Props to Marc for passing this on - Willy Mason did a set on Morning Becomes Eclectic today and it's great. I wish I could have seen him live at Sam Bond's. He's young, mid-twenties I think, and he's got a loose-limbed, rambling, twang-but-not-too-twang sound that comes across better without all the production behind his new album.
Have a listen, eh?
Oh, and I just checked, he's younger than I am. Wow.
ALSO: Beninese diva Anjelique Kidjo did a stellar KCRW set this morning.
Say what you will about the fever-pitch debate surrounding the gray wolf's potential delisting from the Endangered Species List, it's a complex issue, but this, part of a lawsuit being brought by Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd against the federal government for not delisting the wolf and handing over its management fast enough, just blows my mind:
“Friends petitions the court to recognize that wolves are being used as a bio-weapon targeting the civil rights, economy, customs, culture, and heritage of the citizens of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.”
Yes, that's right. Those evil eco types are using wolves as BIO-WEAPONS.
p.s. Will have more on this/the ESA stuff from earlier this week soon. It's on my to-do list.
From The D's Overheard column:
'08 Kappa: The work is for my black feminism class.
'08 Psi U: That's crazy. Can I take a white masculinity class?
'08 Kappa: It's called econ 1.
---
Also, it's Trustee election time at Dartmouth, for which The D musters little enthusiasm:
Each candidate was the favorite of at least one member of the board, but only Alderson garnered a green light from each member. Our struggles in finding a consensus are not a reflection that we disagree about the direction of the College or what a trustee should be, but rather that all of the candidates espouse similar views -- perhaps evidence that there's not much divisiveness about the future of the College after all.
The Little Green Blog has some further commentary on Alderson, the more controversial Smith, and how the voting process works.
Aside from Smith, about whom I've read more than enough, does anyone have any interesting thoughts on the other candidates? Their websites look good but don't say much. I'm talking to Sustainable Dartmouth to see if they'll ask some targeted sustainability questions and gauge their support for environmental initiatives on campus. I'll post the answers here if that happens.
This Salon piece on the Bush administration's efforts to effectively gut the Endangered Species Act is startling, if depressingly unsurprising and not the first time this has happened.
From the lede:
The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.
And, in case you doubt this administration's hostility toward endangered species, check this.
Species granted endangered status under the last 4 presidents:
Clinton - 521
Reagan - 253
Bush I - 234
George W. Bush - 57
(that's fewer than any administration in history, and each case had to be brought via lawsuit)
More on this later, after I do a little research - there's actually some interesting thinking going on in the enviro world re: how to improve the ESA and remove the current problems it's facing with private landowners and Measure 37-style calls for compensation.
From the Warner Wetlands, just north of Plush, OR, in Lake County.
Here comes a long one, folks:
Let's start with Thursday. So I've got this deal worked out with my friends L and E, both lawyers for the county who also happen to be young and fun and in possession of a washer and dryer. I cook for them in return for the use of their laundry facilities. Not only does this mean my clothes are happier (laundromats are terrible for your clothes), it also means I get to test out fabulous dessert recipes on a willing audience.
For last week's laundry session I made a big spicy pot of tortilla soup in the slow-cooker and tried the recipe for "Very Good Chocolate Cake" from Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's The Gift of Southern Cooking, which happens to be a bomber cookbook (Thanks Pam!). I rolled into the dudes' place with a steaming vat of soup in my passenger seat, all nestled up to the beginnings of the cake - a bowl of dry ingredients and a bowl of wet. Short on time and disinclined to deal with the making of buttercream, especially in a sparsely-outfitted bachelor kitchen, I paired it with macerated strawberries. Needless to say, it was a hit. This is indeed a very good cake - moist and tender, with a sweet, old-fashioned chocolatey flavor tempered by the inclusion of strong coffee. Next time I'm going to go all out and do it 2-layer style, with a full dark chocolate-coffee frosting and everything. After a few hours, a few beers, and some good conversation with E (who is a bit more reserved than the ebullient L), I headed home - all of, oh, 6 blocks away.
Friday happened in a very low-key way. Work, coffee and logo/design brainstorming with my friend the Food Bank guy, phone calls from a few faraway friends (B en route to Cali, Mom, East Coasters doing East Coast things), and an evening at home.
And then there was Saturday.
So Megan and I had planned to meet up in Baker City for some yard-sale-shopping, lunch, ice cream, and hiking. But when we got to Baker, there were no yard sales. None. There had to have been 15 in Ontario last weekend, so I'd assumed Baker would be swimming in them as well. Or... not.
