Sunday, July 3, 2011
Mother Nature's Sons
For the last few years I’ve been seeing woodsmen on my city’s streets. They wear long beards and long hair, or long beards and no hair. They favor beat-up leather boots and wool beanies and jobs involving wood. At Best Made Co., a downtown boutique, they purchase hand-painted axes and canvas portage packs. At French atelier APC, they try on pieces by Carhartt, a manufacturer of blue-collar outdoor wear, that have been recut for slimmer legs and thicker wallets. Until recently, they were able to hone their bow-hunting skills in the basement archery range of clothier/barbershop Freeman’s Sporting Club.These urban dwellers seem to be getting ready for a long camping trip that never takes place; their flannel grows tatty and their boots scuffed, but they are never stained with real dirt.Actual lumberjacks, of course, no longer wear flannel. They wear polyester fleeces and CAT boots and wraparound sunglasses and XXL T-shirts. Professional explorers (mountaineers, polar researchers) now wear outfits—often puffy down or synthetic loft in a breathable waterproof shell—that resemble spacesuits. Turn on the Discovery Channel or NatGeo, and you’ll see both types of outdoorsman within two hours: the blue-collar workers emptying our forests of trees, our oceans of crabs, and our rivers of gold; and the explorers, Gore-Tex clad, embarking on extravagant, high-risk vacations. But in order to find Brooklyn’s noveaux voyeageurs, you’ll need to flip over to FashionTV, because they do not exist in the wild.
In any era since the invention of polyester fleece, flannel is a patently absurd choice for outdoor work: when woven from wool it is too heavy; when woven from cotton it fails to retain heat once wet. But the fashion industry, in its ongoing campaign to dust off bygone archetypes of masculinity, has revived the fabric. Along with waxed canvas and leather, flannel plays an important role in repackaging the sex appeal of the vintage outdoorsman while sidestepping both the flimsy artificiality of petroleum-spun fabrics and also the earnestness of organic cloth, which carries with it a whiff of environmentalism—a supposedly emasculating ethos that prudishly promotes the suppression of desire.
Basic physics dictate that, in order to become more sustainable, technology must become ever lighter, quieter, and less hungry. Is it merely a coincidence that these engineering constraints also mirror our favored model of femininity? In a recent study, pollsters found that 82 percent of respondents felt that going green is “more feminine than masculine.” The risk of feminine contamination, the researchers concluded, “holds men back from visible green behavior like using reusable grocery bags or carrying around reusable water bottles.” Add to that the reproachful tone that environmentalists often resort to in their attempts to spread the gospel of Deep Ecology—which stresses the rights of the ecosystem over those of man—and you glimpse how environmentalists came to be miscast as sanctimonious nags.
To expiate their green guilt, tough guys go to extreme lengths: they live in unheated houses, fuel their trucks with rancid cooking oil, subsist on other people’s trash. The tension emerges most clearly with regards to food. Many progressives would like to eat local and organic but don’t want to be seen as either pampering or depriving themselves (or both pampering and depriving themselves, like the diners in Portlandia who must personally visit a chicken on its farm before they can feel sure of its free-range pedigree). In an attempt to live more naturally, a few dozen men in New York City, along with one woman, have reportedly committed themselves to a so-called caveman diet. The diet’s strictures allow them to eat only meat and vegetables—no grains, sugar, dairy, or oil—and requires days of fasting between meals. “I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” one of the dieters told the New York Times.
Like many Americans, the cave people seem distrustful, even contemptuous, of vegan asceticism. Abstaining from animal byproducts is considered difficult, but not tough: your kid sister might gladly survive on barbecued seitan and cartons of Rice Dream. Even as progressive men renounce the traditional notion of subordinated femininity, many still harbor conflicted notions about manhood. They want to feel individually reckless, but not socially irresponsible. They want to minimize carbon emissions, but not to scold, scrimp, or carry tote bags. They want to be pure of deed but wild at heart. So they dig ever deeper into the past, searching for a way of life that existed before “real” men and their ecological consciences parted ways.
