Wrapping Up June 2009

Wrapping Up June 2009

 

 

Wonderful weather lately: sunny but cool, breezy but not windy. Warm in the daytime, good sleeping weather at night. That's the good part. The sad part is that we never see a really blue sky any more unless the air is Canadian.

 

 

 

Good line: looking through pictures of Cambodia in 2007, there was one where the photographer was traveling down the usual Cambodia road, along with the usual assortment of overloaded buses, overfreighted trucks, people with grotesquely large loads balanced on motorbikes, tuk-tuks, brothers sharing a bicycle, etc. etc.-life in the Third World at its usual pace-when a Lamborghini shot by. He wondered: how many people could eat for a year on what was paid for that car? How many people could get an education? The line: "Unfortunately, not all filth is covered with dust in Cambodia." Substitute your country of choice.

 

 

 

Lately one of our supermarkets offered tomatoes at 99 cents per pound. This was surprising: a few years ago there was a tomato crop failure in California, I think, and prices soared, and never came back down, just like peanut butter before that. In commerce, what goes up does not necessarily come down.

The sale tomatoes weren't the little oval paste tomatoes, which are usually cheapest, but rather the round ones all connected by a stem. We bought a small pile of them.

     I'm pleased to report that they were not entirely without taste, but were unexpectedly hard. I realize that commercial tomato varieties need to be bred for toughness, to avoid shipping damage, but this went off the scale in order to get onto the scale.

     No variety was named, but if the growers need one, I would suggest "Sedona." As with Sedona, Arizona, they're beautiful-beautiful red rocks.

 

 

 

     Anyone who doubts that the human mind has an enormous capacity for self-deception should consider the mental maneuvers required sometimes to get out of bed after the alarm clock sounds.

 

 

     North Korea warns of a "thousand-fold retaliation" if anyone opposes their military buildup. This would be history's first thousand-sheep attack.

 

 

     Gov. Douglas says that Vermont Yankee/Entergy's presence on a federal list of plants with inadequate decommissioning funds proves that federal regulation is working. That's like saying that the highway patrol officers are doing their job because they show up at accidents.

 

 

     And now, because it's so hot and wet, there's the same fungus that forced the Irish to leave that country during the potato blight of the 19th century-and which kills tomatoes, too. If we don't spray for fungus, we could lose what's in our gardens. Organic tomatoes? No hope.

'     Global warming has threatened something sacred to Vermonters. It's Pearl Harbor in our gardens, 9-11 on our farms. As the bumper sticker says, "If you aren't appalled, you haven't been paying attention."

Another Farmers' Market

Another Farmers' Market

 

     The other day I took some pictures at the Middlebury farmers' market, and I thought Rutland area localvores might be interested to see how another county is doing it. A few notes before going to the pictures:

     --It takes place on the south side of the Marble Works Complex, a group of buildings centered on restored marble-working sheds (themselves built of marble) from the days when nearby Middlebury Falls (shown) provided the waterpower to drive stone-cutting and shaping machinery. Brandonites should realize they are looking at the latest chapter of what was, at the time, one of the town's great tragedies: the Brandon Italian marble company's relocation to Middlebury.

     =There isn't always a farm animal petting zoo, but there was that day. It wasn't hard to tell the young sheep from the young goats: the latter were very personable, while the former were very terrified.

     -The three-person string band is Run Mountain. They're quite good, for anyone who can't book the Shrewsbury group The Bogstompers, who play similar material in a similar style. Both are spiritual heirs of Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers and Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, for those who care about four-cent cotton and golden shoes and such musical historical details.

     -Crafts are welcome as well as farm products, and quite a few set-ups had stuff to eat out-of-hand. In fact, a dedicated nosher could cobble together most of a meal from the free samples.

     --Middlebury's Main Street is a short walk away, and a pedestrian bridge over Otter Creek gives a fine view of the falls area (another time for that-it's a complex site) and access to the Frog Hollow commercial district. A local group has plans to improve access to the north bank below the falls, and some of the town's stimulus money should speed that project along.

