Meme member memorabilia memoir memorial memo

Here are the rules to be broken:
A) The rules of the game get twisted at the beginning.
B) Each player questions the questions about himself or herself.
C) At the end of the post, the post ends

1) Ten years ago I was...
Searching for grit in paradise.

2) Five things on today's to-do list:
Sour some dough
Catch an express bus and then bike uphill all the way home, weeee
Remember that gophers eat too
Empty my head of planning details about an event next Tuesday
Fish, perhaps grilled or pan seared


3) Things I'd do if I were a billionaire:
Move to Mars
Buy a unicorn
Establish an ethos of equality on Wall Street

4) Three bad habits:
Breaking silly rules
Watching to much b-ball
Annoying Robin (by breaking silly rules and watching too much b-ball)


5) Four places I've lived on the 42nd parallel:
Boston Amherst Binghamton Ames, BABA, then, of course Santa Baba

6) Six jobs I've had in my life:
Husband father friend brother son and part-time drinker

Now That's a Great Speech

The Obama speech responding to the first serious right-wing smear campaign against him is just brilliant, especially if you watch it, but even if you read it. It's extremely intelligent in providing, insisting really, on the historical context of the anger that gets expressed virulently, weirdly perhaps, in the black community. He dares speak the truth. Yet the speech is extremely savvy in speaking to the concerns of black and white communities, perfectly exemplifying his politics of reconciliation and hope. It's as if he and his campaign have been waiting for this opportunity to turn smear into inspiration.

I find it particularly emotional, I suspect, because I've been waiting way too many years for someone, anyone, on a national stage to speak the truth.

A Car That Runs on Air, Literally

Why have I just heard about this news? The real green future in cars is not hybrid electrics or even electrics, but compressed air vehicles. The advantage: No batteries, no nasty battery acids or metals. Rather, energy storage is in the compression. Check out this longish (9 minute) clip for details.

Stars from Music of the Night

Jenna Tico, Co-Director of the student production at Santa Barbara High School, "Music of the Night," brought the house down with Cole Patterson and their version of "Stud and a Babe."




Jenna also directed and sings in "Mama Who Bore Me," featuring Karlin Trexler and some passionate daughters.

Why Greening the Grid Comes First

In the US, coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, provides 50% of electricity, with all fossil fuels fuels providing 72%. Globally, coal provides 40% and all fossil fuels around 66% of the world's electrical power.

This reality suggest that we should first green the grid, then plug into it for transportation and other energy needs.

(Click the image to go to the original website and see a clearer image. It is also, of course, a vivid record of population, wealth, and probably other distributions.)

Our New Place

We leased a fabulous place in Mission Canyon: Craftsman styling with redwood everywhere, island and ocean views, huge yard with vegetable garden and chicken coop. It's a 2 bedroom, 2 bath, large kitchen, huge fire-placed living room, hardwood floors, well-kept funky place from the 1880s. Oh and a pool too.

We might even be able to afford it if we live off the chickens and vegetables.

The End of Economic Fetishism

I laughed at Barbara Ehrenreich's comment on the bipartisan politicos' effort to stave off recession:

With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris.... The immediate challenge...is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

The joke works, too, if the economy were a giant penis. Either way, politicians' desire to stimulate our economic lives is the politics of the pimp, a $1200 come-on from the Wall Street john. For most of us struggling in the middle classes, all this economic stimulation will produce at best fleeting pleasure, consumerist titillation, climaxed at the cash register, and usually ending there. To be sure, $1200 is not nothing, which is what we would otherwise get, what we usually get. But is that what we really want? Will such consumerist titillation change anyone's lives?

Even if this stimulation works and gets the economy throbbing again, the politicos' obsession with the consumerist fetish doesn't begin to address deeper questions:

1. Does economic growth really make us wealthier?
   
2. Does it make our world better?
   
3. Does it make us happier?
   

1) The much ballyhooed economic growth in recent decades serves mainly to create a huge and increasing gap between rich and the rest of us, who try to keep up by working too hard, 350 hours a year longer than Europeans or Japanese. Much of that enforced workaholism is economically ephemeral, except for those who own a home. No surprise, then, that the bursting housing market bubble is the reason the politicos decided to get together and throw a $1200 sop to us middle class saps. Santa Barbara is perhaps a great example of this class dynamic of comfortable wealth, invisible poor, and struggling, over-worked, middle class DINS (double-income no sex), except that the middle class in Santa Barbara hasn't been able to purchase a home since maybe 1998.

2) Even if our politicians won't connect the economy to the environment, many people, especially in places like Santa Barbara, are now beginning to realize that a stimulated, throbbing economy predicated largely on the dizzying production and consumption of stuff ain't natural. Global economic growth, especially in China and India, is stretching resources and stressing the planet. Choose your Armageddon: peak oil or global warming. Rather than addressing the question of sustainability, politicians can only think to provoke our consumerist fetish in order to stimulate unsustainable economic growth.

3) Finally, fortunately, is the question of happiness. As Bill McKibben argues with grace and hope, "the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own." He advocates sustainable, local economies, that value connections to people rather than wealth as the source of human happiness. Why work so hard for money if it doesn't make us happy? Why destroy the environment if there's no happiness in it? Why do we focus on our consumerist fetish when what we really want is so much bigger and more human?

I'm not advocating that our leaders do nothing to prevent recession or depression. I also have to struggle to feel the hope promised by local economies in some murky, idealistic, post-apocalyptic future. I'm not sure what the answers are. But I'm not turned on by stimulating economic growth or tricked by the john's promise of $1200.