Posted inSustainability

What Mars? What environment?

I enjoyed the terminally cranky, but (almost) always enjoyable Mark Morford as he shared his latest rant on Bush’s anti-environmental policies. It truly is amazing, how the right wing has made conservation anathema for conservatives. Shouldn’t conservatives be committed to conserving? You would think so. My dear deeply conservative mother, who had me reading National Review before Anderson’s Fairy Tales, or so I remember in my increasingly muddled recollections of my childhood, was thrifty and concerning about waste in that good old-fashioned New England fashion. If she were alive today, I think she would be writing empassioned letters to the…
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Posted inEntertainment

Cold Mountain

Whew…just got back from seeing “Cold Mountain,” and I’m exhausted. Almost feel like I’ve lived through the Civil War, though I don’t think the actual Civil War lasted as long as the movie. Or maybe it felt that long to me because the only major battle scene was right at the start, and the remaining two and a quarter hours mostly featured Jude Law walking, extremely slowly, back to Cold Mountain and Nicole Kidman, while Kidman learned from Renee Zellweger learned how to live just fine, thank you, without a man around. Proving that Laurel’s liking of any film is…
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Posted inPlotinus Writing/Weblogs

Plotinus passed on

Anti-climatic but deeply meaningful: that’s how I recently viewed the slowly moving “…% complete” Norton Antivirus indicator as my rather large (2 mb) Return to the One file passed into cyberspace on its way to Charles King, the book designer who works with Unlimited Publishing—with whom I’m co-publishing the book, under the guise of Adrasteia Publishing, my newly established (and largely illusory) publishing identity. So now the book is out of my hands, though it will return to me, certainly, for review, proof-reading, and (ugh…) preparation of an index after the interior design is complete. After years of work on…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment Sustainability

On remaining in a room

Pascal said something to the effect that all of our miseries stem from our not being able to remain quietly in a room. I’ve always assumed that he meant in a room alone with ourselves, but lately I’ve begun to extend this concept in an unified effort to explain some seemingly unrelated phenomena and personal experiences. Such as…why John Kerry and John Edwards did so well in the Iowa caucuses…why I can’t stand going to meetings of Sustainable Fairview Associates…why Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson hit it off, eventually, in “Somethings Gotta Give.” Why? Because misery also is remaining in…
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Posted inMiscellany

Angry bed positions

It’s always a pleasure to get a fresh email message from Mil’s Mailing List (written by Mil Millington, the creator of Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, a wildly creative and funny website that I’ve recommended before). Here’s Mil’s take on Angry Bed Positions. I think he has made a real contribution toward advancing mankind’s understanding of this little-studied, but hugely important, sphere of non-verbal human interaction.
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Posted inNeighborhood

Appeal successful!

All in all, a pretty good day for Laurel…and Brian, and the neighborhood. On my next walk up the driveway, to get the mail around 2:00, I saw a manila envelope from the Marion County Hearings Officer—the long-awaited decision on our long-fought appeal of the attempted Nielsen lot partitioning in Spring Lake Estates. First we had won; then on a first appeal by the Nielsens we lost; and now we had made a second appeal, which we were pretty confident about, since all the newly assembled facts were on our side. Laurel was nervous opening the letter, as was I.…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Front page Laurel

What a nice surprise, to be walking down the driveway after retrieving the Statesman-Journal newspaper this morning, idly glancing at a story on the front page about how the Salem’s new mayor is doing in her first year, and out pops a familiar name: Laurel Hines. I read, “Mayor Taylor seems to be too limited in her vision and too afraid of upsetting a few powerful business interests to lead Salem to a truly healthy future,” southeast Salem resident Laurel Hines said.” This was after the story began with a few positive comments, so Laurel got to lead off the…
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Posted inScience

Putting things in perspective

A few nights ago, when I was just about at the peak of my feeling-sorry-for-myself bell curve, since we’ve had to put up with snow/ice/power outages for a couple of weeks now, I picked up two science magazines that helped me put things in perspective. In the November 22 issue of New Scientist (a great weekly science magazine published in Great Britain, so you get a continental, meaning liberal/anti-Bush, perspective in the editorials) I read the cheerily titled piece, “Doomsday Scenario.” Here I learned that all of humanity’s advances during the last 10,000 years have occurred during wonderfully temperate, and…
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Posted inDogs

Kinky sexual behavior

With a title like that, I’m pretty sure this weblog posting will be read. Especially accompanied by the titillating (to dogs, at least) photo of Serena and her new canine boy-toy, Rocco. Yesterday, in freezing weather, made worse by an even-more-freezing wind chill, I dedicated myself to capturing this rather rare animal behavior: a spayed female humping away on a neutered male, who, by his expression, is either in a state of erotic pleasure or, more likely, complete bemusement. So here we are, with several inches of snow/ice on the ground, and freezing rain coming down right now, and we’ve…
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Posted inHome life

Goddess, hear our prayers!

Woke up this morning to alarm clock beeping…no reason to set it, except to be up in time by noon to watch Rose Bowl…no, didn’t set it…slumber thoughts slowly awaken: electricity is off, again!...then on, then off, then on, then off…now on, perhaps the Electricity Goddess has heard our prayers…must pray harder…would offer first-born son if had one…will you take a daughter, Goddess? Name is Celeste, lives in North Hollywood (just kidding C.; actually have offered to loan you to Goddess until cold weather is over)…already being blamed by Laurel for this snow event, just like last time: “You were…
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