Small Streams

How to Make Things

I always loved the factory visits on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and it's great to know that the Children's Museum will be taking some of that information on the road in an exhibit called "How to Make Things." Mike Wereschagin of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has the story.

Would have written more on this but have already spent too much time dealing with comment spam.

Don't Get a Hard'n

Or as Guy Clark says "Pick you a ripe one," but when it comes to tomatoes that's getting harder to do.

Just finished Joan Dye Gussow's This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, who among other things spends a chapter dissecting the Great Tomato Fraud that has been perpetrated upon the country.

Gussow deals with this and other quandries as we become more and more alienated from our food sources. Here are a couple of good quotes from the "Eat My Yard" chapter:

Because my "farm" is only 1,000 square feet of growing space twenty minutes north of NYC, I couldn't really feed myself if I wanted to. But I do grow all my own vegetables, and I therefore eat differently than most people — better, I think. In deciding what to eat, I bind myself to the seasons, augmented by what a small upright freezer will hold.

If we want to be responsible to ourselves and the planet, then the best most of us can do most of the time is to shorten the chain from the farm to our table, get as close to the producer as possible whenever we can, and for the rest, until the food system unwinds, take a chance on regulatory agencies we don't really trust.

I love the inevitablity of our food system unwinding!

Here's another good one:

. . . my assumption about consumption has always been that it is better not to. Not buying, I was convinced, was more righteous than buying. If you could grow it or make it or remake it, you were a better person for it.

And here are some goodies from the flap copy:

It takes three pounds of wild caught fish to raise one pound of farm-raised salmon.

It takes 435 fossil-fuel calories to fly a five calorie strawberry from California to New York.

Besides the one non-bearing tomato plant that I've been growing, the only other thing I do to get closer to production is order our vegetables from Kretschmann Farm. But interesting things are happening in Pittsburgh, including the Urban Farming Initiative, who seek to grow Pittsburgh by growing Pittsburgh.

Some Faves

I sometimes think of myself as a middle-of-the-road fellow, but Mark Morford of SFGate reminds me how rational thinking in the cause of left/liberal ideas leads to some wonderful musings. Here's Morford on the California Supreme Court decision on gay marriage:

The court's decision does not really matter. The right-wing sneers and I-told-you-so's do not really matter. The hateful backlash against gays and progressive notions of love does not matter.

Here's why: The die has been cast. The gauntlet has been thrown down. The wheels are in motion. The sea change is under way. The strap-on has been, well, strapped on.

I'm also probably going to be damned for liking this piece in the New Yorker by Paul Rudnick.

Economic Coup

Was trying to come up with some kind of description of an outcome of the "build-or-buy" question. I was thinking of an instance where someone could cheaply develop something much better than, say, a fancy, propane-fueled outdoor grill. I'm still developing the idea, and I didn't really want to post an entry, but I did write something down in my notebook.

Carrying It in My Head

Went to the beach and wondered whether I could remember some of the thoughts that occured to me. I kept repeating the first two to myself, then I counted them off with my fingers, and then I tried a little visualization, with a little pertinacity, or is it perspicaciousness, I was able to bring home the following words and attached ideas from the beach.

• Pastoral. I'm noticing that people have large lawns that are periodically attacked by lawn care professionals with loud and angry mowing machines. I thought this was fairly ironic since the style of having large grass lawns, which has been traced to George Washington's Mt. Vernon, had been cultivated to evoke the pastoral and the peaceful.

• Cleat. I need to buy a cleat and pulleys and hooks and ropes for storing the kayak I found washed ashore.

• Lamps. I really like paper party lanterns. Especially the fact that they are made of paper and you can fill them with fire.

• Granite. I'd love for there to be a Cape Anne Natural History which do things like explain why granite has different colors.

• Activity Book. Saw my eight-year old niece with an activity book, and am thinking, "activity books are wasted on the young." I do think that adults would start buying up well designed activity books just like they do "for Dummies" books. I remember a pastor asking the congregation to spend the week repeating a single psalm and reflecting on it. Pretty good activity, I think. But the book doesn't have to be a doctrinaire Christian book, nor would it have to be a self-fulfillment book, or anything like that, just a lot of thought problems and exercises. Something to amuse ourselves until death strikes.

• Mussels. Flipped through the rackweed on the big, granite rocks to look for mussels. Would love to have mussels in white wine sauce.

• Shelves. I love the way the some people keep order in their lives. Looking at these shelves makes me happy.

Close Out

Will be closing out comments on a lot of old entries, the whole comment spam thing, you know. So if you really want to comment on an item, send me an e-mail.

Are You Mental?

Maybe you're just a mentalist. The New York Times tells the story of Marc Salem, a man who turned a mental quirk into a side career and eventually into a Broadway show. Salem calls himself an entertainer and not a mentalist or a psychic, but what he does — predict actions, uncover information, read the serial numbers off of distant currency — is approach the world in an unconventional fashion.

he had a certain hypersensitivity that manifested itself in a certain obsession with patterns and empathy to people's emotions. (He blames the same condition for his father's premature death at 41. "He did not know how to have what would you call clinical distance," he said.)

The sixth sense, as I've heard elsewhere, is just a combination of information our other five senses can't use. I'd say there might not be much use for Salem's work beyond the stage, but we've been at war for more than a year based on body language.

Salem, a director of research for the Children's Television Workshop, also has some interesting things to say about entertainment and education.

"One of McLuhan's quotes — such a quotable guy — was anyone who thinks there's a difference between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either," Mr. Salem said. "Because all entertainment, whether you want it to or not, has a curriculum."

Find out more about Marc Salem here.