(low) tech writer

Tech Trouble

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:54:00 +0000

Just a note to say that I'm having some posting troubles, and warn you that if you are reading this post on an RSS style reader, you may have a corrupted version of my last post, which flew the coop before I was ready to go to 'print'. Just visit http://lowtechwriter.com for the full version.

And, more fun may be coming as Google Blogger is requiring that all bloggers who use FTP (me for one) migrate their blogs to a Google-local address. Things may break, but we'll hope they do some more of that smart stuff they do before my turn comes, and everything will be fine.

thanks for reading!

Dave

Light From Fire

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:25:00 +0000

Before it is too late, I'd like to give a little love to the light bulb, old school edition. I'm not talking about the kind filled with toxic gas that glows cold and white when excited by electricity. I'm talking about the real deal: the inefficient, endangered, incandescent, campfire in a bottle. So, a toast: here's to getting our light from fire. End of an era. ... Here's to the scientists who captured fire in a glass prison, and here's to Thomas Edison who perfected the technique, enabling the fire to burn without burning out, by robbing it of oxygen. Brilliant madman.

Frequent readers of my blog may wonder why I'm not writing about candles or lanterns, or hey, maybe torches, as beautiful old-timey sources of illumination. I know that a century and a half ago, the light bulb was not a low-tech reminder of simpler times. It was probably a spooky reminder that we were determined to conquer nature, no longer to be subject to the natural rhythms of day and night: the light bulb may have given my low-tech lovin' ancestors something to fear. Imagine: Edison made a bamboo fiber burn for 1200 hours. Think about that. An inextinguishable flame ... a thing that burned for what seemed like forever. Sounds vaguely demonic.

But one of the reasons I write about the things I do, is that our drive to innovate usually involves ditching simple, functional, beautiful tools in favor of hastily designed, indurable, inelegant, ugly things that do very few things only slightly better than the thing they are replacing. Often, when we choose to upgrade to get a single improved feature, we lose an ecosystem of form and function.

Government bodies are beginning to legislate the end of the incandescent bulb (by 2014 in the U.S.) in favor of compact fluorescent lamps (CFL), which last longer and use less power. That's two good features. They also contain mercury, are a documented danger to low-income workers who manufacture them for export to the U.S. and other western nations, and cannot easily, cheaply, or safely be disposed of (the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends that fluorescent bulbs be double-bagged in plastic before disposal, even though two plastic bags won't stop the leaching of mercury. Nice.) Far more energy is used in the manufacture of CFLs than in the making of incandescents. They are also very expensive, can fade light-sensitive paints and textiles, and have a number of problems depending on the kind of electronics used, related to operating temperature, orientation, and noise. Sure, most of these problems can be solved. But they'll never make a CFL look like the bulb in the picture above. That makes me sad, and I'm surprised to be sad about it. I'm hearing Joni Mitchell right about now: Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?

I was about to call that light bulb a work of art, but that's silly. It never was meant to be a work of art. But sometimes a simple thing made well approaches a kind of elegant beauty, by chance, or by some inherited creative spark left over in us as a part of the Image of God ... occasionally we do beautiful things even when we are simply trying to solve problems, or make life better. Occasionally. I think incandescent light bulbs, with their warm, quiet, clean simple light, are very beautiful. Only not when they are frosted. Frosting is for cupcakes.

An incandescent light bulb hanging in the fire house of the nearby city of Livermore has been burning continuously, with only a few very brief interruptions, for almost a million hours, since 1901. It's got the record, in case you're wondering. This very bulb (there it is in the picture to the left) burned for every minute of the last thirty years of Thomas Edison's life, and has been burning ever since. The bulb managed to outlive my grandmother, born the year it was turned on, though my Grandma only just passed away a couple months ago, at the age of 108, and was as bright and clear-eyed as this bulb to the end.

One of the reasons proposed for the Livermore bulb's long life is that it's burning at a very low wattage (four watts, which apparently was enough for a fire station night light back when Grandma was young). Low wattage means low heat. Low heat means long life.

So, here's the deal. Why not just use lower wattage incandescents: let's split the difference--halfway between 4 and 60 (the most popular wattage in incandescents) makes around 32 watts, still far more than the Livermore firefighters would have dreamed of, and plenty of light for a reading space, if not for a large room. Lower wattage means less power consumed and a longer life. Problem(s) solved. And while we're at it, I bet most of us could walk around our home or workspace and turn off half the lights and not suffer for it. I wouldn't even mind a little legislation encouraging me to find creative ways to cut my consumption by half. Why is it necessary to legislate the adoption of an immature, dangerous, toxic, fussy, ugly, and expensive technology? Can someone call the government and ask?

I know, I'm a silly idealist, and it will never work. It's easier to ask Americans to spend $15 more on a light bulb to solve a problem, than to do less of anything to save $15 and eliminate the problem. I think we feel that we have the right to daylight brightness for 24 hours of the day, and if technology can provide it and boost the economy in the bargain, what's wrong with that? But it gets tiring answering questions like that.

What I'm really worried about is what will become of lava lamps?

Grooming Habits and The Cult of Innovation

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:03:00 +0000

I don't hate innovation. But I do hate innovation that has been driven by the desire to sell more crap and not by the needs of human beings. Proctor & Gamble, one of America's largest advertisers (and that is saying something), is a company that markets and sells such commodity products as toothbrushes and shaving razors. In the early 90s advertising book, Where the Suckers Moon, Randall Rothenberg describes Proctor & Gamble as "... the corporation that pioneered the selling of mass products to mass audiences through mass media" and that has an "expertise at moving undifferentiated commodity products unmatched by any other marketer." In order to continue to grow, companies like P&G need to continue to "innovate". That means ... get you to buy a "new and improved" thing, even where the existing product does a fine job of cleaning your teeth, or whatever. With Proctor & Gamble and other consumer goods companies, every day in this great country is a day for revolutionary product design.

What, you thought that your old toothbrush was getting your teeth clean? How sad. I guess you can't be blamed. You made do with what was available to you. After all, until today, no company on earth had yet invented the revolutionary sonic vibrating, ProSoft, CrossMax, Interslide, Power Tip, Micropulse, Indicator-bristle Warrior Brush 2000! Your plaque is doomed. It's the battle of Helm's Deep in your mouth.

But, hold on there soldier! Before you make the mistake of thinking that your brush is actually doing anything by itself (you have so much to learn), you'll need a toothpaste with our revolutionary cavity-crusading crystals, rainbow swirls, bleaching chemicals, breath-fresheners, plaque disintegrators, tartar control, enamel protectors (makes you wonder what your enamel needs to be protected from) and a few other chemistry-set ingredients that should trigger alarms at the airport--and why not? Your mouth is a battlefield. Whatever you do, don't use baking soda to brush your teeth: it's not at all minty. Or dangerous. Or expensive.

And, sorry. Men, are you still shaving with less than five blades? Does your razor not have a revolutionary battery-powered beard trimmer in the handle or Micropulse vibration in the blades? Are you not experiencing the revolutionary benefits of on-blade Indicator lubricating strips or enhanced Microfin stubble stimulating technology? Then you are not sexy. You aren't groomed until Proctor & Gamble says you are. In fact, I'm willing to bet you haven't even gotten to second base with your razor: P&G's Gillette Fusion web site seductively invites you to "Go further ... with body shaving!" (And don't assume I'm the one with my blades in the gutter ... I will not. repeat. their. advice.)

I don't like to upgrade my tools or technology unless the benefit is obvious and looked for. Trade in a hot and sweaty rubber raincoat for waterproof and breathable rain gear? Easy ... yes. Trade in cheap and heavy hi-tensile steel tubing for lightweight and strong steel-alloy bicycle frame materials? Easy ... yes! Trade my triple-bladed razor that cuts my beard just fine for a 5-blade fusion razor? Easy ... no.

I use a three-bladed razor because that's the blade replacement that fits on the handle that I received as a gift years ago. I've used twin-bladed disposables and not suffered for it (though there are way, way too many of these razors thrown away each year). I'm pretty sure I only need one blade, and would happily downgrade if there wasn't such a high cost of (re) entry. I've seen retro-productions of the old "safety razors" (see retrorazor.com ... really) that hold double-sided razors, but I won't be paying 50 bucks for a setup (yet! I still have to use up my 3-fers. I found out my dad still has the safety razor that I remember from my childhood--above--and thought I might take possession of the old treasure, but it turns out he's still using it!) And besides, I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the satisfied customer on retrorazor.com that said he was only nicking himself once a week ... after practice (the starter kit on that site comes with a styptic pencil. That's good marketing: according to Wikipedia these 'pencils' work by "contracting tissue to seal injured blood vessels". Hm.) I'm willing to concede that someone actually pulled off something good with the upgrade to multi-blade safety razors, cause I do not cut myself shaving.

One shaving-related hill I'm willing to fight on is the question of shaving creme. In order to shave you need wet skin and a little lubrication. Hot water in the shower is almost enough, but a little soap goes a long way to keeping your stubble wet for the blade, and adding a touch of slippery. Below is my rig. A funky old travel brush (the head unscrews and hides in the handle) and a cake of shaving soap in a metal cup from the gift shop on Alcatraz (The soap fits perfectly, and I think the cup is really cool--see, it's metal so it can't be broken to be used as a shiv if there were ever a riot in my bathroom.)

