphin-associated fishing, though lots die) is ludicrous.

I think we should go back to fishing dolphin-associated sets AS SOON AS POSSIBLE and hope that the damage done to shark, seabird, sea turtle, and large fish populations by the dolphin-safe disaster is fixable.

Of course, all of this begs the question of whether tuna fishing and tuna consumption in general can be sustainable. Blue fin tuna, for instance (used in sushi), is on the brink of extinction. From what I've read, yellow fin tuna is on the ropes in some fisheries, but not overall. Giving up tuna (like the argument for giving up or substantially decreasing consumption of meat in general) is an important step toward fashioning a more sustainable way of eating.

Footnote: Dave Shiffman was on public radio in July to discuss this issue, debating someone from the Earth Island Institute, who was advocating dolphin-safe methods as the best solution. Shiffman also wrote a follow-up piece about that conversation. It all goes to show how complicated it can be to make positive environmental changes.

Super. Fantastic. Absolutely Marvelous.

Writing a blog entry every day often leads me to write in a dichotomous fashion -- my subjects are usually either something I dislike or something I love or admire. For the things I don't like, the language that readily comes to mind varies as much as the things themselves and the reasons I dislike them.

But when I write about things I like, I often find myself using the same adjectives over and over. Wonderful. Great. Amazing. Cool.

So I have taken to keeping Roget's Thesaurus handy, and, despite the fact that I am revealing a closely guarded writer's secret, I thought I would share the stash of words I have squirreled away to use as needed. Here goes:

Remarkable. Extraordinary. Superb. Marvelous. Striking. Notable. Noteworthy. Astonishing. Fabulous. Incredible. Tremendous. Terrific. Sublime. Distinguished. Stupendous. Outrageous. Excellent. Superior. First-rate. Top-notch. Humdinger of a ___. Prime. Superlative. Dandy. Exquisite. Magnificent. Glorious. Divine. Sensational. Quintessential. Matchless. Phenomenal. Astounding.

(Note: I refuse to write the word awesome. I'm the wrong age for that one.)

Curious about the etymology of these words, I got out my handy Webster's and looked them up. Sometimes it was hard to pick a single source, since words frequently come from one language through another, and occasionally a compound word marries two different etymologies, but here's my best effort at quantification:

Latin: 21
Greek: 1
French (sometimes derived from Latin, of course): 4
German: 1
Old English: 6
Slang: 3

I wonder if this skewed distribution parallels the etymology of the non-technical English vocabulary as a whole, or if the extremely heavy Latin influence is caused by the very concept of greatness? Maybe the Romans were more prone to exaggeration and hyperbole than the other cultures that influenced the development of English.

Postscript: A few minutes after I had the thought to write about my list of superlatives, I heard about this video, which says it all (and says it all and all and all):

Matt Mendelsohn, Phase 3

What does a former newspaper photographer and photo editor do after leaving the world of newspapers?

Shoot really great wedding photos as your bread and butter. Do some side projects that are close to your heart. And take up writing.

Matt Mendelsohn -- post-USA Today magazine, post-UPI, post-daily-newspaper and post-college-newspaper where Daughter Number Three first met him long ago -- has written and photographed a remarkable article about a young woman named Lindsay Ess.

It was published on a site called sportshooter.com, then picked up today by BoingBoing. And gee, I was just thinking of Matt yesterday. Good to see he's keeping busy with something worthwhile in his corner of the newspaper diaspora.

I gather the story was turned down by the Washington Post because it focuses on someone with a disability, and they had just recently had a story on someone with a different disability, so their unspoken "quota" had been used up. Or maybe it was just too negative. As one commenter on BoingBoing put it,

Like the fact that the best news come from the "fake" Daily Show, I find it somewhat ironic that we have to turn to sportsshooter.com -- a site for sports photographers to share tips -- to publish this.

I'll be sure to continue to turn to the mainstream media though, when I want stories and pictures of a basket of puppies.

Also see the Q&A with Mendelsohn about how he met Lindsay and her family, and came to release the story on the Web instead of a print publication.

