Mmmmm, Chicken Nuggets

BoingBoing reports that chicken nuggets contain an ingredient also found in Silly Putty:

American McNuggets (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain the chemical preservative tBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based product. They also contain dimethylpolysiloxane, "an anti-foaming agent" also used in Silly Putty.

That's one more bit of information for Jamie Oliver to add to his chicken nugget demonstration.

Feral Houses, Hospital Mulberries

More of Detroit's feral houses, posted by Jim over at Sweet Juniper.


Accompanied by a bittersweet running text, including this bit:

What is a house, really? Isn't it simply raw materials brought together to shelter us from the elements, from the wind and the rain and the bugs? And because they bear those burdens for us, a house is in perpetual decline. Without maintenance, every house is always on its way to ruin. Every homeowner that's ever paid a roofer knows this. A feral house exposes its vulnerable material core: concrete, wood, brick, mortar. Every home, even yours, will one day be broken down to such brute matter.

Jim also took his young kids on a gleaning trip to pick mulberries in the parking lot of an abandoned hospital near downtown Detroit. He includes photos of what the hospital's interior looked like not long after it was abandoned. They made "Detroit Jam" from the results of their picking.


And another recent series of Sweet Juniper posts has described with loving detail and engaging photos the locally owned businesses that make Detroit unique, even as the national chains have deserted it. Honey Bee Market La Colmena is one place where Jim's family buys their groceries; R. Hirt Jr. Co. is another, mostly for fresh dairy goods; and Busy Bee Hardware meets their needs for anything from seeds to snow shovels.

Even Death Loves a Parade

A week ago tonight, I was at the Rose Parade up in Roseville, Minnesota.

Parade sponsors are acknowledged with signs carried by Boy Scouts who walk between the high school bands, princess-mobiles and miscellaneous small business-people who give out coupons and toss candy at small children.


This Boy Scout must have drawn the short straw when they were handing out the sponsor signs.

While on one hand, I'm a believer in viewing life as a natural continuum from birth to death, on the other hand I wouldn't be caught dead carrying that sign in a parade.

You've Been Warned

My mom got me this shirt for Christmas several years ago. I wear it pretty often when I'm gardening, biking, or doing something else casual.


I do think it would be more truthful with a bit of editing, however.

David Sipress

David Sipress is one of those cartoonists whose work I've seen many places, but had never realized were the product of one mind. (What can I say, sometimes I pay attention to the credit line, and sometimes I don't.)

He's had over 350 cartoons in the New Yorker over the past 12 years, but since I rarely read it, I missed that. And the Boston Phoenix for 30 years, but I really don't read that. The place where I know I see his work most consistently is Parade magazine. I admit it.

This cartoon resonated with me because of my own piles of paper -- er, filing system.

Sipress doesn't have a web page to link to, so to see more you'll have to Google him. Or you can watch him draw a dog on the New Yorker's blog. Your choice.

Losing the Lab Coats

A group of seventh graders were asked to describe what a scientist is, and to draw an accompanying portrait. Then they went on a field trip to Fermilab and met the scientists there.

Upon their return they wrote a new description and did new portraits. Suddenly, there were no more lab coats, and a lot more women (and non-bald men).

It's fun to flip through their before and afters.

via Maggie Koerth Baker on Boing Boing.

Days of Future Past

Seeing the film Things to Come in my freshman year in college was the first time I thought about how people of the past imagined the future. Or how, inevitably, the present becomes the past and the futures that seemed possible then become absurdist fantasies.

Today's Star Tribune Taste section included a look back at their 1980 predictions for the food trends of 2002, including:

• Drastically decreased meat consumption
• Prohibitive energy costs that would kill coast-to-coast shipping of fresh produce, leading to local truck farming, greenhouses and extensive home gardens
• A decrease in car sales and an increase in tractor sales
• Backyard fish farming as part of this local food/self-sufficiency trend

Despite the burgeoning local food movement, I think it's safe to say that much more produce is shipped around the country (and the world) today than in 1980. But the Strib writers definitely foresaw the leading edge of the urban gardening movement.

Meat consumption has shifted, but not decreased:


Source: USDA

Total meat consumption is up a bit, rather than down, but pork is flat and beef has declined. It's chicken, turkey and fish that have gained. I wonder if that's the type of meat the Strib staff had in mind back in 1980.

I don't know about tractor sales, but according to a table on the Wikipedia, the number of cars relative to the U.S. population only increased each year between 1980 and 2002.

And while backyard fish farming has not become common, aquaponics is definitely an idea whose time is coming. Plus, there's the increasing number of backyard chicken flocks.

