Ted Talks As News - Trees And Food -The Good News The MSM Tends Not To Cover

I woke up early this morning - too early to get up, but late enough that I was awake.  So I plugged in the headset for my phone and listened to a Ted Talk.  Suzanne Simard "How Trees Talk To Each Other."

No, this wasn't some vague imagining about talking trees.  It was based on Simard's childhood and  education.  She did studies with isotopes to see how they moved from one tree to another through the mitochondria in the soil.  And how all this interconnected-ness makes forests more resilient to things like climate change.

This isn't technically 'news' because this talk is about ten years old.  And it's based on research she began that's much older.  And I've heard hints of this, but never anything so coherent that it made sense to me.  But don't take my word for it:

Next up was Jamie Oliver - Teach Every Child About Food

Screenshot from Jamie Oliver's Ted Talk

His basic message is that food is the number one cause of death in the United States. He backs it up with this chart. All the ones in red are 'diet-related diseases.' (Heart disease, cancers, stroke, diabetes.)

Jamie is a chef.  He talks about power - about fast food and markets owned by corporations and that food now is  largely processed and full of extra ingredients, while 30 years ago it was mostly fresh and local.  (This talk was given in 2010, so that would get us back  to 1980.)  He talks about portion size and labeling problems.  At home and school kids are eating food that will kill them.
Milk, he says, now has sugar added, though he's talking about chocolate milk. He uses a wheel barrow full of sugar cubes to show how much sugar kids get from five years of school lunch milk. School food systems are run by accountants, not food experts.

Lightbulbs turned on above my head.  This isn't new to me in general. I grew up when most food was fresh or lightly processed and fruits were only available in season.  Growing up in LA meant we probably had more fresh vegetables and fruits all year than people in colder climates.   But he's talking about more than that. He's talking about taking the power back from the big agricultural corporations.  And he thinks they should be sued like the tobacco industry was.  So, you can understand why this stuff doesn't get much attention on corporate media which makes its money from advertisements from, to a great extent, the food industry - fast food, processed food, soft drinks, beer, etc.

Then came Britta Riley and A Garden In My Apartment

This talk is about hydroponics. .  Just growing some of our own food, she quotes Michael Pollen, is one of the best things we can do for the environment.  This is what got her started.  Listening to experts talk about the food problem, she quotes Pollen further, is precisely how we got to where we are.  NASA's hydroponics in space inspired her.  She wanted to get into this, but didn't want to copy the food corporations, so she set up a website where they displayed their products and they crowd sourced to keep improving the systems.  They have 18,000 people connected through the website.  R&DIY - she calls it Research and Development Do It Yourself.  Anyone around the world can duplicate these products themselves for free.   And this is now a community.  We should ditch the term consumer and get behind the people doing things themselves.  The website - rndiy.com - isn't working now.  Not sure where to find this community today.

Followed by Roger Doiron - My Subversive (Garden) Plot

Doiron took the whole idea of gardens as a way to take back food and make it healthier and fresher a little further.  His plot is to radically alter the balance of power, not just in our own country, but around the world.  Here's what he says near the beginning:  Food is a form of energy, but also a form of power.  When we encourage people to grow their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their hands, power over their diets, power over their health, and power over their pocketbooks.  And we're also talking about taking that power away from someone else.  Those actors who have power now over food and health.  See gardening as a healthy gateway drug to food freedom.  Not long after you start a garden, you starting thinking, "I might want to learn how to cook."  He talks about Michele Obama's vegetable garden at the White House that he helped on.  And the food needs of the planet as the human population grows   Plenty to chew on.



Then, finally, I heard Ron Finley - A guerrilla Gardener in South Central LA

He got in trouble with the City of LA because he planted a food court in front of his house on the strip between the sidewalk and the street with edibles.

Screen shot from Ron Finley Ted Talk

The city owns that land, he said, but the homeowner is supposed to keep it up. Fortunately he got enough publicity to overcome that obstacle.  His job is to spread the idea of growing your own food, and in particularly in neighborhoods that are food deserts.  He says that LA owns enough vacant lots to create 20 Central Parks.


The corporate news media today - and that includes to a certain extent National Public Radio - are focused on offering a constant diet of breaking news, with headlines and video, aimed at attracting the most possible eyeballs.  We get short vignettes that often disappear and we never learn what happened.  Or the opposite, as with the never ending election coverage, where the focus is on the horserace, not where the horses are headed.  We only hear about who's up this week, this day, this hour.  Every new poll becomes top news.  Conflict sells.  What we need is cool headed analysis of the policy proposals and how candidates plan to carry them out.

