Tuesday, 10 April 2007
I’ve often been impressed by Gwen Ifill, even more so after reading this essay—and I have to agree: it’s an unequal playing field out there for most of us.
One issue I’d pick with Ms. Ifill, though: those Rutgers players are women not girls.
Monday, 9 April 2007
Blooms and buds are luscious visuals, but the vegetative world offers other eye candy, like the bark of this mature tree.
Sunday, 8 April 2007
I am amazed at this turn of events: huge donations (in aggregate) pouring into presidential candidate coffers (well, some of them)—that is, huge compared to previous primaries/elections. So, is there any significant influence on this from “American Idol” (and myriad opportunities to vote for this or that on the web)? Have some people got the voting bug from popular culture? Is it too much of a stretch to think they have gained the urge to vote and the urge to donate to their favored candidate all at once?
Will people follow their cash to the voting booth? Or are the donors overwhelmingly people who voted in the last presidential election?
And, of most import, perhaps, to the candidates and their handlers, will this level of giving continue? Can they burn through this cash assuming gobs more are coming their way?
Saturday, 7 April 2007
I watched the digital outdoor thermometer drop from 30.2°F to 29.8°F around 7:15 this morning, tying the low record for the day. “Unseasonably cold” doesn’t adequately describe it! Fortunately, it’s breezy enough that nothing has apparently frozen. I hear of snow flurries in the mountains and northern suburbs. Brrrrrr!
Friday, 6 April 2007
Yesterday crews across Piedmont Park mowed and trimmed, but these guys, busy generating branches to feed an Intimidator, may have been having the most fun.
Tonight we’ve been warned to expect temps at or just below freezing, even here under the city’s weather bubble. It’s already clear and breezy, just right to usher in those low temps.
Thursday, 5 April 2007
Ecologically aware members of the general public in this country tend to do a better job thinking about the implications of their choices about what they ingest than thinking about “downstream” effects. Sometimes we consider problems with fertilizer washing into our waterways, but less so the chemicals we send out our homes’ wastepipes. (Exception: Jay—but you’re not “general public”!!)
Cornelia Dean, in this NYTimes piece, details the problem liquids that typical households deliver to treatment systems that often just pass them on without trying to remove them. I’d heard about hormone problems in water creatures and the presence of antibiotics in streams, but it’s far more than that. So, your new acronym is PPCP, meaning pharmaceutical and personal care products. Find PPCP in a water faucet near you. Notes an environmental scientist, “it is a mistake to consider all of these compounds safe “by default,” and…more must be done to assess their cumulative effects, individually or in combination, even at low doses.”
I had no understanding of buying bottled drinking water until I lived in Oaxaca in 1989 and the tap water was not potable. I have never seriously considered it here in Atlanta (“our water tastes good”), but I may have to reconsider—but not in individual portions, only those large water-cooler sizes (returnable ones, too). Too bad here we don’t have the trucks cruising residential neighborhoods with refills, their drivers yelling “Aaaahhhh-gwaaaaaahhhhhh!”
Here’s a Mexican-Spanish vocabulary word: garrafón—large bottle or carafe, (a perfect size for household use).
Wednesday, 4 April 2007
This house is basically around the corner, but after the first few times I passed it, I only saw the electric green trim. Somehow, last week I looked beyond that and saw that the shingles are probably around five decades old. Retro paint, retro shingles?
A fierce front came through in the wee hours, bringing enough rain to drop the pollen count to a figure in the mid-500s—still considered extremely high (but nothing like the 5500+ it was). The meteorologists say the temps will stay low (highs in the 50s) through the weekend—that’s a change!—and maybe below freezing in the ’burbs and mountains. This afternoon was breezy and sunny.
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
…historians consistently differ from ecologists, who more often than not treat people as exogenous variables that fit awkwardly if at all into the theoretical models of the discipline. The historian’s tendency is quite opposite. The chief protagonists and antagonists of our stories are almost always human, for reasons that go to the very heart of our narrative impulse.*
We archaeologists often try hard to get people, emotional people, into our publications, but it’s difficult to do while appeasing the gods of science by describing what is nearly unarguably true—systematically observed truths, anyway (and replicable, if at all possible—that’s why there’s so much data published in addition to discussions and analysis).
Charles Hudson’s recent fiction, Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa, is an example of a premier ethnohistorian abandoning the limitations of academic publishing in a search for (adventure in?) truths not readily accepted there.
BTW, a triumphant (not triumphal) 4.6 miles today at 3.6 mph. Whew! T-shirt weather already, even before 8 am.
* William Cronon. 1992. A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, Journal of American History 78:1347–1376.
Monday, 2 April 2007
I think pretty highly of Atlanta’s mayor, Shirley Franklin, but sometimes I wonder if the entrenched system has unalterable aspects. Now, I discovered, it takes three men, two armed and apparently vigilant, to collect the city’s nickels. The guy on the left never took his eyes, as near as I could tell, off the meter-emptier; so much for what’s going on in the general area (including directions perps might enter the scene from). Is this more Homeland Security dole working for the benefit of all?
Sunday, 1 April 2007
Lovely fleurs brought over by neighbors headed to the beach….