A cool and sunny Christmas Eve morning coffee muses.
I was sitting at the kitchen table going through my morning emails, reading the blogs I keep up with and generally doing what I do during the quiet of a Saturday morn when after checking out Fragments I started running Fred's link list. Basically, I was looking for some new…
A great lady who preceded the mess we had with Gov. G W Bush died last week. Molly Ivins remembers a thing or two in her latest column. Go have a read... Creators.com - Creators Syndicate: "At a long-ago political do at Scholz Garten in Austin, everybody who was anybody…
I know we are all holding out great hopes for biofuels, but these nagging pieces keep showing up in the papers... The False Hope of Biofuels: "Biofuels such as ethanol made from corn, sugar cane, switchgrass and other crops are being touted as a 'green' solution for a large part…
Here's another article on the sustainable foods culture. The tie is to the book by Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Looks like another trip to the booksellers for me. Everthing I keep reading about "Omnivore" makes me want to check out the book. Common Ground: The Shortest Food Chain: "In the…
It looks like if there is a common thread running through recent posts it is the idea of buying local. My concern was originally in the way of food. I feel a bit leery of the commercialization of the organic movement. Call me a “Luddite” but when the big Agri-Business…
Thursday, June 22, 2006 Thoreau's Journal: 22-Jun-1851 As I walk the railroad causeway, I notice that the fields and meadows have acquired various tinges as the season advances, the sun gradually using all his paints. There is the rosaceous evening red tinge of red clover,—like an evening sky gone down…
'Organic' Loses Its Freshness: Until recently, organic practices were sneered at by those in academia, in government and in chemical agribusiness -- now called 'conventional agriculture.' Thanks to a fast-growing demand for organic food, the sneers are now reserved for those who practice organics on a small scale. Long accustomed…
Latest measles case brings total to 14 - The Boston Globe: "June 21, 2006 The Massachusetts Department of Public Health confirmed another case of measles yesterday, bringing the total to 14 since early May. The patient, a woman in her early 20s, has recovered from the disease and is back…
Wandering through the blogs I read regularly today led to another interesting discovery... via Colleen thru her sister Kathy to Christina Baldwin and her book "Storycatcher". Now it looks like I need to make another trip to the Amazon site. In reading at the storycatcher.net site a couple of things caught my eye...…
I was cleaning up my bookmark list this morning and what usually happens when I try happened. I followed an old link that crashed. Then in trying to find a new clean link to the site I found a article that has more relevance to me now than when it…
I spend my days in a darkened room staring at twin windows on the electronic world. My twin windows are the twin 20” monitors on which I design my projects before sending them through the cable that ties my machine to the others in this network of interconnected ideas. My…
From The Washington Post Editorial, May 17, 2006 "Why the National Guard?: "Disingenuously, Mr. Bush declared in his address that 'we have enough Guard forces to win the war on terror, to respond to natural disasters and to help secure our border.' That may be true in strictly numerical terms.…
A Lonely Warning On Debt: "'The question I ask is, what sacrifice are we making? Anyone in the know who is watching us has to wonder about our character, our intellectual honesty, our concern about our national security, our nation's competitiveness in the global marketplace now and in the future,…
I was sitting at the kitchen table this morning with the doors and windows open enjoying our unseasonably cool morning, answering email and reading the daily news and views (as in blogs), when my youngest daughter wandered in and wanted to know why the AC wasn't on. Now folks, the…
The Carpetbagger Report "The Washington Post ran an interesting chart this week that every Democrat should memorize. It shows your annual savings under the latest Republican tax cut. Here are the figures: $10,000-$20,000: $2 $20,000-$30,000: $9 $30,000-$40,000: $16 $40,000-$50,000: $46 $50,000-$75,000: $100 $75,000-$100,000: $403 $100,000-$200,000: $1,388 $200,000-$500,000: $4,499 $500,000-$1 million: $5,562…