If you're interested in the future of food, here's an interesting essay: Twilight of the Chicken Tenders, about transitioning away from industrial foods in ways that are more practical than slow food or Martha Stewart.

In that essay, John Michael Greer suggests that "[t]he recipes to look for aren’t the fancy ones you’ll find in glossy recent cookbooks that are meant to gaze scornfully down from the bookshelf and overawe the guests...".

I think he won't mind if I dissent in one particular instance: the same essay includes "De gustibus non disputandum est; which is to say that in food choices, above all else, dissensus rules." Unfortunately, I'm having trouble posting a comment directly, but it's a long enough comment to stand alone here.

The book I'm thinking of is packaged to gaze scornfully down and to overawe, but isn't written the way the cover would suggest. Chad Robertson et alia have done a great job of reviving the tradition of peasant bread for Tartine Bread. It's unusually considerate of the baker's schedule: the community of test cooks included a graduate student who found that the rhythms of fermentation prompted her to study more effectively than she had before she took up baking, and the first-time proprietor of a new coffee shop with an infant and a serious surfing habit who had to radically distort the process to fit the narrow windows of time that remained. It is a better resource than any I've seen on how to adjust to the ingredients, the fuel, the equipment, and especially time available. It also produces better bread with less effort or expense than Tassajara recipes or any from my family. Partly, this is because Robertson drew on very deep traditions, including apprenticeships in rural France, but has gracefully adapted them to his own time and place. I decided not to buy the book, but I got a lot out of reading it; I hope there's a paperback edition in the works, with more memoir/how-to spirit, and less coffee table book/intimidating gourmet attitude.

A great how-to on cuisine-building in general, is Carol Deppe's latest book, The Resilient Gardener. She has gone so far as to breed vegetables for less time- and energy-intensive preparation, but a good third of the book focuses on attitudes toward cooking and food storage that would be helpful even for those who live in studio apartments.

Last, there are a lot of good web log resources on this topic. An ongoing feature I enjoy is the "Bean Fest" series at Homegrown Evolution. This week's topic is a quick and adaptable rice-and-lentil dish called khichdi.

I would like to green the streets.

Traffic through residential streets is often quieted using speed bumps, but some cities have begun using barriers and legal restrictions to do so more forcefully. A common tactic is to install concrete planters in intersections, cutting off diagonal traffic and forcing oncoming cars to turn a particular direction. This led me to wonder: What if those planters expanded, and took over a significant amount of pavement?

I'd like to see more streets made one-way, one lane, with barriers enforcing a winding path, and blocks of diagonal parking in the remaining space. This would mean a significant area of green space near the (very sunny) middle of the road. The raised planter beds could be used as a community garden.

If possible, I'd like to start this on my own street, which has some unique advantages:

1. a lively community of politically, culturally, and socially active neighbors
2. neighborhood dissatisfaction with traffic, parking hassles, and the aesthetics of cities in general and our street in particular
3. close enough ties to the local college town that everyone is familiar with related ideas for traffic and for food
4. located outside of that college town, so that constraints are more often economic than political, and tend to be more solidly rooted in reality

I'm not so sure about the legal requirements or implementation details, but I think it's more likely to satisfy more people than a few of the ideas I've heard floated lately, including parking permits and tearing up the whole street to plant in the soil underneath.

It would be nice to have a garden that looks nice as well as producing food, and thankfully there have been some amazing efforts with that goal in mind.

My (wildly optimistic) vision of the planters themselves has them about three feet tall, and made from locally-available re-claimed materials. One tentative thought is to use strips of tire tread, plastic fry-grease jugs, and demolition waste. There's enough free firewood and clean dirt listed on Craigslist to make literally tons of terra preta, if my neighborhood starts composting locally rather than filling green bins for Waste Management. I'm also thinking of a system to pump water from the gutters into the aforementioned plastic jugs during the wet season, for electronically-controlled irrigation later in the year, although that would require some special attention to keeping the pavement clean.

I'd like to hear what people think about this idea. It would be a lot of lobbying and even more manual labor, so it would be nice to hear as much criticism as possible, as early as possible. Even better would be if some other neighborhood would find all the pitfalls: if you've done something similar, or want to steal the idea, that's fantastic.

Republicans are getting huffy about "lipstick on a pig".

Let me break that metaphor down for you: Palin is not the pig, she's the lipstick.

That's right, McCain and Palin were compared to a coat of lipstick. Republican policies were compared to a pig, which lipstick will fail to beautify or disguise. That is to say, he showed respect for her, and contempt for what she stands for...or rather, stands in fron of.

Sheesh...doesn't anyone in the Right Wing ever read Lakoff?

Weeding his alms:
Weeks' worth of good luck,
Sown in the street.

Note: this overlaps with some things I've written before, but I'm thinking of publishing elsewhere. Forgive any repetitiveness.

Whenever I hear someone wax poetic about the mystical powers of crystals, as elaborated in neo-Pagan systems of magic or medicine, I smile and nod, and say "you have no earthly idea how right you are," though they may have a celestial idea or two.

I say "earthly" because I don't believe in the woo-woo power of big, natural quartz rocks to harmonize one's aura. Instead, I agree with them because I've been trained in crystallography, and I know of several breathtakingly practical applications that materials scientists and engineers have found for this discipline. For instance, the fact that quartz crystals lack inversion symmetry makes them piezoelectric, able to transform electrical energy to mechanical work and vice versa. Resonators that slosh energy back and forth between these two forms are available from hobby shops at very low prices. These crystals allow all of your electronics to keep time with one another, maintaining a harmony so exquisite that it would escape even a dog's ear (canine hearing reaches to maybe 0.1 MHz; the 4 GHz quartz clock shown below isn't especially fast for use with a microprocessor).

Speaking of sound, several mystical traditions hold that vibrations or verbalizations are primordial and universal; for instance, that the syllable "om" brought the universe into being. I don't have any evidence for or against that assertion, but I do know that electron-phonon interactions (that is, collisions between particles of electricity and particles of sound) are very important for the workings of semiconductors and superconductors. Your dad's old transistor radio, let alone your doctor's new MRI scanner, wouldn't work without the designers having some very subtle understanding of the properties of sound.

But phonons are really only well-defined within crystalline solids, so maybe that's a spurious example. Even sound in gasses has some surprising applications, though, through the thermoacoustic effect. There's a commercially available system that uses sound to condense natural gas on remote oil wells, for shipment to consumers. Offshore oil rigs, or wells in the middle of a desert or tundra, would otherwise vent or flare the gas they produce, adding a lot of methane or (slightly less bad, from a greenhouse perspective) carbon dioxide into the air without using it to accomplis anything. A thermoacoustic system will burn some small fraction of the gas, and use that heat to generate sound waves, which, in turn, drive a refrigerator that brings the remaining gas to cryogenic temperatures. This reduces the methane's volume by about a thousand times, and allows it to be transported in cheaper equipment designed for liquids, easing demand for synthetic fuel gasses. Why not use a conventional heat engine and mechanical refrigerator, you ask? Well, if it's so remote, a breakdown would be a big problem. Thermoacoustic systems are a lot more reliable, because they have approximately as many working parts as an old-fashioned flute: zero.

Of course, seeing this gas liquefaction technology as a good thing begs the question of whether we should be extracting fossil fuels at all. It's great to save a lot of methane emissions at the expense of a little carbon dioxide, but if we want our global climate to stay at all familiar, we should probably be working to return carbon to the earth, rather than to dig it up more efficiently.

I think there should be a lot more composting, for instance. If something goes into thelandfill and begins to rot, it will largely turn into methane and be released. Efforts are made to capture some fraction of this methane at the most enlightened of dumps, but I'm told that this is only a small help.

Judging by how much weight my compost pile has lost since I set it up, I'm probably emitting more carbon dioxide now than I did a year ago. But that means a lot less methane, and, on top of that benefit, I intend for the carbon that remains to be buried in garden soil, where it will probably stay for quite some time. If it leads to more plant life, it will pull still more carbon from the air.

I try to be thorough about it: food waste, raked leaves, and floor sweepings, of course, but also any paper towels that I use in public restrooms. Unless a paper product is recyclable, or small samples of it burn green (a test for poisonous copper, which many fast-food companies use in their ink), or it's coated in plastic rather than wax, it goes in the compost pile.

Composting has some other benefits, of course. At the risk of sounding like a gullible hippy, I find the act of turning a compost pile to be a powerful meditation on mortality. It adds some much-needed perspective to my life when I can see the things of man, from pizza boxes to my own nail clippings, being digested by the earth. It challenges my notion of permanence, and keeps me humble. Which I need, as much as the next guy.

humble (adj.)

c.1250, from O.Fr. humble, earlier humele, from L. humilis "lowly, humble," lit. "on the ground," from humus "earth."

So, a high-school peace group is being denied the right, peaceably, to organize. Honestly, how else would they?

The group of students wear yellow ribbons. They don't say anything against Bush, or for Democrats. They just wear shirts that proclaim peace. Peace signs, the word "Peace," that kind of stuff. They followed the rules with a written application, and an official statement of purpose & principles, and an adult sponsor. The administration rejected their application, and is preventing them from posting anything related to peace on their lockers.

The whole school is in an uproar, with students united behind a common cause. Now a huge number of students are wearing shirts with the same theme, holding their ground in this battle of ideas.
That newly-popular theme, though, is not a peace symbol, but a Confederate flag. Yep, the majority of students side with the administration (school and national), and want this group of dissenters to be silenced. And wearing the old Stars and Bars is the least they can do to show their support...for...their, um...country? Uh, and for the President...of the, um, Union.

But peace advocacy can't be allowed, because it's disruptive and nigh-upon treasonous. Best to stick with safe, patriotic themes...like that group who rebelled against the US government and eventually became symbols of slavery. No controversy there, no sir.

I stole the above link from Ran Preiur, who says: "Ordinary Americans, post 1980, are probably the only population in history to be generally pro-war." But I think Spartan citizens would have also swung pro-war. I hear that the government of Sparta declared war on most of its own, non-citizen population on a regular basis, using a ballot by a representative body. This meant most of the work within their borders was done by enemies of the state, allowing more-powerful Spartans to ignore what little civil rights protections had been developed at that time, and treat their workers worse than an Athenian would have treated a slave.

You may have seen 300, in which the Spartan protagonist (a young prince, natch) is sent out to live off the land, the way soldiers do. He makes a spear from a sapling and kills a giant, slavering CG wolf.



This is kind of historically accurate, if we remember that this cartoon wolf is actually symbolic. Soldiers don't live from the earth the way hunter-gatherers do; that would require some sissy expertise with a digging stick, and less time for manly spear-play. "Live off the land" is a euphemism for "steal from the locals:" Spartan youths weren't cast out on their own to dig for grubs and tubers; they were forced to join street gangs, and get first-hand experience of, as Terry Gilliam would put it, the violence inherent in the system. Having to choose between starvation and armed robbery was their rite of passage, and the slavering wolf represents the threat of an empowered lower or middle class, like the phantom menace faced by Marie Antoinette. He slew that wolf, alright...and got food, clothing, and status in the bargain.

Anyone who couldn't find a place in the hierarchy of thugs would be left in the cold, to be killed by an angry peasant if hunger or exposure weren't enough...but I'm sure that didn't happen too often. People are good at fitting in, whether they're in an ancient Greek scouting troop, a Prussian-style public school, or a Bentham-Foucault inspired prison system.

It occurs to me that the bulk of agricultural workers in this country are in a similar situation to their Spartan forbears: they're economically necessary, but legally forbidden. In my neighborhood, citizen "rat packs" have formed to exploit this situation. Like Sinatra before them, they've found strength and wealth in organized crime. Like young Spartans, they target members of the laboring class, because "Illegals" tend to be frozen out of the banking system, so they often carry cash on payday, rather than a checkbook or ATM card. And they can't go to the authorities, for fear of deportation.

But the plumbing for deportation is getting a little clogged, and prisoners are backing up faster than they can be drained from our borders...so they're staying in prison longer. And with shortages of agricultural labor in the parts of rural America with the toughest immigration enforcement, they've started using chain gangs to harvest and care for crops. Like illegal aliens, inmates don't need to be paid minimum wage.

The current political situation raises many small concerns, each little more than a drop in the bucket, or a grain of sand on the beach. They all add up, though, until I can't go along with it, and can barely even keep my temper. If I weren't such a peaceful fellow, I'd have the urge to kill the messenger. By...oh, I don't know...kicking him into a well, or something.


Here's your moment of Zen...unless that phrase is a registered trademark, in which case it's a moment of Taoism or Yoga or something:

How a 1970s Mother Earth News article made me less of a dirty hippy

I washed my car today & yesterday, for the first time in at least a year.

Ick, I know. It was high time.

But people are rationing water here in California, and the Delta Smelt face extinction...how could I, in good conscience, turn on the hose for such a frivolous purpose? Especially when I obviously don't much care how my car looks?

Well, I've figured out a way to wash my car without using a hose or bucket. You'll be disqualified from the Hipster Olympics if you use my method, since it involves getting up around dawn, but other than that, it's pretty convenient:

Use dew.

I took an old nylon scrubber pad with a squirt of dish soap, and some of the paper towels I pocket after drying my hands in public restrooms (these accumulate quickly; 4 days' worth is enough to dry a car twice over), and two mornings' worth of dew was enough to remove a year's grime, bird droppings, and aphid sugar. Not to mention the ants that had colonized the car exterior in order to eat the aphid sugar...I know, ick.

If you are a morning person, it's actually easier than hauling out a bucket and hose. The scrubber went into the bathtub and was rinsed out as I trod on it during my morning shower, and the towels went into the compost, which I had intended to do anyway (warning: road dust contains some lead, due to the weights that balance wheels...lobby automakers to use zinc or something instead, and hope the exposure is not too great). A squeegee might cut down on the number of towels you need, if you don't have once-used ones lying around.

An added bonus: more reason to mock the people who use filtered water to wash their car. Filter cartridges for that ridiculous Mr. Clean/Pur gizmo have appeared in the clearance aisle, so there clearly aren't as many of these people as the marketing industry might have hoped, but if I should ever meet one, I can now say: "Filtered water? Well, okay...but I use distilled."

As usual, I feel pretty clever, but this idea is actually borrowed from a famous survivalist, Tom Brown, Jr. I highly recommend his series of articles on how to survive in the wilderness, especially since he's not trying to sell high-end gimmicky equipment. The article in question is here.

Now that I've washed it, perhaps I should take care of the dent from that fender bender back in February of '06...