Orgrease Crankbait

Leaf Raking

2009-11-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

My friend -- I believe them on all things environmental and weedy -- said that they were raking leaves... to which I was inspired to write about my not raking leaves.

They also reminded me that as we live very very close to the Atlantic Ocean and the salt-hay marsh that our residence is an intruder on the saltwater wetland... and though they are a bit inland they noted that they are intruders on a freshwater wetland. Oh, my, we have so much responsibility in so little time.

When it occurred to me after reading Bill McKibben’s book (Deep Economy), and my reaching out to friend Mr. McKibben on FB -- on the day that he was doing an intensive at 350.org, -- the primary a reason we do not live in a super-kool place (like Ithaca, NY) is that we don’t do enough in the intensive local of ‘me’ to make our daily place super-kool. Not raking leaves, and feeding sparrows at the bird feeder makes for a portion of my answer to the feeling of uncoolness to be overcome.

First appearance of this article is at Blogcritics.com, which means that an editor looked at it and made modest corrections, said nice things to me, and had sense enough to show me where it made no sense whatsoever at all... things like the subtle difference between if it were the leaves that were indignant at my laziness, or my family, or the neighbors, or the yard police. At times it can be very important to know exactly who it is that is indignant. Regardless, if you have the energy and the wherewithal to hop over to my posting on Blogcritics and leave a comment on my leafy commentary it just may encourage me to keep gassing on in a similar vein, and it may attract a few more readers, and a few more lawn care savants to consider -- to rake or not to rake, there is no question.

...............

I want to share some thoughts on leaf raking.

We live in a suburban neighborhood on Long Island that is lowly enough, working class and lower, where neighbors pretty much let neighbors be, though we do relate with each other. Guy across the street has turned his lot into a pool-table flatness of green lawn over the last few years. For decades it was a jungle of vines, poison ivy, and dead fallen branches. Now he has it mowed regularly and he put in sprinklers (note: though he works the lawn he does not mow it himself). Neighbor on the other corner works as a groundskeeper for a local school district... which means he mows a whole lot of lawns, and his lot is pristine, except the area where he stores his weekend freelance equipment and plays with tuning up his chopper.

Though I have no qualms about mowing the lawn, and enjoy the work, the smell of new-mown grass, and the pleasure of a flat (well, almost flat) green area, I also like weeds. I do have qualms about the use of fertilizer and herbicides. I enjoy plants that persist on their own – so our lawn is not exactly a monoculture of bluegrass fescue. When I do mow I avoid disturbing the devil’s paintbrush, and I never mow when the violets are hardy.

For a few years now I have been resisting mowing the lawn at all, and in particular I hold out until the grass that will grow in the acidic/sandy soil will seed. It is not easy to get grass to grow in our lawn and there are areas of persistent dirt. There are also areas where moss seems to thrive, and I like moss. I will even introduce moss into the scene. The failure to mow I call my "prairie restoration project." I do this act of landscape resistance in fear all summer long that the self-appointed citizen "lawn police" will come down on me for having a house that looks abandoned. They do come down on me if I leave bricks lying about in obvious piles (I threaten back that I am storing up to build a large bear sculpture). I think about maybe installation of an interpretive sign. People do like to read things. The professional lawn-mowing neighbor occasionally stops around when he walks his dog and asks if everything is OK with us.

We have oak trees, whose leaves are fairly acidic as leaves go. Raking leaves in our household is not a communal activity... if it gets done I get to do it alone. I get to mow alone also. There is nothing wrong with this, to my mind, it is just that it is lonely, and in preference to a lonely mow I would rather watch a group of sparrows fight at the feeder.

There is also a difference of opinion as to the proper disposal of leaves. I am a stubborn and frugal sort on some things, and this is one of them. Most leaf raking activity that I see in our neighborhood consists of putting the leaves in paper bags and setting them out on the street. My immediate reaction to this practice is wondering why my neighbors are giving away their biological wealth. The trees suck up nutrients from the ground of the lot, they put a portion of that into their leaves, then they drop their leaves, and we bag them up and send them away to a landfill site – or a facility near the landfill where they are processed into mulch, which we can then pay for, spending more energy to drive our cars around with processed dead leaves bagged up in the trunk. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

It costs fuel-energy to run the trucks to move the leaves. This is also true of all the leaf-blower machines that are so active in the autumn season (though I am all in favor of keeping the illegal alien population busy and employed, particularly out in the Hamptons)... Yesterday I saw a man using a pressure washer to move leaves (not to clean, but to move leaves) off of a commercial sidewalk. I will be the first to say that using a pressure washer for this purpose is a whole lot of fun, but it is, to be honest, an indulgence, a waste of a finite energy resource – though the guy did not look like the brightest mind on Long Island and I felt that at least he could be proud of his work. Hydro-power blowing includes throwing away otherwise potable water, in our case water processed through the public system, water sucked out of the Pine Barrens aquifer. Though I suppose after impacting a concrete sidewalk it goes somewhere.

At one point last year I considered an investment in pelletizing machines for a garage-industry to take tree leaves and turn them into fuel pellets for pellet stoves. I am interested in suburban recycling on a DIY basis. And I was really pissed about the cost of fuel oil to heat the house. Though tree leaves are not anticipated to produce as much heat as wood pulp, the lower energy return may be balanced by the fact that they are recycled and zeroed against the energy saved by not having to truck them to the landfill.

When I do rake the leaves (note, I say "when I do") I have locations on the property where I rake them into a pile and leave them. In essence our lot in life becomes one large composting operation. This hording of leaves seems to bother my associates to the point that they refuse to participate in the making of piles, no matter what I say – and if I cannot win an argument at home then how can I expect to go up against the entire lawn care industry? And who will buy all of those paper bags? I notice that not putting leaves in bags takes less time and energy, on my part, than simply raking them into a corner below the butterfly bush. Used to be I raked them across the street into what is now the pool-table lawn, back when it was a jungle and I could readily hide my organic subversion, and they composted up real well for garden soil. The energy expended in that transaction was the equivalent of a beer and a sandwich. Though nowadays what I also notice is that we have a fairly amazing population of worms on the property. I like to keep them well fed and happy.

I have also got in the habit, over the years, of holding out later and later into the fall season in the hope that there will be a groundswell of familial indignation at the steady accumulation of leaves on the lawn. Enough leaves piled up in layers will form an impermeable mattress to suffocate whatever green stuff we have growing there, threatening to make us Orgreases appear even more dejected and socially unsavory next summer. But that seems a false promise of a poor strategy.

Nowadays I simply let the leaves fall and the snow land and melt (it only stays for a few days), and I leave the leaves alone until spring when it dries up a bit so that I may give in and, alone, go rake leaves, or not.

I’m not sure about the psychological implications of off-season leaf raking. It is nice to talk about leaf raking with leaf raking peers. It is a variation on the usual chatter about the weather and climate change and the impending extinction of human life as we know it. "Have you noticed how the leaves fell sooner and they had a tinge of purple to them? I hear in Vermont the tourist industry is going gangbusters. Yes, it is terrible. Terrible. We need to do something about the international leaf problem." This spring, though, the crocuses got there with their life mission before I did. I was hesitant to rake the leaves because I wanted to see the pretty crocuses... purple, white, yellow... scattered haphazardly around the "lawn." I feel less depressed when I see them. They bring on the audacity of hope. So what happened is that I thought, “Oh, my gawd... this year I have really done it. I have killed the lawn.”

But nobody told the lawn that it was dead, and the grass, the weeds, the wild lettuce, the white clover, and the poison ivy all just came right up and flourished. It was so damned abundant that I worried I was in even more danger of being caught by the yard police. I broke down and mowed once this year (it helped that the town sent me a threatening letter). I am not exactly sure where all of the oak leaves went but I did absolutely nothing at all about them. And I suspect that we have an organic biomass cycle ongoing here where we are not using up energy of any sort to deplete the wealth of our small lot. Or at least I fancy that is the case.

In future I may add to my prairie restoration spiel and tell folks that I am indignant that we are not allowed to burn leaves, that I love the smell of burned leaves, and that I refuse by civil disobedience to rake leaves until I am given back my American individual free citizen entitlement to burn leaves and stink up the neighborhood. I will proudly flash my NRA membership card just to reinforce my leaf-bagging resistance.

There is one other consequence of my laziness that I notice this year. When my neighbor with the pool-table lawn comes back from a day out on his boat and stands bare-chested on his lawn, he has to keep swatting at the skeeters. A hundred feet away I sit on my porch and don’t notice any skeeters. I notice all the spiders, and I am often frustrated when I walk out the front door in the morning and I get a web in the face, but we don’t have nearly the skeeter population of our neighbor. I would like to ask him if everything is OK, but I can look out across the street and quickly see that it is.

The Master and Margarita | The Truth About Lies

2009-10-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Master and Margarita | The Truth About Lies

My friend the novelist Jim Murdoch provides a very detailed and interesting commentary on Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. An astounding novel that I first read last spring. It was one of those books that sort of popped out at me when I was browsing the bookshelves in the bookstore while looking for something else entirely. As Jim says, and I agree, every writer should read it. Perfectly delightful.

Sufjan Stevens, BQE

2009-10-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

This week while driving on the Long Island Expressway we heard on WNYC Spinning on Air an interview of a musician and selections of his work.

The comment made in our truck while on our way to Home Depot was something like, "Yeah, I think this is the guy I started to play his music and it freaked me out. I had to shut it off. He did an album of electronic music about animals that sounded like someone who had never done electronic music."