Unfazed, we did a little downtown strolling. Baker has a great Western downtown that's a mix of old (traditional Western wear outfitters) and new (espresso bar and kitchen goods store). Also, there's some street art.
Next up we hit the Salvation Army. Oh, what a Salvation Army. Say hello to my new purple jumpsuit:
Megan made me try it on and I said only if you pick something too and when I opened the door looking like that, well, I don't think either of us has laughed so hard in a long time. Also purchased: $3 electric mixer. This is going to revolutionize my life.
We had an excellent lunch at tiny, intimate (and affordable) Prospector's, which doesn't have menus; the proprietess tells you what she's got for the day and then goes back to prepare your selection. She also makes chocolates - truffles, fudge, and peanut brittle. The cardamom truffle was especially good.
Juxtaposition: watching the Wrangler-clad proprietess enthusiastically greet a group of dusty roughneck friends and then turn around to explain to us in detail all of the sophisticated truffles in her display case.
After a 20-minute drive out of town, we found ourselves winding up a narrow, rocky dirt road toward our chosen hike for the day. After a few miles we saw patches of snow in the road. A few miles farther, extended stretches of soft snow, requiring a few rounds of gunning the engine and holding on tight. And then we hit the snow that would not end - higher than the car's undercarriage and too soft to hike on. We had not brought snowshoes and soon tired of the thigh-high slush. It did make for some funny videos, though. Afterward I noticed that the guidebook listed this hike as being open "July-October." Oops.
We had only one last option for entertainment - the Sumpter dredge. So we drove. A few miles out I spotted it: a garage sale sign! When we pulled up I knew we'd found a good one - big FREE pile out front, intriguing-looking items in the garage, and nary a cheap plastic tchotchke in sight.
We ended up staying for almost 2 hours. The older couple running the sale were the friendliest, funniest, most fantastic pair of Westerners I've met. People came and went from the sale and still we talked, swapping adventure stories (mostly listening) and joking and getting hiking tips for the area. They met over 30 years ago, talked for 3 hours, and promptly moved in together - nothing but a life well-lived since. I can't properly convey how much of a delight it was to meet and talk to these folks. And, since they're moving, we've now got a standing invitation to visit them anytime on the southern Oregon coast. We're totally going to make that happen.
Back in Baker we closed the evening with good conversation and then Blizzards from Dairy Queen. What a good day.
How to keep oneself from getting sucked into wasting time on the internet when there are more pressing nesting and cleaning and puttering matters at hand: fill your easy chair, beside which the computer must be tethered to its external drive, with unpaid bills and other urgent to-dos.
It works.
These days I'm still cranking away on my going-on-5-years-old Powerbook. This old bugger takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin', it's great. I do all of my photo management (and occasional editing, usually too lazy) on it. Things tend to look pretty decent, color-wise, aside from all of the stupid mistakes I make when actually taking the pictures.
Then I go to the office. I work on a new Dell laptop there, provided to me by the U of O. When I log into my Flickr account, the pictures look terrible. Terrible! Too faded, too dark, too saturated, not saturated enough. I literally cringe every time I see them and think about all of my friends who are still using PCs and how every image they see on their laptops could be just as bad.
I suspect that higher-end PC laptops have better displays, but seriously, Dell, come on. My 5-year old Mac pwnz your NEW one. Get with the program.
Speaking of bad and old things, here's a classic, recently unearthed, I don't even remember who took this but it sure takes me back: How not to ride tandem, or, How not to take an action shot, or, Shades of violet that should never be worn together. Lordy.
I haven't really been following MoveOn lately, but this Salon piece is interesting - they're looking at MoveOn's stance on Iraq and when to withdraw in light of the fact that, hey, not everybody on that mailing list agrees about when/how to get out.
Now, however, with the Democrats running the House and Senate, MoveOn's stance on the Pelosi bill has led critics to suggest complicity with the new congressional power structure. MoveOn has settled for something less than ideal. It's the classic problem the outsider faces after getting inside: Now that it's got an in with the speaker of the House, has MoveOn lost its soul?It's true that Pariser, a 26-year-old who has worked for MoveOn since 2001, looks at the Iraq supplemental bill with a shrewdly pragmatic eye. Of all the Iraq plans discussed in Congress this week -- including one by liberal members calling for a quicker, complete withdrawal -- Pariser saw Pelosi's bill as the left's best chance. He saw it as the only one that could plausibly pass. And Pariser argues that its passage will help end the war. "Let's play this out," he says. "Congress passes a supplemental with a timeline attached and Bush is forced to veto it. That forces the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people." The bill is thus a starting point for future efforts. It builds legislative support, Pariser says, for an eventual congressional mandate to withdraw.