What these Ted Talks suggest to me is there is a lot going on in the US (and the world), but it's not initiated by corporations and it doesn't get much coverage.  It's people taking control of their own food, in this case, something that agribusiness, which advertises widely on corporate media, doesn't really want being covered.  These people powered activities don't get covered much, unless there's conflict or violence involved - say the Keystone Pipeline standoff last year.

So I suggest you watch and listen to the positive things people are doing all over the country, the innovations that come from crowdsourcing, or in response to the disgust with the hazardous - to the environment, to health, to sustainability, to family finance - offerings of corporate America.  Check out the endless options from Ted Talks and go looking for other podcasts that do similar things.  There's lots of good news out there.  It doesn't need blood covered to be covered by the news.  

Once Upon A Time I Thought I Might Catch Up. Fat Chance.

As I wrote the title, I realized we never can catch up in life, but I was referring to little things like writing blog posts and paying the bills.  Today was my wife's birthday.  We went for a movie and dinner.   It seemed like a good day to spend the early afternoon in a movie, but the rain had stopped and there were even breaks in the clouds when we got there.

 And the snow was mostly gone from the Chugach.


I've already  written about my mixed feelings about going to see Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.   Now that I've seen it, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have missed anything important.

Even though I've eaten at Musso & Franks, went to movies at the Bruin theater when I was a student at UCLA, and even interviewed George Putnam (there was an ad for his newscast on a bus stop) for my junior high school newspaper.  Putnam arrived in a gold limo - a Rolls, I think - and he smoked through the interview even though his bio said he didn't smoke. (At least that's what my memory tells me.)

The movie began in a Pan Am 747, which set alarms off right way, since the date posted was 1969.  I'd read that the period details had been carefully done.  And yes, I know some odd details.  In this case because I first flew on one of the early Pan Am 747 flights - from Honolulu to Tokyo - in March 1970. (I was flying from a Peace Corps training program I worked at in Hilo to the second part of the training in Thailand.)  Pan Am 1 and 2 had just started flying. I think it was Pan Am 1 that flew around the world toward the west and Pan Am2 to the east.  Did it start earlier in 1969?  I've now had time to look it up and the first commercial flight was in January 1970.

It wasn't a bad movie - though I generally skip movies with lots of violence - but it felt artificial throughout.  Cardboard.  I assume that was intentional since it was about Hollywood and all the phoniness of that life, but as the birthday girl said over dinner at the Thai Kitchen, with all the really good stuff we're seeing on Netflix, it just didn't cut it.

So I'm reduced to writing filler pieces like this because I just haven't had time to finish my thoughts on the Joseph Maguire hearings and several other drafts that probably will never get beyond that stage.  

And tomorrow I start a slew of OLÉ classes.  (Continuing ed classes aimed at retired folks at UAA.  I think they pay for themselves so maybe they won't disappear next year.)   I have an actual project in one that I need to spend extra time on and I haven't figured out what I'm going to do.  It's a Pecha-Kucha class - you present 20 pictures in seven minutes with narration of the story they tell. Well, I've got plenty of pictures, but organizing a compelling story is the challenge.  As I see it now, though I'll probably discover that was the easy part once I get the story figured out.

Other classes I enrolled in include:

• An Overview of the Pebble Copper-Molybdenum-Gold Prospect 
• The Innocence Project
• State and Federal Courts and Current Legal Issues
• Homeless, Homelessness and Finding "Home"

And a one time short class that's a trip to an Escape Room.

I'm hoping the classes will provide plenty of fodder for the blog.

Solstice Is Past And It's Fall In Anchorage

There's more termination dust.





Ravens Roost had an apple festival the other night.

There were clouds in   Goose Lake.

Trees are getting yellow and losing their leaves.

I got some radishes on the last day of the Muldoon Farmers Market for this year.

And this woodpecker visited our yard today.  

Jonathan Haidt At Citizens Climate Lobby And Then Cauliflower And Carrots At Farmers Market

Anchorage voters are adamant that the summer flower budget isn't cut.  So the municipal green house keeps busy all year.  And the best two landscaped institutions are the University of Alaska Anchorage and Providence Hospital.  Our Citizens Climate Lobby meeting is at UAA and these flowers are an example.  There are small luxuries that do matter because they do so much for people's mental health.

