High Fidelity
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Swamps Élysées: The Queen of Gator

Christy Plott Redd says she likes to take the fancy out of fashion, but on a recent afternoon in Manhattan—her auburn hair falling in carefully curled waves beneath a mink hat, her eyelashes pressed into thick half-moons over shadowed lids, her teeth flashing white in an outline of Smashbox fuchsia lipstick—the fancy was very much on display. She wheeled behind her a suitcase the size of a small car. Inside were dozens of alligator skins, samples she was toting around to sell to big-name fashion designers—Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta—for their next collections.

Redd is 36 and the creative director, head of global sales, and co-owner of American Tanning and Leather, a family tannery based in Griffin, Georgia, 40 miles south of Atlanta. But she introduces herself by a far more flamboyant title: the Queen of Gator. It’s her handle on Twitter and Instagram. “La Reina” is engraved on her silver ID bracelet; “Queen of Alligator” is embroidered inside her mink coat. The tongue of her right pink-and-green Nike running shoe says “Gator”; the left says “Queen.” A pink-trimmed calling card is letterpressed with her title and a crown (she’ll tell you it’s her personal card, not her business card, and gleefully dole out one of each).

The title is self-appointed. Several years ago, Redd heard about an alligator buyer from Italy working in Florida and calling himself the King. This was annoying. For one thing, there are no alligators in Italy. Live ones, anyway. More importantly, royalty is demonstrated by blood line, and nobody in the world can lay claim to one more established than Redd’s, whose great-grand­father founded the family business almost a century ago in Blairsville, whose grandfather served time in prison for illegally selling alligator skins in the 1970s, and whose father did too, for that matter. American Tanning is the oldest and largest alligator tannery in the country—and one of the only major ones in the world. Alligator mississippiensis, the American alligator, has been establishing its foothold in what is now the southern United States—its sole habitat—for 180 million years. The Plotts’ regional lineage may stretch back a mere 200 or so, but in any case, what family’s fortune has been entwined with the alligator’s for longer than theirs? Certainly no Italian arriviste’s.

In New York, Redd had scheduled back-to-back appointments: One hour, she had a meeting at a flashy Madison Avenue headquarters; the next, she was in a streamlined downtown studio with a young designer. Redd has been making calls like this (in New York, Milan, Paris) for nearly 15 years, and it’s not uncommon to find her in settings that couldn’t be farther—geographically, culturally, metaphysically—from the rotting reeds of the swamps where her raw material is captured. But she refuses to be intimidated, a gator out of water.

“I don’t like mean girls,” Redd explained. “People say I am down to earth. I’m from Griffin, Georgia, and I treat these people the same I would anyone else.” In other words, she’s got fishermen and farmers on speed dial, but she’s wearing diamonds—preferably her long marquise-shaped earrings by designer and customer Opal Stone, wife of actor Ron Perlman.

On this day, the prospective buyers were coming to Redd’s hotel room, where dozens of hides—in a shape evoking their previous owners, legs and tail dangling—were spread across the desk and slung over the backs of chairs. Redd used one hide to tie back the drapes to let in more sun. The general scaliness, compounded by colors not found in nature, could prompt a shudder in the uninitiated.

One potential customer was an Upper East Side handbag maker who had never bought alligator before. She had an idea: a clutch that would take advantage of the button-sized hole at the top of the tail of every hide, as a way to toggle it shut. Redd didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, that’s the butthole,” she said. “It would be a little butthole clutch.” Then she gently suggested a magnet closure instead. (...)

Christy Plott was born in 1979, the same year that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, encouraged by a rebound in the alligator population, agreed to resume the legal trade of alligator on a strictly regulated basis. The idea was that alligators were such a valuable commodity, landowners would be more inclined to protect the animals’ habitat. Commerce could benefit conservation.

That year, at an auction in Florida, Chris Plott scooped up the first legal alligator skins available in more than a decade. But because the alligator trade had been closed, there wasn’t anyone around to tan them. With 5,000 skins in hand, he decided to build his own tannery. In 1980, American Tanning and Leather was born. Q.C. died of cancer that same year, at 56, leaving Chris to handle business on his own. American Tanning’s first hides were displayed at a show in St. Louis, but they weren’t up to par. Chris went to Europe and brought back a French tanner to advise him. Every year, he said, he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on alligator, subsidized by his fur business.