But some of the more radical (more idealistic? farther left?) peace movement groups think they've sold out by not endorsing an immediate-withdrawal option.
"Unfortunately we're living in a world where in order for anything to happen on Iraq that forces the president's hand, were going to need two thirds of Congress." MoveOn's strategy arises out of this parliamentary consideration; its goal is now legislative, to build toward two-thirds support in Congress.
I think this was a smart move. It's a compromise, sure, but it's something. How do you make that distinction between taking a truly principled (but very nearly doomed) stance and taking a compromised (but more likely to move forward) stance? Can you play parliamentary games and still call yourself an activist? An idealist?
Living and working in a deeply conservative, poor, rural community has put me into an even more pragmatic state of mind than usual; not only am I working against the overwhelming crush of inertia, there's also the matter of lack of resources. I'm learning that slow, incremental steps toward progress seem so much more, well, likely to succeed.
Speaking of pragmatic, Bill McKibben continues to be awesome. (also via Salon)
What do you say to someone who says, "I'll tell you when I've had enough. If I want another car, that should be my right."All I'm saying is this is a democracy. I don't have much patience for the argument that no one should tell me what to do ever. In a democracy we work on figuring out what kind of society we want to build. And if you want to make the argument that we'd be better off with all of us buying whatever car we want until the end of time, then you're going to have to deal with those of us who are pointing out some of the drawbacks.
He's long been one of the most strident voices for taking action on climate change, but he's practical about it. We don't have to chuck capitalism altogether, but we do have to rethink growth and recognize that, hey, marginal utility has diminishing returns.
Getting back to rural Oregon and changing the subject a bit, here's McKibben on a future that may be drastically affected by climate change. In a sense, this is the same kind of thing that I'm working toward with my job, except that I spend my time talking about floods and wildfires instead of global warming:
But if you stop to think about it, you start to understand that the communities we need to build in order to slow down global warming are the same kind of communities that are going to be resilient and durable enough to help adapt to that which we can't prevent. In the not very distant future, having neighbors is going to be more important than having belongings. Membership in a community is going to become important once again both psychologically and physically in the way that it's been for most of human history.
For example: many people in the county in which I work have no fire protection or emergency services - they're too remote. That means if your house catches fire, the only people who will come help you are your neighbors. And when you live out in the high desert, which has a fire cycle of about 30 years, you've got a damn good chance of your house catching fire. Or your barn. Or your crops. Or the range where you graze your cattle. When I go out and interview people in the county for my job, they tell me this over and over again - we are a tight-knit community. We take care of one another. Stuff happens, but we get each other through it.
Wherever I end up settling down, I want to be able to feel that way about my community.
Hi, my name is Chicken Little. I'm going to talk to you today about the risk of a falling sky in Eastern Oregon.
It's funny how sometimes you won't hear a song, really truly hear it, until days or months or years after that first time. I mean this musically and lyrically; maybe it's the back harmonies you never noticed, the way a fiddle swings lazily into melody, or the verse that for whatever reason suddenly socks you in the gut in the best possible manner.
You sit there listening, struck dumb, wondering how the hell you missed it the first time, the first fifty times. You wonder what changed. But mostly once you really hear it you can never go back. It'll never be background noise again.
Dear Wilco,
Thank you for writing and recording pretty much every song on A Ghost is Born. I'm sorry it took me so many years to truly hear them. I'm making up for lost time.
Love,
Sarah
---
I think it was just about a year ago that somebody gave me some good advice. It was: Sarah, you need to give yourself more credit. I bristled upon hearing it. I have this memory of puffing uphill on a cold afternoon shortly afterward, preparing an arsenal of snippy, defensive replies that I would never use. What the hell is that supposed to mean? I give myself plenty of goddamn credit! It's you and everyone else who needs to give me more credit! And then I forgot about it and proceeded with a rather dissatisfying Life as Usual.
A few months later, I moved out West and started over. Sans friends, family, and familiar territory, I found myself flailing. I mean, I had new friends and I liked my new location and I was doing great at my new job. But it was still a rather dissatisfying Life as Usual, just without all of my old comforts.
It was just about 2 months ago that somebody else gave me some more good advice, given in a rather less... pedantic tone, as the closing to an email: be good to your heart.