So, not bad, Strib staffers of 1980! But the hits -- and particularly the misses -- on the list got me thinking about the predictions we hear all the time about natural resource availability and population growth. Like many of the prognosticators, I tend to think things are going to hell in a handbasket. I've been waiting for peak oil for a long time.

But we're still here. I have to admit, back in the late 1970s or early 80s, I had little hope of that reality, let alone that many of us would still be enjoying the cushiest living standard in human history. So maybe there's something wrong with the nature of our predictions.

Take Paul Ehrlich's dire forecasts of a population bomb, which have not yet come to pass. In fact, population -- now declining or at least stable in many parts of the world -- is likely to peak by midcentury. In 1980, Ehrlich bet libertarian futurist Julian Simon that the prices of five commodity metals would increase by 1990 because of scarcity in an increasingly populous world. It turned out not only was Ehrlich wrong, but he was off by a wide margin, and ended up paying Simon.

Simon, an academic economist who was associated with the Cato Institute for part of his career, is a futurist whose views are sometimes called cornucopian:

More people, and increased income, cause resources to become more scarce in the short run. Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices present opportunity, and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to search for solutions. Many fail in the search, at cost to themselves. But in a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. That is, prices eventually become lower than before the increased scarcity occurred. -- Julian Simon, The State of Humanity, 1996

A 1997 Wired article about Simon put it this way:

For some reason [Simon] could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.

Simon's books, particularly The State of Humanity and The Ultimate Resource, sound worth reading. As the Wired article summed it up:

"Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air," says Simon. "Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species."

The defect of the Malthusian models, superficially plausible but invariably wrong, is that they leave the human mind out of the equation. "These models simply do not comprehend key elements of people -- the imaginative and creative."

As for the future, "This is my long-run forecast in brief," says Simon. "The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.

"I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse."

All of this reminds me of a favorite Daily Show clip from January 2010:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Even Better Than the Real Thing
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Noun : Men :: Adjective : Women

Cruising through the Star Tribune a few days ago, I found this photo of a Grand Prix bike race.


And the cutline said:


That construction -- "Women elite riders" -- made me stumble. Shouldn't it be elite women riders? I wondered.

But then I thought, How would it sound if they were men? "Men elite riders." "Elite men riders."

Neither one sounded right.

I realized I am unaccustomed to men being used as an adjective, while I often hear women used that way. Men is generally a noun. Women, of course, is a noun also, but too often it's a modifier applied to another noun, such as "women basketball players" or "women astronauts," which would otherwise be assumed to be men.

Female (and male) are more clearly adjectives, although they can also be nouns. When there's a profession or role that's usually associated with women, male seems to be the more usual adjective. ("Male nurse" would be the key example. Although I believe that phrase is frowned upon by nurses.)

It's odd that using the term female before nouns like basketball players or astronauts makes the terms sound more clinical or classifying, rather than descriptive of some specific women who are basketball players or astronauts.

Have you heard phrases that use men as an adjective, but sound natural to you? Is this just my idiosyncracy of the ear?

The Worst Usage Error I've Ever Read

I know I can appear to be a language-usage curmudgeon, but I'm not.

Mostly, I'm amused at the funny constructions people come up with, whether in speech or informal texts, such as comments. I write about them here because I think others will find them amusing, too.

I admit to feeling more curmudgeonly about errors made by professional writers and, particularly, copy editors. Yes, we all work on deadlines, and everyone makes mistakes. There are so many errors in professional writing these days, it's getting to the point where I hardly notice the occasional typo. But there's nothing like a glaring "thinko" to make me sit up and take notice.

This one was made by a professional writer-editor and copy-edited by a second professional writer-editor, each with more than 20 years' experience. While explaining a series of changes in her organization in the last two years, the writer had this to say:

[The changes] began with the hiring of a new management company... From there we implemented a new logo and branding. Then came the new physical year -- moving from July-June to January-December.

As I said, if this had been written by a regular person, I would have chuckled. But the writer and copy editor both write annual report copy. How could the writer not know it's a fiscal year? How could the word "physical" even have flowed out of her typing fingers? And if the copy editor actually read the sentence, how could she have missed the error, since it makes absolutely no sense as written?

My headline might be a bit exaggerated; I'm sure there are worse usage errors. But considering the source, it was hard to keep my inner curmudgeon from taking over on this post.
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Writing this reminds me once again of Muphry's Law, which says that "if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."

To Pay or Not to Pay?