When the Fish and Wildlife Service declared the alligator population fully recovered in 1987, things got easier for him, and in the early 1990s, Chris started to make a profit on alligators. Lucky for him, because around the same time, fur was on its way out—thanks in no small part to high-profile, celebrity-spiked animal rights protests, like PETA’s 1994 ad campaign featuring five supermodels claiming they’d “rather go naked than wear fur.” Before long, the wild fur business was nearly defunct, and the Plotts went all in with alligator. (...)

The 30,000 skins the factory processes each year arrive in salted, rolled, refrigerated bundles, courtesy of year-round harvests from alligator farms; periodic catches by nuisance trappers; and, in late summer, hunters and fishermen. About half of AmTan’s skins come from farms, the other half from wild harvest. By far, the most wild gators come from Louisiana, where the Plotts bought a processing center in 2008. During hunting season, the Plotts stake out along the Atchafalaya Basin in St. Martinville, the birthplace of Cajun culture, to purchase whole alligators, typically from commercial fishermen who buy from the docks. At their facility, the meat is separated for sale to seafood dealers; the skins are salt-cured and shipped to Griffin. There, the skins are converted to leather in a series of steps that includes preserving, stretching, drying, chrome dyeing, and polishing. Midway through the process, the skins are said to be “in crust.” The Plotts stock crust year-round, awaiting orders for specific hues and finishes, after which they emerge in a Skittles spectrum of colors, with names like Tahiti, viola, suntan, and pretty-in-pink. Like diamonds, they are graded for quality on a five-point scale—one being the highest tier and accounting for, usually, just 10 percent of the wild skins. Redd’s older brother Damon and his team first grade the skins in raw, then Christy grades them in both crust and in their finished state, looking for any scar or scratch that could render them less valuable. In this relationship-based business, the tanner determines the grade, and if a customer isn’t happy, they ship them back. The risk is that they could switch to a competitor, so the tanner aims to please.

In January, with last season’s skins in crust but many not yet sold, shelves in the crust room were stacked high with the grayish leather, and yellow shopping carts spilled over with sorted bundles. Redd said they represented about $5 million worth.

She put her red manicured fingertips together as if preparing for a dive and said, laughing, “I’m like Scrooge McDuck diving into his money pit—only mine’s filled with alligator skins.” She drew the last word out into two syllables.

by Mary Logan Bikoff, Atlanta Magazine | Read more:
Images: Alex Martinez and Zach Wolfe

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

When he ran for the White House, Texas governor George W. Bush took a similarly soft approach, though one that came from the right. A born-again Christian, he shared Bill Clinton’s ability to discuss his faith openly. When Republican primary candidates were asked to name their favorite philosopher in a 1999 debate, for instance, Bush immediately named Christ, “because He changed my heart.” Despite the centrality of faith in his own life, Bush assured voters that he would not implement the rigid agenda of the religious right. Borrowing a phrase from author Marvin Olasky, Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative” and said he would take a lighter approach to social issues including abortion and gay rights than culture warriors such as Pat Buchanan. But many on the right took issue with the phrase. For some, the “compassionate” qualifier implicitly condemned mainstream conservatism as heartless; for others, the phrase seemed an empty marketing gimmick. (As Republican speechwriter David Frum put it, “Love conservatism but hate arguing about abortion? Try our new compassionate conservatism—great ideological taste, now with less controversy.”) But the candidate backed his words with deeds, distancing himself from the ideologues in his party. In a single week in October 1999, for instance, Bush criticized House Republicans for “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor” and lamented that all too often “my party has painted an image of America slouching toward Gomorrah.”

