Category: Environment

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Crimes Against Horticulture: A Photojournalistic Screed

As some of you know, I’m an activist. I’m now engaging in my activism against carbuncles on our landscapes. By “carbuncles,” I mean the egregious errors we make in plant choice, plant placement, pruning decisions, and erecting structures adjacent to plants that are innocently minding their own business when humans come charging in to muck things up.

I’ll start in my backyard. Crimes Against Hort: Fence edition

See that functional yet attractive fence carefully erected between two trees? You can see the little crossbar where the vertical pole couldn’t reach the ground because a tree or two was in the way. Whoever erected this fence accommodated future growth—until they didn’t.

Is anyone else concerned about the person in the future who will need to chainsaw his way through that trunk once the trees die or get blown over by a tornado? That person could be killed.

I have not yet asked the neighbors what they were thinking. They are Very Nice People.

My cousin Lisa supplied incriminating evidence of another disturbing fence condition caused by a neighbor’s landscaping gross negligence.

That poor retaining wall won’t retain anything much longer because it’s trying its best to contain the roots of trees that never should have been allowed to grow there. Hackberry and black locust? More like horticultural hackery and a plague of locusts.

Bamboo creates an impenetrable fence of evil that mere fences cannot contain and for which our victimized neighbors hate us with the fiery passion of the sun.

Crimes Against Hort: bamboo fence edition
Crimes Against Hort: Bamboo Neighbor Edition

Sometimes, bamboo disguises itself as a religious enterprise. “Heavenly” bamboo is a beautiful scourge. Very Nice People cut it and bring it indoors, telling me, “It looks so pretty in winter!”

Yes. In winter, the birds do their best to aid Nandina domestica in its insidious plan for world domination. They die in the process. Nandina kills the birds that eat its berries. New Nandinas grow from the rotting corpses of mockingbirds, cedar waxwings, robins, and other songbirds that consume the cyanide-laden berries. This stuff is evil, through and through.

Last year, a tornado exposed an army of nandina encamped on the hillside bordering Indian Trail. The photo here cannot do justice to the scope of the invasion. Every bit of red and green is nandina. Next time you’re out and about, drive by. Like the Indians of yore, you will see non-natives marauding from the east. You can do everything to eradicate the problem; you will fail. Conscientious gardeners cannot root out nandina with poison, pickaxes, diesel, and fire. I should know. I’ve tried.

We need to drive no further than Cedar Hill Road to feast our eyes on a veritable smörgåsbord of non-native invasive species. In addition to an abundance of wisteria, visitors are delighted (?) to see English ivy, Bradford pear, privet, and—commonly seen in the wild—the effusive ditch nandina (N. domestica ‘Pretty Woman’), preening and proudly displaying her berries like some streetwalker in fishnets and a microskirt.

Without regard for decency or decorum–in fact, without any evidence of good manners at all–these invasive aliens crowd the narrow, winding road and cover the street signs. Nandina is there, of course, but also more Privet than remains in China, Bradford pears, mimosas, Asian honeysuckles (please consider using our beautiful Arkansas native yellow honeysuckle or trumpet honeysuckle instead), Vinca major (periwinkle), Paulownia, English ivy, thickets of Tree of Heaven, Photinia, Chinese tallow trees, Chinese parasol trees, and more.

Even though it is not currently smothering the hillside, we all know what this stretch of Cedar Hill looks like in July. Soon, my activist friends and I will circulate a petition to rename the area “Kudzu Hill.” Please be prepared to sign it.

Allsopp Park could serve as the poster child for the Cooperative Extension Services’s website for invasive species. Check it out. You’ll be appalled at what evils we harbor in our home landscape. My photocompanion and I took so many pictures of Asian wisteria in the park we nearly exhausted the limitless storage space on our photojournalism-issued iPhones. Here are some specimens growing about 200 feet from the ravine’s floor along Cedar Hill Road. (Note the abundance of privet, too.)

A friend from my hometown proudly posted a photo of his favorite wisteria. It is indeed gorgeous. We are publishing his photo with his blessing and giving him credit as promised. (He provided no information as to the health of the beleaguered tree strangling under the glory of the purple succubus.)

This time of year, Vinca major, the European periwinkle used as a perennial ground cover, gears up to take over unsuspecting beds in a coup that asphyxiates everything within its reach. Yes, it can hold a hillside in place. It does so at the cost of native plants, insects, and wildlife. Here’s a particularly healthy clump of it, newly exposed to lots of sun on this steep slope in Kingwood since March 31, 2023.

Not all alien species are invasive, but some scream “I DO NOT BELONG HERE” at the top of their lungs anyway. cough palm trees cough

In the category of pruning things that should never be pruned, let’s discuss azaleas. Walls of flowers are lovely, sure, but the stripes in those ranks aren’t exactly uniform. (Also, Loropetalum is not supposed to be given a flattop. I shall endeavor to find a photo at some point.)

Many of us proclaim disdain for invasive, non-native species. We generally aren’t talking about fire ants, zebra mussels, or homo sapiens sapiens; we refer to Bradford pears. “Something should be done,” we agree, nodding somberly and congratulating ourselves on our awareness of the tragedy. Then, we prune them like this just before they bloom, eliminating all the problems.

