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.