In concrete terms, Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” constituted a promise to empower private religious and community organizations and thereby expand their role in the provision of social services. This “faith­ based initiative” became the centerpiece of his campaign. In his address to the 2000 Republican National Convention, Bush heralded the work of Christian charities and called upon the nation to do what it could to sup­port them. After his inauguration, Bush moved swiftly to make the pro­posal a reality. Indeed, the longest section of his 2001 inaugural address was an expansive reflection on the idea. “America, at its best, is compassionate,” he observed. “Church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws.” Bush promoted the initiative at his first Na­tional Prayer Breakfast as well. But it was ill-fated. Hamstrung by a lack of clear direction during the administration’s first months, it was quickly overshadowed by a new emphasis on national security after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Bush continued to advance his vision of a godly nation. Soon after 9/11, he made a special trip to the Islamic Center of Washington, the very same mosque that had opened its doors to celebrate the Eisenhower inauguration a half century earlier. No sitting president had ever visited an Islamic house of worship, but Bush made clear by his words and deeds there that he considered Muslims part of the nation’s diverse religious community. He denounced recent acts of violence against Muslims and Arab Americans in no uncertain terms. “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America,” he said; “they represent the worst of humankind and they should be ashamed.” Referring to Islam as a “religion of peace” and citing the Koran, he closed his address with the same words of inclusion he would have used before any audience, religious or otherwise: “God bless us all.” The president was not alone in enlisting religious patriotism to demonstrate national unity after the attacks. On September 12, 2001, congressional representatives from both parties joined together on the Capitol steps to sing “God Bless America.”Meanwhile, several states that did not already require recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance in their schools introduced bills to do just that.

But the efforts to use the pledge as a source of unity were soon thrown into disarray. In June 2002, a federal court ruled that the phrase “one na­tion under God” violated the First Amendment prohibition against the establishment of a state religion. The case Newdow v. Elk Grove Unified School District had been filed in 2000 by Michael Newdow, an emergency room doctor who complained that his daughter’s rights were infringed because she was forced to “watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that ours is ‘one nation under God.” In a 2-to-1 decision, the court agreed. It held that the phrase was just as objectionable as a statement that “we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.” The reaction from political leaders was as swift as it was predictable. The Senate suspended debate on a pending military spending bill to draft a resolution condemning the ruling, while dozens of House members took to the Capitol steps to recite the pledge and sing “God Bless America” one more time. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced that the president thought the decision was “ridiculous”; Democratic senator Tom Daschle called it “nuts.” The reaction was so pronounced, in fact, that the appeals court delayed implementation of its ruling until an appeal could be heard.

As the case made its way through the courts, the nation had to reckon anew with the meaning of “one nation under God.” According to Newdow, an atheist, the language of the amended pledge clearly took “one side in the quintessential religious question ‘Does God exist?’” The Bush administration, defending the pledge, asserted that reciting it was no more a religious act than using a coin with “In God We Trust” inscribed on it; both merely acknowledged the nation’s heritage. A separate brief filed by conservative religious organizations, however, argued that the pledge was “both theological and political.” Reviving claims of the Christian libertarians, it asserted that the words “under God” were added to underscore the concept of limited government. They were meant as a reminder that “government is not the highest authority in human affairs” because, as the Declaration of Independence claimed, “inalienable rights come from God.” In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Newdow technically lacked standing to bring the suit and thus dismissed the lower court’s ruling, dodging the issue for the time being.

Having survived that challenge in the courts, the concept of “one nation under God” thrived on the campaign trail. Seeking to rally religious voters for the 2004 election, Republican strategist Karl Rove advocated a “play-to-the-base” plan to exploit the concerns of the religious right for electoral gain.The president passed two major pieces of pro-life legisla­tion and then joined the campaign for a Federal Marriage Amendment to ban homosexual unions. Many on the right saw the coming campaign as the kind of”religious war” that Pat Buchanan heralded a decade before. The Bush campaign worked to capitalize on “the God gap” in the elector­ate, mobilizing religious conservatives in record numbers. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, one backer erected a billboard that summed up the unofficial strategy of the Republicans: “Bush Cheney ’04-0ne Nation Under God.” The Democrats, meanwhile, gave the politics of religion compara­tively little attention. John Kerry’s presidential campaign relegated much of its national religious outreach to a twenty-eight-year-old newcomer who had virtually no institutional support, not even an old database of contacts. “The matchup between the two parties in pursuit of religious voters wasn’t just David versus Goliath,” the journalist Amy Sullivan wrote.”It was David versus Goliath and the Philistines and the Assyrians and the Egyptians, with a few plagues thrown in for good measure.”

by Kevin M. Kruse, Salon |  Read more:

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Yoshio Okada, Surfer Girl, 1974
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Jean-Michel Basquiat
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Chet Faker

What a Horrible Mother

In the moments before the police and county prosecutors and child protective services took over her life, Monique was thinking about dinner. Specifically, she wanted a baked chicken. She had just left a birthday party and was driving home with her two daughters. By the time she pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store near their house, her younger daughter, then 4 years old, was taking a much needed nap.