True story: I was at a local garden center last weekend – one that proudly touts its stock of native plants. It openly sells Bradford pears. WHY?!

In addition to allowing the proliferation of invasive aliens, we do active damage to otherwise law-abiding plants. Beginning in February, crape murder happens unabated on practically every block. My friend Nancy sent me this photo of an active murder scene in her backyard. When she said she had a murder, I was hoping for crows.

Humans compound their crime by allowing the proliferation of black sooty mold on the bare trunks of the murder victims. Failure to treat the pest that causes the mold spreads it like a plague, and those sadly shorn crape myrtles are plague enough.

This stand of molded and murdered crapes is enhanced by the Chinese wisteria tangled in the privet in the background. A four-fer!

This tree on Cantrell desperately waves for help after being butchered by the utility company’s tree service.

These are two in an entire street’s worth of big old oaks that got topped in the name of utility. Topless trees are obscene.

This poor Magnolia grandiflora x torturosa tragicii var. ‘Someone Cut Off Its Head AND Stole Its Pants’ is dreadfully exposed on University Avenue.

Pruning isn’t our only mistake. I drove through a local country club recently and noticed their professional grounds crew had mulched the iris. I nearly had a case of the vapors.

To end on another travesty from my yard, I’d like to introduce you to my sweet autumn clematis. Except, I can’t. Last year, when I learned it was an invasive foreigner, I sanctimoniously ripped it off my mailbox. I replaced it with a native passionflower vine that had been growing joyously in the backyard. I hope it likes its new home. It will probably take over.

As an unrepentant activist, I’d typically invite you to a fundraiser or a rally right now. Instead, I have a different favor to ask: Please examine your gardens for criminal elements and eradicate them. Exercise responsible horticulture and good taste.

Good taste. That brings me to azaleaballs. How does one serve azaleaballs? Should they be accompanied by a dipping sauce or simply rolled in sugar?

Yours in activist spirit,

Anne

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Ugly Food Waste

Miguel de Cervantes

We celebrated the holiday season with an abundance of food. Roasted turkeys, sweet potatoes, greens, pumpkins, cranberries, pecans, wine – it would be unthinkable to omit the wine!

Some traditional holiday foods are those we don’t eat. For instance, some great-grandmother on one side of our family passed down a recipe for fruitcake-like cookies that have a half-life of a Hostess Twinkie. Everyone nibbles on one to be polite and insists that I really don’t need to bother with them next year. We toss the bulk of these cookies into the trash come January.

Of course, nearly all of the food we ate this holiday season came from a grocery store. It was beautiful food. Kroger heaps its bins high with out-of-season and exotic produce, not to mention the seasonal fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Food no longer has a season.

We pick out only the best to take home. Marred, oddly shaped, or irregularly colored produce stays behind. We study those “sell by” dates as though they are an oracle. Every once in a while, we purge our pantries and fridges, laughing about the discovery of new life forms while sheepishly wishing we hadn’t wasted the money or that we had planned our meals a little better.

Food waste Is No Laughing Matter

One-third of all food grown for human consumption either spoils or is thrown out. Here in the United States, we waste more than that – a full forty percent of the food we grow. Half of that waste never even leaves the farm because it isn’t considered attractive enough: misshapen carrots, undersized pears, crystallized honey, apples with dimples, scarred squash, mutant strawberries, off-color tomatoes. These fruits and vegetables have nothing at all wrong with them except that we humans have assigned them a ridiculously high standard of beauty.

Conservative estimates are that people throw away 20% or more of the food they actually buy. Imagine walking out of the grocery store with four or five bags, dropping one in the parking lot, and not bothering to pick it up. That’s essentially what we do.

Ugly Food Waste is Thirsty Business

Wasting food wastes the resources that create that food. Agriculture sucks up 80% of our nation’s freshwater supply, so when food goes to waste we waste all that water too. And in some places right here in the United States, fresh drinking water is disappearing.

Consider California’s Central Valley. More than 230 different crops grow there, amounting to nearly half of America’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts. The Central Valley accounts for one-sixth of the nation’s irrigated farmland. Four trillion gallons of water a year disappear from underground aquifers and its river basins.

Desert irrigation in the Central Valley

Practically no snow has fallen in the Sierra Nevada mountains for several years, so snow melt has not replenished the Central Valley’s water supply. Groundwater levels currently sit 100 feet below average. There is no water to flow through irrigation canals. In some parts of the Central Valley, the desiccated land subsides by more than two inches every month due to a lack of water. Crops deplete not just groundwater, but deep water wells, and a third of these crops never even leave the fields because they aren’t pretty enough for grocers to stock. Meanwhile people in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, who depend on that same source for water to drink and to bathe in, ration it and pay steep penalties for use deemed “excessive.”

Waste from food animal production also impacts our environment. We have all probably heard that the Buffalo River watershed is threatened by a farm that needs to dispose of 7 million gallons of hog manure a year. That project involves a single large farm. Because of the pollution from this one pig farm, the Buffalo River has experienced unusual algae blooms this year. Now imagine that sort of effect on every stream in America from hundreds of thousands of animal farms.