Something prickled in the back of my mind, but I brushed it aside and kept on walking. I am good to my heart! See how open and willing to love am I, even in the face of gigantic red warning flags? Now that's treating your heart right, that's love.
As should be obvious, I paid big. Don't really need to go into details, but it involved a month of irrational expectations, impulsive behavior, and piss-poor decisions. It sucked. And, well, something changed.
I can't think of a way to say this without being heavy-handed, so rather than that, I'm gonna go a little oblique - in the immortal words of Jimmy Cliff, I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW. *
There's some real progress being made over here at Sarita Inc., folks. I'm doing well - better than I have been in a real long time. Knowing something and living something aren't nearly one and the same, but you've got to start somewhere. It's about damn time.
* Yes, I know he wasn't the original artist. But the Jimmy Cliff version is the one they used to play on 94.9 FM every Monday morning when I was a kid and by God I love it.
You'd think that's an Onion headline right there, but it's not.
Easter Sunday. Time for spring vegetables, candy baskets in the mail from Mom, and Portland's Bunny on a Bike Ride III with Katie. Plus all the other awesome things about PDX, like good food and friends and springtime on the west side of the mountains.
That was my plan until yesterday. Then Peter and the Wolf had to go and schedule a chill Sunday night show in Boise at this guy's house. And, well, that would be pretty stellar.
I live 6-7 hours from Portland and the bike ride's not til 3 PM so there's no way I'd make it back for an evening show. So doing both is out.
What to do?!? Somebody help me out here.
So if you receive an email through Gmail that contains, say, a Russian mailing address, Gmail will think you speak Russian and make the text ads in Cyrillic script.
OK, so I've got a lot of updating to do: Lakeview, Hart Mtn, Eugene, Leslie Gulch, Whitehorse, Boise, and so much more. I'll get to that tonight. Today, I've got work to do at work. Lots of it. Lots.
Hope you fine folks are well. Come back soon.
By the way, I'm in Eugene for a few days of job training. Updates may be kinda few and far between.
How to stay alert when you have to sit at a desk for 9 hours straight and wrangle a big mess of qualitative, anecdotal information into something resembling a quantitative risk assessment.
(Or: the peppiest, most melodious and motivating mp3s I have on my computer at work, thanks to the sweet sweet world of music blogs and intermittent flash-drive transfers from home. No, it's not in any sort of specific order other than how iTunes randomly mixed it.)
Andrew Bird - Heretics
David Kitt - Don't Fuck With Me
Fela Kuti - Shakara
Big Sir - The Pistol Chasers
Amy Winehouse - Rehab
T. Rex - Jeepster
Peter Bjorn & John - Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
The Shins - Australia
Andrew Bird - Two Way Action
Wilco - Theologians
Michael Haves & Chris Thile - Air Mail Special
Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris - This is Us
Allen Toussaint - Last Train
Jon Brion - Knock Yourself Out
I've got a bet for a shortbread cookie from Sweet Life riding on my getting an entire section of the hazards plan drafted today (it's due at the beginning of next week), so I don't have much to say to y'all this morning.
I do, however, have 2 sweeeeet Tweedy vids to keep you entertained: solo acoustic versions of Theologians and, whoa man, Acuff-Rose. Well worth it.
Theologians:
Acuff-Rose:
Song of the evening: Uncle Tupelo, Steal the Crumbs
It's raining tonight, just the light, intermittent sprinkling that's all the high desert ever sees. I've got all my windows open despite the damp and cold - it smells like the beginning of spring out there.
I love walking past this house. It's conveniently located on the way to the library. I feel like I should leave a charming ceramic tchotchke in one of the pots as thanks.
Here are a few bright spots for a gray Tuesday morning:
I’ve always wanted to date someone who’d call me darlin. Of course, you can’t force that. The term of endearment has to happen organically. I dated a guy once who called me sugar, in an exaggerated Southern accent. Shuh-gurr. He wasn’t from the south. Not even close. I acted like I liked it, and at first I even thought maybe I did, but inside I’d cringe whenever he said it.
— $26 million more to hire 400 additional reading coaches.
— $3.9 million to continue implementing class size reduction.
— $295 million to double teacher merit pay bonuses to about $4,000.
— $1.4 billion more to increase public school spending by 7.5 percent including a $500 per student increase.
— $25.7 million more to provide an additional 12,673 Bright Futures scholarships.
— $100 million more to purchase sensitive lands under the Florida Forever Program, a 33 percent increase.
— $50 million to continue Lake Okeechobee cleanup and rehabilitation.