Here's a well-argued op-ed on why unpaid internships are essentially unfair, by Daniel Akst of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. An excerpt:

The reality is that unpaid internships are a great way of giving the children of affluence a leg up in life. If they really do help young people get permanent jobs in desirable fields, then the current internship system has the effect, however unintended, of reserving this advantage mainly for well-to-do families....

In fact, unpaid internships have become such a staple of privilege that some families pay thousands of dollars to for-profit placement firms to land a spot for their kids, something lower-income families can't possibly afford. The practice of requiring interns to pay for college credit -- which some employers hope will keep them from running afoul of labor laws -- only adds to the inequity by raising the price of admission.

A few months ago, the New York Times carried a story on the increasing prevalence of these unpaid internships at for-profit companies. The story quoted Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, as saying, “If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law.”

In addition to not being paid, interns are not protected by employment law, and so have no recourse if they're subjected to sexual harassment. They're a perfect underclass, which doesn't dare speak out for fear of messing up what they perceive as a necessary step on the path toward getting a job.

It Pays to Read the Instructions

Minneapolis (and hopefully, soon St. Paul!) has a new bike-sharing service called Nice Ride. Bikes are available in locked kiosks located around town, requiring a credit card to take one out for a spin. Once you return the bike, a small amount of money is charged to your account. While you have the bike, your card is used as a $250 security deposit.

Sounds simple enough, but what about debit cards? Those of us who don't have credit cards, but do have debit cards that generally behave like credit cards, might think we can use our cards.

Not so. The Whistleblower column in the Star Tribune carried this brief notice the other day: "Jim Leinfelder and Steven Morris weren't expecting an eight-day, $250 hold on their checking accounts when they rented bikes at Nice Ride Minnesota. They think people should know, in case their bank balances are low."

By chance, I happened to stop and read one of the Nice Ride kiosks the day before this item ran in the paper. Here's what I saw:


If you click to enlarge it, you'll see that step 2 of the clearly designed instructions says "Insert credit card when directed. No debit cards."

So what part of that admonition did Jim and Steven not read? Using the kiosk is not something I could have done without reading the directions, so they must have read them. But they missed that important part, or didn't take it seriously.

To deal with the fact that people don't read even the best-designed instructions, Nice Ride has now added a dayglow sticker to the left of the credit card slot.


It's probably just as well that the new label explains why you can't use debit cards. But it annoys me just a bit that someone complained, when it was their own failure to follow instructions that caused the hold to be put on their bank accounts.

Low Blow

Every time I hear about laws that would require people convicted of DWI to have breath alcohol ignition interlocks on their cars, I think of Florence Courington.

Actually, I didn't recall her name, but I remembered her case, and wondered what had become of her. Today's Pioneer Press brought me up to date in a story by Fred Melo.

Courington is a Twin Cities woman who had spent 36 years as a flight attendant with Northwest Airlines (before the Delta merger). One day in 2007, as she checked in for work, she was asked to give a breath sample as part of a random alcohol screening. As I recall from the earlier coverage, Courington is not a large woman, and when she breathed into the machine, it didn't get the amount of air or the rate of air movement it wanted, and so it spat out her results as refusing the test.

Incredibly, she was eventually fired from her job for this, and also lost her pension. Now, despite holding two part-time jobs, she's fighting foreclosure of her home and her phone has been disconnected.

According to Courington's lawyer,

"By all accounts, by everyone that was there and even the tester, she was not under the influence of alcohol in any way," Madia said. "She repeatedly followed the instructions of the tester as best she could. Unfortunately, all her samples came up reading insufficient air."

As the Pioneer Press's Melo tells it:

...the amount of air required for a breath sample varies depending on the version of software running the machine.

The minimal amount of air necessary to provide a breath sample is 1.1 liters of air blown at .17 liters per second. But if a driver blows too hard, the minimum sample required increases to 4.1 liters, according to the toxicologist's e-mail.

"The minimum value quadrupled," Sheridan said. "And by doing that, it would exclude about 80 percent of women. ... The shorter and older you are, you're virtually guaranteed you'd be unable to provide a sample."

The misfires are recorded as test refusals, and that can have disastrous legal consequences. Punishments for test refusals are in some cases more severe than the penalties for drunken driving.

Sounds like a proven technology that should be used as a basis to fire people!

And what if it were hooked up to keep drunk people from driving a car? But instead it won't let them drive when they're sober because they can't blow hard enough? Especially women?

Sounds like a great plan.

Advice for the Irrational in All of Us

Here's a new book I want to check out: The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely.

A brief review by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing had these intriguing things to say:

My favorite is the section on adaptation, that is, the way in which both terrible pain and incredible delights fade down to a kind of baseline normal over time. Ariely points out that adaptation can be slowed or even prevented through intermittent exposure to the underlying stimulus -- that is, if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force.