The Environmental Impact of Food Waste

Growing and transporting all that wasted food spews out a staggering amount of carbon emissions. Wasted food is the single-largest contributor to U.S. landfills, and correspondingly to the methane emissions that result from them.

Nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers from these wasted crops have polluted the streams of the Missouri-Mississippi River systems. The second largest marine “dead zone” in the world is at the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. Fertilizers in the runoff from farms become more and more concentrated as they move downstream and collect still more fertilizers from more farms. By the time the Mississippi reaches the Gulf coast, this soupy brew causes recurrent algae blooms. Decomposing algae consume the oxygen needed to support aquatic life. Fishing boats and shrimpers have to travel farther from shore to harvest anything. The ecosystem of the polluted shores no longer sustains the wildlife it once did. The Gulf dead zone has now grown to the size of the combined states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. It is easily visible in satellite images because the toxic, hypoxic waters appear murky and brown.

Food Waste Can Beget or Resolve Food Waste

Vegetable crops are not the only wasted food. Meat raised for human consumption is wasted at an alarming rate. Twenty percent, or about twelve billion chickens, pigs, and cattle, are raised, fed, watered, and slaughtered for food but never eaten. Raising an animal from birth to table is incredibly expensive in terms of the food it eats, the water it drinks, the labor to care for it, the space it requires, the time it takes to grow, and the drugs used to keep it healthy.

We grow enormous amounts of grain to feed the animals we eat. Imagine the savings in resources, water, and pollutants if the animals we eat were fed on the food we waste. Two food consumers are doing just that: Rutgers University in New Jersey donates dining hall food scraps to a local cattle and hog farm, and MGM Resorts in Las Vegas donates food scraps from its casinos and restaurants to a local hog farm. Imagine if more businesses and farms cooperated like this.

The Cost of Food Waste

Worldwide, nearly a trillion dollars worth of food is wasted every year. In 2015 the UN’s task force on global food insecurity reported that nearly 800 million people – one-eighth of the planet’s population – are chronically undernourished. The food that currently feeds landfills could feed the 800 million hungry people in the world twice over. And we are throwing away forty percent of our perfectly edible meat, vegetables, and fruits. Poverty and logistics create food insecurity, not scarcity.

When we think of starving families, we think of places like war-torn countries and times of famine. We think of Syria, where humanitarian aid is prevented from reaching bombed-out cities. We think of Yemen, where families have to choose which children to feed and which to allow to die. We think of that Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a starving Sudanese toddler, crouched in hunger and despair as a vulture stalks her.

We don’t think of developed nations. We do not think of the fertile American South and we certainly don’t think of our own neighborhoods.

But one in every eight American families struggles to put enough food on the table. During the school year, the only meals the children in some of these families get are the ones served at school. As much as a fifth of Mississippi’s population has trouble finding affordable, nutritious food. Arkansas’s numbers are slightly better, but before we say “Thank God for Mississippi,” we should recognize that one in four Arkansas children cannot grow and develop normally because they don’t get enough to eat. Single parent families, the working poor, and senior citizens tend to not have enough food, while Pulaski County discards more than 100,000 pounds of food daily.

Reclaiming Ugly Food for the Hungry

We must put this wasted but perfectly edible food into the mouths and bellies of the people who need it. The United Nations has recognized that the right to food and water is a basic human right, and its member nations are slowly taking action.

In November Slovenia made the right to clean drinking water a constitutional right and Scotland’s Independent Working Group on Food Poverty recommended that its government make the right to food a matter of law. Such legislation will not end food insecurity or water scarcity. It would, however, mandate that the governments of these countries ensure that everyone has access to adequate and affordable food and water. Earlier this year, France passed a law banning supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food, requiring them to donate that food to charities and food banks. Italy did the same. It also created tax incentives for businesses based on the amount of food donated and passed legislation to permit food slightly past its sell-by date to be donated without risk to the donor.

Non-government organizations also try to make a difference. In its first year of existence, a single company in the San Francisco Bay area rescued 350 tons of produce that had been rejected for sale in grocery stores solely for cosmetic reasons. The company donated the produce to homeless shelters and food banks and sold what it could to individual consumers.

To help address the hunger issue locally, the Junior League of Little Rock started a nonprofit organization called Potluck. Potluck collects food waste from hundreds of area food donors such as hospitals, food distributors, event centers, grocery stores, restaurants, and hotels. It redistributes its collections to food pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters. It serves several Arkansas communities, and with more help could serve more.

History’s Lessons

None of us has to waste as much food as we do. When my grandmother died more than 15 years ago, I rescued several tattered, fragile books from the shelf in her kitchen. Two of these hand-written books of recipes were over 100 years old and had belonged to her own mother and grandmother. These women who lived in Scott, Arkansas more than a century ago did not waste anything that could be eaten. They had recipes that specifically called for sour milk, bruised plums, and leftovers.