— $40 million to help implement rehabilitation of the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers.
— $100 million to fully fund Florida’s share of the state-federal Everglades restoration project.
— $68 million in new money for grants, rebates and tax incentives to encourage energy conservation.
— $40 million in new money to establish an Alternative Energy Incentive Fund.
— $750,000 in new money to create a public education program to encourage energy conservation and alternative energy use.
— $10 million to continue the state’s Renewable Energy Technology Grant Program.
If you substitute "men" for "women" in this sentence, you get where I've been at for the past few months. Thanks to A. for putting it so well (and reminding me why I'm taking time off).
I always thought it would be nice to have a variety of women to pursue, but being in such a situation I've realized that the only way that situation crops up is when none of the women you know are really what you need.
Here's the schedule for Monday and Tuesday of next week, as prepared by Marc, for when my natural hazards colleagues and I ("Team Hazards," "Hazardous Girls," "Mitigation Mamas") will be in Eugene again.
I know it's not January 1. But I just found this list of 9 New Year's resolutions for the Left from Katha Pollitt at The Nation and it's dead on. These are the kinds of things that it does one well to hear at any time. Here are my four favorites; you can read the rest here.
4. Don't think your lifestyle can save the world. I love slow food! I cook slow food! I shop at farmers' markets, I pay extra for organic, I am always buying cloth bags and forgetting to bring them to the supermarket. But the world will never be saved by highly educated, privileged people making different upscale consumer choices. If you have enough money to buy grass-fed beef or tofu prepared by Tibetan virgins, you have enough money to give more of it away to people who really need it and groups that can make real social change.7. Be honest. Withdrawing from Iraq may be the right thing to do, but it won't mean peace, at least not for the Iraqis.
8. Stop treating race and gender and sexual orientation as annoying distractions from the big manly task of uniting America behind class politics. Like it or not, women, gays and people of color make up something like 80 percent of the population. Get used to it! Discrimination--whether it's racial resegregation or denial of reproductive healthcare or antigay legislation--is not some touchy-feely issue of "identity politics." It's a central feature of the social injustice we all claim to be fighting.
9. Have some fun. Party like it's 2007!
Say you're lookin' for some new hubcaps for your car. Maybe yours are ugly or cracked or you don't even have any. You could go to your local Les Schwab and buy a set for pretty cheap, but you have a better idea: you're gonna steal some.
So you drive around town, cruisin' in your crappy car with its ugly hubcaps, looking for some 'caps that'll fit your wheels and make you look good. Those chrome babies on the F250 parked on the street? Nah. The swank 'caps on the neighbor's Hummer? No way. You spot a 2001 Subaru parked innocently in the driveway of a big house. It has a phenomenal set of cheapass grey plastic Wal-Mart 'caps - one of them is even cracked! HOT DAMN, you think. IT'S MY LUCKY DAY.
You come back by night to do the deed, since the car is parked near several other cars and lots of people live in the apartments in the big house. There are also several driveway spotlights. No matter - you set to work. You get two of the hubcaps off the car.
In the silence of a small-town Friday night, you drop one. SHIT. A light comes on at a neighboring house, and a sleepy middle-aged man pokes his head out to survey the scene. Maybe you ran away, maybe you hid, maybe you were long gone down the highway before he stumbles outside. But he doesn't see anything, so he goes back to bed.
The car's owner, the kind of brokeass twentysomething who would have cheapass Wal-Mart 'caps, looks out of her kitchen window the next morning. She blinks and looks again. Are her hubcaps missing?! She hustles downstairs and looks again.
Two are gone.
Two are still there.
What the hell?
Her landlady and husband live next door, so she asks them if they've heard anything. She gets the story of the noise in the middle of the night, the checking to see if anyone was there. But that's it - nobody saw anything. She herself slept through the entire debacle. They didn't take her bicycle parts or snowshoes or bike rack or winter hiking boots, all of which were in the car. There was no stereo to steal, just the factory tape deck, thank the Lord, since that got ganked a few years ago and she is too broke and cheap to buy a new one.
The landlady suggests that she go to the auto salvage yard and see if they might have some hubcaps to match the two that are still hanging on. She wonders if she could get some sweet funky 'caps for cheap.
She wonders if they'll come back tonight for the other two. If so, they're in for a little surprise - she'll be out of town. HA! Of course, there's always Sunday night. And Monday night, and every other night. Dammit.
Also, did you know that if you Google "two hubcaps stolen" you will come up with a lot of police reports of people having had two hubcaps stolen?
Some good reads from the past few days: