Small Streams

Come on and Take a Free Ride

I always thought that "Free Ride" was a Foghat tune, but I think maybe it was Edgar Winter's.

Anyway the whole family went to Free Ride, which is located in Construction Junction in Point Breeze, this past Saturday. We brought a bike in to fix, one to drop off, and looked for bikes to buy. Thomas got a 15-speed for twenty bucks. I found a ten-speed, which I'll have to learn how to fix myself. Actually, the folks at Free Ride are very generous in their assisting. Work for them for four hours and you can have the bike for free.

In my mind, it's all very eutechnically correct, and the whole arrangement reminds me of possibilities of alternative economies, alternative manufacturing, alternative thinking, etc., especially when you see a dozen enthusiasts tuning bikes, picking out and putting back tools. Sure, the people are younger and hipper looking than me(Perhaps an updated version of the Dazed and Confused cast), but Free Ride has a very welcoming environment, especially since they had Dock Boggs playing on the CD player.

I Found It in the Sunday Papers

Bloggers Organize -- What if Jane Jacobs had a blog?
Nature in the City -- New York's High Line remains as a tribute to nature's regenerative powers.
Beckett -- A centenary tribute to Samuel Beckett, Joyce stenographer, writer of Waiting for Godot. I have no idea what it means.
Tim Menees leaves Post-Gazette. -- Menee's was the P-G's boomer cartoonist. Not as prolific as Rob Rogers. A little bit more acerbic. I can't think of Allegheny County row officers without thinking of Menees' monikers, Clerk of Quartz, Lamplighter, and Profanitary. I also loved his drawings of State Store officials with Kaiser Wilhelm helmets.

His drawings always seemed to hint that they might at any moment fugue into Ralph Steadman-style chaos. Will miss seeing his words and pictures in the P-G. He's a multi-talented person, though, and I'm sure he'll be turning up all over the place.

Eat Nature

I took this on the way back from dropping my daughter at school. I usually listen to WDUQ's Sean Doherty and Bob Studebaker banter about sports. But today I was busy trying to take pictures out the window.

On the way to picking up my daughter from school, I usually listen to Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Yesterday she interviewed, Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, and the more recent The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan discussed the industrial methods which produce the foods we eat and some of the alternatives. At any moment, I thought Wendell Berry would sprout out of Pollan's chest like something in Men in Black and start reciting to Gross chapter and verse the problems with our techno-industrial agricultural system. Pollan did a pretty good job on his own. I'm going to have to check out The Omnivore's Dilemma; and I might even have to add him to my pantheon of non-fiction writers, which stands as follows:

Fernand Braudel
Finley Peter Dunne
William Whyte
Jane Jacobs
Daniel Kemmis
Lewis Mumford
Stewart Brand
Kevin Kelly
Wendell Berry
Jerry Mander
H. D. Thoreau

Here, There, and Everywhere

. . . is the name of a Beatles song and a recently published book by Geoff Emerick, one time sound engineer for the Beatles. I haven't read the book yet, but I've ordered it from the library. Elvis Costello wrote the foreword, and he writes about the conditions that Emerick worked under and what those conditions gave rise to. One of the great lines in the foreword is where Costello talks about how George Martin, Emerick, and the Beatles were struggling with the technology, how some of the great technological advances were made with chopped up audio tape, rubber bands, and whatever they had on hand. As Edwin Land said, "The problem can be solved with the materials on hand in the room at the time." Few of these tricks, so to speak, have been superceded by much more powerful technologies. At one point Lennon was looking for a certain vocal sound on "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite." Emerick's solution: have Lennon sing through a loudspeaker.

Emerick traces the advances of recording through a milieu that went from Abbey Road engineers wearing white coats to wearing Nehru jackets. The spirit of Zen comes to mind, moving from strict discipline to la la, and it probably gave this music its sense of endless possibility.

The teachers say "Learn the fundamentals first." What if the fundamentals are Sgt. Pepper's, the Banana Splits, Doonesbury, and Kerouac's "Dr. Sax"? -- which by the way, would make the foundation for a great multi-media mash up. I see that someone has already tried their hand at it.

Recycling in Pittsburgh, Part Two

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had a mouse in the house. The mouse seems to have died due to a recycling accident. Somehow he found his way into an olive oil bottle in the recycling bin and couldn't get out. You can thank me for not taking a picture of the result.

I believe there are much more humane ways to get rid of mice.

In other recycling news, the P-G's Rich Lord reports that Recycling Begins to Pay off for Pittsburgh.

Recycling still seems like a feel-good thing, but as the collection, distribution, and technology improves, I can't help but think that we'll be doing even more recycling and that there will be an even better market for our discards. At least we'lll be making more room in our landfills for stuff from New York and New Jersey.

Thoughts on Breakfast

I had some name brand nonMeat sausage this morning, and had to come face to face with some of the problems of eating vegetarian.

I'm all for the idea of living lightly on the planet. And if each American eats nearly two hundred pounds of meat each year (my estimate), that makes for 60 billion pounds of slaughtering a year. Ethics aside this is a disturbing statistic.

I've always heard that raising meat is very inefficient. Cows eat thousands of pounds of vegetable matter to bring forth a small fraction of that in meat.

To do our part and to avoid clogging my arteries any more than necessary, I've been eating Morning Star or Boca sausages. We buy them in ten ounce packages at four dollars a package, as opposed to sausage which can be had at three dollars a pound. So it's hard to see how the efficiencies of not passing our vegetables through a cow are making their way to the consumer.

So let's look at nonMeat products like TVP:

TVP® is a food product made from soybeans. It is produced from soy flour after the soybean oil has been extracted, then cooked under pressure, extruded, and dried.

First off, food that has a copyright by its name makes me nervous. The crux of the matter is that we're looking at a fairly processed food by the time it winds up as sausage (Don't tell me it's not sausage, because the definition of sausage is anything you can stick in a casing, and actually you don't even need the casing.), enclosed in a plastic lining and colorful cardboard box.

My hunch is that we can lighten our load on the planet without our doomed bovine friends. Though the urge to have processed and packaged foods foils even vegan purists. How many petrochemicals go into manufacturing and shipping the product, how much waste packaging does the product create, what's the premium in price?

I guess I could just eat the soybeans (edamame) themselves, which I like to do. But I grew up eating sausage for breakfast, and I might as well pay a premium to keep my arteries clean and keep eating soy-sages. I don't think that my conscience is any cleaner for it, though.