I've used cans of shave creme which are a horrible waste: they do not last and too much metal and plastic gets thrown away (to say nothing of the propellant that escapes into the atmosphere. So what if it's CFC free, can anyone say it's a good thing to be releasing compressed flammable gas in the shower?). These products simply reek of invented need. Is it quicker to push a button on a can than to lather up with shaving soap? Yes. Will you regret those lost seconds when you look back on your life? Unlikely.

There is also a temptation with the push-button solution to think the product that comes out is all you need. But in fact the one thing you need for a close (and safe) shave is wet skin, and since water isn't needed with a can of insta-foam, you are less likely to wet your face every time. This means that P&G gets to 'innovate' new ways for their millions of blades to slide over your skin without cutting it. Washed and wet skin is not nearly as exciting (or marketable) as lubri-strips and micro-fins.

There are also really nice shaving cremes that come in squeeze tubes. I've used them for years: a pea-sized bead and a brush produces the same lovely lather that you get with the soap (or the can), but I think the soap is the easiest on the environment, with the least throwaway. It's also the most work: about 10 seconds to produce a lather each day, which works out to one hour a year. You can get that hour back, with dividends, by turning away from the television whenever a P&G ad comes on, and taking the opportunity to tell the other people in the room that you love and/or appreciate them (and that they should not, under any circumstances, buy you the Gillette Fusion for Christmas). Everybody wins.

As for toothpaste, I've never liked the perpetual innovation machines that turn out minty abominations as fast as consumers can buy them. I'm can tolerate the natural 'spearmint' flavor from Tom's of Maine (but worry, now that Colgate-Palmolive bought them, that the integrity of their all-natural product will slip). My favorite flavor of toothpaste? Tom's Silly Strawberry, without question. Yes it is a children's toothpaste. It's flavored with strawberries and banana. It's a great toothpaste, and doesn't pretend to explode in your mouth with minty amazingness.

Ok, I see the way you're looking at me. You are wondering if I have a paranoid fixation on the flavor mint. Not true! Just because it would be possible for P&G to mask mind-control drugs in their toothpaste with minty crystals in order to influence the entire country to think that a six-bladed razor would help them Face the Day With Confidence, doesn't mean they are planning to do that. Yet. Seriously, in my defense, allow me to describe the landscape as I see it. To take one example, following are the actual flavor names that involve mint in P&G's current Crest brand toothpaste line: 1) "Invigorating Mint", 2) "Cool Mint", 3) "Sparkling Mint", 4) "Fresh Mint", 5) "Long-lasting Mint", 6) "Clean Mint", 7) "Clean Night Mint", 8) "Minty Fresh", 9) "Super Action Mint", 10) "Fresh Clean Mint", 11) "Soothing Whitening Mint", 12) "Moonlight Mint", 13) "Revitalizing Mint", 14) "Refreshing Mint", 15) "Refreshing Vanilla Mint", 16) "Minty Fresh Striped", and last but not least (but probably not even 'last'), 17) "Extreme Herbal Mint". I'm not even listing the sparkly variations on peppermints, wintergreens, or the non-minty fruits, burstin' bubblegums, and others. One reviewer on Crest's site has this to say: "I demand minty fresh breath everyday. This is the only toothpaste I have ever used that has kept my breath really minty fresh for hours ...! (Five stars)."

So who's got the unhealthy fixation now?

When I run out of Silly Strawberry--and I can't find any in my kid's bathroom--I brush my teeth with baking soda. It tastes bad. I dub the flavor, "Extreme Powdery Non-Mintiness", but will say that it is, in fact, refreshing, and works really well, costs next to nothing, and involves very little throwaway (a recyclable cardboard box). If you're game to use one of the original tooth cleaning products, I have a simple piece of advice. Don't get it from a box that has been used to absorb odors in your fridge or a musty closet. Simple. Wet your toothbrush and mash it in the powder, and brush.

But be warned, if you're not getting your daily dose of mint ... you may start to wonder why you spend money on various mass produced consumer products that only solve problems you learn about in commercials. Confidence to face the day ... for free: how revolutionary.

On the Road, Old School

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:19:00 +0000

Ahh, the old-school road trip: a car, endless highway, conversation, one-radio-station-at-a-time-if-you-can-get-one-at-all .... America: pre-internet, pre-Discovery Channel, pre-cell phone laws, pre-DVD-player-in-the-minivan, pre-iPod, pre-media saturation. My dad was born in Cleveland during the depression, and worked toward his M.D. in the south. He'd never been Out West, and if he had tapped out www.tetoncam.com on his typewriter to get a look at where he was headed, he would have gotten a 404.

He tells me he had no idea what to expect when he set out from Florida to travel through the Pacific Northwest on a roundabout journey to Southern California. He'd graduated from medical school in Tennessee, done a few months of general practice "in Kentucky, helping 'ol' Doc Hay'", then moved on to flight surgeon school in Pensacola, Florida, where he earned his Navy Wings right before he headed out on the Road Trip. Imagine seeing the above sight for the first time. Is it possible for our HD/3D/Imax generation to imagine what it would be like to see those mountains explode into view from inside a big iron giant of a car before most people had color TV? Think my dad is dreaming of his first color TV purchase in this picture? No.

My dad was a few years away from marriage, and on his way to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station (the Marines 'borrowed' docs from the Navy) in southern Cal. He and his friend Jim Bone took the "scenic route" from Florida, via the Northwest, then on to El Toro. After that, they'd ship out to the Far East.

My dad served in Southeast Asia just before the Vietnam war began. When he came home to start a family and a medical practice, he got his honorable discharge, and the man who took his place was killed in action.

I really love that picture.

Ambivalence

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:09:00 +0000

I have several questions.

Why was I compelled to buy this?
Why does this label make me believe a drink that's mostly sugar is cool?
Why would Pepsi want to advertise that they usually use unreal sugar?
Why would Pepsi want to advertise that they will return to using unreal sugar?
Is "Throwback" what happens to you when you gain 40 pounds because you drink sugar water and then try to lift something without stretching?
Why was I compelled to buy this?

Works on Paper: Bright Sadness

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:16:00 +0000

10 years ago, I wrote a simple devotional for Lent, drawing on the rich expression of the Christian faith in churches more traditional, and Eastern, than my own. That devotional has been online ever since, and gets a lot of visitors every year, and every year I get requests for the materials to be used in communities around the world. Having it available on the web has been great: I'm always amazed at the way this work has touched people in very far away places. It has also been used and appreciated in my own Vineyard church here in California ... a church not very Eastern, and not very traditional.

I've just taken a leap and revised the material for a print edition, which I'm very happy about: I like being able to hold a physical book. It's available now at lulu.com. (If you are against holding dead trees in your hand, there is a half-price download for your reader.)

Though the devotional will remain online, the book has updated content, some extra woodcuts by Spyros Vassiliou, and doesn't require batteries. Nice!

It's for sale for $10. Check it out.

The New Smells of Winter

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:12:00 +0000

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what exactly it is I smell, on my weekly evening bike commute. At least once a week I ride to an evening meeting on two wheels: I choose the bike over the car even when it's cold, dark, and rainy because I love riding through the chill. One longstanding blessing of winter riding has been the smell of wood fires. Not any more. I've written eulogies to natural wood fires, now increasingly frowned upon. I live in an area with lots of auto and industrial smog, a not coincidentally high rate of breathing problems, and therefore a high sensitivity to politically-correct burn behavior. I understand the need to put less smoke and stuff in the air, but I just can't be happy about the "green" solutions (gas barbecues, gas heaters), when they require the burning of petrochemicals to address an air quality problem caused primarily by the burning of petrochemicals.

Today, as I pedal around my town, I smell the wet rotting leaves (that's one of the good smells), yummy dinners of different ethnicities, and now, with increasing regularity, I smell burning wax. It took me a few nights out before I realized what it was. I mean I knew I was smelling burning wax, but I couldn't figure out why I smelled it so powerfully on the street, and over and over. Then I got it. DuraFlame. I'm smelling fake fireplace logs made from sawdust and wax.

And it really breaks my heart. I know these fake logs are supposed to be better than wood for burning. I know the numbers. 70% less stuff coming out your chimney. They are supposedly made only with natural waxes (at least today they are). But the only reason the burning of natural logs is bad is because of all the other crap that we load the atmosphere with on this overcrowded planet. I mean, really: does it have to be the wood fires that go? It's perfectly alright to keep my hummer, but I can't have a wood fire?

When you go looking into this strange fake-log market, you learn that there is an old-school version of the fake fireplace log. Pres-to-Logs were made from sawdust leftover from lumber production (so no waste, and no trees cut for the product) pressed into shape under high pressure, with no wax or other binders. Pres-to-Logs have been around for 75 years and are made by a company that makes pellets for wood burning stoves. Why aren't we burning those in Los Altos? I know: because they don't light themselves. Too inconvenient. I can hear the pitch now: "We're going to give Americans a fire they can light with one match and no fuss! All we have to do is make a product that is basically a massive sawdust candle." I can smell the lesser of two evils and DuraFlames are not it.

Even if Pres-to-logs are way better than DuraFlame, and they certainly are (I'll be looking for a local distributor for the next logless fire), they do not come close to the look and sounds of a natural wood fire.

I know that fake logs are better by the numbers, but the whole thing stinks. I mean that in every sense: it just seems wrong ... and these things are making my neighborhood smell like a fire at a candle factory. In my economy, if something stinks, it's probably rotten.