But there was something else going on here in this orchestral music that we were hearing on the radio. As soon as I had an opportunity I followed up to get hold of the entire symphony, laid back with the headphones and let it rip. As some of my friends & family already know I have one hell of a lot of hours driving on the Robert Moses built expressways around, within and out of NYC. Plus a bunch of years living and working in the Willy-B/Greenpoint area of Brooklyn.

It is not solely a dedication to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, or the original commission by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, or the intimacy of my decades of familiarity with the expressway, either on it, near it, under it -- there is something gloriously grand in Sufjan Steven's symphonic composition BQE that makes me feel that it could only have been bred, born and nurtured in the soul of Brooklyn.

Though that sentiment may be in great part an illusion seeing as Sufjan is originally from Michigan. Though his banjo wings and his Methodist upbringing could be magically misleading.

I am not a reliable music critic, don't intend to be , I know my taste is eclectic (give me Dongjing any day), but anyone that titles a composition "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois", would not remain off my radar for long. Though I will say that if you breeze around looking up YouTubes and such you will find a very mixed bag.

The largest complaint that can be found on the internet about Sufjan centers on his being stylistically all over the place, either a pop-folk indie, or symphonic composer, and if you listen to his work (other than his symphony) you may immediately notice that it varies in quality, at times remarkable then just as suddenly it falls off a cliff somewhere. I was asked why an artist would behave in this manner and it caused me to reflect on how, as a writer, I can hit a note here, and miss there, fall off a cliff or bash my face into a brick wall, and that my own work is, as with Sufjan... it is all over the place. I never really have a feeling for when it is good, or bad, I'm involved and engaged in the minutia of the fungus on the tree trunk, let alone looking at the forest from outer space. Difficult to hold down, difficult to pin down, an existential leap through an obstacle course brought on by a being alive and awake. Perfectly willing to change the rules of the game to take the game onto another playing field, or to evaporate the playing field entirely in favor to sit on a sofa and eat chips. If one follows their creative inspiration, as obviously Sufjan is doing, and they have the least bit of a complicated human nature then they are not going to fit very well into the boxes provided by audience expectations in a world of mass-commodity media, either in music or in literature (and it appears Sufjan is also a writer). What one needs to anticipate from Sufjan is something entirely else next time.

THE BQE- A Film By Sufjan Stevens from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

Interlude I—Dream Sequence in Subi Circumnavigation from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

Traffic Shock, BQE - Movement IV
Album, DVD etc. available at Rough Trade.

A full CD soundtrack, the DVD of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway footage, a 40 page booklet with liner notes and photos as well as a stereoscopic 3-D Viewmaster reel. Asthmatic Kitty, Stevens' label, to release a limited edition double gatefold vinyl edition of The BQE on 180-gram vinyl with a 32 page booklet, and a black and white version of a BQE themed Hooper Heroes Comic Book.

Deep Economy, the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben

2009-10-20T06:37:00.000-07:00

When I read this book I kept reading passages that made me desire to buy more copies and send to specific of my friends as McKibben brings up so many issues that I have heard expressed regarding the need for a sustainable human built-environment, as well as sustaining the resource of traditional trades.

Preservation of old buildings, and the people who practice the craft of historic preservation, is not solely about a near-religious fixation on ancestor worship. It is also about not discarding the embedded energy and resource of the existing built environment, and a conscientious understanding of how most optimally to preserve that previously expended use of energy resources, and it is this perspective that the practitioners of traditional trades embody in a collective knowledge. To bring these people together to share in their knowledge is to build a sustainable community toward a durable future.

You can paint it GREEN if you so desire, but it is so much more than choice of a color pallet.

“Consider the most influential new program on television in the last decade, Survivor, which ushered in the reality show craze. Along with its uncountable offspring, it operates on the premise that the goal is to end up alone on the island, to manipulate and scheme until everyone else goes away and leaves you by yourself with your money”

And then we have the father of balloon boy.

Can one say that Richard Heene and his family is not living out the American dream, or soon to be nightmare, in a sort of modern morality play of Everyman as reinforced by our mass-news media?

I have been building a UFO out of cast iron for many years now... on a test flight of an early prototype it sunk off the south shore of Long Island. Possibly I should have called the Coast Guard? Or possibly the answer to capture maximum broad-band exposure is more gas and we purchase more better duct tape?

After many years of working in the construction industry I am often struck, and a bit outraged, at the prevailing public opinion that the low bidder on a project, particularly one paid for by taxes, is the least cost and the most efficient. On the surface it makes sense that we would want to pay less for more, or for just enough, but once the public spotlight on a project is gone, once a project goes into contract there are a whole host of “hidden” costs. These are costs that are in the interest of various players, particularly the ones who receive the windfall, to want to keep hidden. The name of the game is to bid low, which assures getting the project, then fight for change orders on every single discrepancy that can be fought over. It makes for a cantankerous work environment. Contractors who master the low-bid game also master the change order process. I say this as the largest change order I was ever involved in manipulating, from the contractor side, was $2.5M and it had more to do with bureaucratic incompetence than it had to do with necessity. Give it a few years later and the entire project would likely be done over again at an even higher cost. There are techniques of manipulation and negotiation that one learns as in any profession.

None of this low-bid outrage has much to do with Bill McKibben’s book, least ways not much on the surface. This book sat on the corner of my work desk for more than a year before I finally picked it up. In part my slowness in taking it on had to do with the recession, having to work hard enough already to stay solvent and not wanting to focus on those problems, and a reluctance to maybe look at what is hidden beneath our current economic trends. There is one thing that comes out to me very strongly in the current economy, and that is that healthy community, connections, relationships, networking is vital to our personal survival. That is a bit of what McKibben talks about, the relationship of hyper-individualism, the uninhibited pursuit of number-one as opposed to the common good, and posits this social relationship against a backdrop of a closed-earth system with a limitation on progressive growth, and a limitation on the resources of energy, and a strain on the natural environment that human life itself is dependent upon.

Something that I picked up on in New Orleans post-Katrina is that the historic structures that survived tended to be built not only in survivable areas, but with local materials (cypress for example, plaster made with burnt oyster shells for another) that were understood by the local building culture to be appropriate, but also that the local building culture had been influenced by centuries of French experience in Equatorial and tropic climates. And yet, post-Katrina one of the problems encountered was the tendency of sheetrock to get black mold (unlike with plaster, and who knows how much of the sheetrock came from China and may contain poisons?), or the replacement of exterior doors or windows with the latest mass-manufactured big-box substitute. McKibben in one passage talks about local forest harvests and what some may call “alternative” building technologies that re-jigger the mass production economics in the building industry (think home building industry, and was it not the home building industry, mortgages etc. that fueled the last economic bubble?) to increase local labor (decentralized, potentially in work teams, as in communal and/or barter exchange) and in the end come out not only less expensive in the long-range (avoidance of long-term debt and usury) and often with materials that can be replenished within one human’s lifetime.

Regardless what one believes about climate change it is fairly obvious that humans are running out of resources as populations increase, and as emerging 'growth' populations take on a rapidly expanding conversion of non-renewable energy resources -- but what is not so easily noticed is the hidden costs of our state of mind, of the ferocity of our individualism, our demand that an individual has a right to rise to the top “by their own efforts”. Unfortunately nobody rises by their own efforts, they rise by the efforts of the community that selects and supports them to rise. One can bend the language to create a myth of self-reliant individualism, but it remains just that, a myth.

One of the things that I hear, and feel, is that a long-term sustainable economic recovery cannot be obtained if we continue to push toward “progress” in the same manner as got us to where we are now, and that a future economy will need to be different, will need to be more communal... and I mean this in the sense that not every home needs to be a McMansion, and not every McMansion needs three cars and a speed boat too large to trailer behind their SUV. McKibben provides a host of examples and contemplation on the hidden costs and the need for sustainable, local, community based economic models. What I come away with is looking at the immediate lives around me, my own included, and a desire to figure out how to make sensible adjustments toward a sustainable business model and life.

Philadelphia Aerial Lift Accident 10/12/09

2009-10-17T04:42:00.000-07:00

This is a similar model of lift that we were using on our gig on Park Ave. in September -- the one where we had to move the machine out of President Obama's route of travel. In this case one of the mechanics died from the 125' fall. Fox Chicago article with videos http://bit.ly/21cthu and a detailed article including comments by Brent Schopfel, owner of Masonry Preservation Group http://bit.ly/4p68nx

A problem with any equipment -- in this case the rule that one does not move a lift on the street or sidewalk when it is extended -- is that operators get comfortable with the equipment, be it lift or scaffold or whatever, and begin to take risks as they explore the boundaries of the safety envelope. Note that there were two lifts used at this location (you an see a white lift extended to height in the still of the 1st video here) and there were not the appropriate street and sidewalk permits.... on Columbus Day.... and for an inspection at a church.

Why I had nothing to add here in September

2009-10-09T03:36:00.000-07:00

September was a busy month for our business.

Project #1: We provided site and logistic support services for the design team for investigation of the Edison Memorial Tower in New Jersey. This is the tower at the Menlo Park location where Edison invented the light bulb. The exterior of the tower is made with John Earley exposed aggregate panels. John Earley was an artisan who developed and advanced the early practice (yes, Earley was early) of exposed aggregate concrete. We spent an intensive week there, first in, last out on the site, making sure that the architects and structural engineers, technicians, consultants and conservators got the information that they came looking for. This is our third Edison related project, the first being our lead on the movement of Edison Building #11 from Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI to within 10’ of where it originally resided at the Edison National Historic site in West Orange, NJ. The building had been relocated to Dearborn in 1940 and essentially we reversed the process. We were also involved in an early stage in the rescue of a former schoolhouse from Edison’s Ogden Mine at Mount Sparta, now turned into a local Hungarian culture museum at Franklin, NJ. [Yes, and those are people hanging from ropes off the tower, not us, but our friends at Vertical Access.]