If we are foolish enough to believe that our society’s current careless attitude toward our excess food production cannot be a serious problem, let us remember that a drought between 1931-1941 desiccated the mid-section of the U.S. In the 1930s more than three and a half million people abandoned farms in the Plains states. Following Route 66, many of them ended up in California’s Central Valley. Their descendants still produce half of our domestically-grown fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

The ghosts of Joad family, the Okie protagonists of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, are watching us. After five years of desperate drought in Oklahoma, they moved to California’s Central Valley. California’s Central Valley, which has been in a state of desperate drought for five years.

Agri-business, commercial consumers, governments, and ordinary people must work together to increase the efficiency of our food supply system. Ugly food is wasted, but the impact of current levels of food waste is even uglier.

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Drug Testing: the Wrong Results

Slowly She Dissolves, by Melinda Green Harvey
Slowly She Dissolves, by Melinda Green Harvey

When I was a law student, I took a class on environmental law. One of the subjects I was interested in was contamination by secondary exposure. Direct exposure is obvious and often quantifiable. Indirect or secondary exposure – in the form of things like acid rain or second-hand smoke – was more complex and harder to quantify and prove. I was also fascinated by the possibility of false positive and false negative results from the testing methods available at the time. These tests were being used to fight coal-fired power plants and to hold cigarette manufacturers liable for the lung cancer of non-smokers. They were also being used to ferret out pot smokers and recreational users of certain prescription medications.

It was 1988. The Reagans were in the White House. Nancy’s “Just Say No” campaign was wildly popular among people who had no clue about how teenagers test boundaries. That year saw a wave of employers demanding that their employees take drug tests either before beginning employment, after an accident, or randomly. Aside from the 4th Amendment issues (which only applied to the government employers), dissenters raised objections to false positive test results that could damage not only someone’s career but their reputations and future employability. Being a child of the 70’s and 80’s, I was at least passingly familiar with the concept of the “contact high.” Could a person’s off-duty social associations cause him to lose his job? I decided to investigate the matter.

I researched the science, not just the law. I learned that something as ordinary as a poppy seed bagel or over-the-counter antihistamines could skew test results. There was no way to differentiate between someone who had ingested the substance illicitly or simply gone to a concert and been assigned a seat near people who were smoking weed. The science could test for the presence of the chemicals, but could not say how they had gotten into the person’s body or whether the person was feeling the effects of the substance at the time of testing.

Five years later I had a very active family law practice. I handled quite a few employment law cases, too. Drug testing came up over and over again. Knowing what I did, I discouraged clients from attacking each other for drug use unless it was seriously interfering with parenting responsibilities – and not just because of the false positives and false negatives. Usually if one parent partakes, the other parent will have been exposed, if they didn’t themselves indulge. The employment cases were the worst, though.

All it took was an accident that was someone else’s fault to trigger a drug test under most employers’ policies. I remember a truck driver who hired me who said yes, for the first time in 20 years he had smoked a joint at his college reunion a few days before the accident. He wasn’t high when it happened, but lost a $70,000/year job when a woman driving another vehicle ran a stop sign. He swerved to miss her and ended up in a ditch. He was fired because of the drug test, not because of the accident.

I remember the 60+ year old woman who was told she had failed a pre-employment drug test. This woman had been out of work for more than a year because the plant where she had worked closed. She had had to give up her home of 40 years and move in with her daughter. She was looking forward to independence again. Our investigation revealed that the test samples had probably been switched accidently, either at the lab or by whoever had collected the samples. A long-haired hippie-type person had the job she had applied for, and in a fit of profiling she just knew he was actually the one with the drugs in his system. Her preacher, though, in whom she had confided the devastating test results, had condemned her and was counseling her to get help for her non-existent addiction. She was humiliated and literally sick over it.

By 2000, there were lots of products on the market specifically marketed to people who needed to beat a drug test. Substance abuse was an issue in at least half of the custody cases I tried, and maybe more. Every single client – and every single opposing party – knew about these products. They weren’t 100% reliable, but I didn’t have any clients who submitted to a drug test without using the products if there was time for them to do so. Those who I knew used drugs were made aware that in-court testing was a possibility. While I couldn’t tell them to destroy the evidence, I could tell them to be ready to be tested. With a few exceptions, they were all smart enough to take steps.

drug testing - hair follicle collectionThen there was the grandmother who was suing for custody of her badly neglected grandchildren. She didn’t use drugs. She was asking for custody because her daughter and son in law did, and because of their drug use they didn’t take care of their children adequately. She had asked for drug testing knowing that she would pass easily and that the parents would fail any drug test they were ordered to take. The judge ordered everyone to be tested. The grandmother had gone to a James Taylor concert at Alltell Arena and breathed in that second-hand marijuana smoke. Her grandchildren ended up in foster care.

Then came hair follicle testing. Follicle testing was more foolproof and harder to beat, the testing centers and manufacturers claimed. It wasn’t long before the shampoos and rinses were marketed in the same places as those flushing solutions. “You cannot beat a hair test,” one site still boasts. It’s wrong. Even if the test shows positive, it doesn’t explain how the substance got there.