Even these summer tourists were enjoying a stroll around the campus.









Inside, we heard from Jonathan Haidt via teleconference with the other 400 plus local chapters of CCL around the country.  Plus another bunch of international chapters.

Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, studies and talks about the emotional aspects of morality and public debate.  He listed

Three Principles Of Moral Psychology:

1.  Intuition comes first, then the brain can take in the rational argument.  So, the brain reacts emotionally first to something, which is why what you look like, how you talk, etc. will affect how people listen. If the intuition reacts positively, then it's more likely to accept the rational argument. I saw this as a good explanation why small talk, ice-breaking matter.  First you need a sense of the messengers before you listen to what they suggest.

2.  There's more to morality than harm and fairness - people conceptualize these basic human reactions differently.  For the Left, say, fairness is more equated with equity, whereas for the Right more with loyalty, authority.

3.  Morality Binds and Blinds.  It keeps tribes together and causes them to NOT see things that contradict their beliefs.

He went on to connect these ideas specifically to climate change politics.


After the meeting, I biked over to the Farmers Market at the BP parking lot (I guess it will have a different name next year).

2000 Pound Pumpkin And Other Alaska State Fair Shots

That's the champion pumpkin grower just after his pumpkin was weighed.  That's 907 kilos!  A lot bigger than last year, due, he things, to our warm summer.

From Time:  (The quotes are from different pages in the slide show)

"State and county fairs have been organized in the United States since 1841, when the first such gathering was organized in Syracuse, New York. Food — both its production and enjoyment — has been their centerpiece from the very beginning."

"Credit for the idea of the state fair is often given to Elkanah Watson, a wealthy New England farmer and businessman who showcased his sheep in the public square of Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1807."

You can learn about the history of  the Alaska State Fair at their website.  I can't cut and paste from there so you'll have to just go there yourself.  But it began in Anchorage, it says, in 1926, and moved to Palmer in 1936.

I hadn't been to a fair for quite a while.  And I was amazed at how much it had grown.  If I recall right, last time I went the maps identified all the food booths.  This time there was a color fold out guide and map, just for Tuesday August 27!  But having a 6 year old in the house was a strong incentive to go.

I have to admit that the highlight, for me, was seeing about 100 or so Sandhill Cranes in the field on the road you turn off the highway to get to the fair.  (No pics because it was tricky parking there and my camera was in the back of the car.)

But here are some pics of the fair itself.  Starting with things up in the air.

There were animals  and crops and flowers:

And lots of prizes

A goat milking contest.

And more exotic animals:

And lots and lots and lots of food. And people seemed to be spending lots of money.  We all had a great time

"You haven't got the disqualifications. . ." Plus Carrots Radishes And The Bike Trail

I'm reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis for my bookclub.  I don't consider myself Lucky Steve for having to read it.  It's a 1950s British.  It's supposed to be an academic comedy I guess.  The cover says, "No one has been so funny in this vein since Eveyln Waugh was at his best."  It also says, "$1.45."

But I did find a redeeming quote today.  The feckless main character has just given a disastrous lecture to the whole academic and local elite community and lost his job as a professor.  But he gets a phone call offering him a new job.

"I think you'll do the job all right, Dixon.  It's not that you've got the qualifications, for this or any other work, but there are plenty who have.  You haven't got the disqualifications, though, and that's much rarer."

I'm not quite sure what that means, but I suspect that it's the unspoken reason many people do get jobs.  If anyone has some examples, I'd love to hear them.

Meanwhile mi nieta (Spanish does granddaughter so much better than English) is here with her parents.  We went to the Muldoon Saturday market at Chanshtnu Muldoon Park (Muldoon at the end of Debarr.)  This market has a mix of fresh veggies, baked goods, and hadn't  [hand-]made items from knits to lego earrings.



The produce was beautiful  Look at those radishes and carrots!

These are Somali baked goods.  Here's the ingredients of Kac Kac:

Z took this and the next picture.  These are squash.








And this is one of the Nepali farmers.

Just look at these onions.  I guess we're so used to food that's taken a week to get to Anchorage from Outside, that when we get fresh locally grown crops, they look sooo good.