Project #2: Paint stripping from limestone within a vestibule at the 90th Street entrance for the Church of Heavenly Rest. This project had to be done over Labor Day weekend as the Church leases space for a day school and the messy work had to be done when the children, and their parents, would not be around. For some unknown reason the beautiful limestone within the vestibule had been covered over the years with several layers of paint. This project has proven a very messy job and more of a challenge than we anticipated, but we persist, and continue to work at removing the paint. We enjoy logistical problems and in this case you need to imagine using paint stripper within an enclosed space (as if inside the chamber of a large drum) and then coming along with a pressure washer and removing the residue and controlling the run-off. Talk about blow-back! Fortunately the paint stripper that we are using, that appears to work, does not eat through our skin with chemical burns as it appears impossible to undertake this mission without getting ourselves immediately soaked down to our socks and underwear. I absolutely hate paint stripping... but we do a considerable amount of these small missions for the church. We are also involved with the restoration and resetting of a bronze gate on the 5th Ave. elevation. One of our favorite projects with the Church this year was to mount the alms box just in time for Easter. We got to meet the 80+ year old woodworker who made the box... we asked him to drill four holes into the back of it.

Project #3: We had a gig to run a 125’ tall aerial lift around on Park Ave. between 52nd and 53rd Street for a structural engineer to investigate the condition of the terra cotta cornice at the Racquet & Tennis Club. Talking logistics, this project was an interesting challenge. I was worried about traffic both pedestrian and vehicular in a highly congested area of Manhattan, but that was the least of our adventure. I am almost nearly complete with writing up just what went on at this gig, near to 9,000 words. Simply put, first thing 1,000 Chinese showed up and we were in the middle of their demonstration, that is how we found out the hard way that the UN was in session, then we had to deal with being in the path of Obama who wanted to visit Letterman... we were in the path on the street with a 44,000 pound machine (i like this little advert movie). It got sticky. And in the final move of absurdity we were faced with a possible shut-down for a television series shoot on Park Avenue. We managed to survive.

In the midst of all this we had family birthdays, vehicles that needed critical care, worked with a team to assemble a bid on restoration of a windmill tower at Sagamore Hill, the Town of Brookhaven threatening to clean our yard, and a construction project suddenly happening next door to our house. Oh, and we think we finally fixed the damaged sill cock at the Mineola Presbyterian Church.

October is starting up a bit slower, and we are grateful for the rest and the opportunity to put things back in order. It is not a good time of year to have a cold. It is a good time of year to work on the heating system for the office shed. In the mean time we visited a church in Harlem where the roof and parapet are rather dramatically gone, and we looked at maybe doing repair work on sculptural stone benches at the British Memorial Gardens at Hanover Square in lower Manhattan.

Next week we are going to be doing probes at a bath house at Jones Beach. We have worked on a number of Robert Moses structures, most recently as the probe & mock-up contractor for the design team for the restoration of the pool at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This is a $40M+ project now in stage of going to contract. We used to live across the street from the pool – when the gangs stole from parked vehicles they would go hide in the pool house to sort through the loot -- and we have a long history with the neighborhood that we had sense to run away from, to move to the most obscure spot we could find on Long Island, before Williamsburg became upscale artsy fashionable. And in the past we relocated the Paul Manship aluminum medallions from the façade of the NY Coliseum to remount them on the face of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel ventilation building at Battery Park in lower Manhattan. Our project to mount these medallions held up the filming of Men in Black II as the ventilation building, which houses an array of very large fans, is the structure that is used as the headquarters in the movie.

My Life with UFOs, Part 2

2009-08-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

A kindly correspondent wrote me a real nifty and uplifting note of encouragement last week and has asked me to continue w/ my UFO series.

Somewhere I read, and I wish I knew where so I could give a proper citation, that 90% of Americans believe that they originated on another planet. This says something about the political climate of our democratic republic, though I am not sure exactly what it says. It may be equivalent to belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and various historical religious figures. There is no need for a theory of evolution once we have determined that we came from Alpha Centauri. But I do believe that this crisis of origination indicates that if you are a woman, and pregnant, that you should talk to, have the father talk to, have all your family and friends talk to the baby before it is born just so’s there is no confusion later on as to where exactly it is that they came from.Texian secession movement?
In the late 1990’s, nostalgic for the sorts of people who talked about universal mystery as I remembered in my childhood I sought out the Long Island UFO Network (LIUFON). This was after our local crash in Southaven Park and the claim was that they had a film of the alien creatures... which in fact they did have a film and I saw it on a Saturday at a hotel conference/meeting room. I was impressed.

What I saw was a lizard-like humanoid creature that had eyes and looked a bit dazed and maybe terrified sitting and was leaned up against the base of a tree, at night in the dark with people walking around. At one point a human hand moved across the screen. It held a red plastic flashlight. I also saw an alien being carried away on a stretcher.

John Ford, the fellow who showed the film, it was VHS, was nervous and fumbled with the equipment having a problem getting it to run. He had been telling us that there were probably FBI agents planted in the small hotel conference/meeting room. I had sat close to the action and when I offered to help him with the machine he freaked a bit. I have been told in the past that I sometimes look like a street cop.

Then there was some professor from some school, it could have been a community college, not sure about that, who was an expert on telling people that films are authentic and not faked. I suggested that since the flashlight was obviously real they may want to track down what kind it was... I mean, the people walking around in the film were described as some sort of special UFO black ops and so I imagine they have special issue UFO investigation flashlights. John Ford did not like my idea.

Preston Nichols, the famous author who has writ books on the Montauk Project spoke for a while and explained that the particle accelerator recently built at Brookhaven Labs is actually a proton beam canon and that the deadly instrument had been used to shoot down the UFO. He went into some detail as to the physics of how a little bitty proton can knock down a UFO.... but that got confused with another story about how the craft was actually a captured one that humans trained at Brookhaven Labs were trying to fly, but they crashed. Stupid humans.

something akin to a sensory deprivation tank?
you can do this at home with half-cut ping pong balls
taped over your eyes,
an incandescent bulb, a fan blade
and an i-pod
Then there was this chain smoker lady -- I had seen her previously outside the hotel. We were told she was from some exclusive investigation group out of Washington, DC. She explained to us how the aliens abducted people at random and had sex with them in some sort of cosmic breeder’s program. The really old guy in the chair behind me woke up at that and snarked that we don’t need aliens to do that ‘cause everybody in our community already swaps partners.

We were told about how some black preacher that lives near the park how the battery on his car died. We were told that the perimeter fence of the park had reversed polarity. And we were told that the town had installed a new horse stable on the crash site as a cover up.

They did a real good job of the cover up as my wife and I spent an entire day wandering around the park with a loony poetess lady and her young boys looking for evidence. We found nothing. I understand some of the trees lean over in the park. I found something burnt but it was very small and may have been a penny doll's head.

Here is a snippet that I found elsewhere on the Internets:

“The most Coherent information on Southaven was located in the LIUFON Press Release on August 3 1998. The actual crash occurred at 7:00pm on Nov. 24th, 1992. A man was driving east on Sunrise Highway heading toward WIlliam Floyd Parkway. There was a patch of trees separating Sunrise from Montauk Hwy. To the south of Sunrise he saw a large craft that he describes as, "tubular in shape with two large bright blue lights on each end with a bright white light in its center whose structure was composed of a dull metallic grey texture". He saw the object make a very tight right angle, cross the highway, and crash into the woods of Southaven Park. When it hit, the object emitted a dazzlingly white beam that was said to turn night to day for a moment. “

John Ford later got in trouble for putting some sort of radioactive material in the toothpaste of a local small-time politician and he was put in jail.

We Took a Special Class:
that is me in the middle
with my arm on my hip
finding out that
I am not really from
around here.

Of the people that follow UFOs there are some distinctive types:

1. Skeptical: Those who have seen weird things that make no sense and yet they remain ever hopeful of a reasonable explanation. Sometimes a scientific explanation is sought. The late J. Allen Hynek fits into this category.

2. Technical Hams: The folks that like electronics and gadgetry and will go into excruciating detail about things like anti-gravitational generators. They like to play with oscillators and strobe lights. They are apt to try to do a home-built craft. Preston Nichols fits this type.

3. Religious Folksters: Karl Jaspers talked about UFOs as religious phenomena, and this is where angels, fairies, elves and creatures living in an alternate parallel universe seem to fit. This is also where the likes of Jacques Vallee seem to settle. John Mack the Harvard psychologist borders on this region in a secular manner with his investigation of abduction experiences.

4. Fakers: Those that know they are full of crap but laugh their way to the bank, particularly when we buy their books and pay to attend their séances. I put Whitley Strieber square in this camp.

5. Schizoid: Hallucinatory paranoids... which is where I see the unfortunate John Ford.

On a good day I will find myself anywhere on this scale.

If I am fortunate to ever get to a Part 3 in this remembrance I hope to talk a bit on my thoughts in respect of the wealth of UFO related literature. We are a long way past when a friendly Norwegian looking babe would walk through the wall, tell us that the earth needs to be saved, and that we – us and only us who are always diligently paying attention -- can save it, and then casually share a cold lemon soda with them. I am intrigued as to how people come to believe stuff through reading words. If we can figure it out with outer space then pretty soon we may have it under control as a global MASH with Facebook and Tweeter.

One of them mysterious crash sites.

My Life with UFOs, Part 1, District 9

2009-08-17T17:25:00.000-07:00

I saw the movie District 9 this weekend and found it very entertaining. It reminded me of my life with UFOs. Check it out.

Here we have the cover of Science & Mechanics, August 1968.