Monique hesitated. She didn’t want to wake her daughter to bring her into the store, where she was liable to be as cranky and difficult as anyone else who’d been prematurely awakened. On the other hand, Monique was hungry.

“I’ll watch her,” said her older daughter. She was 8. She had an iPad she could text her mother from. It was January in Maryland. Mild, 45 degrees.

A few minutes later, standing in the checkout line of the grocery store, Monique heard her name being paged, asking her to return to her car. When she got there she found three police officers surrounding it, asking if she was the mother of the children in the vehicle, shouting at her, “Do you know how dangerous this is?” The two male officers went about the lengthy business of finding an appropriate charge, while the female officer continued to berate Monique, who stood, stunned, next to the car, while her daughters cried.

An hour later they were still there, waiting to be released, when one of the officers asked where Monique’s husband was. She told him they were separated.

“Well,” he said, “you need to have him come pick up the kids so we can arrest you.”

For Dawn, a young mother in New England, it was the same: a moment of convenience followed by one of shock. She had just picked up her daughter from daycare when she remembered she was out of toilet paper. Her daughter, worn out after the day, was strapped into her car seat and busily enjoying what was her first ever Happy Meal to boot. Dawn pulled up in front of a Rite Aid, locked the doors, and sprinted inside. By the time she returned to the vehicle, three minutes later, a woman was standing by the window, beside Dawn’s daughter, who was still waiting comfortably.

“You’re disgusting,” the stranger said. “What a horrible mother. I’ve called the police on you. I have your license plate number. I’m waiting here to make sure they arrest you.”

For Courtney, the decision to stop wasn’t spontaneous; for days she’d been meaning to get a gate to put in front of her fireplace, to keep away her 3-year-old daughter who’d been growing increasingly curious about it. She was driving home to New York after a weekend visiting her mother-in-law and knew she would be passing a store where she could get just that. Five minutes before she reached the place, her daughter fell asleep.

“She had a little cold,” Courtney told me. “I just wanted to let her rest. It was 70 degrees, but I knew I’d only be a couple minutes.” She opened the windows and parked in the shade.

She spent no more than 10 minutes in the store. She was on the way back to her car when she noticed something odd. A woman, a stranger, standing near the hood of her car, a store employee on either side of her, all of them staring and watching Courtney as she approached. She experienced a moment of dread. Had something happened to her daughter … but no, her daughter was fine. She was in the car seat, stirring a little, but fine. Courtney opened the back door, adjusted her little girl’s blanket. There was a shopping cart near her car and she pushed it a few feet into the stall. She unlocked the door, got in, checked her text messages. And all the while, the woman and employees stood watching her, saying nothing.

“It was so odd,” Courtney later said. “I kept feeling like they were going to say something to me, but they never did.”

That night, after she’d put her daughter to bed, she mentioned the incident to her husband. She asked him, “Is it not OK to let a kid wait in a car for a few minutes with the windows open while you run an errand?” He had no idea. It hardly seemed worth worrying about. Certainly no more worrisome than their daughter’s cold. A few days later, going down to the lobby of their building, Courtney’s husband was stopped by a New York police officer. The officer asked his name, if he was Courtney’s husband. He said yes. The officer said his wife needed to call the police about an incident in a parking lot.

Courtney was baffled but did as instructed. “I just thought I needed to explain it,” she told me. “I thought that it was all a misunderstanding.”

She and the officer spoke for about 30 minutes. The officer asked her to describe what had happened. She recounted to him the events of the afternoon, explained that she’d opened the windows, parked in the shade, explained that it had been raining and was overcast, that she’d only gone in to look for one item, had hurried back after just a few minutes. She could hear the officer typing as she spoke. He asked her to hold on a moment. Then he said, without emotion, “At this point, based on what you’ve told me, I’d say there’s a 90 percent chance you’re going to be arrested.”

The cases against all three women remain open (names and some identifying details have been changed). The details, as they have been described to me, are harrowing and strange. Strange enough that three years ago, I might not have believed them. Back then, I was aware that children died after being forgotten or becoming trapped in hot cars, but these were rare and tragic instances that seemed more a matter of horrible forgetfulness than anything criminal. The idea that strangers might be watching for any suggestion of what they deemed to be neglect, and prepared to involve the authorities and provide stern, hurtful commentary on top of it, seemed absurd, an over-the-top parody mashup of modern parenting techniques and the East German Stasi.

Then it happened to me. (...)

These cases fly in the face of logic and statistics on actual dangers: A child is far more likely to be killed or injured in a moving vehicle than in a stationary one; if a child is going to be abducted, far more often the culprit is a family member, not a stranger. Yet parents continue to be harassed and arrested for allowing children to play in a park unsupervised, walk alone to a friend’s house, or wait in a car for a few minutes. The boogeyman of “stranger danger” that my generation grew up haunted by and that continues to loom darkly over the parenting landscape – “Unsolved Mysteries” mutates into “To Catch a Predator” – was never much of a threat to begin with. A news cycle overrun with statistically unlikely horror stories is bad enough for an exhausted mother or father, frayed nerves and all. What makes this current situation worse is the climate of judgment that seems to have permeated the national consciousness. There is a moral vigilantism about parenting that, as with all forms of vigilantism, veers far into paranoia. (...)

Lately, I’ve become as interested in these people who call the police on women like myself as I am in the victims of this new type of harassment. And when I think about them, it’s not indignation I feel but sadness and regret at how little any of us know about each other’s lives. I see these good samaritans slowing down in a parking lot, resisting the anonymity of modern life, wanting to help but unsure of what to do, of how to reach out or engage. I see them grappling with this uncertainty for the briefest moment, then reaching for the phone. We’re raising our kids in a moment when it’s easier to call 911 than to have a conversation.

by Kim Brooks, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Melissa King via Shutterstock

The Big Reverse of the Web

[ed. See also: Notifications are the next platform.]

I believe that for the web to reach its full potential, it will go through a massive re-architecture and re-platforming in the next decade. The current web is "pull-based", meaning we visit websites or download mobile applications. The future of the web is "push-based", meaning the web will be coming to us. In the next 10 years, we will witness a transformation from a pull-based web to a push-based web. When this "Big Reverse" is complete, the web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply. We'll forget what 'www' stood for (which was kind of dumb to begin with). These are bold statements, I understand, but let me explain you why.

In the future, content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them. Puma will let us know to replace our shoes and Marriott will automatically present you room options if you missed your connecting flight. Instead of visiting a website, we will proactively be notified of what is relevant and asked to take action. The dominant function of the web is to let us know what is happening or what is relevant, rather than us having to find out.

Facebook and Flipboard are early examples of what such push-based experience looks like. Facebook "pushes" a stream of personalized information designed to tell you what is happening with your friends and family; you no longer have "pull" them and ask how they are doing. Flipboard changes how we consume content by aggregating the best of the web and filtering it based on our interests; it "pushes" the relevant and interesting content to you rather than you having to "pull" the news from multiple sources. Also consider the rise of notification-centric experiences; your smartphone's notification center provides you with a stream of relevant information that is pushed to you. More recently, these notifications have become interactive; you can check in for a flight without having to open your travel app. You can buy a product without having to visit their website.

What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get information. It saves them time and effort and in the long run, an improved user experience always wins. In most cases, "Show me what I want" is more useful than "Let me search around and see what I can find".

With some imagination, it's not too hard to picture how these kind of experiences could expand to other areas of the web. The way the e-commerce works today is really no different than having to visit a lot of separate physical stores or wading through hundreds of products in a department store. We shouldn't have to work so hard to find what we want. In a push-based world, we would sit back as if we were watching a fashion show -- the clothing presented could come for hundreds of different online brands but the stream is "personalized" to our needs, budget, sizes and style preferences. When the Big Reverse is complete, it will be the end of department stores and malls. Keep an eye on personalized clothing services like Trunk Club or Stitch Fix.