Here's where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from those things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure -- a great dessert, the delight of furnishing your first real apartment after graduation, a wonderful new relationship -- you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain -- an unpleasant chore, an awful trip -- you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.

I've been known to say that having frequent "peak experiences" like travel to Disneyworld can't help but diminish the pleaure of the everyday, especially in children who lack even the small amount of perspective adults have about these things.

I hadn't thought about how powering through the unpleasant could actually make it less dismal than taking frequent breaks from the grind. I'll have to get ahold of the book, as well as Ariely's earlier book, Predictably Irrational, and find out more.

Mira-Cool -- Repackaged Cool Surge?

Just in time for our first warm day in a while, today's Star Tribune had an ad from the Universal Media Syndicate for something called Mira-Cool.

As it's described in the ad, it sounds indistinguishable from the Cool Surges they were marketing last year, which I wrote about here.


Even better, Consumer Reports did a test in 2009 that concluded, "Because of its negligible cooling in our tests, we've given the Cool Surge portable air cooler our Don't Buy: Performance Problem judgment."

What was the test CR put it to? Here are the details:

We controlled conditions around [a 200-square-foot] room to simulate an 85°F dry summer day with a relative humidity of just 57 percent.

...Our string of sensors showed the device failed to appreciably lower the room's overall temperature during a four-hour test.

We also tested the Cool Surge at an even drier, desertlike setting of 25 percent relative humidity, again, at 85°F. Even in these conditions, which are suitable for an evaporative cooler, we measured a mere 2 degrees of cooling during the four-hour test.

Of course, I don't know that the Mira-Cool is the same exact machine inside as Cool Surge. Here are the similarities, based on the generalities available in the two ads.

• Cool Surge "uses about 96% less electricity than air conditioners." Mira-Cool "uses 95% less electricity."
• Both promote the idea of "ice cooled air" (no hyphen), courtesy of two reusable ice blocks that are included. (Just like the kind you'd put in a picnic cooler... you have to keep refreezing them in your freezer every four hours, a detail not provided in the ad).
  
• Both ads have quotes from an Operations Director named Chris Gallo or Christopher Gallow. Huh. What's up with the spelling change?
• It's even the same price -- $298 plus shipping, and you get a second one for free (except the shipping, which I understand from Consumer Reports and other sources runs about $50 per unit).

From looking at the two ads, it's clear that at least the outer shells of the two coolers are different, although they appear to be the same dimensions. It will take another review by Consumer Reports to find out if the Mira-Cool performs any better than Cool Surge.

Amusingly, the four photos across the bottom of the two ads are identical... except they're not the same photos. Instead, the photos have been reshot with the same content:

• An older woman with her cooler, holding up some type of certificate or bill or something. It's even the same document, with a big red triangle in the upper right corner...just not the same woman. (They've given her a dog in the Mira-Cool ad. Nice touch, there.)
• A young girl rolling the cooler from left to right through a doorway.
  
• A family with mom, dad, two boys, and one girl playing a board game.
• A woman sleeping in a darkened room while the cooler looms over her.
  

Repackaging the ad, repackaging the product... I wonder why? Didn't they build up any brand equity in the Cool Surge name last year?

One difference between the two ads: I didn't notice any claims about Mira-Cool being "eco-friendly," unlike last year's Cool Surge ad.
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Here's a list of my past posts about the Universal Media Syndicate, its many products, and its parent company, Arthur Middleton Capital Holdings.

Potato Towers

Next year, I'm planting potatoes.

Use Less

It's been a long day, and I really wanted something quick and easy to post here. The Gulf oil spill doesn't exactly qualify.

But Maggie Koerth Baker's post on BoingBoing, plus several letters to the editor in the Star Tribune aligned. Plus this outstanding image, also via BoingBoing (originally from the Aquaman Shrine).

The letters, headlined We're Responsible for Future Generations, pointed to our collective responsibility for the oil spill. After noting that Americans today eat four times as much meat as we did in the "good old days" of 1950, one called on people to eat less meat: "If we all reduced our consumption of meat by 20 percent, which we might accomplish by not eating meat on two days a week, our fossil-fuel use would drop by as much as if we had all switched from average cars to Priuses." (Jeff Smith, Wheaton, Minn.)