Media Goodness for September

Here's a round-up of some excellent media from the last week:

Diane Rehm talking with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday. Minnesotans don't know Diane Rehm, because her show isn't on the Minnesota Public Radio network, but I remember her fondly from my years living in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. With a voice like Lynne Rossetto Kasper's (actually, I should say that Lynne's voice is like Diane's) and a consistently interesting set of guests covering a huge range of topics, she filled my mornings for several years when her show was broadcast only on WAMU, the second-rated public radio station in our nation's capitol. I didn't even know she had gone national until a few months ago. It's because of Diane Rehm that I first gave money to public radio. And I wish I could find my cracked, 1985-vintage "I Love the Diane Rehm Show" mug.

Karen Youso in the Star Tribune Saturday, Sept. 12, on going six days without plastic. A quick read, but a good overview of just how entrenched plastic is in our daily lives. If anyone is serious about changing that, it would take systemic change -- there's not a lot an individual can really do about it.

Stephen Colbert last night on The Word: Corporations as people, and money as speech. Colbert is brilliant. And frightening as hell:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Let Freedom Ka-Ching
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

Key point: The idea that corporations are legally considered people comes from an 1886 case called Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, when the Chief Justice made "an off-the-record comment to that effect, the court reporter wrote it down, and it's been cited ever since. It was a huge win for the railroads, and a brilliant judicial decision by the court reporter, whose previous job experience was being the president of a railroad."

And since money is the only way a voiceless entity like a corporation can speak, money must equal speech. Following this logic, corporations cannot be deprived of the right to spend money on political campaigns as they see fit. And there goes any semblance of campaign finance reform.

John Stewart on the Acorn exposé by two young contrarian actors (and conservatives). It really does make you wonder what the heck Acorn is doing.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Audacity of Hos
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

According to the New York Times coverage of the Acorn exposé,

In a statement over the weekend, Bertha Lewis, the chief organizer for Acorn, said the bogus prostitute and pimp had spent months visiting numerous Acorn offices, including those in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia, before getting the responses they were looking for.

“I cannot and I will not defend the actions of the workers depicted in the video, who have since been terminated,” Ms. Lewis wrote. But she defended the group’s overall record and said it had become “the boogeyman for the right wing and its echo chambers.”

All true, but man. That is some damning footage. What a PR nightmare for Acorn. It will be hard to prove that the whole barrel of apples isn't rotten after that.

Dan Gillmor on 11 things he would do if he ran a news organization (hint: number 11 is he wouldn't do lists of 10, but there's a lot more to it than that). I sure love reading Dan Gillmor as he works to continue the conversation about what news media should become. (Via BoingBoing.)

Cease and Desist

It finally happened. Today I received a cease and desist letter from Arthur Middleton Capital Holdings, telling me to remove "defamatory" language about their products from my blog.

So instead of writing about some other topic, I've spent the evening going through old posts to read them from a more legalistic perspective, to the best of my ability, and also to see if I have been fair.

Here's what I changed:

• I have removed several instances (cited in the letter) where I made a blanket statement that their products are "overpriced," but left in discussion and analysis about their pricing, leaving it to the reader to draw her/his own conclusions.
• I have added two examples provided by AMCH's counsel on the value of several coins sold by the World Reserve Monetary Exchange. These values come from the Guide Book of United States Coins, which appears (to me as a non-expert) to be a reputable source of coin valuation, and in one case, from the U.S. Mint website.
  
• I have added a link to the Granted Wish Foundation's website, and I apologize for not including it earlier. Although an oversight, it was a breach of good Web etiquette.
  

I intend to reply to AMCH's counsel by the arbitrary deadline she set next week telling her what measures I've taken to address her concerns. I'll keep you posted on what happens.

I welcome comments on my posts from any and all, including people from Arthur Middleton Capital Holdings and its subsidiaries.

Here is a list of all my posts on this topic, if you want to read through the updated versions:

February 20, 2010 - Apatrim -- Scam or Science?

August 30, 2009 - World Reserve Monetary Exchange Exploits Ted Kennedy (updated)

June 12, 2009 - Overpriced CompTek Laptops from Universal Media Syndicate

May 20, 2009 - Cool Surge -- Another Scam from Canton, Ohio (updated)

March 25, 2009 - Call the Papers When You See the Ads (updated)

January 21, 2009 - Obama Mania -- at a Price (updated)

January 10, 2009 - Universal Media Syndicate -- Half-Truths, Puffery and Outright Lies (updated)

December 6, 2008 - Universal Health Card Scam, Update 2

November 21, 2008 - Update on the Universal Health Card Scam

November 19, 2008 - Universal Health Card -- Money for Nothing (The post that started it all)

What Most Doctors Think About Health Care Reform

Researchers at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, surveyed a representative sample of physicians throughout the U.S. and found that they overwhelmingly support either a private/public health care reform combination or single payer health care.

The summary of the study, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, says that:

62.9 percent of physicians nationwide support proposals to expand health care coverage that include both public and private insurance options—where people under the age of 65 would have the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans. The survey shows that just 27.3 percent of physicians support a new program that does not include a public option and instead provides subsidies for low-income people to purchase private insurance. Only 9.6 percent of doctors nationwide support a system where a Medicare-like public program is created in lieu of any private insurance. A majority of physicians (58%) also support expanding Medicare eligibility to those between the ages of 55 and 64.

In every region of the country, a majority of physicians supported a combination of public and private options, as did physicians who identified themselves as primary care providers, surgeons, or other medical subspecialists. Among those who identified themselves as members of the American Medical Association, 62.2 percent favored both the public and private options.

So that's 62.9 percent + 9.6 = 72.5 percent supporting either a private/public approach or a completely public approach. And the doctors who were members of the AMA were just about indistinguishable from the group as a whole (62.2 vs. 62.9 in favor of the private/public approach). This despite the fact that the AMA has come out against the public option.

Makes you wonder how they make policy decisions... I guess it must not include a vote of the membership.

Complete study including sample size and methodology

NPR story on the study

Kids Draw the Darnedest Things

A teacher named Mr. Taylor from Rutherford Elementary School in Nanaimo, British Columbia, asked his 9- to 11-year-old students to draw pictures illustrating common English idioms. This generated thousands of drawings, which Taylor put up around the classroom.

But he did more than that. He scanned them and loaded them onto a website called idiomsbykids.com, so we can all chuckle at the ways kids think about language and try to come up with a visual way of expressing these sometimes murky concepts.

Many of the drawings are not super-interesting to look at -- there are a lot of stick figures, and lots of words labeling concepts or objects that were hard to draw. But it's a treasure hunt to look through and find the funniest ones!

Here are a few I particularly liked:


Pick your brains. Lots of background details and a funny way of thinking about the key concept.


A bull in a china shop. I love this child's idea of what a china shop is! A nice example of how kids (and adults, admittedly) sometimes have no idea what an idiom means.


Horseplay. A fine drawing by a child who lacks confidence in her/his concept -- note the arrow at center, pointing at the chess board. As if we might not think two horses sitting at a table was unusual enough to focus attention on the table between them!


Dog eat dog. Mmm, puppy!


Wolf in sheep's clothing. This drawing is simple, expressive and energetic.

Thanks to Mr. Taylor for all the work in creating the site, and for being a teacher who inspires his students to have fun with language.

Via the excellent thatwhichmatter on Twitter.

Signs of Health

I couldn't resist going to check out the scene outside the Target Center in Minneapolis today when President Obama was due to speak on health care reform. Surprisingly, the demonstrators outside were at most half anti-Obama; the other half were pro-single-payer (universal health care).

There were a few who had subtle ways of getting their point across.


This guy had a two-sided sign, both pretty clever:



These folks were thrilled to hear that the text of their sign had been bouncing around the Twitter chatter surrounding the event:



There were some interesting juxtapositions:



And some who just laid out their point of view:



Some brought their Don't Tread on Me flags, I assume left over from a teabagger rally:


And displayed them where children could find them. I wonder what this little girl thinks that flag means?