Ten years from now we're going to look back and recognize that search-based content discovery was broken. Today the burden is put on the user to find relevant content either via directly typing in a URL or by crafting complex search queries. While pull-based experiences might not go away; push-based experiences will dominate as they will prove to be much more efficient.

by Dries Buytaert |  Read more:

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Enya – Orinoco Flow (PrototypeRaptor’s Sailing Away Bootleg Remix)

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Jeb Bush Prepares to Give Traditional Campaigning a Makeover

[ed. Great. Now we get to experience the Supreme Court's Citizen United decision in its fullest and most logical expression. The strategy is called a Chinese Wall, and won't work. Or, maybe it will - at least long enough to install a new president in office, regardless of whatever transgressions are discovered after the fact. Florida 2000, anyone?]

The traditional presidential campaign may be getting a dramatic makeover in Jeb Bush's bid for the White House as he prepares to turn some of a campaign's central functions over to a separate political organization that can raise unlimited amounts of money.

The concept, in development for months as the former Florida governor has raised tens of millions of dollars for his Right to Rise super PAC, would endow that organization not just with advertising on Bush's behalf, but with many of the duties typically conducted by a campaign.

Should Bush move ahead as his team intends, it is possible that for the first time a super PAC created to support a single candidate would spend more than the candidate's campaign itself - at least through the primaries. Some of Bush's donors believe that to be more than likely.

Architects of the plan believe the super PAC's ability to raise unlimited amounts of money legally outweighs its primary disadvantage, that it cannot legally coordinate its actions with Bush or his would-be campaign staff.

"Nothing like this has been done before," said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes limits on campaign finance donations. "It will take a high level of discipline to do it."

The exact design of the strategy remains fluid as Bush approaches an announcement of his intention to run for the Republican nomination in 2016. But at its center is the idea of placing Right to Rise in charge of the brunt of the biggest expense of electing Bush: television advertising and direct mail.

Right to Rise could also break into new areas for a candidate-specific super PAC, such as data gathering, highly individualized online advertising and running phone banks. Also on the table, tasking the super PAC with crucial campaign endgame strategies: the operation to get out the vote and efforts to maximize absentee and early voting on Bush's behalf.

The campaign itself would still handle those things that require Bush's direct involvement, such as candidate travel. It would still pay for advertising, conduct polling and collect voter data. (...)

The strategy aims to take maximum advantage of the new world of campaign finance created by a pair of 2010 Supreme Court decisions and counts on the Federal Election Commission to remain a passive regulator with little willingness to confront those pushing the envelope of the law.

For Bush, the potential benefits are enormous. Campaigns can raise only $2,700 per donor for the primary and $2,700 for the general election. But super PACs are able to raise unlimited cash from individuals, corporations and groups such as labor unions.

The main limitation on super PACs is that they cannot coordinate their activities with a campaign. The risk for Bush is that his super PAC will not have access to the candidate and his senior strategists to make pivotal decisions about how to spend the massive amount of money it will take to win the Republican nomination and, if successful, secure the 270 electoral votes he will need to follow his father and brother into the White House.

by Thomas Beaumont, AP |  Read more:

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4/20 Day

Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist, routinely plays with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, touring as The Dead. It's the spring of 2009, he's just finished a Dead show in Washington, D.C., and he gets a pop quiz from The Huffington Post.

Where does "420" come from?

He pauses and thinks, hands on his sides. "I don't know the real origin. I know myths and rumors," he says. "I'm really confused about the first time I heard it. It was like a police code for smoking in progress or something. What's the real story?"

Wavy Gravy is a hippie icon with his own ice cream flavor who has been hanging out with the Dead for decades. HuffPost spots him outside the same concert. Asked about the term 420, he suggests it began "somewhere in the foggy mists of time. What time is it now? I say to you, 'Eternity now.'"

Depending on whom you ask or their state of inebriation, there are as many varieties of answers as strains of medical bud in California. It's the number of active chemicals in marijuana. It's teatime in Holland. It has something to do with Hitler's birthday. It's those numbers in that Bob Dylan song multiplied.

The origin of the term 420, celebrated around the world by pot smokers every April 20, has long been obscured by the clouded memories of the folks who made it a phenomenon.

by Ryan Grim, Huffington Post |  Read more:

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Where Your State Gets Its Money

Vermont and New Hampshire are similar in a lot of ways — they’re both small, heavily rural New England states that root for the Red Sox. But when it comes to taxes, they could hardly be more different. Vermont is one of the nation’s highest-tax states on a per capita basis; New Hampshire is the lowest. Where they get that tax revenue is different, too: Vermont relies heavily on broad-based income and property taxes. New Hampshire gets much of its revenue from targeted taxes on cigarettes, gasoline and other items, as well as taxes on businesses.