Koerth-Baker points out that it wouldn't be too hard to drive a little bit less. "With a 9% reduction in national daily gasoline consumption, we could eliminate our need for offshore oil. At 22.4 miles per gallon, that's just 4.2 fewer miles of driving, per person, per day." And she concludes:

So, cutting our daily gasoline consumption by 9%. Some of it will be fun—biking, chatting with friends in a carpool, coming up with new activities to do within walking distance, instead of driving for our entertainment. Other times, it will be a pain in the ass. But, that's our responsibility. That's what we owe for our role in this mess.

And what better way to get people to drive less? Increase the price of gas with a tax. $4.00 a gallon was a price that sure had an effect on driving habits.

Even if it was rebated to some people (low-income, farmers, maybe truck drivers), it would still cut consumption among some of those folks because it's human nature to react to the up-front cost.

What We Flush

Oh, the things we Americans never have to think about. Like toilet paper.



That's about a tenth of a roll per person per day.

From a treehugger.com article on adding a bidet to your toilet so you can stop using toilet paper. Via a link from Ask Umbra on grist.org.

When Life Gives You Lemon Zinger

I've written before about the packaging of Celestial Seasonings tea, asking their new packaging to help me out with differentiating their decaffeinated green tea from their decaffeinated mint green tea. Nothing like a mouthful of mint when you're not expecting it!

Being an accommodating company with relatively deep pockets, they changed the packaging not too long after I wrote. I take full credit.

Recently, I finished a box of their Lemon Zinger tea that had been in my cupboard for years, and hence had the old packaging. Because it makes such great iced tea -- my new drink of choice at home -- I've bought another box, which is part of the new packaging program.


Old packaging


New packaging

It's quite a challenge to redesign an iconic package like the Celestial Seasonings product line. I like the new logo, with its Indian decorative references, and the way they've incorporated the illustration into the box face with a flowing rather than rectilinear shape.



It's interesting to note that this version of the box is not what was first done by the well-known branding firm hired to redo the system. The top of the box, with the curving edge and very clear treatment of the specific product name, Lemon Zinger, is not what was first printed and sold, as shown in this photo of the packaging line from the branding firm's website:

It's the same logo and artwork, but the top is a straight line, and the Lemon Zinger name is much less prominent. I wonder who did the more recent version?

The new illustration is fun and, honestly, more dynamic than the old one. But I had to include one last visual genuflection to the old illustration, and its illustrator, Kinuko Y. Craft, so prominently credited. It's not too often you see an illustrator credit on a piece of packaging, and I always liked that, almost as much as the odd little quotes and sayings that covered the sides of the old box.

A Lot More than Peeping

Who decided to call the perpetrator in a series of recent crimes in Minneapolis a Peeping Tom?

In today's Star Tribune, a story by Matt McKinney and Paul Walsh is headlined Peeping Tom Grows More Brazen. The term is used in the lead, but is not directly attributed to the police spokesman. ("A man police believe to be a serial Peeping Tom who victimized two women...")

The definition of a Peeping Tom is that he peeps. He looks. Every definition I've seen uses adjectives like "furtively" or "secretly."

This guy started out doing a lot more than that. In the first two cases:

...the man spoke to women through unlocked lower-level apartment windows. In at least two cases, he threatened the women with a gun, saying he would shoot them if they didn't do what he said, according to police records.

In the first of those cases, he also cut the screen out of the window. In the third, most recent case, he broke in through the window and the woman fought him off and got away.

What part of any of that involves peeping? And who labeled it that way, the police or the Strib? Doesn't it obviously trivialize what this guy has been doing?

Is that Like a Briefcase?

Good thing the judge didn't toss that case... the lawyer might have sued if he got injured when it hit him.

Edible Estates

I don't know about your neighborhood, but mine is sprouting front boulevard vegetable gardens at an amazing pace. With that in mind, I just finished Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn by Fritz Haeg, a garden book without being exactly a garden book. It's part polemic and part pole beans.

For the past five years or so, Haeg has been instigating front-yard vegetable gardens, in cahoots with art museums in cities across the country. Regular citizens volunteer their front 40 (or 30 or 20) feet, and with the help of Haeg and some volunteers, their lawns give way to strawberries and tomatoes.

The book opens with a number of essays by big names in the urban food and new urbanism world: Will Allen of Growing Power, Michael Pollan, Diana Balmori. One important focus of the essays and the book in general is the high-input, low-return cultural phenomenon known as the American front lawn. Here are a few quotes.