UFOs not only invaded New York, they invaded Ithaca, NY (my home turf), and more specific they invaded the woods and swamps of Newfield, NY.

At the time the incident was said to be the most extended ‘flap’ since Kenneth Arnold’s sightings over Mount Rainier.

A quote from the eye witness Mrs. Anna “X” who lived over near Connecticut Hill and Arnot Forest, “What I saw was even bigger in diameter than that big tractor tire sitting down there in the yard.” “I had already turned off the television because it wouldn’t straighten out, no matter how I jiggled the knobs.”

Mr. B was out fishing, “He was a little guy, maybe three feet tall, and he was wearing what looked to me like a diving suit. It was all black rubber or some such material. He never took his helmet off. And through the glass in front of the helmet I could see his skin was very dark brown. His face looked something like a monkey’s. But he had no hair at all. He planted himself in front of me and started to gesture.” [We can only begin to imagine what that was about.]

Here is a sketch of what Donald Chiszar, then 13 years old, saw:

The significance of all this, in my life, was that Aerial Investigations & Research, Inc. (headed by one William D. Donovan) took up camp in our house... with my stepfather as some sort of officer of the organization, and for several years the folks of the Tompkins County and surrounding area who had witnessed a UFO sighting of any sort showed up -- once a month -- in our living room. Up to that time in my life I had not particularly experienced science fiction all that much and here we had these folks who were very adamant about their very real non-fiction experiences and they were telling their true-life stories.

If you ever need me to tell you how Jesus stepped out of my television set and you want me to make it sound authentic that it really true did happen so help me god then I know how to do that as I have learned at the knees of some of the best in the business.

I knew a whole lot about Men in Black way before Close Encounters of the Third kind came out. Did you know that their blood, if it is blood, is green?

I remember my own spouting off for a half hour or so in the basement, with my one real true UFO book in my sweaty hands, all trembling to fall over with nervous excitement of the adventure... to lay out to Mr. Donovan what techniques we may want to follow in order to encourage a visitation!

I was flattered with my own scientific erudition. I heard years later that Mr. Donovan went on from the Ithaca scene down toward Woodstock along the Hudson and organized gatherings of folks to hang out on naked hilltops. I am not sure if they held hands, wore aluminum foil on their heads, sniffed incense and sang Kum Bah Yah, or not.

For a good while there an EMERGENCY report would come in to our headquarters of a sighting or a cluster of mysteriously leaning over trees in a State Forest and we would run off to tramp around and see what was to be seen. Usually we saw not a whole lot though I will admit I saw a few odd things and if I can ever afford it I might go for regression hypnosis to find out just what happened that night I was walking my bike back from Boy Scouts and the giant white balloon Zeppelin thingy flew over... and I was home late by an hour. Or that really weird moon that I saw out the bedroom window where a moon has never been then, nor before or since. When I first realized as an adult I have tinnitus my immediate reaction was to wonder if they had found me (and that only after I concluded it was not my car buzzing). This is not a joke; really, I live, and sleep, in fear of an alien abduction. I fear it enough that I suffer from nocturnal flatulence since my subconscious discovered that they can’t handle that... that smell.

My life with UFOs in an odd way corresponded with my life with marijuana and beer. As a teenager it became something of a sport to toke up then grab a six of cold beer and go hang with the old man on a hilltop with binoculars, freezing our nuts off, late into the night. And there were those other nights we would drive around on back country dirt roads and the truck would suddenly act funny.

My own uprightly religious grandmother confessed to me that she saw three little people standing at the base of her bed one night when she was awoken. She claimed they were minions of the Devil. It may have been an aborted abduction --- but what they would want with her is an even bigger mystery to me. She was way past breeding age.

Then there was Jimmy Orr who when we first met him was a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. I was an avid reader of real science -- I knew all about coral atolls, radiation and evolution -- and I remember him one day spreading out the encyclopedias on the living room floor and giving us his best salesman pitch. I think he may have taken inspiration classes, or special sell-a-thon pills.

He was one of the loudest proponents of the Newfield UFO flap, the guy that got everyone into action... in the Science & Mechanics there is a picture where he stands in a snowy field, wearing black, his arms stretched out as if he may want to fly, but his head pointed down at the ground looking at three dark splots that could be cow pies for all I can tell this many years later. So much for my powers of time travel.

That inspection of bull manure almost sums up Mr. Orr who in short order got his application to the Ithaca Police Department accepted and he quickly turned turn-coat and denied everything.

But not before the legendary J. Allen Hynek himself had shown up to find out what all the Ithaca noise was about.

If you look it up on the internet you will find some Cornell engineering student claims he sent up a plastic hot-air bag with a sterno burning in it... but he had to have done that on a slew of nights to match the local hysteria of sightings.

On the looney toon side it was said of Mr. Orr that he wanted to be a cop because a stud in uniform made the girls horny. Other than that he was a complete asshole. The last time I saw him he tried to bust me and several of my friends... but that is a whole ‘nother story. All I can say to it is I never saw a UFO while on acid.

Then there were our friends Eve and Feister who went west and never returned. They may have gone off with the Hale-Bopp folks, but we may never know. There was a big write up in the Ithaca Journal that I have around here somewhere.

I do not want to go on here much further this time around, and may get to a Part 2, but I will say that I own, and have read since 1968 several hundred UFO books, a few of them rarities from the 50s. Next time around I might tell about how Brookhaven Labs shot down the UFO in our local community. It crashed in one of our Long Island parks and the town built a horse stable over it as a cover-up... the Fed scientists shot it down with their proton cannon.

I Like Trains

2009-08-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

My most memorable railroad experience was when my stepfather, at times a machinist by trade decided to build a 1.5 scale live-steam Union Pacific "Big Boy" locomotive in the basement. It was going to be BIG. It was going to be real steam, I mean that for real... hot steam. Just think of that. It would whistle and chug and have all sorts of amazing mountain-climbing power, and weight, and we could ride behind it.

He built a jig table for it with 2 x 8s running on edge distanced just right to accommodate the proper width of the scale track rail.

We owned five acres of woods with trees with dips and rises and rocks and all sorts of amazing terrain. I knew my way around that five acres pretty good as it was our land. Our land! So we walked it and put out small stakes with colored cloth to identify particular features. We knew where the trestle bridge was going to go. We knew where he would build the pond with the cascading water falls. We knew there would be lights, he was an electrician. We knew where, and exactly how large of a diameter would be allocated for the round table. A round table, such magic!

We wore black and white striped engineer’s caps. We listened to a Live Steam record on the stereo phonograph. It was exciting!

He poured a wheel out of concrete with a piece of pipe in the center of it and attached the handles from a dead lawn mower, the mower part having long been discarded, it was a neat use for handles. I helped him make this amazing tool. It was like having Popular Mechanics in the back yard. We now had a very nice roller, and we used it to roll the crushed stone roadbed, all eight feet of it that was our mock-up.

Then he went and had another idea.

The table lasted many years, too cumbersome for me and my brother to lift. Eventually it got knocked down and morphed into debris.

The eight foot of roadbed lasted longer as it was not particularly in the way. I missed the round table, I really had my heart set on it.

Too many years later I lugged the roller off to the county dump.

And the woods was, well, woods until it got sold and parceled out for house development.

***
My stepfather, who in his waning years insisted to be called Sante Fe, was born on the Seneca reservation at Salamanca in the Western area of New York State. In the photo of the camelback here the man standing 2nd over from the left with the Frenchie hat cocked on his head is his grandfather Joseph Follett. Joseph was a fire man, meaning he kept the locomotive in fuel. Joseph was married to a Seneca woman, and her father was a chief, though that has little to do with railroads. Salamanca, though, was a hub for a whole lot of railroad activity connected with the oil industry. There is an entire history to that in Sinclair Oil and associated with JD Rockefeller. [So that the few times I have worked on a historic preservation project associated with the Rockefellers I have felt that it is my history that I am engaged with... the most striking being work at JD Rockefeller’s boardroom in lower Manhattan. That is another story.]

***
Sante Fe in Korea got an assignment to run an industrial engine from one place across the country to another and for whatever reason it broke down and he and the two other soldiers that were with him refused to abandon the engine. They slept in the freezing cold and as a result my stepfather got frostbite to his feet, a problem that plagued him for the remainder of his life. He also got some bronze stars. Though he never told me about this incident, I learned it only a year ago from my mother, I do remember from when I was a kid black n’ white photos of him standing proudly, and handsome in front of a small steam locomotive. The engine looked something close to the one in this photo.

***
When we bought our house and my son was younger I had an idea that finally I could build an HO scale model railroad. Living in apartments had always made this desire seem temporary. I made a table for it in our front room. It was a large table and made moving around in the room difficult. I bought stuff, switches, lights, locomotives, neat railroad cars. I had an idea to expand on the White Mountain Central Railroad and to incorporate a cog rail system, an expansion of railroad as historic theme park. I meticulously assembled a few buildings and made them look old and weathered. I am proud of my ability to make model buildings look old and weathered. I laid track. We are near the Atlantic ocean and I learned that some kinds of track simply corrode in the salt air all by themselves. In the honorable tradition of our family, and seeing as my son did not seem to be equally infected with the railroading bug, and my working long hours, I stopped in mid stride.

I took up reading books about the demise of the American railroad system, quite an interesting story, actually. Books have beginnings and thankfully endings. When you end a book not many people take notice. When you do not quite end a model railroad layout it tends to linger. We continue to have remnants of that model project waiting in our background.