DuraFlame has no power here

Camera Obscura

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:52:00 +0000

I love the West Coast. It is among the oldest coastlines in the world, and it looks it. This impression is confirmed with a look at maps of the way the continents have drifted, tumbled and collided around the globe over millions of years: the west coast of North America has always been pointed out, facing the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In light if this, it seems to make a kind of poetic sense that the West Coast was the symbolic goal of the Manifest Destiny, the prize in the drive to conquer the North American continent and the frontier. I've always had this sense that the history of technology in California and the West was just an extension of the migratory drive westward of the American pioneers. The Pilgrims and their heirs achieved their Manifest Destiny, and the land has been conquered, for better or for worse. But now, with all the land gobbled up, what do we do with our insatiable drive to discover, to conquer? We keep going.

And where is there to go? Why, into space of course. Up into outer space, and down into inner space. Symbols of the extension of our frontier can be seen from the freeway which runs between San Francisco and San Jose. The most obvious is Stanford University's massive radio telescope which towers over the 280 corridor. The Dish, as it is known around here, takes our drive to conquer and points it out to space. The Dish, and all the world's telescopes and antennas, scan the next swath of territory, looking for signs among the stars that we can keep going. A mile down the freeway, for those who are driven to discovery on a different scale, is the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Dept. of Energy's two-mile long linear accelerator, which runs under the freeway and plumbs microscopic space, searching for pathways to knowledge in between the atoms.

Most of us don't get to go on these journeys--the pathways of science are as obscure to us as was the way west to Louis and Clark, before they started up the Missouri. We don't understand the meaning of the intergalactic hiss that the Dish records or the significance of the images the Hubble takes, as beautiful as they are. We don't know what to make of the dance of the charmed and strange particles that leave their trails on the target at the end of the particle accelerator. But when we see pictures of stars, or of scattered pieces of atoms, we take some comfort in the fact that someone is searching out new trails, that hidden truths may be revealed.

But I wonder if we are ever capable of arriving, of ending the journey. Having come to this place, to the edge, as it were, can we just appreciate it as a place? Can we ever stop searching and just see? Or is every place just a waypoint? Are we bound to urgently press on? I'm willing to accept that some are called to always search the horizon for new routes, but this straining impulse, this expectation that there is more to discover, more to do, is so deeply rooted in the psyche of everyone who has come to California that it is nearly a disease.

As an antidote to this straining, this looking beyond, there is a place on the coast near here where you are encouraged simply to see. Where you are not encouraged to map out new trails, or to imagine what lies over the horizon. Having arrived, you are invited just to see the beauty of it. In this place is a kind of old-school technology that is also an anti-technology. It's a kind of camera, but one that doesn't fill your shelf with albums or your hard drive with JPEGs. The images it produces do not require or even permit analysis. It is the Camera Obscura.

The Camera Obscura looks from the outside like a cheesy tourist spot: the Giant Camera of the old Playland at the Beach amusement park on the seaward side of San Francisco, built in 1946. But as cheesy as it looks, it is a thing of wonder: a dark room containing a six-foot wide parabolic wooden surface painted white that captures a projected image from outside without electricity, chemicals, or WiFi. The image is often moving, gently rotating with the turning of the lens which sits on top of the building, and as it is reflected via a prism down onto the table, we see the scene outside (the Cliff House behind the Camera, Seal Rock, the beach, and the open sea) panning and turning all at once on the circular surface. It can be a little disorienting, a bit hypnotic; it is certainly beautiful.

The round table on which the image is projected is about the same diameter as the target end of the two-mile long accelerator inside SLAC, as the sensor that hangs suspended in front of the Dish to catch it's magnified space signals, and as the mirror in the Hubble Telescope. But the images it captures are less obscure than these, less abstract. What you see on the table in front of you in the Camera Obscura is immediate and intimate, it is the Place Where You Are. No interpretation is needed. You can't study it, because it's moving and changing and always different. You experience it.

A quick view with the lens at rest.

The table is perfectly round, here viewed from the side.

Technology always promises access to things while simultaneously distancing you from them. The Television delivers programming from around the world but you are still stuck sitting in front of a glowing box in a darkened room. Jet airplanes can move you to the other side of the planet in hours, but you have no sense of the journey--of what you flew over, or through--only a sense of discomfort at having been squeezed into a tube and then squeezed out in a place where everything is different. The internet gives us access to all the world's information, but requires us to keep our eyes fixed on a flat screen, and our ears plugged and wired.

The Camera Obscura, as a piece of technology, is no different, even if it operates on principles that have been understood for millennia: the image on the table is of the place where you are, but you are also not there. You're inside a dark room looking at a projection of an image of the sea, not standing on the beach looking at the sea with your own eyes. Yet like all cameras, the Giant Camera of San Francisco helps you see things differently (or see them for the first time), and unlike the portable cameras we all carry, this camera preserves a feeling of immediacy and authenticity because the camera is bound to the place. You never really suffer that technology-induced isolation. You can hear the sea through the walls.

The Camera Obscura is also made of lovely, low-tech things: essentially glass and wood. A five-inch wide glass lens projecting on a six-foot wide table with a concave wood surface. Apart from the motor that turns the lens assembly, there is no electricity, no Intel Inside, no HD screen. In the Camera Obscura, you are the computer that processes the image, and if your capacity to remember hasn't suffered too much from our culture of hyper-literacy, then you will recall this trip to the coast as a distinctly satisfying one.

Visit the Camera Obscura:

1096 Point Lobos Ave
San Francisco, 94121

37°46'41.64"N
122°30'51.22"W

(Satellite view): bit.ly/giantcamera

Hey Kids! More on Fractional Foods

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:03:00 +0000

In my last post, I wrote about the weird world of "half products", processed food pellets that are not edible until expansion by microwaving, or some other process. After reflecting on what makes a product natural, or whole, I had another chance to analyze the claims of a "multi-grain" product. Today, to my great surprise, I opened our cereal cabinet to find a box of Froot Loops. The cabinet had never behaved in this way before. The cabinet usually contains boxes with names like "Soy and Flax Clusters", a product more appropriate to a house where 40-somethings will eat, without question, whatever they find in the cabinet.

Where the Froot Loops came from, I did not know. But I knew that I had to have some. What a thrill to open a cereal box again and find that heavy foil-laminated inner wrapper that only the sweetest cereals merit (Soy and Flax Clusters only have a wax-paper liner). What a thrill to gaze upon the bright rainbow of colors made possible by science! Look at it! Did I mention that Froot Loops are multi-grain?

Printer-Ink Registration Marks on Packaging ...
Rainbow of Frooty Goodness ...

Separated at birth?

My initial thought as I chomped down on my first spoonful since 1986, was that the cereal wasn't as sweet as I remember. But when I looked at the box and reassured myself that sugar was indeed the first and main ingredient, I knew it must be pilot error. Then I saw it: I'm using no-sweetener-added soy milk! Silly me. I am out of practice. So what else is in Froot Loops? Of the three grains listed, only the last of them is whole: the oats. Add to these--in increasing amounts--white flour and refined corn (think: sugar), but don't overdo it because real sugar has to be the number one ingredient, then add some partially hydrogenated oils, and you have a concoction that only a mad scientist would feed to children.

So why is this stuff in our cabinet? Turns out my wife, a children's pastor, found them in our church resource room where she stages the chaos of her Sunday morning kid's church supplies, and decided that the risk of children eating the stuff was not worth the benefit of making pretty necklaces and decided to dispose of it in a OSHA- and EPA- approved manner, i.e. put it where I would find it. She forgot to mention that the sell by date was almost a year ago. I swear I wouldn't have known that by eating it.

Half Foods

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 06:31:00 +0000

Behold the mighty Triscuit: Symbol of Whole Food. Mostly unchanged for 100 years. Ingredients: whole wheat, soybean oil, salt. Compare that to heavily processed, science-fair, "home-style" monstrosities like anything from Pepperidge Farm. I know ... delicious. But read the ingredients of their cookies with a Tylenol chaser. Interesterified Oil? Huh? Wow ... uh, how interest-ing. How terrify-ing.

Of course I recognize that Triscuits are a processed food: Triscuits don't occur in nature. At least with the Triscuit it's pretty easy to imagine the steps between harvest and your snack cabinet. And I'm ok with certain, low-tech processing: when we pull a fresh-baked loaf of bread out of the oven, we are eating a processed food. I don't have any qualms about saying that cooking technology improves on nature. After all, when God visited Abraham and Sarah, they didn't just pour a handful of wheat into the hands of the Holy One. They kneaded it into dough and baked fresh bread, and my guess is that God said something to the effect of "it was good". Fresh bread is a benefit of technology. If fire isn't a technology, then the oven that harnesses it to make bread is.

But there are processed foods, and then there are processed foods.

Recently, I did some writing for a friend who is importing natural mediterranean-style snacks for sale in the U.S.. He's going to be selling to retailers, so to get a line on the language and concerns in the marketplace, I did a little investigoogling on snacks. Yummy? Not so much.

It's always a little disorienting when entering a completely foreign culture, and this was no exception. There are risks to peeking behind the curtain that separates the food on our table from it's origins.

My first stop was the Snack Food Association web site (sfa.org) where I was tempted by such mouth-watering foodie writing as The Essence of Quality Potato Chips ... the authoritative 3rd edition of the Pretzel Quality Manual, and the SFA/AOCS Edible Oils Manual, 2nd edition. It is not only not appetizing to listen in on the corporate back-room talk about foods I share with my family: it's creepy. It's a little bit like suddenly realizing there's a one-way mirror in your dining room hiding lab-coat-wearing technicians who watch how you chew. You say, "Mm. I love these chips, they taste great." ... they say, "optimized mouth feel and end-flavor target-mix".

It gets weirder. The Snack Food Association has a magazine: Snack World.

In the August 2009 issue of Snack World, I found an news-item for J.R. Short, A family business that wants a seat at the dinner table as your "maker of extruded intermediate pellets". What is an extruded intermediate pellet, you ask? Extruded intermediate pellets are known in the business as half-products, because they still need to be cooked, or as J.R. Short so appetizingly puts it, expanded. Extruded Intermediate Pellets, says their web site, "deliver on whole-grain/multigrain and fiber nutritional content claims with a great tasting crunch ... available in a variety of pellet shapes that can deliver great bag fill and perceived value". Pellet shapes?? Bag fill?? Did I just click through to the UPS store?

Maybe we should just take a step back. Deep breath. See, here in America, we're trying to end a decades-old addiction to refined grains in our diets. We're learning that too much white bread is bad for us in the same way that too much sugar is. We know we need to eat more whole grains. Easy to say, but how do we do that? I don't know about you, but I have never in my life been in the same room as a whole grain ... not that was still whole anyway. For the majority of us, if the supermarket doesn't feed us whole grains, we will likely die in our wonder-bread sins. So in order to satisfy our new passion for whole foods (and for living more 'naturally' in general), the food companies must provide products that contain mostly whole grains (mostly, because all that's required for the food to be labeled "whole" is for the first ingredient to be a whole grain of some kind ... the rest of it can be sawdust and saccharine. Most people do not know or care if the thing is really 'whole', only that the package speaks authoritativly to the problem). A company that provides whole grain snack foods is church-like in our pseudo-enlightened world. We secretly imagine them to be providing food for the body and soul.

The J.R. Short company is not actually that company. They are the company that provides the extruded pellets to the company that provides your whole grain snacks. J.R. Short takes powdered grains, seeds, and vegetables--any kind you want, in any combination--and processes them into a paste. And then they sqeeze that paste into whatever shape is required by the food company, which then expands them and tosses them with some powdered flavor. When you browse the products on the J.R. Short company web site, with a little imagination you will recognize things you've eaten out of a bag recently. These are not your father's cheeze puffs.

You may have noticed that what used to be trashy snack food is now yuppie feel-good health food. What's the difference? Simply that processors like the J.R. Short company have replaced whatever was in the cheeze puffs with sexier raw materials. Now, grains or legumes like lentils, flax, barley, and soy join the old standbys-- corn, wheat and rice. Add in vegetable powders from seaweed, carrot, beet, or broccoli and various other "complimentary" ingredients, and J.R. Short will squeeze your custom easy-bake play-do into twists, tubes, shells, ribbons, chips, little balls and beads, even a custom logo-shape ... all of which they call pellets. Hungry yet?

I've got to admit I find this kind of cool in a dial-a-product sort of way. We're not just living in the age of easy information, but the age of easy productization. I can dream up a design and be wearing it on a t-shirt within the week, then sell it in my online store, where you can get the same brilliant design on a teddy bear or a coffee mug. I can write a book and be reading my own first-edition hardcover within a week of uploading the content. Buy my album on MySpace ... watch my movie on YouTube.

Now--brave new world--I can decide that I want a snack chip in the shape of my face made of organic beets, buckwheat, defatted soy, triticale, and sea salt, choose between a "hearty crunch" or a "light and airy crisp" and in no time take delivery of little plasticized extrusions--ready for me to "expand" into a finished food product by frying, hot air popping, or microwaving--in 20 or 50lb bags. Got a party coming up this weekend? Choose the "2,200 pound capacity super sack". Woo.

I should have known that the warm feeling couldn't last. You know what I'm talking about: I'm eating whole grain foods! I'm in touch with the earth! I'm living an authentic life! My foods are crafted by flour-dusted artisans who shuffle around a kitchen warmed by a wood-fired brick oven! Innocence dies hard.

As an antidote to this unappetizing and slightly callous peek behind the food processing curtain, I offer this video of a real flour-dusted bread-making superhero.

warning: contains some language, appropriate to the subject but maybe not to your dining room. To which of these two enterprises would you rather give a seat at the dinner table?

from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Priceless

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:16:00 +0000

Mini R/C Helicopter: 22 dollars

AA batteries: 5 dollars

The following mang-lish instructions: priceless

"This remote control has already installed to protect the device, if want the flight, please open the switch, the indicator would be shining, after operating the pole to the motive to heading up to push then pull to go to most next, the indicator is often Bright, at this time remote control normal usage of ability."

I should probably leave well enough alone, but I ran this English through Google's translator, then took the resulting Chinese and ran it back, just to see if two wrongs might make a right. Strangely, some of the instructions sound better, but with flashes of what sounds like political propaganda.

"The remote control has been installed protection devices, if you want to fly, please turn on the switch, indicator light flashes, it will operate under the motivation, leadership of promoting, and then evacuated to the most, this indicator is often a bright future, at this time, normal use of the remote control"

100 Catalogs

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 21:41:00 +0000

We started stacking catalogs on Thanksgiving day. The pile didn't get as high as we thought it might, but today (December 24) my daughter and I counted 100 catalogs. These catalogs are filled with clothes (by far the majority), shoes, books, toys, food (popcorn, spices, english muffins, fruit), snowboards, computers, cameras, fleece jackets, jewelry, GPS-enabled golf rangefinders, exercise machines, and endless pages of cheap branded trinkets that will self-destruct 15 seconds after you tear off the wrapping. Our bank sent us a catalog (that's where you can get the GPS-enabled golf rangefinder). There are even catalogs selling sheep and other livestock to give (in someone's name) as charitable gifts to poor families--these catalogs are among the smallest, and that seems good to me, though I'm not entirely sure why.

There are 26.6 pounds of paper here. Zoe looked up the number of households in the U.S. and did a little math for me. In America, we're close to 15 million households. 26.6 pounds times the number of households in this country gives us roughly 3 billion pounds of catalogs. In one month! Be sure to check out our new eco-sensitive clothing line ....

Imagine how big our pile would be if we actually bought stuff from catalogs.

The Old Fashioned Way

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:46:00 +0000

Remember when new jeans came in one style and that style was "new"? (What an OLD man thing to say.) I can remember weeks of chafing and mailing tube stiffness when breaking in a new pair of jeans--only slightly less painful then breaking in a new pair of leather hiking boots. And when you'd really worked those denims for a good long time (like, years), they acquired a beautiful, velvety-soft, sky-blue, wonderfulness. Today, thanks to the wonder of whatever dark magic happens in jean factories, we never have to break in clothes again.

I like soft pants. Who doesn't? I admit it: I'd choose faded jeans off the rack and leave behind the dark blue cardboard that is a fresh pair of 501s. But it's kind of sad to me that I'm paying equal or more to buy clothes that have been washed with rocks and will therefore have a shorter lifespan. Aged cheese? Good. Aged wine? Mmm. Aged pants? Wha? Where can I get me a brand-new car with a thousand miles on it, covered with dents and scratches? Rockin!

Now. I think the jeans pictured here are pretty good in a combat-boot-goes-to-the-prom sort of way, and I think the girl in them is pretty great in that kind of way, and in many other ways too. But wow.

Every now and then, me and the kids (this one, who's 16, and the boy, who's 13) get a little punchy and end up wrestling on the floor, which is getting more and more dangerous ... for me: I've broken parts of myself ... and the 13 year-old recently took me down in the kitchen with one move. I can't count all the times these kids cracked skulls while wrestling on the bed in the early years. We all know the risks! And I thought we shared an equally casual attitude towards our wardrobes: I mean, look at those pants. But what do you think happens at the first sound of tearing? She shrieks: "You're tearing my jeans!" Oh really.

Then there's me. This old pair of Levis has finally reach the point of structural failure. It's possible these jeans are 20+ years old. I should be happy that I now have holes. No more of the shame that attends those whose pants are unventilated. I should feel different, but all I feel is a draft on my left knee. I tell my daughter with desperate pride that I put tears in my jeans the old fashioned way ... I earn them. What an old man thing to say.

The Geography of Hope

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:36:00 +0000

Some months ago, I posted an essay about how a ranger scolded me for walking 10 feet off the trail at Palo Alto's Arastradero Open Space Preserve. This preserve is in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a wide-open place where one wouldn't expect the kind of "keep off the grass" rules associated with strips of city park. The title I gave the essay communicated my feelings on the matter ("Signs of The End").

But, I can admit now that I was of two minds on the matter. It still seems ridiculous to be told to stay on the trail in such a wild place. But soon after I wrote the piece, I felt a prick of conscience, and a sense of responsibility to tell the other side of the story. Why? Because I keep going back to Arastradero ... on foot, on mountain bike, alone and with my family. I find myself enjoying that same trail, and many other trails along the San Francisco peninsula again and again, and I began to have new thought share space with my semi-righteous indignation. I realized that I have very little to complain about. I live in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, in the high-tech center of the modern world, and yet ... I am surrounded by simply beautiful natural spaces, forever preserved against development or modification beyond the laying of trail. I have in fact enjoyed open space along the Peninsula for my whole life, in all four seasons, in rain and shine, day and night. I've slept under oaks, prayed on benches, sat writing in journals, and stared without a thought into wilderness ... all in settings that allow my heart and mind and soul to drop their guard and to breath.

Room to breath. This is one of the themes in the language of open space. You come across the phrase frequently in the history of one of the largest of the agencies that oversee open space in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. I wanted to get to know this organization, to meet the people who keep this land for me, and to learn what it takes to preserve open space in a region that the rest of the world associates with high home prices and high technology. How do they do it?

I confess that when I met with Leigh Ann Maze of the OSD, I was looking for dirt (no pun intended): I wanted to hear all about the fights over who gets the land and how it is used. I guess I imagined a great battle over each acre: developers and technologists on one side, and sandle-wearing soldiers in the open space army on the other. Maze couldn't satisfy my need for drama. She said it might get a little hot in the nitty-gritty negotiations over a particular parcel of land, but she's not really aware of any great philosophical divide on the Peninsula. The overall impression I got from talking to her is that the OSD enjoys a lot of favor in the Bay Area. She suggests that open space is a part of what attracts people to live here, and that even the developers recognize that being able to see trees on the mountains increases the value of the homes down in the suburban sprawl between highways 101 and 280.

So it may be that some experience it as a tension, and others as harmony, but either way, there's no argument over whether it is good to have open space here at the end of America's westward expansion. You might expect to see an insulting profusion of development here, in the same way you see great mountains of boulders at the terminus of ancient glaciers. After all, people keep coming .... Instead, land dedicated to open space is increasing, not as much as in the early days, but still increasing each year. Anne Koletzke writes in Peninsula Tales and Trails, a guidebook to the district, that the Bay Area has one of the largest systems of public open space to be found in any urban area in the United States.

But it wasn't always that way. Journalist Jay Thorwaldson, in the foreword to Peninsula Tales and Trails, describes looking down, as a youth on horseback, from the ridges of the Santa Cruz Mountains as the "valley's endless apricot and prune orchards [gave] way to homes and highways in a sad, but seemingly inevitable, roll of market demand and economic reality. Before silicon became the heart of computers," and a significant driver of development for the region, "this was called the 'Valley of Heart's Delight.'" In 1970, the threat was very real. But Thorwaldson was on hand to document a local, citizen-driven campaign to preserve open space. He himself influenced that campaign through editorials which urged these early environmentalists to find a way to buy the land they wanted to protect against development, a strategy also promoted by Wallace Stegner, a Stanford professor and novelist who contributed important ideology to the movement. If you want to preserve open space, the argument went, you have to own it, so that you can keep it open for ever.

Today the OSD owns over 55,000 acres of land, most of which can be explored by anyone who lives in, or visits, the Bay Area. When land is purchased, the first goal of the OSD is preservation, ensuring that the environment in and around the land is protected. These concerns always extend beyond the boundaries of purchases. Wildlife (from ubiquitous deer and squirrels to endangered red-legged frogs) pass through open space preserves and policies within the boundaries must account for the through-traffic. The course of streams in preserves can affect local watersheds and species (including our own species) many miles downstream. At times, early 'improvements', such as logging roads (called by the OSD, 'cultural resources'), need to be reversed to halt the pernicious effects of erosion on the ecosystem.

A very few times, the OSD closes a preserve to human visitors. But the "goal is to keep them open," says Maze, though always with limited provision for human comforts. "We set ourselves apart from other parks: we like to keep the infrastructure to a minimum. ... You'll see dirt parking lots and pit toilets, but no barbecues, play structures, or picnic tables ... the whole system only has one overnight campsite. ... We call what we do ecologically sensitive recreation and education." This emphasis on letting nature be, and not filling it with soccer fields, golf courses, or other recreational infrastructure, is summed up by Wallace Stegner in his Wilderness Letter, who asserted that preserving natural open space has "no more to do with recreation [than] churches have to do with recreation." We need, he says, to learn the "trick of quiet" that our ancestors knew from time spent in the big empty plains. "We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses ... all the wild that still remains to us."

Adding to the delicate balancing act that is managing a piece of nature, the OSD is a public agency and so is accountable to local public opinion, state and federal governments, policies including the Endangered Species Act, and other rulebooks overseen by agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "There are a lot of layers," says Maze, "even for one little project of putting in a bridge ... we have to get permits from cities, counties ... and the public always want to weigh in. ... Ultimately it's the public's land; it's your land, your trails."

With all these obligations to balance, the OSD seems to work really well. They do a great job communicating to the public -- they have a quality website, good-looking publications, and were willing to talk to a snarky blogger like me (that "end of the world" post was not much of a calling card). And, of course, they do a very good job stewarding the land. My experience of the preserves is that they are consistently clean, accessible, and well laid-out. I know that takes work, even when the bulk of the land is trusted to natural processes. Finally, and maybe most impressively, from what I've seen, it appears the OSD manages and spends their considerable budget wisely.

It doesn't mean it's all sunny skies over the preserves though. The downturn in the economy has affected the OSD, like it has every other business. Grants and private donations have dropped, and to add insult to injury, even though the District manages it's budget very well thank you, the State of California is exercising it's "emergency right" to take money from "special districts" to deal with it's own budget shortfall. They are borrowing roughly 2 million from the OSD, "which legally they need to pay back," says Maze (uh ... good luck.) When I asked if the money taken from the OSD would at least go to save some of the state parks that are expected to close (again, good luck), Maze couldn't say, and she showed a remarkably goodnatured attitude towards Sacramento. "We look at it as an investment in the state."

For all this organizational complexity, federal policy, resource managment, state budget trouble, and, yes, the threat of development on currently un-preserved land, the OSD does an amazing job of giving the people exactly what was hoped for some thirty years ago: room to breath.

And though I don't like fences in the wild, I recognize the difficulty of protecting land, especially when the land in question is surrounded by forces hostile to it. Regardless of the relatively harmonious relationship between open space and ... crowd-space on the peninsula, I know that if the fences came down, the land would be lost. So I'm thankful for the activists who fought to purchase land to preserve it, and I'm thankful for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, and other powers that protect land for me, even if it means there are some views I have to enjoy from the trail.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. -Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter

A (low) tech writer principle: invest in the things you love. If that loose community of nature lovers back in the 70s had only come together to complain and had not put their money where their collective mouth was, the land between San Jose and San Francisco would be very different today, and we would all have a lot more to complain about.

=====
http://www.openspace.org/ (be sure to look at their Google Map mashup: the Preserve Finder, on the front page). And get your copy of Peninsula Tales and Trails at the OSD's website to support their work. It's a classic guide book.

A snapshot from space of the Regional Open Space District (with the open spaces labeled nicely, thank you Google):
http://bit.ly/openspaceba

=====

Photography by Karl Gohl and used by permission of the photographer and the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.

bag

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:54:00 +0000

My Bag has one pocket, and it's BIG. I like simplicity in my bags. I do not like complexity. My bag used to have a single inside flap, stitched to the top lip of the opening, with an assortment of little pockets for organizing stuff, but I removed it. It's not that I don't like being organized: it's just that I don't really like having someone else's principles of organization forced on me. The organizer pocket that was stitched inside this bag had a couple pen slots (I carry more than that and so I use a pencil case, which you can see in my profile picture), a wide pocket sized for something like a palm pilot (which most people now keep in a box in a closet, while they wait for the museum to call), a tinier fleece-lined pocket for a phone or media player (which is now a single device, and holstered to my strap for quick access while riding), and other miscellaneous slots that simply didn't fit the stuff I have. So out with the perma-pockets! The bag's a little lighter, it sits open more readily because there isn't a heavy array of pockets pulling the lip of the bag down, and is ready to be customized according to my needs.

Even when it left the factory - organizer pocket intact - my bag was downright simple compared to the modern daypack. Daypack design has gotten a little silly: the more specialized pockets, ports, sleeves, techy functions, fobs, and space age suspension technology a bag has, the more X-Treme you are, and the more money you will be separated from and ... the more doomed you are to throw away the bag as soon as your needs change. Think of it: you buy a new bag to fit your stuff. Your stuff breaks, or gets replaced with new stuff, or you stop using this stuff, or somebody invents a new piece of stuff that has an entirely different form-factor ... then you have pockets and features that are no longer relevant.

What if you don't have an MP3 player? Or you want to put it somewhere other than the specialized, padded media-pocket with a custom port for the headphones? What if you buy a bag with a padded pocket for your 12-inch laptop, then upgrade to a 15-inch? What if the water reservoir that came in the special insulated hydration-sleeve breaks or gets funky (it happens) and the new one you buy has the tube-thingy coming out of the wrong part and so doesn't reach out of the special hydro-hole and so on?

Custom pockets and padding and extra zippers add weight and more points of failure, and often stay empty for want of the Right Sized Thing. My bag, a Timbuk2 large Classic Messenger Bag (made in San Francisco), on the other hand, is insanely durable and beautifully flexible. In the one pocket of my bag, I have at different times carried a case of beer and snacks (ahem, to share), a full-size bike stand (a four foot long box ... it stuck out), camera bodies and multiple lenses, groceries, full picnics for a family of four on the beach or in the mountains (then all the rocks and stuff we collected to take home), and small ad hoc reference libraries. Basically, I can carry more in my bag than is wise, comfortable, or safe for anyone to carry while riding a bicycle. Of course when I only have a few things in it, it collapses to fit. It has no frame or foam suspension. It's a bag: it has the shape of the things it is carrying.

I do have the need to organize and carry small things: bike tools, pump, lights for night riding, food, extra clothes, books, journal, pencils and pens, and various other possibles. I have cheap little ditty bags and stuff sacks for all the things I carry, each one perfectly suited to my purposes because I chose it. If my needs change, I swap out the cheap bags. I put my laptop in a neoprene 'sleeve' that fits it like a glove. If I were to buy a bigger laptop, I'd get a different sleeve to fit it. What happens if the sleeve is stitched into the bag? And for that matter, what does the pocket do when you leave your laptop at home? What else do you put in a permanent, rectangular, foam-padded pocket? A very carefully folded sweater?

Bags with tons of pockets are also a serious liability in the rain. Bags with a lot of pockets and openings either have to use waterproof zippers and specially sealed seams (every stitch point is a point of entry for water in a downpour) or must be under a waterproof cover. My bag has one large, vinyl-coated, rain-proof flap, with no zippers to fail. Simple, beautiful, and durable.

(One extra provision I make for the possibility of really bad weather is the stuff sack that holds my rain gear: this bright orange bag is also waterproof. If the weather turns bad, the rain gear comes out and anything really sensitive to moisture goes inside the bag as extra insurance against water finding its way in.)

(low) tech writer principles. Rigid compartmentalization and design complexity limit flexibility and shorten the lifespan of a thing: complexity wears out its welcome sooner than simplicity. Complex things slow you down, require more maintenance (of a more specialized kind), solve problems you probably don't have, and cost more in the bargain.

Simplicity in design is more enduringly functional, flexible, adaptable, durable, and inexpensive (both on the day you buy it and when you need to repair it).

More on Simple Toys & the boxes they come in

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:02:00 +0000

It's the simple toys that last, and that have a lasting impact. In our house we occasionally clean out the closets of old toys. Massive piles of colorful plastic are thereby doomed to landfill (you'd be surprised how un-recyclable these things are). Each addition to the pile stirring feelings of mild parental shame; each missing a small piece essential to its function, or missing something altogether more essential than just a part. The toys that remain are missing nothing, except perhaps marketability. ... The giraffe, the duck with the floppy feet made of old bicycle tubes on wheels that go flap-flap as you push it around, the little wooden car, unpainted, colored darker brown where handling has stained it. (The pic below is from DoodleTown Toys, a 37 year old maker of classy wooden toys. Click the picture to see their web site, and some really wonderful tiny toys. I like the Doodle Dozer and the Doodle Pickup.)

These unpainted, unpowered, analog, silent, and imagination-ready toys don't get old, and don't get thrown away. When you're done with one of these toys, they are given away to serve for a season in someone elses home. They are simple but come to life when a child projects their imagination onto them. Kids need a blank space to project onto.

With these toys, the less provided, the more room we have to add our own stories, to really make a toy a part of our story. They are the truly beautiful toys, that are quiet enough (in every way) to allow our children to think, to begin to dream. It's not really that there are too few of them, it's that there are too many of the other kind ... noisy, plastic, electronic, brightly colored toys-with-an-agenda that fill the shelves

Some toy designer somewhere is thinking about adding even more lights, more sounds, more chips to toys. Toys have to compete with computers now, is how the story goes. It talks to you! It's more lifelike! It follows you around! It responds to your commands! It sings-and-shows-you-the-notes-on-an-LCD-screen-so-you-can-learn-to-read-music-before-you-turn-three!

My son has a robot toy that occasionally gets woken up (with the push of a button, if the batteries aren't dead) to do it's pre-programmed dance (to pre-programmed music). But that's it. It will break soon, or we'll get tired of providing the four D batteries required, and it will go to whatever place these clever-complex toys go when they die (I have my theories). Sometimes I wonder if we aren't already there, when he tells me all about this years' model with it's much more realistic robot dance.

Once, when my daughter was very little, her grandparents came home from a trip with a stuffed monkey from the airport (warning). Yes, I'm talking about you, Mom and Dad. Its fur was a kind of hyper sparkly white, and it held a red satin heart that had some earnest expression of affection written in white cursive on it. When they handed it over, and showed her how to squeeze the heart, that little howler monkey from hell began to shake ... and ... shriek. Repeatedly. I remember the look on their faces: a kind of embarrassed thrill. They had clearly scored points in some grandparent competition but seemed uncertain about their victory. There was nothing to do but bask in the ridiculous, momentary joy of their granddaughter and dodge the momentarily incoherent protests of her father. They don't have to worry. Even if I will remember this event, ahem, for the rest of my life, I think better of them than this. They are much more thoughtful than the howler monkey episode suggests. They are progressive and intelligent and my kids have not had more than their share of silly gifts. It's a grandparent thing. I will have my moments when I get there, I'm sure.

To balance this painful memory, I recall the time my dad used his jigsaw to cut a rifle shape out of plywood for me. No paint. No moving parts. No logos or names on it. Talk about room for imagination! So cool. Or the times he helped me trick out cardboard boxes for play. Now there is a plaything to make a wooden car seem high-tech. In a flash of brilliance, a toy museum in New York inducted the humble Cardboard Box into its hall-of-fame (next to Barbie and GI Joe and an old Atari).

Empty boxes are ready to be filled with stories. Yes, kids will shriek with joy when they get the hot new toy, as seen on TV. Yes, it's great to get a really big gift. But the truly blessed will recognize that it's not the size of the gift ... it's the size of the box it came in.

At the end of any holiday, a kid should have a cardboard box to climb into, if only to shut out the noise and light and have some discretionary quiet time. If it was socially acceptable for grown-ups to climb into a cardboard box, with a blanket and stuffed bear perhaps, maybe there'd be less people climbing into a bottle at the end of the day.

My best cardboard-box memory has a techy twist: I set up a box in the garage and punctured it with a string of Christmas-tree lights so that I could pretend I was inside the blinking cockpit of an X-Wing fighter. Yes, I converted my simple, low-tech box into a high-tech cockpit from the future! I see the irony, but it was my choice. I made that X-Wing fighter. It was my imagination fueling the creation, and the thing lasted precisely as long as my imagination did: a few days. There was no grief when the whole thing was broken down and the Christmas tree lights went back on the shelf. Nobody was upset about wasting good money, and I got a memory a hundred times more powerful than any packaged, licensed, authentically-styled, battery-powered Star Wars X-wing with authentic sounds and lights could ever provide.

CAUTION - A toy that never goes away

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:51:00 +0000

In total contrast to the toy that once belonged to the power transformer of the previous post (which has disappeared from our lives for reasons that may include, but shall not be limited to, a) failure of electronics, b) boredom deriving from the limited electronic function, c) breaking of shiny and colorful but flimsy plastic enclosure, or d) inability to find the power transformer of the previous post when needed), the toy in the above picture has been a part of our lives and a fixture in our family room for something close to fifteen years. Seriously, for no other reason than we never got tired of it, this thing won't go away. Not only do visiting children instantly straddle it to roll around the room, but our kids occasionally do, and they are 12 and 16 years old.

'Nuff said.

CAUTION-ELECTRIC TOY

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:47:00 +0000

'nuff said?

The smells of success

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:39:00 +0000

My family just spent some time at a lake house as guests of good friends. It was a nice vacation: I think we all got the kind of readjustment that we were looking for. There was water-skiing, swimming, sun-worshiping, fishing, and ... we even got in a hike to a small jewel of an alpine lake called Crystal Lake (that's my happy place). There was also much consuming of barbecued meat, and, although you can do that back home, for some reason barbecued meat tastes better next to a lake at 5000 feet surrounded by friends and by pine trees that are catching the setting sun after a day of fun when you know you get to have another day of fun right after that. I think that's a culinary principle.

To get to this lake, we had to cross over the Pacific Crest, the high-elevation spine that runs through California. I love the change in atmosphere as you climb out of a hot-and-dry valley like the Hwy. 5 corridor. First the temperature changes--but not like you'd think: the air is crisper and feels colder, but the sun is more intense, so it can feel hotter. The air is thinner, which means you'll be out of breath for a few days, but your body will adjust. Then there is the smell. On a drive like this, I can't wait to roll the windows down and be done with the air-conditioning (and air-recycling) needed to survive a hot valley highway jammed with traffic: up high, the air seems so much more breathable. It's the smells.

Above 4000 feet, the air smells fresher, cleaner, and richer. You can smell the herbal shrubs when the sun hits them and they release their perfume. You can smell some of the giant trees, like the pines that cover these mountains. You can even smell the dirt ... and it smells good. One of the most powerful (and I'm ashamed to say, most satisfying) smells comes when a logging truck carrying felled pine trees passes your car. I know that's not so p.c., but the trees are logged sustainably in this area, and anyways, it is such a surprise to smell something good behind a truck that it catches me a little off-guard.

Speaking of trucks, two of the families at our house towed boats up to the lake. One was a fishing boat, and the other was a sport boat that pulled the water skiers. Both of these boats were towed by the original giant sequoia of the road, the Chevy Suburban. Though I am a low-and-green-tech kind of guy who would like to see less big gas-burning cars on the road, I can't deny that these are the very cars you need when towing six people and a boat up to the mountains. Or, as one of the dads said as sixteen of us piled into the two Suburbans for our trek up to the trailhead for an afternoon of hiking, "... Probably the most fuel-efficient way in the world to move 16 adults and kids up to 7000 feet. Prius just wouldn't do it."

I'm inclined to agree, and anyway, this is not the crowd to blame for SUVs crowding the roads in the cities and suburbs: these families are actually using their trucks as trucks. But too many people buy SUVs for their (perceived) safety, their (very-real) projection of power, or the (dubious) image of success they bestow, and then proceed to drive them like cars to and from the market and soccer games. The Suburban has the right size engine for towing and climbing mountains, but way too much engine when all you're towing is ego and attitude. Just because you can afford the gas to drive an empty truck doesn't mean you have a right to burn it: that aroma on the roads of Silicon Valley just may be the unintended smell of success.