Across the country, states vary widely in both the amount and the source of their tax revenue, as new data from the Census Bureau makes clear. States collected an average of about $2,700 per person in tax revenue in 2014. (That’s all taxes — regardless of who paid them — divided by total population, including children.) But there was a huge range, from $1,700 per person in New Hampshire to more than $8,000 per person in North Dakota.1

It might be surprising to see deep-red North Dakota at the top of the list. But that revenue isn’t coming from everyday citizens. It’s coming from oil companies: More than half of North Dakota’s tax revenue comes from so-called severance taxes, the result of the state’s oil boom. It’s a similar story in Alaska, which had the nation’s third-highest per capita tax revenue in 2014 (Vermont was No. 2). Severance taxes account for a whopping 72 percent of Alaska’s tax revenues.

For states that can’t rely on oil booms, there’s tremendous variation in where they get their revenue. Washington, for example, collects no income tax and relies on sales taxes for more than 60 percent of its tax revenue; neighboring Oregon is an almost perfect mirror image. Alaska and New Hampshire are the only states with neither an income nor a sales tax. (New Hampshire does tax dividends and interest.)2

by Ben Casselman and Allsion McCann, FiveThirtyEight |  Read more:

Image: FiveThirtyEight

769 Gallons of Water Were Used To Make This Plate

by Kyle Kim, Jon Schleuss and Priya Krishnakumar, LA Times |  Read more:
Image: Anne Cusack and Kirk McKoy

E. Benyaminson for Hello, I'm Robot! by Stanislav Zigunenko (Russia, 1989)
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Gil Scott-Heron

Solar Power Battle Puts Hawaii at Forefront of Worldwide Changes

Allan Akamine has looked all around the winding, palm tree-lined cul-de-sacs of his suburban neighborhood in Mililani here on Oahu and, with an equal mix of frustration and bemusement, seen roof after roof bearing solar panels.

Mr. Akamine, 61, a manager for a cable company, has wanted nothing more than to lower his $600 to $700 monthly electric bill with a solar system of his own. But for 18 months or so, the state’s biggest utility barred him and thousands of other customers from getting one, citing concerns that power generated by rooftop systems was overwhelming its ability to handle it.

Only under strict orders from state energy officials did the utility, the Hawaiian Electric Company, recently rush to approve the lengthy backlog of solar applications, including Mr. Akamine’s.

It is the latest chapter in a closely watched battle that has put this state at the forefront of a global upheaval in the power business. Rooftop systems now sit atop roughly 12 percent of Hawaii’s homes, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, by far the highest proportion in the nation.

“Hawaii is a postcard from the future,” said Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.

Other states and countries, including California, Arizona, Japan and Germany, are struggling to adapt to the growing popularity of making electricity at home, which puts new pressures on old infrastructure like circuits and power lines and cuts into electric company revenue.

As a result, many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. In response, those solar companies are fighting back through regulators, lawmakers and the courts.

The shift in the electric business is no less profound than those that upended the telecommunications and cable industries in recent decades. It is already remaking the relationship between power companies and the public while raising questions about how to pay for maintaining and operating the nation’s grid.

The issue is not merely academic, electrical engineers say.

In solar-rich areas of California and Arizona, as well as in Hawaii, all that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts.

“Hawaii’s case is not isolated,” said Massoud Amin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota and chairman of the smart grid program at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a technical association. “When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there’s going to be problems.”

by Diane Cardwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kent Nishimura

Forgiving $38,750 in Child Support, for My Kids’ Sake

[ed. See also: Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.]

Earlier this year, I spent three hours sitting on a hard, wooden bench in the Queens County Family Court, waiting for a judge to approve my petition to forgive $38,750 in child support arrears from my ex-husband.

The judge said, “Well this is a rare one,” then asked me several times if I was aware of what I was doing and if I had received legal counsel. When I told my single mom friends, they looked at me as if I had committed an act of treason. “Child support is all we have!” one friend exclaimed.

Is it?

This was not a decision for divorce lawyers or court clerks. Or the unofficial single moms club, for that matter. This was about redefining what child support really is, for our family — and it’s a redefinition that other families should consider.