***
Steam Town is very kool, something of a large layout, but Railroad Tycoon, the computer game, taught me so much. It provided a simulation of ever increasing complexity of supply-demand pressures that build up to a point that suddenly everything collapses in a cascade of chaotic confusion. It gave me the idea to monitor our historic restoration business with real-time progress graphs -- up until 9/11 at least when all the emphasis seemed to switch over to airplanes. It also made the current economic recession seem fairly apparent as it approached, and the cascading collapse of our business and personal economic situation seems so, well, easily anticipated. We need to quit the game and start over fresh. I think next time I will concentrate on the lumber trade up near Montreal.

I met an old feller in a railroad museum in Altoona one day and when he inquired about my wandering around railroad experience I wanted to be more brief in a few words than here... he was a bit nonplussed that I got my railroading off a computer screen.

***
My second most memorable railroad experience was when I took the train from Chicago to New York expressly so that I could ride through Horseshoe Curve. I had been to visit the curve via automobile in the past, and my wife and son seemed a bit sleepy while I wanted to see one more train, just one more, please? So, though the trip was a long one and I had to sleep in my seat the penultimate experience was a very short one. I do remember looking out the window with my eyes and mouth open as we went around.

***
My least favorite railroad experience was on a cold and snowy winter day when a LIRR (Long Island Rail Road) train that I was a passenger on hit a car stopped at a crossing and killed all five family members in it. I have only been on a few trains that have ran into people [and when I am told that nuclear power is safe then I always wonder when the trains will stop hitting each other in the news]. We had to sit there for three hours and did not even get to see anything.

But I am also reminded of the celebratory drunk fellow on one pre-Christmas ride on the LIRR who when he realized he was on his way to Montauk lamented that he had meant to go to Philadelphia.

Dig Well

2009-08-07T05:20:00.001-07:00

I cannot honestly remember if this story was not previously published at Gator Springs Gazette, or not, and I have been a bit too discombobulated the last few months to go ask, but here it appears at Rusty Barnes' Fried Coffee and Chicken (oh, no, Fried Chicks and Caffeine) uh... go check it out for yerself --

Dig Well
Down past the layer of worms. Remnants of a rusty hinge and a broken medicine bottle, things that I finger and turn over and examine before sending the fragments upward for further scrutiny and classification and the comment, “Keep digging.” Down past my own height. The earth towers over as I reach out from side to side, not quite able to stretch fully, confined within the tube of boulders, some larger than my belly, some smaller. I will find this water. Down I dream, and down I dig in dreaming to the core of the world or beyond, downward in search of muddy water. Like any other immigrant to here, I am mud-hogging the stone lining of a dark womb. After a lengthy silence Pop shows up. “How does it look down there?”

in the mean time for the more graphics and audio oriented do check out this neat map and follow the links:

Sex and War

2009-08-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

Sex and War, How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, Malcom Potts and Thomas Hayden

If one truly feels alive in their most dangerous exposure to war, to armed conflict, to death and the risk of their own sudden death, to feel most alive when dealing out death in the killing of others then how can people who never experience war ever feel themselves to be alive?

This is a question that I have become obsessive to understand, and it is a very strong reason for my fascination in reading books about war, and in many respects this book has provided me with the most insight of any that I have read.

“If you want peace, understand war.” – Basil Liddell Hart [found on page 367]

I strongly believe that an answer to my question, above, would provide a clue to how humans can figure a way to manage to survive on this planet. I say manage to survive as in even to address the question of how we humans can find a way to survive in our environment on a closed planet system. So much of war, as is brought home over and over in this book is about resources as a means to survival, and about the connection of human sexuality to the flow, and control of resources. Poon tang or water or blood or oil or black slaves, whatever. And through this book we come to a better understanding of just how closely tied sexual politics is to the maintenance of peace.

It brings me down pretty much to our responsibility of access to birth control, family planning and abortion by choice of the specific woman and the diversion of the global military budget toward universal education -- and why our taxes should be geared toward support of that sexual freedom.

When as young man I decided to be a vegetarian pacifist I found ex-Vietnam Marines beating the crap out of me, illiterate morons punching me out because I held books like they were a purse, potential girlfriends thinking I was a fruit, and fruits jumping me in my sleep, and all I really wanted was not to end up in Vietnam... when I adjusted to a mental state that signified the next person to bash me in the face with a Budweiser beer can, or jump me in my sleep I would kill them, things changed. Life got measurably better day by day. Nowadays at this point in my life all I can hope is to think it up. Boo!

Human aggression is not solely limited to war, it is as simply manifested as relationship of husband to wife (or wives, depending on the culture -- I am still trying to relate with the idea that Osama bin Laden's father had 75 children, if I have the count correct, that is certainly more than we can say for Tolstoy), and of husbands to bands of husbands, or that boys will be boys, in troops, gangs, gaggles even as they appear to mimic the aggressive and organized nature of chimpanzees. One needs to accept a general awareness of evolutionary theory in order to relate with the underlying thesis of this book, which in short is that, our male aggressive behaviors, in war and in sex, were developed through the natural selection of the surviving specimens. The man animal that has been able to kill more, enslave more, destroy more, capture rape and pillage more has also been in general the one who has been able to have the most sexual relations, and the most surviving offspring. It may not be always the case, but enough so that the next Jr. that comes along that kills off their siblings and the siblings of as many around them as they can possibly manage will, obviously, feel alive both with the sword (the machete seems to kill more people than nuclear proliferation) and in the saddle.

Cain wins.

I read somewhere that playing with money, as occurs in lower Manhattan that commerce built not on physical labor but on outwitting the opposition through the manipulation of numbers creates not only Masters of the Universe who buy up posh properties in the former Long Island Gold Coast (as in Fitzgerald land), but sexual dynamos who take their aggressive hunger for the thrill of the hunt manifested, bled out in the bedroom. That can all be bullmonkey, or horse adoration -- but I would be curious to read a study by Potts of the relationship of Sex and Commerce, or surprise, surprise -- to learn that politics is sex by other means.

As I have read in other reviews, the book does wander though I find things such as a footnote that says that it has been reported that an American manning a rocket silo once demonstrated that with a piece of string and a spoon he could override the carefully designed system requiring two men to initiate firing a missile – well, this just makes me feel all tingly and goose bumpy all over, particularly with my other fixation on Chernobyl... and we are even told elsewhere where goose bumps come from.

I am curious though that one time a Texas friend whom I trust told me that at Angola the snipers are women as they have found out Southern girls do not hesitate to narrow in on target and shoot when a prisoner tries to run into the countryside. I think I need more research, though hopefully not in the form of my own quality time. Been there, done that, not interested to revisit.

As a kid I was told that when we see the white light to run toward it.

We were not talking about an alien abduction experience. A few years ago I found out that when my step-father was sent off to Korea that they made a stop in Japan for a tour in the back of a truck of the flatter blacker portions of Hiroshima -- and yesterday I watched Henry Fonda tool around in an old truck in Grapes of Wrath and thought, gosh, they all look related to me. My stepfather never told me that he felt most alive in Korea, but he did mention waking in the night in a frozen trench and bayoneting the shadow of a man that was descending down upon him. And he did, some years later, tell me that he loved me.

Let us not forget the cost of peace as it rides through us each day that we are here alive.

Tale of a Man with No Teeth

2009-07-29T04:49:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine once remarked that it is his opinion that the smartest people on the planet are the ones with crooked teeth. Ever since then I have made a note to check out not only a person's shoes but the alignment of their teeth. White, bright and straight for me almost becomes synonymous with a washed out character, particularly if one is looking at the dental evidence of talking heads on television or a local politician. The whole crooked perspective sort of goes along with the understanding, gained from another friend, that the most interesting bars in the world are the ones with no signs out front.

Ohioan caver, Larry C. Simpson is author of “The Lost Cave of the Jaguar Prophets”, a book that is a delightful read of a Yucatan mystery adventure. He is also a poet that knows about concrete. I am not sure if his teeth are crooked, or not, but I sure like this video from Cincinnati that he recently sent out:

His comments on this video are as follows:

“A little background. It was written in the 1980's. There was some centennial or something of Cincinnati, and they were going to pick a poet from each neighborhood and put out a book. It was going to be edited by some NY writer who wrote a biography of Marilyn Monroe. There were some big time movers & shakers involved. So I gave them a little history lesson on Reaganomics. I guess they weren't amused. I didn't get picked.

The Army surplus store is no longer there, and a storm knocked the steeple of the church through the building destroying it. (Different church in the video.) One building, the gray frame house, was torn down about a week after I shot it.

My musician friend, Gary Woster and I have been putting poems to music since the 70's so we did this one a few years ago. At first it was about a homeless guy walking around the neighborhood, then I put it in the bar for the music. For the video, I had to morph both. Now I think of the character as a ghost.”

I delight when art and politics meet head on.

For a fine example of a collaboration of poetry and music check out Iguana House Music and Poetry at JukeboxAlive. Larry is the poet/author and the voice here.

I really like the crow caws in The Glass Canoe. Words can be found here.

And if you are into caving, or curious, check out Pushing the Dark, twenty two miles of friendship and adventure underground.

"We would wait patiently while stories were told, about an outlaw who hid in a cave, a lost silver mine, confederate gold, bottomless pits, and a haunted cave that once expelled a fireball, all the while eager to get the locations and get underground, but also fascinated by the stories themselves. Mr. Barnes, who presided over this tobacco-spitting forum, told us about a big cave that led all the way to Buck Creek until Lake Cumberland flooded the exit. Before we left he gave us two onions in case we got hungry. Then he showed us something in a matchbox."

Capture the Imagination

2009-07-25T03:25:00.000-07:00

FashFiction.Net
080209

Garden Gnome Wars

2009-07-22T01:54:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I never get all of the facts of a story straight in my head, I do not pretend to be a journalist, and as I grow older I care less about the facts and more about the reality of the fiction.