When our families arrived at the trailhead for our hike to Crystal lake, one of the moms got out of the car, took a deep breath and said, "Oh! It smells so good here!" And it did. I said to her, "There's lots of good smells back home too, we just don't know it, because there are too many other smells on top of the good ones." I don't like the idea that it can only smell good far away from home. That sweet smell of the naked earth, uncluttered and unmasked, was one of the rewards at the end of our long ascent. But what about those hidden smells back home? How should our home towns smell?

As in the case of the giant, pine-scented logging trucks laboring over the mountains, one powerful smell can mask another. On mountain roads, I learned, pine trumps diesel (and how cool is that?). Back home in the Bay Area, the smells of nature are more subtle and diffuse than cut-pine: as a bicycle commuter who often spends time wedged between SUVs, I can tell you what smells are winning. I wonder: is there anyone still living here in suburbia who remembers what this place really smells like?

A lover's quarrel

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:30:00 +0000

My friend Heather writes a beautiful, honest post about returning home to Georgia and the tension of how things change. She talks about Georgia like one might a former boyfriend--winsome memories of lovable qualities, and a hard encounter with all the reasons why it could never have worked out .... Her clear-headed reflection on the imbalance in the urban/rural relationship is itself balanced and evocative.

When I return, I feel...I feel betrayed. Atlanta has sprawled beyond her rightful and necessary boundaries. Or you could say the symbol Atlanta is of urban commerce has overrun its banks and flooded the rural landscape that gives that commercial river the right to flow in the first place. I'm not naive enough to say that commerce is bad or that cities are bad but I am principled enough to say that when the balance of urban and rural gets knocked off its fragile footing both sides lose.

From Heather's blog, Garden Street Farm: A song of you comes as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines.

Upside Down

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:52:00 +0000

Once I held the impressive title of Director of Marketing at a Java software company .... Ok, the truth is that the company belonged to my friend Steve, and he was in fact the only employee, #1 of one, until I came along. He asked me to help him staff his booth at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. He made business cards for me with my new title on it. Steve had written a Java Obfuscator (what?) and I was doing some marketing/communication work for him at the time, so I understood his product as well as any of the other attractive young people who handed out brochures at conferences. Yes, I was a booth babe.

It was a blast being on the floor at a tech convention during a peak time in the industry, and we had a choice location. We were right inside the main doors, so that every single one of the 30,000 attendees walked right by our spot. I did a fair job of introducing his product and liked working with him. But the real fun was in walking around the huge hall at Moscone Center and just looking at all the stuff. When else was I going to be at a Java software convention? It was like walking around a city in a foreign country. This was back in the boom times, when companies gave away serious hardware for free. Each paid attendee at the conference got a brand-new Palm V, loaded with conference software.

I didn't do that well, but I came home from that event with a bag full of exceptional swag: logo key chains, stress balls, flashlights, all of it carefully designed so that we would remember ... something about some company being the premier provider of solutions that I'm confident had something to do with Java. My kids got it all ... except one piece of treasure I still use (and who can say that about their Palm V? Beam me your contact info, anyone? ... Anyone?). I visited the booth for Upside, a technology-and-money magazine that I used to read, where I managed to score a nice big UPSIDE mug. I'm drinking my coffee out of it as I write this, and I am almost awake.

This is still the largest coffee mug in my kitchen--almost ten years later--and that's saying something in America, where any technology for delivering food or drink doubles in capacity every decade (I believe that's Moore's law of American food consumption). It had the word "UPSIDE" printed in huge letters on it, with the words "PEOPLE TECHNOLOGY CAPITAL" in smaller letters under it. I say had, because those words are now entirely missing from the mug. Worn off, or faded, or gone to wherever all the money went.

Now you can just barely see where the words were. At the moment, it looks a little like one of those ceramic mugs that has a secret word or picture that materializes when you put a hot or a cold drink into it, the novelty item that reveals a hidden surprise when conditions are right. Only conditions will never be right for this UPSIDE to reappear. Sounds like the year 2000 and the promise of the dotcom market. Is my mug big enough to contain such an overblown metaphor? It is big enough that I will not need any more coffee today. After this post, maybe I should cut back.

Simpler Times?

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 13 May 2009 05:52:00 +0000

I found an old copy of Thomas Kinkade's Simpler Times on my daughter's bookshelf, which I promptly re-claimed for collages. She didn't mind: neither of us had ever really read it. The book had been sent to me more than a decade ago when I took a writing job for Media Arts Group, the company that sells Kinkade's pictures. In fact, I poked around on thomaskinkade.com a bit and found the plein-air paintings that I had written about years ago. My words are still there, signed by the Painter of Light himself. You could read my old masterpieces of copywriting if you knew where to look. ... I'm not talking.

The book, Simpler Times, and the art that fills it, is all about a return to some kind of good-old-days: stone cottages, warm firelight, cozy villages, and gas-lit streets. This is all elaborated in the book as the opposite of noisy, media-filled, task-list-crazed individualism. Had Kinkade and his co-author written the book today, I assume blog-writing and -reading, and other webby activities wouldn't qualify as simple-time either. Who would buy a Thomas Kinkade painting of an apartment window glowing with the unearthly fluorescent blue of computer screens? The Painter of Light, 2.0!

Who doesn't love the idea of old stone buildings lit by fire? Kinkade is popular because his paintings strike some pretty big chords - simplicity is highly attractive to anyone who lives and works in this crazy-complex modern world. Longing is probably not too strong a word to describe the attraction. Also attractive are the various elements that populate these works: stone, water, and fire; cottages, gardens, and gazebos. Here at (low) tech writer, I share this attraction. But all of these elements are brought together in a world as unreal as a model-railroad diorama. What is it exactly? A little too much color in that garden scene? Not quite enough color in that crowd scene? Is it all just a little too much of the wrong idea of perfect? As I flipped through the book (before cutting it up for art), I began to discern one significant way that these pictures go wrong. It's the water. When I look at the water in a Kinkade painting, I long for a little less simplicity.

Here's what I see: in Thomas Kinkade's world, water is harmless.

Take a look at the painting titled Almost Heaven (you can zoom in on it by clicking the picture to visit the Web site). The waterfalls in this picture sit on top of the earth like they don't belong there -- like they are just passing through: not like they have been carving the surface of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. One of these uninvited rivers spills over the high-point on a rock jutting out from a cliff, managing a double-miracle: resisting the tendency of water to flow downhill, and also the habit of water to wear stuff down. Other waterfalls in the scene rage with snowmelt, but seem unable to have any effect on the landscape at all. In other works, rivers float through villages on top of the soft earth in perpetual flood, yet also fail to have any erosive effect on the perfect, grassy banks. It seems to me that Kinkade makes a mistake similar to that made by some of the romantic painters of the 19th century: while 'recording' what they witnessed in the new territory of the American West, they often mixed up their geology by painting what they imagined, instead of what was. Albert Bierstadt painted the scenery of the Sierra Nevada in California from a mix of memory and imagination. He seems to have occasionally confused and combined u-shaped glaciated valleys with the v-shaped terrain created by liquid water.

At least Bierstadt was never confused about the violence that water can do, in liquid or solid form. Looking at Kinkade's paintings, we're left to imagine that God formed the mountains and valleys according to whimsy and then sent the impotent water over it for his own amusement. And, I guess, for painters to have something to paint. Will there be no erosion in heaven?

But if God made the mountains and the valleys, then the shaping of them was done with water. If you've ever tried to swim across a river, or escape a rip-tide, or walked under a waterfall, you know that water has power. And power is precisely what is missing from Kinkade's portrayal of nature.

I can accept the unabashed hopefulness--hope needs nurturing. I can accept the occasional too-sweet sentiment--who doesn't like sugar in their lemonade? I can almost accept that there is never any strife in Kinkade's art: after all, he is painting his vision of heaven on earth, and some of us--even before we take in his luminous, idealized landscapes--are invested in the idea that one day our tears will be wiped away and there will be joy. But, while I believe that this kind of heaven is breaking through into the world, I don't think that it will create the homogeneous and impotent landscape that the Painter of Light portrays. In fact, I'd say Kinkade's powerless waters (for starters) give his vision itself a dangerous power ... power to lure the viewer away from the challenges of reality in the way that psychotropic drugs dilute your desire to find real peace. Take enough Valium and you may just give up thinking about what's wrong with your life.

One take-away from this kind of art is the idea that the creation is ideally impotent. That in this picture of heaven not only will the lion lay down with the lamb, but the water will never again shape the rock, or otherwise change the landscape. But what Kincade fails to document in his vision is that this shaping and changing is a part of the design. It is part of God's design that water and earth are locked in constant conflict, and one result of this clash is that the earth is made more beautiful.

Here's what's true about water. Water is not impotent. In nature, water moves according to huge and hairy rhythms and gives swimmers and sailors something to worry about. Water tears at the landscape, breaks it down, carries it off, and leaves the earth scarred and changed. Here's how awesome water is: if Water was invited to make a guest appearance in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors ... it would trump them all, but none would fall more memorably than Rock, which succumbs slowly but utterly to water's power.