Relieve Itchy Mosquito and Wasp Bites with Vick’s Vapo Rub
[ed. This is not an endorsement - I've never tried Vicks for this purpose, but it might be worth investigating.]
It's finally Summer but that brings one of the year's most annoying problems: bug bites. If you do fall victim to a bee sting or mosquito bite, you can easily relieve the itching and redness with the help of Vick's Vapo Rub.
This tip comes from The People's Pharmacy:
For more years than I can remember, I've had an allergy to mosquito bites. Now I don't suffer long. With a touch of Vicks the itching and redness are gone.It seems to work for the same reasons as toothpaste, since both use menthol and menthol is a local anesthetic, but a Vick's has the distinct advantage of being made for skin application and won't show as a white splotch while you're enjoying the upcoming fourth of July weekend.
Graedon's Guide to Unique Uses for Vicks (PDF)
Gearing Up for a Fireworks Extravaganza
When the sun goes down on July 4, Americans in more than a hundred cities will see the latest combustible pageantry from Fireworks by Grucci. The 160-year-old pyrotechnics firm has produced eye-popping explosions for everything from The Bachelor (a Las Vegas extravaganza in season 15) to the opening of Dubai's Palm Jumeirah artificial islands (the largest fireworks show in history). But for all the computers and wireless launching systems on hand at events, many of Grucci's most important tools are in its facility on the grounds of an Army ammunition plant in Radford, Virginia. Safety is paramount to executive VP Phil Grucci, who lost his father and a cousin in an explosion in 1983. We asked him to tell us about his tools.
Fireworks and Production Instruments
Safe-T-Ohm Shoe Tester
Conductive footwear and antistatic coveralls are de rigueur at Grucci, where a static shock can have terrible consequences. This meter sends a current through the foot to make sure workers aren't building up a charge. $920
Patterson-Kelley V Blender
Fireworks usually contain an oxidizer and a coloring agent (copper burns blue, for example). These ingredients are mixed in this giant V blender. It can also be used to coat rice hulls with black powder to create a bursting charge. $35,000
Baseball in the Last Frontier
On a summer afternoon in Anchorage, tourists who stumble across Mulcahy Stadium -- a decades-old structure with the picturesque Chugach Mountains to the east, an orange-and-green artificial turf infield that creeps onto the browning grass of the outfield behind second base, and rickety stands that could seat a few thousand but are more likely to hold a number of fans closer to a few dozen -- have at least one of the following reactions: There's baseball in Alaska? Of course. Are these guys professional, or what? Eventually. How much does the beer cost? Not much.
Yes, there's baseball in Alaska
The baseball history of the (very) far north reaches back to at least March of 1894, according to Albert Spalding's "America's National Game." The founder of the sporting goods manufacturing firm that bears his name, Spalding describes a story from Gen. Frederick Funston. Funston was part of a few baseball games between military officers and Native Alaskan guides that had led the group of American soldiers on a 20-day snowshoeing trip to the Yukon's Herschel Island while they waited for ice drifts to clear so they could return home. The participants wore comically thick fur coats and crafted balls and bats out of anything they could find, and the game was played on an ice sheet.
That's the first record of America's pastime reaching the Arctic, at least the first that Lew Freedman was able to track down for his excellent book about Alaska baseball, "Diamonds in the Rough."*
One of the early baseball names to help the cause for a more organized incarnation of baseball in Alaska is the all-time great Satchel Paige, who spent most of his career barnstorming around the United States and pitching around the world in various Negro leagues. Satch participated in an exhibition series against local Alaskans in 1965. By the time Paige arrived at Anchorage International Airport, he was already 59 years old, but he looked many years younger and was enough of a generational icon that he caused a significant local stir over the course of four games.
Those are some of the early, informal bouts with baseball, but thanks to H.A. "Red" Boucher and others, there eventually came into being a full-fledged Alaska Baseball League, which locals and tourists can watch in stadiums like Mulcahy around the state during the summer months. The old stadiums and the laid-back attitude of everyone around the game might distort the fact that the league has grown into one of the elite programs for college baseball players that hope are working on mechanics and staying in shape during the summer, enough so that it is often mentioned in the same breath as the storied Cape Cod League.
What makes the Alaska summer league special is something of a recurring storyline that crops up every year: players with raw talent and endless potential that grow into themselves during a summer in Alaska. That's a well-documented phenomena, but few of those players stand out more than a lanky pitcher from the University of Southern California that played for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots in 1982.
That kid, who intended to work on his pitching form for a few months, was tossed into a position at first base for opening day because of an injury-depleted lineup. It turned out that he did a better job hitting and fielding than he ever would have imagined: he hit .404 with 10 home runs and 44 RBIs that summer in Alaska. It comes as a surprise to many that that kid from SoCal was Mark McGwire.
Joining McGwire is a laundry list of hall-of-fame caliber players that have spent a summer or two in Alaska: Barry Bonds, Tom Seaver, Dave Winfield, Randy Johnson and Jason Giambi, to name a few. Obviously, not everyone that plays in the summer league goes on to that level of success, but it's a safe bet that you'll see a few future major leaguers if you watch a couple of games.
Yes, there's baseball in Alaska The baseball history of the (very) far north reaches back to at least March of 1894, according to Albert Spalding's "America's National Game." The founder of the sporting goods manufacturing firm that bears his name, Spalding describes a story from Gen. Frederick Funston. Funston was part of a few baseball games between military officers and Native Alaskan guides that had led the group of American soldiers on a 20-day snowshoeing trip to the Yukon's Herschel Island while they waited for ice drifts to clear so they could return home. The participants wore comically thick fur coats and crafted balls and bats out of anything they could find, and the game was played on an ice sheet.
That's the first record of America's pastime reaching the Arctic, at least the first that Lew Freedman was able to track down for his excellent book about Alaska baseball, "Diamonds in the Rough."*
One of the early baseball names to help the cause for a more organized incarnation of baseball in Alaska is the all-time great Satchel Paige, who spent most of his career barnstorming around the United States and pitching around the world in various Negro leagues. Satch participated in an exhibition series against local Alaskans in 1965. By the time Paige arrived at Anchorage International Airport, he was already 59 years old, but he looked many years younger and was enough of a generational icon that he caused a significant local stir over the course of four games.
Those are some of the early, informal bouts with baseball, but thanks to H.A. "Red" Boucher and others, there eventually came into being a full-fledged Alaska Baseball League, which locals and tourists can watch in stadiums like Mulcahy around the state during the summer months. The old stadiums and the laid-back attitude of everyone around the game might distort the fact that the league has grown into one of the elite programs for college baseball players that hope are working on mechanics and staying in shape during the summer, enough so that it is often mentioned in the same breath as the storied Cape Cod League.
What makes the Alaska summer league special is something of a recurring storyline that crops up every year: players with raw talent and endless potential that grow into themselves during a summer in Alaska. That's a well-documented phenomena, but few of those players stand out more than a lanky pitcher from the University of Southern California that played for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots in 1982.
That kid, who intended to work on his pitching form for a few months, was tossed into a position at first base for opening day because of an injury-depleted lineup. It turned out that he did a better job hitting and fielding than he ever would have imagined: he hit .404 with 10 home runs and 44 RBIs that summer in Alaska. It comes as a surprise to many that that kid from SoCal was Mark McGwire.
Joining McGwire is a laundry list of hall-of-fame caliber players that have spent a summer or two in Alaska: Barry Bonds, Tom Seaver, Dave Winfield, Randy Johnson and Jason Giambi, to name a few. Obviously, not everyone that plays in the summer league goes on to that level of success, but it's a safe bet that you'll see a few future major leaguers if you watch a couple of games.
What's Eating You?
Bugs have always been in our houses and on our persons.Truly, the arthropods shall inherit the earth. Or they would if they weren’t already running the show: Insects outnumber us 200 million to 1. Ants alone may account for as much as one-third of all animal biomass on earth, according to an estimate by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. But in the summer of 2010 bedbugs seemed to be on our minds more than usual.
New York, and therefore a large portion of American news consumers, were terrorized by bedbugs. But so what? There’s a story like that almost every summer, because reporters have less news to cover yet just as many pages and broadcast hours to fill.
So bedbugs are no big deal and you should sleep easy, America. Bedbugs are not as bad as you’ve heard. Right?
Actually, they are much worse than you have heard, says Gail Getty, a leading bedbug expert and entomologist at the University of California–Berkeley’s Urban Pest Management Center. “I don’t think people should necessarily panic at this point, but everything we know in the scientific community suggests this is going to get worse,” Getty says.
Bedbugs were a common household pest in America up through the 1930s, but after the massive DDT fumigation campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, only small pockets of the insects remained. Their resurgence in the past decade probably has a number of causes, Getty says. The bedbugs that survived fumigations grew increasingly resistant to existing pesticides. Insect control became more targeted toward specific pests, meaning that if you call an exterminator for cockroaches, he’s just going to kill your cockroaches. Finally, bedbugs were never comparably reduced in the rest of the world, and international travel has become more common.
If these trends aren’t creepy enough, consider how bedbugs’ disturbing sex lives—which make even rape-happy otters seem like models of enlightened gender relations—influence their migration patterns.
Field of Plundered Dreams
The city of Los Angeles is emphatically out of love. In fact it is aghast – appalled, disgusted – with one of its most revered institutions, the Dodgers baseball team.
The problem is not with the team's performance. True, the Dodgers are having a stinker of a season, but the city sees only extenuating circumstances as the cause. The real problem is with their out-of-town owner, an erstwhile car park magnate from Boston called Frank McCourt, who has managed in a few short years to run the team's finances into the ground while constructing a life of unabashed luxury for himself and his fractious family.It is not a sporting scandal so much as a financial one. Multimillion-dollar homes have been bought, refurbished and discarded, the proceeds of the deal which allowed McCourt to purchase the Dodgers; family members have been added to the payroll whether or not they work at the stadium; money and debt have been shuffled around a series of shell companies and subsidiaries, while the team – the beefy sportsmen whose job it is to thwack baseballs into the stands so that the fans keep buying tickets and beers and hot dogs – have been left almost entirely in the lurch.
Many of the story's more extraordinary details have spilled out since Frank and his wife Jamie, who served as the team's chief executive, filed for divorce a year-and-a-half ago and began to savage each other like bloodhounds in open court. Both appear to have regarded the Dodgers as the source of wildly extravagent spending. One senior team executive characterised Jamie's attitude in court as "Why have a family business, but to support the family lifestyle?"
If that sounds like a plotline from Arrested Development, the quirky TV comedy about a family of dysfunctional property developers from the LA suburbs, it is only one way in which reality is proving as strange as fiction.
Among the people found to have been on the Dodgers' payroll is a Russian-born psychic whose sole job was to watch games on his television in the Boston suburbs and send out positive vibes so that they would win more often. In years when the Dodgers made the end-of-season playoffs – which they did in 2008 and 2009 – he was promised a six-figure payoff.