When a country enters into the European Union there are agreements made as to what they can proudly claim to produce as a national product.

France has claim on a specific type of fried potato (popular at McDonald's), Italy a type of wine (popular in the Bowery), Greece on goat cheese and wrestling, or, like Ohio is allowed to make Ludowicci roof tile, Texas gun owners and Vermont allowed to make hot Vermont maple syrup poured on white snow. All products that will increasingly be manufactured in China. So when Poland entered the EU there was suddenly a rivalry in the garden gnome industry between them and Germany.

Garden gnomes: those short little whimsical figures made of terra cotta or, in the USA usually of precast concrete, unpainted or painted in glorious reds and greens, smoking pipes or displaying pitchforks stuck out their bums, and with panoply of comic expressions, that one purchases and then lugs home to place in the garden, or yard as a sort of secular fertility guardian. They could as well be angels, or a virgin with a baby, or a unicorn. (Note: in the Long Island Hamptons they have gigantic horses, ironic pedestals and dinosaurs.)

Lest you think this is all meant in funny according to Wikipedia there are an estimated 25 million garden gnomes in Germany, the nation reported as origin of the first garden gnomes at Gräfenroda (my obligatory histo presto context).

The French have their Front for the Liberation of Garden Gnomes—le Front pour la Libération des Nains de Jardin (FLNJ).

{In 1998 there was another strike that has been attributed to the Garden Gnome Liberation Front. This strike was known as the "mass suicide." In Briey, a small city in eastern France, citizens woke up to find 11 garden gnomes hanging from a bridge with nooses around their necks. A nearby note stated: "When you read these few words we will no longer be part of your selfish world, where we serve merely as pretty decorations."}

The Italians have the MALAG (Movimento Autonomo per la Liberazione delle Anime da Giardino). In the UK is the ISPCG (International Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Gnomes). And in the Republic of California there is the conservative DEKGJ (Deportar al Estúpido Kitsch Gnomos de Jardín) that through some misunderstanding believes all of these alien figures in the American floral landscape originated from Ecuador.

If you drive from Berlin to Szczecin, as my friend did one day on his return to his homeland, when you approach the border there are garden gnome dealers lining the road. Hundreds and hundreds of garden gnomes arrayed to entice the enthusiasm of impulse buyers -- we assume impulsive gardeners. And when you drive into Poland there are even more dealers and more garden gnomes lined up. It is as if the industrial production resources of Poland have been arrayed to amass their symbolic troops in an economic battle, which, in fact, it is.

Just as a New Yorker will drive to Paramus, NJ to buy school clothes and designer knock-off shoes cheaper, Poland is undercutting the cost of garden gnomes and the Germans are ignoring their own garden gnomes to cross the border to purchase the less expensive, and we assume qualitatively equivalent, Polish garden gnomes.

We do not know who has won the battle or the war. Stay tuned for future reports from the front lines.

We will keep an eye out for you.

We Love Museums, The Pinky Show

2009-07-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

Remembrance of Trees

2009-07-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

Tree Reader at elimae

When I was last in Poland we were visiting historic sites on our way to Chopin’s house. Across the road, a major truck route out of Warsaw (which in Poland is a two-lane road) -- across from one old wooden church was a large tree with a low iron rail fence around it. The fence was built with carved stones of granite at the corners. I asked what that was about and was told that it was revered, and considered an historic site, as an old tree. The tree was considered special for being old... it was down the road from the copse that we were casually told marked the first military use of nerve gas by the Nazis. I presume there may have been something more to the old tree reverence but the discussion was along the lines of, “Why are you looking at that? Here we have this old wooden church to look at.” My thought was, Wow, this is really kool, a tree marked off as special and nobody is even asking a dollar for us to look at it. [Hear about that trip to Poland that includes raven caws and dog barking. Radio Free Preservation v1 i1 April 2008]

In the Podlaskie region of Poland, on a previous visit, where there is an historic wooden architecture that is vernacular to the region, a comment was made as to the sacred nature of trees as a connecting link between the earth and the sky... and that thus when building a church or synagogue or mosque or barn or house of wood one needs to carry this sacred connection into the work. When you are there and you look around at the fields and the groves of trees it creates an epiphany in vision of the biota... the relatively thin layer of bio-mass that trees provide to our common earth. It is nice that there are a few humans who can perceive this sustainable connection in nature.

I am reminded that Thoreau's family made their fortune in pencils.

As a kid I had a friend who was something of a romantic in the classical Germanic sense of the term (at that time I was not particularly aware of my German roots). We were walking along from school one day on the sidewalk when suddenly he ran up to and hugged the trunk of an elm tree. He then excitedly confessed to me, the ever present confident, that he would rather hug a tree any day than hug a girl. I am all for hugging trees but I don’t see that as a higher calling in life than hugging people, women and men, children, that sort of friendly breaking through the barriers to grab hold of each other. At the time I was not too sure what to make of his confession. I see now that he is married with children and we can assume that a few trees here and there are safe from untoward assault. One of the primary reasons that extraterrestrials keep visiting and abducting humans is that they have lost the tactile consciousness of hugging each other. They know that they are missing something but you never hear of them abducting our trees and eviscerating them as with stray cattle in Wyoming. So much for intergalactic lumbering around.

Recently I was reading a book about Joan D’Arc. My interest stems from my having been told as a child that our family is descended from Joan D’Arc. Now, as this does seem implausible (about as implausible as my being convinced that I was present at the Last Supper at the moment of my earthly conception -- and we can argue over exactly when that occurred in the history of biological evolution, I mean, considering that everything is pre-designed) I must confess that I am fascinated by the unrealistic pieces of ancestral data that we carry around with us, sort of a psychic DNA. Information that intrigues me in odd ways such as that my maternal great-grandfather, the Iowan sheep farmer (he had trees on his land too, I have seen them), a bonifide descendant of Daniel Boone (who wrote flash fiction on the trunks of trees) raped the traveling school teacher in his barn (I think I was told that she had red red hair), thus a family was born and bred with the violence of an intellectual background... that is, one of them could read.

Regardless, back to Joan. I like to associate myself with a female religious warrior background (especially when playing WoW), it just seems so kool to me even if it is unlikely that I am sort-of related to Joan D'Arc but probably not really. So I was reading this book about her, supposedly written by one of her male childhood friends, that tells about a large resplendent tree on the hill outside of their French village, and since I can’t find the book in all the mess of books I am winging it here... and the humble village children would play at the tree and for hundreds and hundreds of years they would play there along with the faeries. Then one day a fairy did something rude... was seen spying out a naked grandmother through her kitchen window or whatever, and the local priest (Catholic) came along and banished the fairies from playing with the children. This all sounds so damnably contemporary when you think about it. But the impression I get is that the tree was made unhappy and that Joan D’Arc took the local priest to task to defend the fairies. I am proud of my brave ancestors even if they are not. I hope that the tree is still there, one of a few places that I would like to visit and maybe read a book, more on that later, and nowadays when people no longer believe in fairies it just may be the little magical buggers are free to dance around and party unmolested. It is France.

As a kid we had five acres of woods surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods and farm fields. There were many trees, a few of them quite distinct. A very large basswood was one where I spent hours building forts -- basswoods are good for that. It gave me an early sense of the engineering of building, particularly on the day when all of the logs rolled out and Ronnie Harkness (he is Italian, sort of, and his sister had very red red hair), who was up in the tree on top of the logs that I was handing up (well, they were a bit rotted and fairly small in diameter) made a sudden move and everything came tumbling down.

Ronnie ended up on the bottom of the pile; I ended up on the top. Lessons learned, round elements roll off from sloped branches of basswood real easy and -- don’t stand too close to Ronnie when he is pissed.

We had another tree way off in the back corner, near to the wild strawberry patch, a tall white pine, taller than all of the other trees around. Most of the trees were maple and ash with a small dose of hickory and hawthorn, and ironwood and there was the area that had once been apple orchard.

Diversion, apples, green apples, small worm ridden hard little round apples, we would cut a stout switch of maple or ash or whatever was handy, sharpen one end and poke it into the apple. This created, at minimal cost to us or the environment, a neat toy and an amazing weapon. The principle was that if you swung the apple on the switch overhead that the apple would fly off at considerable speed toward whatever target you were aiming, though rarely if ever able to hit on target. It was fantastic! Unfortunately from about a hundred feet away I hit my younger brother directly in the eye.

That was enough of that, back to the white pine... so I was in a habit to climb up to the top of the white pine, an act that usually got my hands covered with pine pitch (so these days when I muck my hands with epoxy I feel childlike in my dirtiness and digits stuck together so that I need to manhandle a screwdriver to pull them apart -- just yesterday I remarked on how I purchase latex gloves but never remember to use them), and I would sit up there for hours, particularly on a nice sunny day, and watch the wind sway the top of the woods, and sway me with it. I like to be swayed.

There was a place along the local crick a ways down where people did not wander where a group of hemlocks grew. It was actually a small island where the crick divided to go around the root base of the trees. I love the aromatic smell and the branch movement, springy with grace, and the gentle leaves of Hemlock. I built a Dan Beard type of lean-to down there below the trees. That was where I would wander off to be alone to read Shakespeare.

There is something I believe very important about where one reads, and where one writes.

Where we live now, on Long Island, for our house and property we were particularly attracted to the diversity of trees, and bushes, and ocean, and weeds, and bugs, and birds and squirrels and deer and racoons... well, the racoons are not particularly good neighbors, especially when you have pet chickens... but you can get the gist of it.

We had a very tall and regal Hemlock at the corner of the house, within fifteen feet of where I sit now, but sadly it was taken out by wooly aphids. Diversity is grand!