A pretty good example of what can result from all this clash and conflict between water and stone is a little vacation spot in the California mountains called Yosemite Valley. You may have heard of it. There are peaceful places in the Valley, but I'm not sure a feeling of peace is the appropriate response when looking at a waterfall moving 2,500 gallons of water per second and cutting through a two-thousand-foot granite cliff. Water has terrible power and who would want it any other way? But Kinkade's paintings suggest that something God made powerful will one day ideally lose it's power, and that is a message with the power to make people mistrust true power, wherever it should be found.

One place where power is seldom trusted, where conflict gets a bad rap, is among the human characters that move here and there on the surface of the planet. While nobody loves the wars that plague humanity, even the proverb says that people shape and change each other, that we are somehow improved by conflict:

"Iron sharpens iron,

so one person sharpens the wits of another."

(Proverbs 27.17)

Conflict is not evil. It's only evil when we try to silence or destroy those who challenge or threaten us. That's what makes war. Allow me to suggest a (low) tech writer people-principle: peace does not come from avoiding conflict or clashes, it comes from accepting these things as part of God's design for beautiful people.

Or to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity".

-----

The photo of Yosemite Falls, 2005, is by Kevin Ingolfsland and is on WikiMedia Commons.

Signs of The End

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:39:00 +0000

Signs that we are in the last days: police action in the wild-lands of Palo Alto. On the very same day as my encouraging visit to Peet's, I was walking in Arastradero Park, in the foothills above Palo Alto. This is no city park: there are no lawns, no landscaped flower-beds, no bandstands--just 10 miles of beautiful trails.

A great effort has been made at Arastradero to return this suburban open space to wilderness. But wild is as wild does.

After shooting some pictures of wildflowers just off the trail, I was met by a ranger (where DID she come from?) who scolded me for leaving the path--a violation of park rules. This picture is the evidence of my shameful transgression.

OK, I know, because she told me, that this park gets "loved to death", and that the rules are there to preserve this natural beauty for future generations. But the whole experience made me feel like I was in a museum, or a zoo, except in some zoos you get to go through the fences and pet the goats. Look at that trail. It's beautiful. Isn't it spoiled, just a bit, by a "Keep Off The Grass" sign?

I've written about this kind of madness before. If I cut off a trail at the same place as a hundred other people, or if I choose to walk just to the side of a trail to avoid the mud in the low track, then I would be contributing to visible wear on the ecosystem. But is it really going to scar the planet if I leave the trail at a random point to walk out in the grass a bit for a different view? Please.

No matter what justification is offered--and it all has a kind of grim logic about it--who can be happy about such barriers arising between human beings and nature? There are many more disturbing things in the world, but this still feels to me like one more sign of the apocalypse.

Signs of Hope

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:07:00 +0000

Signs of hope ... that we Silicon Valley peoples aren't totally enslaved to our devices. A couple days ago, in a local Peet's, I counted a total of no laptops. You read that right. I also counted no smartphones, no handheld computers, no Internet surfing technologies whatsoever. The place has wifi, but the clientele seemed totally unconcerned that they were falling behind on their email. And the place was full of coffee drinkers: can you drink coffee and not be productive?

There was the old couple in the corner mostly being quiet and looking out the window (searching for ...?). There was the family of four (mom, dad, teen girl, tween boy) sitting around a small table and talking, not on phones, but all in-person and stuff. There was the guy in the corner reading a book, printed on a pre- e-paper technology called, confusingly, paper. There was the man chatting with the store manager, who sat next to him on a bench against the wall.

And just in case you don't know how strange this is, in case you live in a town where it's normal to go out in public to be with people, consider the case of the Red Rock Coffee shop, a mile or so down the street. I was in the Red Rock today. I love the Red Rock. Good coffee. Good art. Good vibe. Good grief: I counted twenty-eight laptops.

Water and Fire

noreply@blogger.com ((low) tech writer) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:45:00 +0000

Crystal Springs Reservoir is an artificial lake that sits on the San Andreas Fault between San Francisco and San Jose. It is one of the more beautiful reservoirs I know of, and there are lots of pretty views along the lake. Nevertheless, I had to work hard to snap a picture that didn't show barbed wire between me and the water. It's filled from pipes that come from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite, famous for the valley of the same name that was destroyed by the San Francisco Water Department when it was flooded in the early 20th century to provide water for the city. John Muir mourned the loss of Hetch Hetchy, which he compared to Yosemite Valley in beauty (Muir suggested that the governement might as well seal up cathedrals and churches for water tanks while they were at it). But Crystal Springs is a beautiful expanse of water in a beautiful area minutes from Silicon Valley, and beggars can't be choosers.

As a suburbanite living in an overcrowded metropolitan area, I am sometimes surprised to be reminded that I am surrounded by water. Yes I can get to the Pacific Ocean in about 40 minutes, but though the San Francisco Bay is even closer, and there are natural creeks and streams everywhere, water is hard to find; hidden under concrete and usually only seen--but just barely--from bridges. I used to live in Redwood City, and it wasn't until I'd been there for several years that I learned that there used to be canals--canals!--running right into the downtown area. While boats had once docked a hundred yards from the beautiful county courthouse, now you can stand where schooners once floated and not even know that water still flows somewhere underneath your feet.

My heart broke when I learned that I could have walked along canals in the center of this old, interesting town, instead of along a loud, car-filled street. I know why they covered them up. Ships stopped contributing significantly to the economy, and the creek feeding the area was too much work to dredge. Add to that the increase in automobile traffic and the economic potential of more streets and better traffic management, and you can see the logic of paving over nature, which has a way of getting in the way of progress. When the creek went underground, something was gained and something was lost. I don't always root for the losing team (my mom and my wife do that), but in this case I'm crying in my beer.

Thankfully you can still get to the remaining wet places in the area, but you have to get out of your car to see them (the scene above is only visible from the car-free Sawyer Camp Trail), and that means that most people won't see them. You can drive over any number of bridges that span the Bay, and hardly see the water at all. This will be partly because of the railings and traffic that block your view, and partly because if you do try to take in the view, you'll probably crash your car, which might give you more time to look at the view, but behind you will be the drivers of many cars who are now looking at the view instead of driving to wherever it is they want to go, and they will hate you. Nobody likes to be forced to appreciate nature.

You need to get out of your car. Looking at water from inside a car (a parked car, please) is like watching the nature channel--you can't really experience water through the window of your car. You might as well watch it on TV. You need to get close. You need to listen to water as it washes over the sand and as waves slap against the rocks. You have to get close to hear the sounds of water as it tumbles over rapids in a stream, echoing off the leaves of shade trees. You need to be able to watch the surface of the water move (impossible, if you are moving yourself--you have to stop). This is another one of those almost forgotten things that causes my skin to tingle when I experience it after a long time of deprivation.

Fire has also been caged and hidden. For most of us metro-unfortunates, the only fire that burns in our houses is safely hidden from view in steel boxes where our water or our air or our chicken nuggets are heated (that is if we still cook with the box that uses heat waves and haven't given it up for the one that uses electromagnetic waves). For those of us in old homes that still have fireplaces, we are told by the law that we can't burn wood on certain days, because then all the drivers would have to roll up their windows to keep from smelling the air we thoughtlessly smoked up. The air we smoked up by burning wood, another natural thing that is being outlawed while we continue to pursue happiness in cars.

Now I know, because I am reminded constantly, that these days any smoke adds to the danger in an already dangerously overcrowded region. I once heard that the Los Angeles basin has always had a natural inversion-layer and that Southern California air quality was a problem even when the only smoke rose from the fires of Native camps. I guess some places were never capable of naturally supporting large populations no matter how they cooked their food or got to work.

And I know that these days I have a choice: I don't need to burn wood to stay warm or cook my food. Even if I want to barbecue, I'm told, I should get a gas grill because it is more eco-sensitive. Better to burn gas under the food I eat: better for the food (less carcinogenic, I'm told) better for the air (less particulates in the smoke), more convenient (Quicker! Cleaner!). If I miss the smoky flavor of charcoal, I can add it to the meat before I barbecue (Smoke in a Bottle! That's green.)

And I know that these days 99% of the population have no choices when it comes to commuting: they have to drive to work, or think that they have to. The society is set up for cars.

I know these things. But I will never, ever be comfortable with the idea that because so many people burn gas in their vehicles to get to work, they should then come home and use gas to cook their burgers instead of charcoal. How did burning petrochemicals in a barbecue become part of the green solution to an air quality problem caused by the burning of petrochemicals?

We have candles in our fireplace now. It's pretty I guess. We don't need the fireplace to warm the house, so it works out. It's better for the air: kids and adults with breathing-related illnesses like asthma will breathe easier. That's a win. But something has been lost too. The sights and sounds of a wood fire in a house are emblematic of home, shelter, comfort: the sound of fire, almost like banners moving in stiff wind, with the occasionally snap or pop that makes you jump and check the floor for sparks; the sight of fire, intensity of color, flames rippling, also like banners, trapped in their own thermals. Move in close, as close as possible, to stare at the embers. It's like looking into a volcano in miniature, as close as I'll ever get.

Will California broadcasters ever realize that most of their audience is now in the same boat as New York apartment-dwellers and put a yule log on the TV at Christmas time? Oh, I forgot, we are allowed to put gas fireplaces in our new homes, which is kind like the TV yule log already, with the following differences: 1) you still get the pleasure of lighting your "fire"; 2) it doesn't come into the home over the air, but through pipes; and 3) it still produces some heat and exhaust gasses. If I had to choose one over the other, I don't know which is worse for the planet. But for my money, if the gas fire is burning behind glass, I figure I'll just go with the TV, and turn up the heat.