Planet in a Bottle
At 8:15 am on 26 September 1991, eight “bionauts,” as they called themselves, wearing identical red Star Trek–like jumpsuits (made for them by Marilyn Monroe’s former dressmaker) waved to the assembled crowd and climbed through an airlock door in the Arizona desert. They shut it behind them and opened another that led into a series of hermetically sealed greenhouses in which they would live for the next two years. The three-acre complex of interconnected glass Mesoamerican pyramids, geodesic domes, and vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland, a farm, and a salt-water ocean with a wave machine and gravelly beach. This was Biosphere 2—the first biosphere being Earth—a $150 million experiment designed to see if, in a climate of nuclear and ecological fear, the colonization of space might be possible. The project was described in the press as a “planet in a bottle,” “Eden revisited,” and “Greenhouse Ark.” Before entering, the Biosphere’s pioneer inhabitants had enjoyed a final, hearty breakfast consisting of ham, eggs, and buttered bread, but from here on, they would be self-sufficient—everything they ate would be grown, processed, and prepared in their airtight bubble. A few years before designing the Biosphere, architect Phil Hawes had proposed a space city 110 feet in diameter, a flying doughnut that would spin to create its own gravity and in which miniature animals could be kept and plants cultivated, along with a store of cryogenically frozen seed for the propagation of twenty thousand other species. The space frame of the Biosphere, a terrestrial version of such a sci-fi fantasy, had been built by an engineer who had worked with Buckminster Fuller, author of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which compared the planet to a spaceship flying through the universe with finite resources that could never be resupplied. The Biosphere was intended as a similar symbol of our ecological plight.
The project caught the national imagination. Discover, the popular science magazine, declared the mission “the most exciting venture to be undertaken in the US since President Kennedy launched us towards the moon.” Tourists came by the busload to peer through the glass at the bionauts, trapped in their vivarium like laboratory rats (the project was an acknowledged precursor to the Big Brother reality-TV show). Over the first six months, 159,000 people visited, including William S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary.
Life inside the glass city was colored by its inventors’ countercultural idealism. They had all met on the Synergia Ranch, a commune they founded near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the late 1960s and ran according to Wilhelm Reich’s idea of “work democracy”; they practiced improvisational theatre and made a fortune building developments of adobe condos, which helped pay for the Biosphere (the commune is described in Laurence Veysey’s 1971 ethnography, The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth-Century America). The Biosphere’s half-acre arable plot had been cultivated for three months in preparation for the crew’s arrival to what was supposed to be a high-tech Eden. However, the members of the chosen team lacked experience as farmers and, despite reading how-to manuals with titles such as How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine, yields were disappointing and they began to starve.
The bionauts had to perform hard physical labor to produce their food, but there was only enough for them to consume a measly 1750 calories a day, and they found it difficult to sustain such active lives. On a diet of beans, porridge, beets, carrots, and sweet potatoes, their weight plummeted and their skin began to go orange as a result of the excess beta-carotene in their diet. “It was very stressful, especially with a crew like that,” recalled Sally Silverstone, the Agriculture and Food Systems Manager, “essentially white middle-class, upper-middle-class Western individuals who had never been short of food in their whole life—it was a tremendous shock.”
Silverstone would weigh out the day’s allotment of fresh food for whoever’s turn it was to cook, entering into a computer database the amount of nutrients to check that the crew was keeping above the recommended intake levels of calories, proteins, and fats. At first the meals were served buffet style but, as the crew got hungrier, the cooks scrupulously divided their offerings into equal portions. Leaving every meal still hungry, all the bionauts could think about was food, and their memoirs of the two-year project are full of references to their recurring dreams of McDonald’s hamburgers, lobster, sushi, Snickers-bar cheesecake, lox and bagels, croissants, and whiskey. They bartered most of their possessions, but food was too precious to trade. They became sluggish and irritable through lack of it, and were driven by hunger to acts of sabotage. Bananas were stolen from the basement storeroom; the freezer had to be locked.
The medic who presided over the team’s health was Dr. Roy Walford, a professor of pathology at UCLA Medical School who had served in the Korean War and, at sixty-nine, was the oldest member of the crew. He was a gerontologist and specialist in life extension who, in studies with mice, thought that he’d successfully shown that one could live longer by eating less; his skinny mice outlived his fat ones by as much as forty percent. In his books Maximum Life Span (1983) and The 120-Year Diet (1986), Walford promised that “calorie restriction with optimal nutrition, which I call the ‘CRON-diet,’ will retard your rate of aging, extend lifespan (up to perhaps 150 to 160 years, depending on when you start and how thoroughly you hold to it), and markedly decrease susceptibility to most major diseases.”