After we got back, we took out the bike that Z learned to ride last summer.  We'd gone to a nearby empty parking lot and she got the hang of it.  Then I told her the second most important thing you need to know is how to use the brakes.  But when she left last summer, she was riding a bike.

Today we got out the bike to see how she was doing a year later as a 6 year old.  The alley near our house was paved this summer and it's perfect - a couple hundred yards, no traffic.  Well two other girls showed up on their bikes.  It's slightly downhill from our end, but she had no trouble, including looping around and coming back.  So later we went to Campbell Creek and rode the bike trail.  After about a mile and a half, I mentioned that however far we go, we have to go back.  She decided it was time to turn around. I didn't know how far she'd last so I didn't push to go further.
But the trail through the woods is beautiful and she was going up and down the small hills like a trooper.  Family pictures are not allowed on here.  Not sure how long she can avoid being captured by the online data vultures, but for now trying to keep her free.

However, I did take a short video of the grasses dancing in the wind on the bike ride.


(The wind apparently was responsible for knocking out the power in the area around our house too today.)

Wonderful day.

We're Back In This Strangely Warm And Smoky Anchorage

Coming home after a time away means getting back into the routine.

The non-stop from LA is a nearly five hour flight.  (The same as Buenos Aires to Lima)   We didn't get pre-check, but they bumped us up to first class which was nice.  The lights below us kept reminding me we had left LA, not Seattle.  Eventually, the descent began.  It was 3:30am and when I looked out the window, I could see bits of the Chugach peaks and glaciers, though the ground was still fairly dark despite the dawning horizon.

Soon we were home.  It was hot and stuffy when we opened the door.  We dragged our stuff in and found the box of mail our house sitter had gathered.  He also left our fridge with lots of goodies including Korean takeout.  Thanks C!

After sorting some mail - why did GCI send us a bill?  We don't have GCI.  The bill was for $0, but why?  I crashed and slept til about 10am.  The toilet upstairs had been disabled - the note said it kept filling with water, so this was to shut it off.  The deck was full of aphid sap or honeydew - from Wikipedia:

"Honeydew is a sugar-rich sticky liquid, secreted by aphids and some scale insects as they feed on plant sap. When their mouthpart penetrates the phloem, the sugary, high-pressure liquid is forced out of the anus of the aphid. Honeydew is particularly common as a secretion in hemipteraninsects and is often the basis for trophobiosis.^[1] Some caterpillars of Lycaenidae butterflies and some moths also produce honeydew.^[2]Honeydew can cause sooty mold—a bane of gardeners—on many ornamental plants. It also contaminates vehicles parked beneath trees, and can then be difficult to remove from glass and bodywork. Honeydew is also secreted by certain fungi, particularly ergot.^[3]Honeydew is collected by certain species of birds, wasps, stingless bees^[4] and honey bees, which process it into a dark, strong honey(honeydew honey). This is highly prized in parts of Europe and Asia for its reputed medicinal value. Parachartergus fraternus, a eusocial wasp species, collects honeydew to feed to their growing larvae.^[5] Recent research has also documented the use of honeydew by over 40 species of wild, native, mostly solitary bees in California.^[6]"

This leaf is full of shiny, sticky honeydew as is the wood of the deck.  In fact the whole deck was sticky as were the deck chairs.  Eventually I hosed it down so we could sit out there.

Also did some serious watering in the yard.  The record high temperatures along with the lack of rain has had a serious effect in the yard. Our house sitter did water the raspberries up on the top of the hill.  It's odd though - parts of the yard look fine - the high bush cranberry is lush and the little ferns are healthy, but in other parts, some are wilted, even crinkly dried out.  And there's new planting work I didn't finish due to the rebuilding of the deck.  Lots of cotton wood shoots here and there.

Emptied suitcases - well we each had a small rollon suitcase and backpack, so not too much.  Found the things that seemed to be missing - a t-shirt I'd bought in Buenos Aires as well as a puzzle for my San Francisco nieta.  (A much easier word to write than granddaughter.)

Then I double checked on Youtube about what I needed to fix the toilet - here's the seal that was the problem - and rode over to get a new seal.

My route to Lowe's let's me bike through the Helen Louise McDowell Sanctuary, which was particularly relaxing yesterday.  The vegetation is shrinking the boardwalk a bit.  Nature landscaped this park, not CarlosThays.  People just added the boardwalks.