It made me think of the rumor I had heard back in the 1980’s when cocaine use was rampant in the United States. It was said that traces of cocaine could be found on nearly every American $100 in circulation. Partiers would roll the bill into a straw and snort the powder through it. This level of contamination is still the case, and the bills don’t even have to be used directly with the cocaine. They can get contaminated inside currency-counting machines at the bank. Imagine handling one of those bank-contaminated bills that you just withdrew to pay your lawyer, them smoothing a stray strand of hair. Then imagine that you are sent directly for a drug test, and despite the fact that you have never in your life even seen cocaine, much less used it, your drug test comes back positive for the drug. It doesn’t have to be in your system to count. It just has to be in your hair. And once again, you are placed in the position of having to explain how it got there, and proving the negative of the drug use that you are now presumed to engage in.

With the announcement from the American Chemical Society last week that steps taken to remove secondary contamination from hair being drug tested actually washes cocaine into the hair shaft, the most reliable of these unreliable tests just became even less reliable.

Science gives us a lot, but it is not a panacea and never will be. It answers some questions, but answering those tends to lead to more that need to be asked. Whether in the courtroom or just in everyday life, we need to remember to ask those questions that logically come next. Science can then begin investigating them and working to find the answers.

Drug testing is too fallible to be reliable. A positive drug test tells us virtually nothing. It doesn’t prove frequent use or addiction. It doesn’t prove use at all – and it never has.

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Litterbugs Litter Butts

So today was the day for the Adopt-a-Highway litter pick-up.

Sign for the Adopt-A-Highway mile of the Freethinkers of Central Arkansas

The sign says “Freethinkers of Central Arkansas,” but that group was one of several that merged with the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers a couple of years ago. Somebody in charge of the organization really ought to do something about getting the name on the sign changed. Somebody? Somebody? Oh. Wait. That would probably end up being me.  Therefore, it’s fine the way it is – for a little longer, anyway.

We do our highway clean-ups on Sunday mornings, because, well, it’s not like we go to church. It’s the one time in the week when people in our group are apt to be available. We met at 9:00 a.m. today, before things got too blazing hot. The mile we adopted is in downtown Little Rock, on State Highway 10 near the state capitol. It’s part of LaHarpe Boulevard where the highway crosses a railroad and becomes Third Street, then crosses the railroad again a couple of miles before it officially becomes Cantrell Road. Little Rock’s primary roads don’t tend to keep a single name for long distances. Don’t ask me why.

trash, cigarette butts, litter, gross
This patch of the side of the road is about two feet square.

Litter along this street doesn’t tend to get too out of hand. I don’t know if that’s because the property owners along this stretch tend to be conscientious about keeping their sidewalks clean. (I’m especially giving you nods of approval, Dillard’s Corporate Headquarters and Episcopal Collegiate School.)

In the years that I’ve participated in the highway cleanup, I’ve noticed one thing to be consistently true:

Cigarette smokers are some trashy, nasty, litter-bugging sumbitches.

And I don’t mean just a little trashy, either. If you count the actual number of things picked up today, far and away the most numerous were cigarette butts. If I’ve counted correctly, there are about thirty pieces of litter in the photo to the right. Twenty-six of those are cigarette butts. I circled the litter butts in red so you could see them better. The non-butt pieces of litter are circled in blue.

Do cigarette smokers realize that their butts are not biodegradable? Do they understand that when they throw their butts out of the car window they are really and truly littering? Do they know that the rest of the world really doesn’t want to look at their trash?

I guess not. I may be a little sensitive to this, seeing as how just this morning I spent an hour and half with about 15 other folks on the side of the road picking up mostly cigarette butts discarded by thoughtless smokers. Cigarette smokers litter butts like breadcrumbs through the forest paths of their lives. Why?

cigarette butts
This is my HOUSE, dammit!
trash, matches, liltter
We do have trash cans.

I don’t smoke. I am allergic to cigarette smoke. My throat closes up when I spend to much time around it. I can’t breathe. So I am grateful for the modern courtesy of people going outside to smoke when they are in my company. Smoking indoors caused me lots of unpleasant breathing issues before it became customary for smokers to go outside. I will provide ashtrays for my guests who want to smoke.

Smokers who come over to my house and toss their nasty butts in my yard are pretty friggin’ rude, in my book. Do they think no one picks up after them? Do they think I want their ugly butts to just sit there, waiting for some archaeologist to come along in a couple hundred years to dig them up and think that I lived on top of some trash heap? Damn litterbugs.

After I got home from the highway cleanup today, I went out through my son’s basement bedroom to the patio. The photo to the left shows what was on the steps outside his door. I circled the cigarette butts – five of them, and those are the ones I didn’t have to look for. They were just thrown, or carefully placed, right there on the steps leading down to the yard. I didn’t circle the matches in the photo on the left, but I was pretty appalled at the collection I found, and the photo on the right shows more matches that were apparently used to light those cigarettes. The matches were tossed onto the stoop. They are wooden, so they are biodegradable, but that doesn’t mean I really want them littering my damn deck. and we’ve got a serious drought going on. I don’t want my house to burn down, either.

I have a couple of family members who occasionally smoke at my house. I suspect that one of them left those butts outside the basement door. Another of them is my favorite youngest male first cousin, who I’ll call Paul, because that’s his name. Paul doesn’t litter cigarette butts at my house anymore. There’s a reason for that.