     On to the pictures.

No Halfway Measures

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE AND CRUELTY THAT THE READER MAY NOT BE ABLE TO FORGET

 

No Halfway Measures

 

       Former Beelzebubba-in-Chief Dick Cheney believes extreme methods of interrogation are necessary to save American lives. “in the fight against terrorism there is no middle ground. And half measures keep you half exposed,” he proclaimed as  part of the “dueling speeches” with President Obama.

       But the methods used in the detention center at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba—waterboarding, isolation, sleep deprivation, slamming people against walls, threatening them with vicious dogs—only went a third of the way.

       To go two-thirds of the distance to full measures, we would abandon the idea of torturing one prisoner at a time, and go instead to having a high-value prisoner watch, and listen to, a low-value prisoner being tortured to death. Then the interrogator would bring in a third high-value prisoner and say, in effect,  “Do you want to talk with us, or would you rather become an warning for someone else?”

       Probably you remember Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian ruler some say was the precursor of Dracula, with his army of 20,000 impaled Turks. The illustrations you see show men with sharp-pointed stakes driven through their chests, left on those stakes to rot.

       That’s not how it’s done in most cases. After the victim is bound, he is seated on the sharp stake, in such a way that it enters his body and slowly but surely works its way through. If the person is lucky, the point breaks into a vital organ. If he is not—something that can be facilitated by making sure the stake is not sharply pointed—the stake keeps going until it comes through at the breastbone, and finally braces against the chin. Secured in this position, the prisoner dies of thirst, which can take days.

       The demonstration victim could be broken on the wheel, or a functional equivalent thereof. The wheel, back in dungeon days, was mainly something sturdy on which someone could be tied, though in some cases it was spun. The torturer would smash the victim’s bones and joints, one at a time, making sure not to do anything that would cause a lot of bleeding. (An alternative was a chair with dozens of short, triangular blades for the back, seat, legs and arms--it avoided great blood loss because once the victim was tightly strapped down, the blades plugged the wounds (and, because the apparatus would not be cleaned between executions, eventually brought on gangrene.

       And so on. In a modern version, the intended’s tongue could be split first, because his pleadings, curses and so on would be unimportant. Then the sound track of horrified screams, agonized shouts, broken sobbing and witless moaning could be playing at high volume for other prisoners, to interfere with their sleep. Loud rock music? Halfway measures.

       As I may have said before, a piece of advice about my subconscious: never get lost there after dark. As a poet, I have followed the Roman poet Terence’s principle: “Nothing human is foreign to me.”

       Returning to full methods of interrogation: as I stated previously, torturing someone to death as an example goes only two-thirds of the way. For utmost effect, every day you inject the high-value prisoner with heroin (or crack cocaine, or crystal methedrine, etc.), slowly ratcheting up the dose. The horror of such drugs is that they derange the brain’s pleasure centers, so that all the old satisfactions—gourmet food,  splendid music, a glorious sunset, the things that happen between people after the sun goes down—no longer bring happiness. Only the drug matters. When it is withheld, the addict’s body itself devises the most effective tortures, whether they be particularly fearful hallucinations, William Burroughs’ “slow burn,” or something else the body designs as being the best way of getting what it wants. The addict, suffering from withdrawal, is brought in: “If you want your shot, you have to talk.”

       Does it work? It works every day, all over the world, successfully turning innocent rural girls into city whores. If we were serious about a war on terror, we would consider such trafficked slaves as important as our hallowed “American lives.”

 

Another Farmers’ Market

Another Farmers' Market

   The other day I took some pictures at the Middlebury farmers’ market, and I thought Rutland area localvores might be interested to see how another county is doing it. A few notes before going to the pictures:

       --It takes place on the south side of the Marble Works Complex, a group of buildings centered on restored marble-working sheds (themselves built of marble) from the days when nearby Middlebury Falls (shown) provided the waterpower to drive stone-cutting and shaping machinery. Brandonites should realize they are looking at the latest chapter of what was, at the time, one of the town’s great tragedies: the Brandon Italian marble company’s relocation to Middlebury.