Got my new seal and rode home.  Not all the way as wonderful as the Sanctuary.  Also had to ride along Tudor.  But after Buenos Aires and Santiago, Tudor, one of Anchorage's busiest streets, looks pretty rural.  But it was a hot Sunday so there wasn't much traffic.  And the air is still smoky, hazing the mountains in the background.

It's nice to be doing this post on my MacBook instead of the iPad I got for the trip.  Blogger works here without all the bugs it has on the iPad.  But I did figure out some workarounds to make it possible to post, though not easily.  I might do a post on that for people struggling with it.

More to do as we ease back into Alaska.

Buenos Aires Tour Part 2: San Telmo And More

This is a continuation of our tour of parts of Buenos Aires with Carolina and Belem.  Part 1 which covers La Boca is here. 

While we were with Belen, Carolina had moved the car so it was close to the museum and we then went off to San Telmo market.  Again, we were dropped off and with Caroline walked the open market, saw the church, and bought some home made soap.

 Here’s where we got dropped off, with the church behind this muraled wall.

And across the street was a very spiffy looking apartment building.  
     
     
       

  

We went in to look at the church.  

 You can learn more about San Telmo - who was born in 1175 and was the patron saint of fishers and sailers in the south of Italy at the church website.

I got fascinated by the floor tiles.  They have this Escher like patterN, and then in a spot of light, I saw that it was made up of pentagonal tiles.  I want these in my house somewhere.  

J liked the tiles out in front of the church.  

Here’s the street market from in front of the church.  

We got to what looked like a larger square that was filled with booths that looked more like a flea market and then up another street passing musicians, a magician, until we got to the San Telmo market.  It was teaming with people.  It’s a regular neighborhood market shops selling all sorts of things - fruits, vegetables - beautiful fresh vegies - meat.  And lots of little places to eat.

On the right, they’re making empanadas.  

We got a couple of vegetarian empanadas - the best I’ve ever had - and a humita chala, which was a mix of corn and onions and something else wrapped in a corn husk.  I am going to have to figure out how they made that because it was delicious.  

I found a Youtube of someone preparing humita chala.  This is not an Argentine version because she adds some spicy sauce at the end, but it’s close enough for now.  

We wandered around a bit more.  At one point a car was trying to figure out where it wanted to go and the car behind it almost touched it and honked.  Hands flew out the windows of the first car.  I was in sympathy with them.  They pulled into a parking place, but someone called out from a window to say they couldnt.  But Belen told them we were just up the street and leaving so they followed us and all was well.

From there we wandered over to ‘the most expensive part of town”. Puerto Madero.  It’s on an island and there are only a couple of bridges there.  Lots of fancy high rise business and residential buildings.  

We stopped and Belen wanted to show us the very fancy Faena Hotel,  in a refurbished old brick building.  We didn’t see much, but this long red space was striking.  There’s a lot of money involved here.    Belen asked for information on a tango show they have.  “It’s not ‘a’ tango show, it’s ‘the best tango show” was the response.  It’s $250 a person.  I asked if that was pesos or dollars.  Dollars.  Is Lady Gaga in it?  Belen smiled.  

Then we got caught in a traffic jam.  Nothing was moving.  Well, sometimes the bridges are pulled up to let boats pass.  In 15 minutes we were off the island and headed by the Colon National Theater and then by the old Synagogue.  

We went through Recoleta - below is the church by the cemetery - and then back to where we are staying.  

It was a gorgeous sunny day, in the upper 60s.  But it got chilly in the late afternoon.  

 We got to talking about how they are building up this business.  It’s hard.  But they both know Buenos Aires well and are warm and helping people.  They seemed to be having as good a time as we were.  It was like good friends were showing us around.  They are willing to just give people basic advice - how to get into town from the airport and find a good place to stay and get a bus pass - to actually arranging everything for people including taking them around to see things.  Carolina also has special connections into some fields like polo.  

i don’t usually make recommendations like this, but if anyone is going to Argentina and wants some help planning their trip, their website is Choice Buenos Aires.  As I said in the previous post, it’s a work in progress.  These women are much better at guiding tours and planning trips than making their website just the way they’d like it.  And they also  have a Facebook page and a Twitter page.   (@aireschoice) 

We had a really wonderful day yesterday.  And tomorrow morning early, we head for the airport and our plane back to the US.  I’m not ready to go back, even though we’ve been here a month.