Paul came over one evening, and we spent a pleasant few hours chatting. Paul has spent many hours at my house, and he knows I can’t handle cigarettes inside. Off and on throughout his visit that evening, Paul would go out onto the deck to smoke. He took a can with him. I don’t remember if it was a can of beer or of soda, or if it was empty or full. He did not ask for an ashtray, though, so I assumed he was using his can as his ashtray.

hanging plant
The new hanging plant on the deck

“This pot is kind of cool,” Paul said. “But why does it have a hole in its side?” He was standing on the deck looking at the hanging plant that graced the door to my living room.

“A what?”

I looked at the pot. Sure enough, there was a hole in the side of the pot. I had just bought the flowers in that pot a couple of weeks before, filled the empty pot with a coconut coir potting mixture, and planted them. For a moment I was confused. I didn’t remember it being the type of pot with holes for strawberries or herbs to grow out of its sides. I reached for the pot and turned it to see if there were more holes on the sides, which I had just missed because of a psychotic break or something.

“That’s weird. It’s smoking,” said Paul.

“Shit!” I dashed for the water hose a few feet away.

After playing Fire Marshall, I looked at Paul, who looked very sheepish.

“Um,” he said.

“I guess you weren’t using that as an ashtray,” I said, nodding toward the can.

“Yeah. No. No, I wasn’t.”

“That pot didn’t originally have a hole in its side,” I said, because at that moment it dawned on me that the hole had just materialized.  Or dematerialized. The plastic had melted, mysteriously.

“No, I guess it didn’t.”

“Paul, we’ve discussed smoking pot,” I said gently. Because we have, lots of times.

Pots really shouldn’t smoke.

 

(Paul, you know I love you. Don’t hate me for telling this story.)

 

 

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Vivoleum

Let’s just accept it as fact: the whole energy from fossil fuels thing is bad.

Only a finite amount of oil and gas exists under the crust of our planet. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. We aren’t reclaiming it after we use it. Recycle gasoline? Come on, who are we kidding? We burn it and convert it into greenhouse gases, which just pollutes the planet. We don’t use those greenhouse gases for fuel or convert them into something more useful and less dangerous. We spill oil and petroleum products in our oceans and saturate our ground with them, but we can’t pick them back up and use them afterward.

No, we have a real problem on our hands. We’re going to use up all our fossil fuels, and then we’re going to be screwed.

Big Oil isn’t investing nearly enough money into developing alternative fuel sources. With chart-busting profits from oil and gas, why should they? They’re riding a tsunami of a wave of corporate irresponsibility, but with all that money, who’s going to stop them? Their lobby is way too strong for the government to shake them up.

It’s up to someone else to find a renewable, reliable, and economical alternative fuel source. Altruistic oil giants just don’t exist.

Or do they?

Last week, there was a huge meeting in Calgary, Alberta of Canadian oil and gas magnates. According to its website, “Canada’s largest oil and gas event had a record-breaking pre-registered attendance of nearly 20,000 visitors and exhibitors. Over 600 exhibiting companies had the opportunity to showcase the latest technologies, products, and services.” The keynote speakers at the luncheon on the last day of the conference were Shepard Wolffe of the US National Petroleum Council and ExxonMobil’s Florian Osenberg.  Word was that these notable gentlemen would talk about a study commissioned by the US Department of Energy.

The 300 or so luncheon attendees were treated to an impressive PowerPoint presentation and entertainment by the YesMen. The execs just didn’t realize that the YesMen were entertainment, exactly. They appeared to be representatives of Exxon-Mobil and the National Petroleum Council and had a mind-blowing proposition.

Why not use human remains as a renewable energy resource? We’re just like whales, after all, just slightly smaller. Since we like to “biggie size” ourselves, that makes so much more of us that is just being wasted when we die. Something should be done about the wasteful behavior associated with our funeral rites.

Burial? Inefficient and expensive. The half-lives of these bodies in their satin-padded, air-tight caskets are too long. Cremation? No, no. Cremation actually consumes the fossil fuels we’re trying to conserve these days. Viking funeral? What?  Do you mean litter the oceans with more garbage?

The GO-EXPO actually distributed a news release to assure people that “Keynote Luncheon speakers were impersonating representatives from Exxon Mobil and National Petroleum Council.” These are not the droids you’re looking for, lunch-goers. Move along.

This is satire by The Yes Men on par with Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” The pranksters actually distributed vigil candles made of their product, “Vivoleum.” Brilliant!

According to its website, “The Yes Men agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. In other words, the Yes Men are team players… but they play for the opposing team.”

It took me hours to access Vivoleum.com, the web page touting the Yes Men’s “product.” Perhaps because Exxon was busy yelling “trademark infringement” and generally not being good sports over being the tool and butt of one of the best practical jokes I think I’ve ever heard of.

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Earthquake

I just felt an earthquake. A significant one.

The news says that  Oklahoma – OKLAHOMA! – experienced an earthquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter Scale about the time I felt it.

Geologically stable areas of Arkansas have been experiencing earthquakes in recent months. Some reports connect them to fracking because the epicenters are where natural gas is extracted in significant quantities.

Update: Yeah. This was significant.