       =There isn’t always a farm animal petting zoo, but there was that day. It wasn’t hard to tell the young sheep from the young goats: the latter were very personable, while the former were very terrified.

       -The three-person string band is Run Mountain. They’re quite good, for anyone who can’t book the Shrewsbury group The Bogstompers, who play similar material in a similar style. Both are spiritual heirs of Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers and Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, for those who care about four-cent cotton and golden shoes and such musical historical details.

       -Crafts are welcome as well as farm products, and quite a few set-ups had stuff to eat out-of-hand. In fact, a dedicated nosher could cobble together most of a meal from the free samples.

       --Middlebury’s Main Street is a short walk away, and a pedestrian bridge over Otter Creek gives a fine view of the falls area (another time for that—it’s a complex site) and access to the Frog Hollow commercial district. A local group has plans to improve access to the north bank below the falls, and some of the town’s stimulus money should speed that project along.

       On to the pictures.

     

SLUMDOG PLAGIARISM?

SLUMDOG PLAGIARISM?

 

     The Academy Award-winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire" ends on a high note with the Academy Award-winning A. H. Rahman song "Jai Ho." It puts a hopeful spin on a tale of struggle through grim conditions and horrifying abuses. In part the lyrics say, in one translation,

"Come, come my Life, under the canopy

Come under the blue brocade sky!

Taste it, taste it, this night is honey

Taste it, and keep it,

It's a heart; the heart is the final limit..."

And as a refrain, there is the choral shout of "Jai Ho!", which the same translator says is "Something between 'Hail' and 'Hallelujah.'"

 

     The 1987 movie "Slamdance," directed by Wayne Wang, is a grim action-adventure pic about an artist who is falsely accused of a crime, and who in the process of trying to clear himself of the charge, finds himself embroiled in a web of official corruption and deceit. But it ends on a high note, with the Tim Scott song "High Hope." It, too, uses a shouted choral refrain ("High hopes!"), and the pattern of the song, though not the melody exactly, irresistibly suggests that a DNA test of it and "Jai Ho" might reveal some common parentage.

 

     I'm not saying that A. H. Rahman deliberately copied Tim Scott's work. As a poet, I've had the experience of writing something that used a poem I'd read in an anthology 20 years earlier as a template, unconsciously, only realizing the connection after the author of the poem I'd read became the national poet laureate. I haven't excised that poem from my body of work-I think it has values of its own-but I make sure to acknowledge the relationship. Very possibly Rahman watched this thoroughly forgettable B movie sometime in the past, and the effectiveness of that kind of chorus impressed him. Or Scott inspired someone else who inspired Rahman. Or popular songs, which utilize a small number of modes and chords and patterns, has landed on this solution to ending a song again and again.

 

     But for what it's worth, I'm putting out there my observation that there may possibly be a relationship.

 

     In looking up information related to this blog, I turned to an indispensable source that every movie-lover should know: the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). The site now has a fair number of TV programs that can be watched in their entirety (half hour or hour, not season) for those who are interested in comedy, late night shows, or old series like "Star Trek."

Bag That One

Bag That One

        I had started seeing the figure of four cents apiece given as the cost of a plastic grocery bag, and since that seemed high to me, so I decided to do a little fact-checking.

At ask.com, I asked the price of a plastic grocery bag. There was no direct answer, just a lot of links, a la Google. One of them, I could see in the top excerpt, had that four cents figure in it.

       But I was looking for something else: an online wholesaler from which a store could buy such plastic bags. I didn’t have to go far: there were scads of suppliers, one of which, BagsOnNet.com, seemed businesslike enough to get a probable rough estimate.