Fritz Haeg:

The front lawn was born of vanity and decadence, under the assumption that fertile land was infinite. The English estate owner in Tudor times would demonstrate his vast wealth by not growing food on the highly visible fecund property in front of his residence. (p. 16)

Once that fertile farmland in front of the English estate had been turned into a sterile monoculture, where did the cultivation of food happen? Out of view, of course... This was perhaps the beginning of the notion that plants that produce food are ugly and should no be seen. Today the idea has played itself out at an industrial global scale, with our produce grown on the other side of the planet. (p. 17)

We are obsessed with our homes as protective bubbles from the realities around us. Today's towns and cities are engineered for isolation, and growing food in your front yard becomes a way to subvert this tendency. (p. 25)

Will Allen:

The greatest danger of winning [the good/local food] revolution too soon and too easily is that we will find ourselves being seduced by the blandishments of Big Ag with claims that it has become local when it has merely become slightly less distant; when it claims that it has become healthier by merely becoming a bit less dangerous; when it claims to have become sustainable when it has merely become marginally less exploitative of the land and the people who work it. (p. 30)

Michael Pollan, in an essay called Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns:

...we superimpose our lawns on the land. And since the geography and climate of much of this country are poorly suited to turfgrasses (none of which is native), this can't be accomplished without the tools of twentieth-century industrial civilization -- its chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and machinery. For we won't settle for the lawn that will grow here; we want the one that grows there, that dense springy supergreen and weed-free carpet, that Platonic ideal of a lawn.... (p. 42)

For if lawn mowing feels like copying the same sentence over and over, gardening is like writing out new ones, an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery. (p. 43)

Michael Foti, part of the second family to establish an edible estate with Haeg's help, blogged about the process and the garden:

...one of the things that is most striking about the garden when you first see it is how open and close to the sidewalk it is. How vulnerable it seems. There's no fences or anything to keep anybody out. It really makes you aware of how most lawns function as kind of a buffer between public and private space. In a way, it sort of illuminates the value of a lawn to most people -- not worth stealing, and useful only to the extent that it keeps people away, or doesn't need to be worried about. (p. 81)

If I slack off on the maintenance [of the garden], it will turn into an eyesore very quickly. I think that is a valid concern, but do people really prefer their neighborhoods be maintained by low-paid workers whose main concern is efficiency rather than beauty? I think it's a vicious cycle. The more utilitarian and fuctional these spaces become, the easier they are to maintain, but also the easier they are to ignore and neglect. Ultimately, the upkeep of a lawn becomes nothing more than a kind of tax on the homeowner that he only pays out of some sense of obligation, or self-interest in neighborhood property values. (p. 81)

Plus lots of nice before, during, and after photos. It's inspiring and fun, so if you have any interest in gardening or growing your own food, it's worth a look.
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An afterthought: The section on the Los Angeles-area front-yard garden opens with this stunning quote from Le Corbusier (1935):

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work... enough for all. (quoted on page 73)

Snakes in the Checkout Lane

Sometimes consumer culture comes up with absurd delights.

Got Photo Editor?

Today's Star Tribune had a nice column by Neal St. Anthony about mentoring programs for at-risk teens. St. Anthony did a good job of highlighting the work of Bolder Options, while mentioning other organizations like Search Institute and PPL.

But what does that kid's shirt say?


I know the shirt probably says "got luck?", given the shamrock... and I know I tend to read into things rather freely.

But was this really the best photo among the ones the editor had to choose from? (In the age of the newspaper diaspora, was there an editor?)

I see the name in the photo credit is Neal St. Anthony, rather than one of the Strib's photographers. Wouldn't you think a word guy might notice something like that?

If You're Ever Feeling Stupid

Just go to the Customer Is Not Always Right website and keep clicking the Random button until the feeling goes away.

Here's one example from a bookstore employee in South Dakota:

Customer: “I am looking for one of those things that are like a book, but not a book.”

Me: “Do you mean a magazine?”

Customer: “No, no. It is like a book, but not a book.”

Me: *speechless*

Customer: “You know! A book thing, but not a book.”

(After the customer tries to explain this object to me for about 10 minutes, my coworker comes back from lunch.)

Coworker: “What seems to be the problem here?”

Customer: “I asked your coworker if you have those things that are like books but not books, but she is too simple to understand.”

Coworker: “You mean a magazine?”

Customer: “No! Is it so hard to just find one of those things? I thought this was a bookstore!”

(Overhearing us, my manager tries to help.)

Manager: “Is there a problem?”

Customer: “I am looking for a thing that is like a book, but not a book.”

Manager: “Well, let’s go look for it…”

(My manager ended up leading the customer all around the store, pointing out every thing we had. The thing that was like a book but not a book? A bookmark.)

The Horror, the Horror

It was inevitable.

They should have known better.

What else could one expect to happen when family-values-defender Rush Limbaugh got married for the fourth time (after three divorces), with LGBT-rights-defender Elton John (himself in a civil partnership with a man) playing music at the reception?

Past, Present, Future

An interesting talk about different perspectives on time, made even more arresting by the accelerated live drawings that act as animation.



The speaker, Stanford emeritus professor of psychology Phil Zimbardo, has published several books that sound like they're worth reading: The Time Paradox, The Lucifer Effect, and Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It.

Via kottke.org

Like Butter, Only Toxic

Everyone knows that butter is made from milk. But did you know that it requires the cream from 20 pounds of milk to make 1 pound of butter?

That pound of butter might seem extravagant, but at least the 19 unused pounds of milk have a purpose. We can drink it or turn it to milk powder to mix into other foods, right?

Yes, of course -- if anyone wants to pay for the milk. That's the problem the grass-fed butter-maker PastureLand Co-op has faced for the past five months. Given the economic recession and crash in organic milk prices, no processor wanted to buy their milk at a price PastureLand was willing to take.

Today, Simple Good and Tasty blogger Angelique Chao reported that PastureLand is on the verge of a contract, so their excellent butter will soon be back in production. I hope the new contract works out for them.

Now imagine... what if there wasn't a use for that milk? And even further, what if the milk was toxic? Wouldn't that be crazy? Who would want to consume a product made under those circumstances?

That's exactly how the Canadian oil we use here in Minnesota is made. Minnesota Public Radio's Stephanie Hemphill followed the supply line for Minnesota's oil from a gas station in St. Paul to the Flint Hills refinery in the southeastern suburbs, to the pipeline that runs about a thousand miles up to northeastern Alberta.

Like other Americans, I've been in denial or ignorance about this. Somehow I imagined they were drilling for oil in Canada, like they do in Texas. Not perfectly environmental, but better than some options... like drilling 5,000 feet below the Gulf of Mexico, for instance -- right?

But no. They're not drilling up in Canada, they're strip mining. Swaths of Alberta are blessed with "oil sands," which are laced with a tacky substance called bitumen. It's oil, but it can only be extracted by mixing the soil with water and caustic soda to separate the useful part from the rest of the material.


Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine site and plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Image from the Wikimedia Commons.

Before that process can even start, though, the bitumen needs to be dug up out of the ground. As Hemphill puts it, "To get at it, oil companies strip the land of trees and wetlands, then dig into the ground, hauling and extracting four tons of earth for each barrel of oil.... All this is happening in a place a lot like Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness."

Ironically, the mining company calls the virgin forests, soil and rocks that cover the oil sands "overburden," four tons of which are trashed for every barrel of oil. That's a ratio very similar to the 20 : 1 milk-to-butter ratio: One barrel of oil holds 42 gallons. One ton of soil is the equivalent of 240 liquid gallons (according to WolframAlpha), times four tons equals 960 gallons. 960 : 42 = 23 : 1, approximately.

In 2006, 1.25 million barrels of oil were produced in Canada every day (according to the Wikipedia), which means 5 million tons of wilderness were turned into "overburden." That's a trillion pounds of earth removed and trashed. Enough to fill the beds of 10 million pickup trucks. Every day.

Plus, for every barrel of oil created, 2 - 4.5 barrels of water are used in the extraction process (again, according to the Wikipedia), and all of that water becomes toxic slurry that has to be kept in retaining ponds.

And the final kick in the pants: Creating oil out of bitumen requires a third more energy than oil from conventional drilling.

This is where our need for oil and gas has led us.

Scientist Heroes

I had never heard of Nikolay Vavilov until Saturday afternoon, when I happened to catch part of the Splendid Table on Minnesota Public Radio. Ethnobiologist, conservationist and farmer Gary Nabhan was on the show to talk about his book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine.

According to Nabhan, between 1916 and 1940, Vavilov collected seeds and tubers from all over the world. He was "an incredible explorer of food diversity. He visited 64 countries on five continents, he learned 15 languages. He was one of the first scientists to listen to traditional farmers, peasant farmers around the world... All of our notions of biodiversity spring from his work, and if justice be done, he would be as famous as Darwin or Luther Burbank." Vavilov's collection is still housed in a seed bank a few blocks from the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg.

Vavilov headed the Soviets' agricultural research efforts until 1940, when he was purged and scapegoated for the failure of farm collectivization and the growing reliance on Lamarckian genetics, as advocated by Trofim Lysenko. Vavilov fought against Lysenkoism until he was taken to prison, but in the twisted Stalinist logic, he was blamed for its failure. He spent the last three years of his life in a cell, starving to death.

Nabhan also told the story of the seed bank during the 1941 siege of Leningrad. The city's people were beating the doors of the seed bank to get at the seeds to eat them, but Vavilov's team of scientists, also starving, guarded the seed bank:

Over a series of months, a dozen of the scientists starved to death while guarding those seeds. One of them said, It was hard to wake up, it was hard to get on your feet and put on your clothes in the morning, but no, it was not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits about you. That saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after war was more important than a single person's comfort.

I've had the blessing of visiting the seed bank... and we looked at a wall of photos of the people who died protecting those seeds. And I've never been so deeply moved by the courage of scientists... That they put humankind before their own personal lives seemed to me an astonishing act.

Listening to him speak, you can hear the emotion in Nabhan's voice. I look forward to reading his book and learning more about his work.

Too Many Tabs Open, Part 2

Human taste buds have one type of receptor for sweet, one for salty, one for sour and one for savory... but we have 25 different ones for bitter. "Scientists believe this variety of bitter receptors capable of detecting thousands of different compounds helps to protect us since poisons and toxins found in nature tend to be bitter tasting." (From a MinnPost story about research to develop bitter blockers that could be used in medicines, food and beverages to soothe that bitter edge.)
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The Gulf oil disaster is just another chance to realize that privilege is a headache you don't know that you don't have. Nigeria constantly experiences as much devastation and more from oil spills as we're seeing in the Gulf of Mexico. For decades. Every year. FYI, Nigeria supplies 40 percent of the oil used in the U.S. From the Guardian.
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Chalk one up for the law of unintended consequences when it comes to cracking down on illegal immigration. Allowing many more immigrants to enter the country and work legally would alleviate many of the problems perceived by the anti-immigration crowd:

Trying to lock down the border has not stanched the flow of unauthorized newcomers from the south, but it has made the trip much more dangerous and expensive. So illegal foreigners who once came and left now come and stay.

Thirty years ago, nearly half of undocumented arrivals departed within a year. Today, only one in 14 does.

If most of the 12 million illegal immigrants were to gain authorized status, many would feel free to return to their native countries, and some would remain there. Permitting more legal immigrants, oddly, could reduce the number of total immigrants.

From Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman's A Paradox: Fix Immigration by Growing It.
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The writer of the Fixit column, Karen Youso, is taking a buyout from the Star Tribune. As I've written about Fixit before, "This column is such a reminder of the value of the general interest newspaper. I wasn't reading it because I was looking specifically for information on [that day's topic]. But there it was, sprinkled in among the dance and theater reviews, just across from the Sudoku and crossword puzzles. So I saw it. I think that's called serendipity." David Brauer at MinnPost published Youso's letter of goodbye to her coworkers, and colleagues and readers added some nice comments about her and her work over the years.

An Old Metal Sign

One day almost 10 years ago, I was at Bauer Brothers, a venerable salvage yard in the Twin Cities. It's a sprawling place, both indoors and outdoors, with everything from reclaimed wood flooring and valuable architectural details to cheap kitchen sinks.

I can't remember my purpose for that trip, but while I was wandering around between the maze of doors and the light fixture bins, my eye fell upon a three-dimensional metal sign.


I wasn't sure what its purpose had been, but the letter shapes and spacing, the way the brass-colored letters were attached to the silver base, the C raised up above the baseline... it spoke to me of an unknown history. 20th-century commercial modern, definitely.

Many things at Bauer Brothers aren't marked for price. So I found one of the brothers and asked him how much, thinking to myself, If it's under $50, I'll buy it. I'm not a person who can bargain, and can sometimes pay way too much for things, so I wanted to be ready with my limit.

He looked at it, hefted it, then took out a magnet to see if it would stick (it didn't -- I guess it's aluminum). Finally, he looked at me and said, "$15."

I bought it, but I've never quite known what to do with it. I wondered, off and on, where it came from. It almost seemed like the type of sign you'd see above a bank tellers' cage, but McLellans couldn't be the name of a bank.

Then around five years ago, I was watching a PBS documentary about the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville and sure enough, there was a quick shot of my sign (or one just like it) above one of the lunch counters.

It turns out McLellans is a defunct five-and-dime chain that had over 200 locations at one point. Most of them would have changed names by the 1960s, since it was bought by McCrory's in 1958, but at least the one in Nashville still had the original name and sign in 1960 when the sit-ins happened. (The Wikipedia entry on the Nashville sit-ins shows McLellan's on the map of lunch counters.)

Those who read my blog regularly know I'm generally interested in signs. Okay, maybe "interested" isn't a strong enough adjective.

But this sign is extra special. Although I'm sure it isn't from the Nashville store, it's a piece of second-hand history that came to me in a moment of serendipity.