The disappointing crop yields in the Biosphere allowed Walford to experiment with his “healthy starvation diet” on humans in unprecedented laboratory conditions. While his subjects pleaded with mission control for more supplies, Walford—who had been on the CRON-diet for years—maintained that their daily calorie intake was sufficient. “I think if there had been any other nutritionist or physician, they would have freaked out and said, ‘We’re starving,’” Walford said, “but I knew we were actually on a program of health enhancement.” Every two weeks he would give them all a full medical checkup. He discovered that their blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol counts did indeed drop to healthier levels—which he presumed would retard aging and extend maximal lifespan as it seemed to in mice—though an unanticipated side effect of this was that their blood was awash with the toxins that had been stored in their rapidly dissolving body fat.
Whither The Astronauts Without A Shuttle?
On July 8, the final space shuttle will take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. With it comes the end of a 40-year program that's put more humans in space than any other.
NASA is retiring its fleet of shuttle spacecraft to build something that can take humans past the moon and into deep space. That's expected to take years, leaving astronauts with some hard choices about what to do in the meantime.
Brave, daring and working for the greater good, astronauts rank up there with firemen and the president for jobs that inspire kids and spawn scores of movie scripts. Most of us don't make it past the credits before we've abandoned our own dreams of space travel. Most of us, but not all. Not astronaut Jose Hernandez.
'You Taste It Once, And You Want To Go Back'
"I remember we used to have an old black-and-white console TV, and we would watch the moon walk," Hernandez says. "I would sit there and I would go outside, look at the moon, come back in, watch Gene Cernan walking on the moon, go back out — and I was just amazed that we had humans up on the moon a quarter-million miles away."
Hernandez grew up in a family of migrant workers from Mexico, picking everything from strawberries to lettuce. But ever since he saw those Apollo missions as a kid, he wanted to be an astronaut, and he spent most of his adult life earning engineering degrees, learning Russian, whatever he could to get on NASA's radar.
NASA is retiring its fleet of shuttle spacecraft to build something that can take humans past the moon and into deep space. That's expected to take years, leaving astronauts with some hard choices about what to do in the meantime. Brave, daring and working for the greater good, astronauts rank up there with firemen and the president for jobs that inspire kids and spawn scores of movie scripts. Most of us don't make it past the credits before we've abandoned our own dreams of space travel. Most of us, but not all. Not astronaut Jose Hernandez.
'You Taste It Once, And You Want To Go Back'
"I remember we used to have an old black-and-white console TV, and we would watch the moon walk," Hernandez says. "I would sit there and I would go outside, look at the moon, come back in, watch Gene Cernan walking on the moon, go back out — and I was just amazed that we had humans up on the moon a quarter-million miles away."
Hernandez grew up in a family of migrant workers from Mexico, picking everything from strawberries to lettuce. But ever since he saw those Apollo missions as a kid, he wanted to be an astronaut, and he spent most of his adult life earning engineering degrees, learning Russian, whatever he could to get on NASA's radar.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Tom Waits
[ed. Orignal lyrics, though Tom doesn't adhere to them too closely in this video.]
liar liar with your pants on fire, white spades hangin' on the telephone
wire, gamblers reevaluate along the dotted line, you'll never recognize
yourself on heartattack and vine.
doctor lawyer beggar man thief, philly joe remarkable looks on in disbelief,
if you want a taste of madness, you'll have to wait in line, you'll probably
see someone you know on heartattack and vine.
boney's high on china white, shorty found a punk, don't you know there ain't
no devil, there's just god when he's drunk, well this stuff will probably kill
you, let's do another line, what you say you meet me down on heartattack and
vine.
see that little jersey girl in the see-through top, with the peddle pushers
sucking on a soda pop, well i bet she's still a virgin but it's only twenty-
five 'til nine, you can see a million of 'em on heartattack and vine.
better off in iowa against your scrambled eggs, than crawling down cahuenga
on a broken pair of legs, you'll find your ignorance is blissful every goddamn
time, your're waitin' for the rtd on heartattack and vine.
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