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Historic Flooding in Des Arc

There is a great tragedy unfolding in my hometown. Des Arc is experiencing the worst flooding in 75 years – maybe longer. I-40 is closed because of the flooding. Parts of the county were evacuated last week. The National Guard is there, and two highways into town are underwater. People have lost their homes, businesses are deep in water, and farms are in the middle of a vast, wild river. This disaster is as great as any tornado in Alabama or any hurricane in Florida.

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I Just Solved All Our Problems

In response to the blog post of a friend who is understandably bemoaning the state of the nation, I got a wee bit windy.

I know, I know – it’s hard for anyone to believe that I – moi – would spew opinions unrestrained against the drums of ears attached to mouths that were asking rhetoricals, not practicals. Nevertheless, I have the answer, and if the president would only sit down and pay attention to me, all the country’s problems – yea, even all the world’s! – would be solved.

The economy is not going to be fixed overnight, and right now Obama is listening to the experts who advise throwing more money at the economy in all the wrong places – at least IMHO. But, in response to those who are nodding sagely, saying “We told you that Obama would bring socialism and liberalism to the country, but did you listen?  Nooooo,” I say that (ahem) this started on the Republican watch. Obama inherited this disaster; he did not create it. And since no one has ever dealt with such a staggering world-wide economic crisis before, that means he is inventing this wheel as he goes along.  Will he get it all right?  Of course not.  But he won’t be likely to get it all wrong, either.

From what I hear and read, the economy isn’t going to start upward on any consistent basis until at least next year, and maybe not until 2011. Whenever in history the economy has tanked as suddenly and as severely as it did last summer and fall, the recovery has always been slow. That’s why they call them “depressions.”

Consumer confidence is badly shaken, and as more and more jobs are lost and more and more foreclosure notices are mailed, it’s not as if Dick and Jane are suddenly going to decide to splurge on that vacation home, lavish gifts for their status-conscious kids, or a pricey new automobile. Their businesses aren’t going to be hell-bent to hire new employees, either, because if sales are down, and no one is getting the services they offer, the employers simply can’t justify it.

The economy is, believe it or not, depressed.  And Economic Abilify has not yet been invented.

My opinion (and one or two of you might possibly be aware that I have one or two opinions, even though I rarely mention them in polite company) is that Obama would be better off to give stimulus money to the people and entities that are best in a position to turn this thing around, i.e., all of us, but in different ways.

Money should go to the homeowners trying to stave off foreclosure as a condition of and part of the debt renegotiation with the lenders – that way the lenders get paid directly by the government on behalf of the homeowners, the homeowners and their children aren’t sleeping on the streets, and the banks don’t own homes they can’t sell.

If a home is undervalued for the debt the homeowner has against it, the government should pay the difference as soon as new terms for the remainder are worked out between the borrower and the lender. If the borrower can’t afford to continue making the original payments – not the juiced-up interest payments – then there can be a second tier of incentives for the lenders to extend the debts to a 40 year amortization as opposed to the customary 30 year schedule.

And NO MORE INTEREST-ONLY long term debt!  Whose idiotic notion was that, anyway?  “Here, Joe Bob and Sally Sue, take this money that you never have to pay back. Just pay us interest and we’ll all be happy.”  The hell, they say! Morons.

Next, apply stimulus funds to the remaking of the American infrastructure, especially rural and smaller urban areas without reasonable public transit. Make light rail, high speed rail, and buses reach more places and serve more people on better schedules. One of the worst things we ever did was allow our railroads to be dismantled in favor of three cars in every driveway and five lanes on every freeway. Refurbishing and improving our infrastructure will employ hundreds of thousands of people in various positions throughout the country. From engineers to draftsmen to laborers to porters, we can get this country moving at a much more economical rate, and faster, if we’ll commit the funds to do it. And those jobs won’t go away when the projects are complete – they will need to be maintained, too.

Simultaneously, pour money into scientific research and development of alternative energy as well as into to cleaning up and maintain the environment. I’m not talking about just reducing greenhouse gases, although that is certainly a big concern, but (for example) about making reasonable accommodations for heavy metals that are the by-product of mining and drilling. A rocket laden with nuclear waste, arsenic, mercury and lead headed for the dark side of the moon might not be a bad use of NASA’s funding.

Put people to work cleaning up the environmental damage we’ve done to the planet, and making sure we’ve still got a planet to leave to our great-grandchildren. Clean water, clean air, and fewer chemicals artificially enhancing the soil and crops will go a long way toward making us all healthier – not to mention the possibility that our grandchildren might be able to play with frogs in their back yards some day.

And while we’re at it, quit giving chickens and cows all those damn hormones!  I have yet to meet a teenage girl whose double-D’s don’t put my paltry gifts to shame.  Why are their adolescent mammaries the size of a Holstein’s udders? Hormones!

Reduce the employer’s share of employment taxes. With the matching amounts that employers pay for health insurance, medicaid, unemployment, and social security, the cost of hiring an employee is a lot more than just what the employee sees in his check. This would be a real, dollar amount of savings for employers and would probably allow businesses to hire more workers across the board and at all levels.

Nationalized health care? Bring it on. Insurance companies will always provide coverage to people who choose to pay more for less care.  Those of us who have survived cancer (twice, thankyouverymuch) or who are on certain costly medications can’t get health insurance without staggering pre-existing conditions clauses that make our health insurance worthless and excruciatingly expensive – if we can get it at all.

When health insurance benefits dictate whether a parent can open a business of his or her own or must stay with an employer who provides health coverage the family can’t get elsewhere, entrepreneurialism is stifled. This country is dependent on small business and entrepreneurs. We absolutely must break down the barriers that prevent people from making an attempt to achieve their dreams. I don’t know about you, but I work a lot harder for myself than I do for someone else. I don’t think failed businesses should be propped up by the government (Detroit, are you listening?), but when something like paying for childbirth determines whether a family can start a small business, there’s something desperately wrong.

Where, O Where will the money come from to do all this?

(clearing my throat)

The same place the last two trillion dollars came from.  And the next trillion will actually make a difference. It will put people to work, shore up the foundation of the country, and stabilize the economy. It will also have the added benefit of making the world a better place.  And if any of you out there are thinking there won’t be more stimulus money forthcoming, you just hide and watch. It’ll come, I promise, whether the president takes my incontrovertible advice or not.

Now that I have solved the problems of the environment, the economy, health care, and reliance on fossil fuels, are there any other problems you’d like me to take a look at?  My rates are reasonable, and I’m in a spewing mood.

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Tree Splooge

Spring is a miserable time of year.

First, there’s the weather. The damnable, changeable, hot-then-cold-again weather. The tornado, thunderstorm, wildly fluctuating barometric pressure, what the hell do I wear today, blustery, windy, knock me on my ass, fifty degree temperature spread in a day weather.

Then there’s the plants. You think it’s warm. There has been a recent series of beautiful warm spring days so you go to the local nursery and buy plants. You know, those tender annuals or baby herbs or vegetables just sprouted that make your mouth water with the promise of zucchini to come and tomatoes heavy on the vine. You put them in your car. You ferry them home. You place them where you want them and tamp the cool soil around their delicate stems, and after spending a day soaking up natural Vitamin D you go to bed, tired but fulfilled from a day playing the farmer, only to wake up shivering because you turned off the heat and the indoor temperature now matches the outdoor temperature of about 27 degrees and all the work you did yesterday is for naught. You vow next year to give it a week even after the frost-free date before you buy so much as a single packet of parsley seeds, knowing full well that spring’s siren song of false seduction will lure you to the nursery for that fateful waste of valuable money on plants doomed to die by the next sunrise.

The very worst part of spring, though, has to be the trees. Tall, bare-limbed, they stretch themselves and shake off the winter by emitting tentative tendrils of leaves, and before even the first leaf is full formed, the oaks go into full rut.

Oaks are horny bastards.

Because of the oaks, heinous fuckery most foul is visited upon me. Each fall the acorns hit my deck sounding like scatter shot, someone’s Daisy BB gun with an automatic clip, a terrorist squirrel at the helm of a acorn-grenade launching Gatling gun, firing hell bent for leather at my precious darling deck which never hurt anyone. Acorns are the demon-spawn of oaks. To create those diabolical children, the oaks engage in a springtime orgy that makes Bacchus himself blush at the pure wanton sex those oaks put out there for all the world to see.

The mighty oaks are masculinity personified. Baring their knotted chests, in Spring they take a deep breath and grimace, and from every pore pop squiggly spermatozoa, wiggling and waggling at other oaks, daring the other oaks to take a breath themselves and shoot back tentacles of spermatozoa in a war of silly string battle-inspired posturing and thrusting. It is indeed heinous fuckery most foul, as the foul squigglies waft their pollen and fill my unsuspecting gutters with their decaying carcasses.

Victims of these oaken battles of male dominance are cars, covered in a greenish yellow dust that hides the metallic grays and greens and reds. Victims also are the furniture, helplessly stationary in their designated positions, the flat planes of which act as a breeding ground not for acorns but for that same greenish yellow film that coats unprotected patio furniture and wafts into the cracks of car windows someone forgot to roll up.

Victim also are my sinuses, and Jack’s, and the sinuses of my receptionist (who I think has had a sinus condition since November). The virile oaks seek to splash their splooge on every available surface, in hopes that all the world will turn into acorns proving their masculine Darwinian fitness. In Spring, we walk through breezes of tree splooge morning, noon and night. Those damnable trees believe, like so many Arab IMers, that the world is a woman, open and panting for their splooge to fall fertile on something and make an acorn of it.

There is a scene in Christopher Moore’s classic Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings in which a pair of female oceanographers are studying sperm whales, and upon seeing a mating pair are delighted at their rare good fortune – until, that is, the female whale moves one way and the male moves the other just at the moment of his ecstasy. The two women are drowned in a sea of sperm whale splooge and instantly turn lesbian, seeking never again to encounter such a substance again.

That is also the novel in which I first encountered the term “heinous fuckery most foul,” uttered by a caucasian Rastafarian surfer called Kona.

My nose is stuffed so much I can’t sniffle. My cough barks deep within my chest. Today, I identify totally with those two female oceanographers. If I never experience tree splooge again, it will be too soon.

The oaks are virile indeed.

The fuckers.

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