Flocculate with Expansive Clay

2009-07-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

I wish I had found this when I was ten years old. It would have helped a whole lot w/ my crik bed dam building projects.

Google books, "Clay Materials Used in Construction " edited by G.M. Reeves, I. Sims & J.C. Cripps

12.1.2. Bentonite

The name bentonite is popularly used for a range of natural clay minerals of the smectite group, principally potassium, calcium and sodium monnnorillonites derived from the weathering of feldspars. The name derives from the discovery of large deposits near Fort Benton in Wyoming. USA. Because of the chemistry and micro-structure of the clay particles they have a strong ability to absorb water and are able to hold up to ten times their dry volume by absorption of water. Montmorillonite (after Montmorillon, southwest of Paris) consists of very thin flat crystalline sheets of clay minerals which are negatively charged and are held together in 'stacks' by positively charged sodium or calcium ions in a layer of adsorbed water. In particular the soil particles comprising a stack of sheets of sodium montmorillonite form extremely small and thin platelets, being typically of the order of 1.0 pm or less in length and 0.001 um thick. The ability to absorb water comes from the relatively low bonding energy of the sheets, which allows water molecules to be adsorbed onto the internal and external sheet surfaces. Calcium ions provide a stronger bond than sodium, so that calcium mommorillonite swells less readily than sodium monnnorillonite. Potassium ions provide much stronger bonding between clay sheets as the potassium ion is of exactly the right diameter to fit between atoms in the sheet structure with negligible gap between the clay sheets. A similar material to mommorillonite but with potassium bonding is the non-swelling clay mineral known as illite. The substitution of sodium by calcium or potassium ions in monnnorillonite greatly reduces the ability of the clay structure to hold water.

The very small particle size of bentonite results in an extremely low hydraulic conductivity for intact clay, with a coefficient of permeability of typically less than 10-1" m/s. This allows the clay to be used to form 'impermeable' or 'waterproof layers and sustain high hydraulic gradients across thin layers with negligible water flow. The swelling property is also important in such applications, since should water permeate a layer of dry bentonite it will swell even against high pressures and tend to seal any crack or fault which might otherwise develop into a leakage path. The volumetric swelling of particles can be up to 13%. but that of an agglomeration of particles is somewhat less depending on their packing.

Many applications of bentonite involve the use of slurry. Mineral particles in a slurry generally carry electrical charges, the nature and intensity of which vary with the particle surface characteristics and the chemistry of the liquid phase. Polar water molecules may then be adsorbed on to the particle surface, forming a layer of 'bound' water surrounding each particle. The result of the two effects is to produce repulsive forces between par¬ticles, which are greater than attractive Van der Waal's forces except when the particles are very close together. The particles in a slurry therefore tend to keep apart from each other in a 'dispersed' condition (Fig. 12.1a). The effects are most noticeable with small particles (clay/silt rather than sand/gravel, and in practical terms only with finer clay particles) since the relative surface areas are much larger. and gravitational forces are much smaller. Under some conditions the plate-like particles of clay minerals may have different charges on the edges and faces of the particles, and are able to clump together in a 'flocculated' structure (Fig. 12.1b). The large flocs settle out of the slurry much more readily than the small individual particles.

Some slurries demonstrate the effect known as thixotropy, whereby they 'set' into a gel if left undisturbed, but revert to a viscous fluid (sol) when sheared. The alterna¬tion between sol and gel may take place any number of times. The phenomenon is well known in 'non-drip' paints. A gelled 'house-of-cards' type of structure with edge to face connections is illustrated in Figure 12.1c; gels of thin clay particles may contain only a few per cent of solid material. The gelled structure is also able to sup¬port larger soil particles and prevent them from settling out. Bentonite slurries are thixotropic and typically form a gel at concentrations of a few per cent by mass in water: this is an important property of bentonite slurries in many applications. For a more detailed discussion of the nature and properties of bentonite slurries see Jefferis (1992).

Bentonite clays occur, and are mined and processed commercially, in many pans of the world. Some natural deposits, notably those from Wyoming, have a high proportion of sodium. These tend to produce slurries with high viscosity but relatively low gel strength. The depos¬its mined in the UK, near Woburn, are mainly of the calcium form, and these are converted by ion exchange to the sodium form by ball-milling with sodium carbonate. These materials tend to be less dispersive and give lower viscosities for the same slurry density, but higher gel strengths. As natural products, bentonites vary widely around the world in quality and content of other minerals, even after commercial processing, and these 'variations must be taken account of in their specification and use.

Bentonite is available commercially in a variety of forms. but nearly always in a dry state, as powder (in bulk or bags. like cement), pellets or blocks. For applications in construction it will usually be hydrated, although in some waterproofing materials the hydration is allowed to occur in situ. For use as a slurry, the bentonite is mixed with water at a rate of a few per cent of solids by mass. The aim is normally to produce a slurry in which the bentonite particles are well dispersed and fully hydrated. For good mixing and rapid hydration, a high-shear colloidal mixer (shear rate >900/s) should be used, and the slurry then left to stand for some time while the clay particles hydrate. The quality of the slurry obtained depends on the hydrogen ion concentration (pH) of the water used in mixing; saline or acidic water or water containing impurities may cause the clay particles in the slurry to flocculate. This may initially cause the slurry to 'thicken', but there will then be a tendency for the flocculated particles to settle out of suspension and form a sludge. However there is not normally a practical problem with seawater coming into contact with a slurry, provided the slurry cannot mix freely with the seawater and has previously been fully hydrated with fresh water. Deliberate flocculation with flocculating agents may be used to help remove bentonite from suspension when the slurry is no longer required or has become too contaminated with cement, clay or silt. A combination of low hydraulic flow into the slurry (so long as hydraulic heads are low), and long diffusion times for salt compared with exposure times, usually causes few problems in the presence of seawater.

Bentonite is also used in combination with other materials, in particular other soil materials and Portland cement. At one extreme a small quantity of bentonite may be added to a concrete mix to produce highly plastic concrete able to undergo quite large deformations without cracking: while a small quantity of cement in a bentonite slurry can produce a hardening slurry with a small shear strength. Natural clay, silt and sand may be used as 'fillers' to produce cheaper material while keeping most of the benefits of the scaling ability and low permeability of the bentonite. Gleason et al. (1997) found that about 5% of sodium bentonite and 10-15% of calcium bentonite had to be added to fine sands to achieve a sand-bentonite mix with a permeability of less than 10-9m/s. Hardened bentonite-cement slurry mixes containing 180 kg/m3 of cement and 60 kg/m3 of bentonite had permeabilities of about 10-7m/s with calcium bentonite and 10-8m/s with sodium bentonite. These mixtures arc discussed further below in relation to various different applications. Small quantities of polymers and other chemical additives may also be used to enhance or modify the properties of bentonite slurries for particular applications. These are also discussed further below. [not below here, though, you gotta go read the book if you want more!]

What I am working on getting shorter and shorter...

2009-07-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

frm Randall Brown in comment to a previous entry that I made to this blog -- “With your own writing, GO, how have you approached "short prose"? I'm curious about what you are currently working on to meet the demands imposed upon the writer of these short forms? Also, I've recently read some discussions about making Twitter's "character limit" add up to so much more than those 140 characters. Any thoughts about how that might be accomplished?”

I can give a long or short answer. I will try short and hope that it does not take too long to read.

I am not sure that I see short prose as being demanding any more or less than other forms, in general, possibly less demanding than say a good sonnet. A bad sonnet is not very demanding unless a reader considers bored doggerel a chore.

Demands are either external or internal. External being expectations of readers, critics, I suppose, the world-at-large, and internal being the demands the writer places on themselves.

Rowing a small boat is demanding on the rower, but if you do it regularly and often then it becomes a pleasure. So I would want to frame the question, How do we meet the pleasures of the short form?

So, as to working on, I am working on enjoyment in writing of the short form.

Other than that I spend a good deal of time looking around at what people are writing and what readers are reading. I could present my analysis of what I am reading, but here and now I will not.

Short prose, for me, is not new. My life, in construction, building a business, building community, networking at-large has been active and it has always been spattered with bursts of short prose as that is how it happens for me. My attention has always wandered and skipped about. I am happy that the world is catching up with what works for me, though as I have complained elsewhere everyone important in my life seems to be getting younger and younger.

I am intrigued by the interest in flash with a sort of humor one has of new people, curious strangers that show up in the side yard to pet an old dog.

There are so many young lions and fresh priestesses that it is all a dazzle to behold!

I recently ran across a quote from Cyril Connolly, it has been a long time since I have read his critical work, but it seems apt enough, “The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.” Note that there is no indication here as to requirement of length.

As to Twitter, at one time I was told by a distraught reader that I should never write an e-mail longer than one page on the screen. So I wrote a serial novelette in weekly e-mails that went on, engaged with an active audience, for two plus years. Now we have Twitter, even shorter yet. I use it for glitter sprinkled in the hair or the bulbous red nose of a clown. Though I feel the best thing to do with Twitter is to point at other things.

Samuel R. Delany (I happened to meet and spend an hour talking with him one cold night in a bookstore, it was snowing, it was supposed to be a reading, but I was the only audience that showed – he has been teaching Creative Writing for 30+ years) in About Writing, his interview/essay Inside and Outside the Canon talks a whole lot about pointing at things. The more a thing is pointed at, let us say the more an author or a flash is pointed at the more likely it is that people will look at it. The more often it is looked at the more likely it will have an opportunity to be considered worthwhile.