       They listed quite a few plastic bags, from sandwich to garbage, but the regular size “tee shirt” bag seemed like the right one (12x6x22). Two types were available, a brown “Thank You” bag for $16.99 per thousand, and a white Happy Face bag for $18.99 per thousand. Choosing the latter, to arrive at a conservative (high) estimate of the cost, I went to shipping costs. That was determined by UPS. Nothing said how much 1,000 such bags weighed, packaged, so I put the figure of 10 pounds in their calculator, and got a shipping cost to Middlebury, Vermont of $8.70. If the bags weighed five pounds, they would cost $8.04 for the tightest ship in the shipping business to deliver them. Weight was clearly less a factor than having to make the trip at all—the transportation industry’s version of Woody Allen’s principle that “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

       Arithmetic arrived at a total cost of $27.69. Dividing that by 1,000, my calculator and my graded-school method (thank you, Miss Needham, wherever you aren’t) both arrived at a per-bag cost of $02.77 cents per bag—less than three cents.

       A store would probably order more than one package of 1,000, and would either do some comparison shopping or, in the case of a large chain, either do some bargaining or acquire a bagmaker and get the things at a figure closer to the cost of production. So my fact-checking conclusion is that the cost of a plastic bag is less than three cents for a store of any significance, and probably two cents or less for the franchise stores at which most of the shopping is done.

       That’s a high enough cost, multiplied by millions of consumers, for me to get serious about bringing a canvas bag shopping more often. But not always: we use the paper bags to store and put out our paper recyclables (Middlebury has municipal recycling, and you’re billed for it whether you use it or not, so it behooves you to use it) so as often as not, we ask for paper rather than plastic. Heaven knows what those things cost, and how many trees. I’ll dig into that  another day.

       But four cents for plastic is an environmentalist piety, not a fact. Bag that one.

 

 

 

 

WINDING UP MAY 2009

Note: if you would like to be on an email list alerting people when "Out and About" has a new essay, list, reminiscence, review, group of pictures, or advice from a native Vermont guide, please send an email to that effect to me, Ed Barna, at [email protected]  .

WINDING UP MAY 2009

 

     The Princess Project in New York City gives poor girls their choice of prom gowns, which they say has helped them feel better about themselves. Getting that kind of attention should; but the idea that a woman should feel better about herself if she's wearing expensive clothing is a problem in itself. When will we have a Presidential candidate declare as a long-term goal that we should reduce the economy's dependence on consumer spending, which is now at about 60 percent?

 

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What a difference a generation makes. In my youth, Memorial Day was not Memorial Day without someone reciting from memory the poem written by Canadian physician and lieutenant John McCrae (1872-1918) that began

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row..."

Now the poppies are in Afghanistan, and they are a major reason why there will again be crosses row on row.

Why don't we just outbid the criminals for the opium harvest, rather than trying to abolish it, and dump the stuff in some volcano? It would help the farmers, it would keep the stuff off our streets, and I'll bet it would be cheaper than alternatives.

     If you're interested in the poetry of World War I, start with Wilfred Owen. He makes everything else seem trivial by comparison.

     It isn't possible to select something from World War II that stands out in the same way, but don't overlook James Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific." They made a good musical out of part of a great book.

 

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     Sonia Sottomayor is a racist because she has an ethnic heritage and recognizes that logical people can still be affected by their personal backgrounds. Here we go again: just as in the Sixties, the dividing line between the right and left is whether science-which, if you know analytic philosophy, produces the only strictly logical objects we have-includes psychology and sociology. The religious believe all those findings are trumped by free will: we choose what we do, rather than being influenced by personal and social history. Somehow Gingwretch and Limburger and the rest have overlooked that if free will can bend any action, they can bend the law, too.

 

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     If you feel cut off from the world, get and stock a bird feeder. It's hard to feel down when the flocks start chorusing, at this time of the year, at about 4 a.m.-well before sunup. Here's a new word, for anyone looking for one: beakfest. It's the first meal of the day for birds, and for these advanced dinosaurs (did you know someone is trying to back-engineer the genetic "switches" in bird development to recreate a dinosaur?) beaks speak louder than words-and shape matters just as much as size.

     Oops. Got carried away writing. Time for lunch, or whatever the birds call it. Launch, maybe. Hasta la pasta.

 

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