Log (page 2)
This is the “blog” bit. All the wanky introspective stuff you’d expect – I’ll even try and throw in the odd post apologising for not blogging regularly. Seriously.
Double-vision
A pair of computer-generated T-Rexes.
Last Rites
God made mud.
God got lonesome
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud
that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honour!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait…
To find out for certain what my wampeter was…
And who was in my karass…
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.– The Last Rites of Bokononism, from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle
Shadow Unit
“Brady flicked Lau a glance of his own, as tightly packed as a .zip file.” [241 words]
Intersection of High, Manchester and Lichfield Streets, Christchurch, 8 May 1923
Pelorus Sound, between 1923-1928
Lake Taupo, ca late 1950s
Nerd Venn
Crisis and Hope
Noam Chomsky, quoting The New Nation, on the response to food shortages in much of the (developing) world:
It’s very telling that trillions have already been spent to patch up leading world financial institutions, while out of the comparatively small sum of $12.3 billion pledged in Rome earlier this year, to offset the food crisis, only $1 billion has been delivered.[…]
… As The New Nation anticipated, the “devastating news” released by the World Food Programme barely even reached the level of “mere ‘news.’” In The New York Times, the WFP report of the reduction in the meager Western efforts to deal with this growing “human catastrophe” merited 150 words on page ten under “World Briefing.”
And on choice:
…if Americans a half century ago had been given the choice of directing their tax money to Pentagon programs to enable their grandchildren to have computers, iPods, the Internet, and so on, or putting it into developing a livable and sustainable socioeconomic order, they might have made the latter choice. But they had no choice.
(Both extracts from Noam Chomsky, Crisis and Hope)
Farming (pt. 2)
A farmer defends industrial farming practices. Another farmer responds. Some great debate happening, there. From the latter:
The sustainable-food movement needs to step up and start grappling with big questions. I’ve said for a while that I see three big challenges for the sustainable-food movement as it scales up: 1) soil fertility—in the absence of synthesized nitrogen and mined phosphorous and potassium, how are we to build soil fertility on a larger scale?; 2) labor—sustainable farming requires more hands on the ground; who’s going to work our farm fields, and at what wages?; and 3) access—in an economy built on long-term wage stagnation, how can we make sustainably grown food accessible to everyone?
Hurst’s essay begins to engage these questions—sort of. I don’t have the time or energy right now to take it on point by point. But I will say that the discussion would be much richer if he acknowledged a few serious questions about the industrial-farming model he champions.
Window