Even if for no other reason it is worthless, trite, possibly drab, clumsy or stupid if enough people look at a thing it gains value for having been looked at. We are fortunate that eventually the collective forgets a whole bunch of stuff in fairly short order of appearance.

One can do same serializing w/ Twitter, but it needs to be kept exciting, lots of cliff hangers and plot twists... it needs to be fun. It also takes a bit of energy to consistently keep doing it and finding ways to make it work. I would tend to suggest that several writers could gather together as a collaborative and write line by line, hitting off of each other, trying to trip each other up, but there would need to be an overall structure of background rules for everyone to maintain their focus, and to make sure the story does not fall flat or meet a timely death.

Learn Flash in a Flash

2009-07-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tips from Editors, Teachers and Writers in the Field, edited by Tara L. Masih, published by The Rose Metal Press.

For me an early experience of learning to write stories, of any length, was reading Aristotle’s Poetics. What I mainly learned from that was that reading about how to write usually does more to ruin one’s writing than never reading about writing at all. That said, I own a whole slew of books about the process of writing, and when I am not writing I am often reading them. There is a way to read books about writing, a sort of offhand, “Yes, yes, I get what this says but I will do my best to forget it as quickly as possible.” This is not a book to be forgotten so easily.

This is a book for writers. That is, most readers who are not writers, and who may not have a specific interest in learning to write in the short prose form, would not find this collection of brief essays (most of them brief, as can be expected from writers who are used to cutting their word count to the bone) interesting other than from an historic perspective. By that I mean, this collection may have greater value to the general reader years from now than it does today, particularly after it has made it through a decade of classroom use, as it should. For a writer, however, particularly one who is writing short prose, this is an invaluable resource right now.

As the title suggests, this is a collection of essays, comments, from people who have some sort of international experience with the activity of creation and propagation/distribution of short prose. I know of or have read other work by most of the essayists contained here, and with a few of them I correspond. The ones I do not know, I will seek out, because they all are interesting, experienced, and at the top of their game. If as a writer you want to know what is going on in short prose - I am avoiding use of the word “flash” for no particular reason - then this is the essential guide.

Apparently each contributor was asked to write a brief essay to provide an example, and to suggest an exercise. There is material here to explore for several months of scribbling; for a writer looking for inspiration from which to step forward to write, the exercises should be a good resource. Over time it should be interesting to trace the influence of this book on short prose writing. I believe it will introduce new themes and fuel the current Internet trend toward short “bits” of attention-deficit feeding prose, and also, of course, help us see where the authors featured in this collection are going with their own work.

The caveat, my detraction, goes back to my initial encounter with Aristotle. Although I believe the material in this book is essential, I also find it to be confining, not for any fault of the editor, who has performed an admirable task, but exactly because of the way the approach to short prose of each essayist is revealed. It can be confusing to find so many divergent opinions and viewpoints all together in one swarm. Nevertheless, I suddenly find that I have a better idea of what I did not previously understand. I do not know how long it will take for me to adjust... like finding out that driving your foot on the brake, as you have done for twenty years, is not the optimal method.

My advice for the writer who is learning to write in short prose is to get into the book, sink deep, follow the examples and exercises, explore as many comments and threads to their infinite conclusion... and then walk away and forget all of it, or at least most of it. By then it should be about June of 2015.

Copies may be ordered directly from the publisher at The Rose Metal Press

Writer's Apartment Building Falls Over

2009-06-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

When we found out that we had been assigned an apartment on the eleventh floor and that we would have a view out over the city with an enclosed balcony we were very excited. Kim and I had waited a number of years on the list to be housed in the newly built exclusive writer’s building, “弯曲泥泞的沼泽”. It was only last week that we visited the apartment. We had the library and the locations of our writing desks all worked out. We both appreciated that it would be a perfect setting for us to finish my last novel and for Kim to complete her poetry collection. Unfortunate for us, I suppose, the last week has been something of a let down.

Ladders Can Be Dangerous

2009-06-26T07:25:00.000-07:00

The only time I fell off a ladder, and want to tell about it, was when it was hit by a boxcar that had been let loose to roll down a slope. It was when I worked at the salt mine.

I was running electrical conduit at the entrance to a tunnel below the salt sifter building. I had five bosses on the ground telling me what to do. The classic too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

Regardless, the rail car was let loose, nothing unusual in that at the salt mine -- but this time it rolled toward me. I saw it and started to climb down off the ladder. The bosses all yelled at me to climb up the ladder saying the rail car would miss me. They were correct, it did miss me. But it did not miss the ladder.

I jumped atop the rail car and thought that was OK. But there was only about three feet of space between the ceiling of the tunnel and the top of the rail car. The ceiling was very rough, blown on clumps of concrete. All would have been fine at this point except it being an active construction site there was a large electrical cable draped down. I got tangled up in it and was worried if I did not get loose then I would be hanging quite a distance up in the air when the rail car went away without me. Let alone I was worried I might get a bit bashed up dragged along the top of the rail car more than absolutely necessary.

So in the three foot of space I did a summersault around the cable. I then lay down on the top of the rail car… on that long steel platform where you see dandies in the movies that walk a train.

When the car came out of the other side of the tunnel I staid down and there was no sign of me. All of the bosses were mystified that I had vanished.

This was one lesson; it was fairly quick and over with, where I learned to suspect authority figures of being full of crap and it being dangerous for me to pay too much attention to them.

A bit of history about the salt mine here.

Check This Out

2009-06-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

Queen Isabella Eats a Pineapple and Misses the Jews
by Cami Park

Go Figure -- Cross Section

2009-06-12T16:53:00.000-07:00

How Wordsmiths Erode Language

2009-06-10T02:04:00.000-07:00

I have a bone to pick; it is a small and insignificant one. Lately in my wandering around reading creative work, poetry, novels and flash, I have run up on a number of occasions where a writer referred to ‘cement’ when what they actually meant was ‘concrete’. This inappropriate usage of the word ‘cement’ drives me just a little bit batty.

I feel each time like I had got some of that wet cement hit in the eyeball.

Not meaning to pick on Chris Middleman in particular, I do not know him, never heard of him until this morning I came across his poem online where he has the line:
“on the bone-white cement”
Cement for at least the last 100 years is the stuff that comes in a bag, as a powder. You mix it with sand and water to make ‘mortar’ and you mix it with sand and water and gravel (aggregate) to make ‘concrete.’

When I make something out of cement it is usually unintentional, like leaving a bag of it out where it gets rained on and turns hard, and pretty much useless. If I am lucky I can bash it with a sledge and turn it into mud puddle fill.

Sidewalks are made out of concrete... yes, there is cement in them, but if the poet walks onto a construction site they will quickly learn that cement is not concrete and sidewalks are not cement. Walls are not cement. Concrete buildings are not cement.

Middleman’s verse is almost like saying, “on the bone-white glue” because cement is the glue of concrete, sort of. Since so many writers say ‘cement’ is it a cliché? Why not say, on the bone-white mastic? Or, on the bone-white avenue?

In The Polish Woman (see me review elsewhere) I remember to imagine in my reading that I ran across 'cement' used at least a half dozen times, and never once an appropriate reference to the intended 'concrete'. Is it that 'concrete' just does not sound poetic? Or is it that poetics, and prose, are disjointed from a sensitive appreciation of modern industrial technology?

I can only begin to be bothered when writers do not bother to connect their metaphors into the reality of the industrial world where stuff like cement comes from. They should get out of whatever room they are sitting in and go visit a cement plant. If we want to have an environmentally conscious literature then it makes sense to know where 'cement' comes from (it begins with a really really big hole in the ground), which understanding may start with a distinction to know what cement is, and what it is not. Cement is not concrete.

The energy consumption in the production of cement is one of a small few critical GLOBAL environmental issues alongside oil and coal. The production of cement is also a top air pollution issue. The Interstate Highway system is made of concrete, as are dams for hydroelectric plants, and that concrete is made with cement, Portland cement to be even more specific, and when the government starts to talk about repairing 'infrastructure' you can bet the market cost of cement goes up.

Because of the cost of transport of heavy materials, like crushed rock on barges, cement plants need to be close to the really ginormous hole in the ground and therefore it is an industry not easily outsourced. The general rule is that a cement plant supplies cement for a 200 mile radius from the plant. The world is dotted with cement plants -- and they are all using massive clumps of energy and they are all exhausting into the air that we breath.

For creative writers to be ignorant of the world, as witnessed by their not even knowing the ramifications of what they say when they say 'cement', amazes me. But, as I said at the start of this rant, it is a small bone to pick. A larger one would be how poets, flashers and novelists ignore science and paint pretty pictures of a world that does not exist... not that I particularly care for the austerity of realism. Hopefully writers all practice intelligent design and we can rest assured in the feelings of faith that they spread with their creative use of words.

It is very rare that concrete would be bone-white. That in itself is a bad observation of color. Usually concrete is a soft gray, and off-white, if old concrete it will be darker in color, maybe, and in an historic district it may have been tinted black, but it is not black, it is only a darker gray. The basic color of concrete is GRAY, not white, not bone.

If you want WHITE concrete then you need to use white cement, and white cement costs a whole lot more than GRAY cement and hardly anyone in their right mind (other than an artiste or a poet slightly disconnected from reality) would ever think to make concrete with white cement, and certainly would not consider to make sidewalks of concrete made with white cement. White concrete in a sidewalk will not remain white for very long.

Now, if we really want to get esoteric let us talk ‘terrazzo’. Hardly ever do we hear from the creative writers about the bone-white terrazzo.

Morning Visitors

2009-06-08T05:44:00.001-07:00

This is my morning visitor. Very wary. Every move I make to position the camera he flies away. If I cleaned the window outside of my writing desk it may help my photo and bird watching ambitions?