We have too often reduced nonresidential fathers to being weighed and judged by a financial transaction. If you don’t pay, you’re a “dead beat.” End of one story, beginning of a new one, one that can mean suspended drivers’ licenses and professional licenses, seized bank deposits and tax refunds, and the very real risk of jail time. The family of Walter Scott, who was fatally shot in the back following a traffic stop, speculates that a similar narrative led him to flee the police, fearing another lost job and another jail stint. It can also mean some mothers blocking access to children (called “pay per view”) and children becoming pawns in a game that puts their development and psychological well-being on the line.

For many, many reasons, I was determined to ensure that our family story did not include any version of that too-common series of events. Studies prove that school-age children of involved fathers have better academic success, higher grade point averages and go on to have higher levels of economic and educational achievement. We focus on money, when “child support” also means emotional support, academic support and the supportive power of a male influence in a child’s life. Negating that value is dangerous to our children. Regardless of what I think of him, my children love their father and doing my part to keep that feeling alive is priceless to me.

As mothers we would never want our value to be trivialized to a dollar amount. But fathers are often reduced to being an accessory parent — nice to have around, but not essential as long as a good mother stands in. In the seven years since my divorce, my ex-husband (or “wasband” as I like to call him) has always given our children his time, whether he had money or not. He currently makes payments to me directly when he is able.

But his arrears have accumulated during years when he was unemployed or underemployed and either paid less than the monthly payment ($600) granted when we divorced, or nothing at all. So when our children were young, after our separation and early in our divorce, I negotiated new currencies such as additional time when I needed child care, meal preparation, haircuts and even helping with home repairs, instead of acting as if a cash payment was all he had to offer our children. The look on their faces when he came to pick them up was more than worth it.

by Kimberly Seals Allers, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Abigail Gray Swartz

Ignominious Pasquinade

Late last month the word pasquinade popped to the top of the most frequently looked-up word list. The explanation for the flurry of look-ups was the word's appearance in an opinion piece by Charles Cooke lamenting the poor performance of Sarah Palin at a recent political event on Iowa. Cooke ends his column saying that Palin has "collapse[d] into ignominious pasquinade."

We'll admit it. Pasquinade is not part of our working vocabulary, so we had to look it up. Our dictionary defines it as "a lampoon posted in a public place" and as "satirical writing, satire." Fair enough, but it was the etymology that caught our eye:

Middle French, from Italian pasquinata, from Pasquino, name given to a statue in Rome on which lampoons were posted

A statue named Pasquino? This required more digging.

Yes, Pasquino was the popular name for the remains of an ancient Roman statue unearthed in Rome in 1501. The statue was supposedly named after a local shopkeeper whose house or shop was near where the statue was found. And there was a custom that anonymous satirists would attach highly critical political passages to the torso of the statue. These pasquinades, some by important 16th-century writers, such as Pietro Aretino, were then collected and published.

A word about this Pietro Aretino fellow, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica: He was born in the town of Arezzo, in the Republic of Florence, in 1492. He was the son of a shoemaker, but he later pretended to be the natural son of a nobleman and derived his adopted name ("the Aretine") from his native city. He moved to Rome in 1517 and wrote a series of viciously satirical lampoons supporting the candidacy of Giulio de' Medici. Perhaps partially as a result, Giulio became Pope Clement VII in 1523, but despite the support of the pope, Aretino was forced to leave Rome because of his general notoriety and his 1524 collection of Sonetti lussuriosi ("Lewd Sonnets"). From Rome he went to Venice, where he was the object of great adulation, became friends with the painter Titian, for whom he sold many paintings to the King of France, and lived in a grand and dissolute style for the rest of his life.

We're a long way from Iowa at this point, but we can get one more stop on this trip if we ask the question, Can pasquinade also be used as a verb? Yes, it can, at least according to Merriam-Webster Unabridged. It means "to lampoon" or "to satirize." As an example of this use, the Unabridged offers a brief snippet from Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Here's the context: The narrator and his companion are walking the streets of Paris and end up discussing an actor named Chantilly. The narrator explains:

Chantilly was a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the rôle of Xerxes, in Crébillon's tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains.

Try that one out on your friends.

by Merrium Webster |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia