A Box of Puppies

When I was a child, my greatest dream was to find a box full of puppies. And every shoebox, every discarded Manhattan Mini Storage vessel had the potential to change my life. I knew just what I’d do with the puppies I found: take them home, place them in a corner of my loft bed, give them names like Anastasia and Kristy, and feed them the parts of my dinner I didn’t want. I’d throw them in with my stuffed animals, so you couldn’t tell the plush from the living. I’d keep them in my backpack at school and in my skirts at home. By the time they were fully grown, they would follow me down the streets of SoHo, off-leash. They’d bark at shady characters, and even at my parents when they asked me to do something I didn’t like.

In reality, I was deeply dog-less. Until I was six, I had no pets at all, despite trying to catch rabbits in a net at the park and lure turtles with Sun Chips at other people’s country houses. My first (and worst) pet was a newt that choked to death on a bad worm. Next came a hairless cat my mother bought on Greene Street. Both were poor substitutes for the dog I wanted but couldn’t have. We didn’t have a proper home. We lived in what was essentially one big room, on Broadway. And all my promises to care for the dog were futile: I wasn’t even allowed to go outside alone.

My parents’ childhood dogs loomed large in our family mythology. My mother had been the proud owner of Cindy, a shepherd-collie mix with serious aggression issues and a pathological obsession with Ritz crackers. She was tied to a tree all day on the lawn outside my mother’s neo-Tudor house. At the age of six, my mother was both her captor and her protector. One of the first sentences I learned was “Cindy was a bad dog.”

A few states away, my father had General George Armstrong Custer (General for short), a runt dachshund whose claim to fame was that he’d once eaten an entire eighteen-pound ham. For days thereafter, General’s gut dragged along the ground. When it was really hot, he liked to run to the riverbank and roll in dead eels. He survived a German-shepherd attack in which he lost part of an ear. He died at eighteen, curled beneath my grandfather’s desk.

Both these dogs seemed to me like outcasts, kooks, pains in the ass who the adults secretly wished would just succumb to their own vices already. And so I concluded that dogs were not man’s best friend but, rather, the mischievous sidekicks of misunderstood children.

When I was fifteen, I took the box-of-puppies fantasy into my own hands. Walking down the main drag of Brooklyn Heights, where we now lived, I stopped to pet a tan mutt, the mascot of an animal-rescue group that had set up a booth at the corner of Montague and Hicks. As I scratched the scarred head of a sleepy “chow mix,” the group explained its mission: to end animal homelessness in our borough.

“My parents won’t let me have a dog,” I said.

“Well, maybe you can foster.”

I don’t remember exactly who the person in charge of the booth was. There were several girls and a man. The situation was so oddly traumatic that in my mind the man is played by the character actor Elias Koteas, of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” fame. I do remember, though, that what came next was a very bad afternoon. It involved my dreams coming true and the empty dread that often follows that experience. I climbed into a van with Elias Koteas, who told me that there was a pit-bull mother dead (in a box!) in a parking lot near the Gowanus Canal and three puppies that desperately needed a foster home. As he drove me out of my neighborhood, away from the bagel shops and the squash players, and into industrial Brooklyn, I suddenly recalled my mother’s countless warnings about “climbing into vans with strangers.” Somehow, this situation seemed outside the bounds of her edict. Just think of the puppies—three of them, he had said, their bodies cold, starving. In the van, one of his colleagues, a silent frizzy-haired woman, filled dog bowls with dirty water. I could hear it sloshing as we rumbled down Atlantic Avenue.

It was dusk by the time we reached the parking lot. It had started to drizzle. Elias Koteas told me to follow him, and I did, to a shipping crate in the corner of the lot. I peered in. The mother wasn’t dead. She lifted her head with tremendous effort, sad-eyed and gaunt, like Fantine, in “Les Misérables.” A mother in a desperate situation. Maybe that’s why she didn’t even growl when I reached in and took her babies, one by one.

They were barely puppies. More like kidney beans, slick and cool, eyes still sealed shut. They whimpered, but quietly, no louder than baby birds. Elias Koteas urged me back to the van. He told me to buy bottles and a heating pad and “make sure they’re warm all night.” I was dropped off near a subway stop.

by Lena Dunham, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Robin Schwartz.

Henri Rousseau - The Dream
via:

Michael Hedges

[ed. One of the most innovative acoustic guitar players, ever. First video shows MH early in his career busking outside of somewhere (love how people just ignore him), the second is the full video documentary from the Artist Profile's series.]

The Carp Must Die

The Asian carp is a skittish fish, averaging about two feet long and 10 pounds apiece. When startled by something, say a boat’s motor, it’s prone to jump up to 10 feet in the air. So when Blake Ruebush, Levi Solomon, and Chase Holtman, an ecology team with the Illinois Natural History Survey, head out on an early October carp-hunting mission, they do so with caution, and armor.

Ruebush’s steering console has been modified with a carp-proof Plexiglas windshield and a side wall of mesh netting to guard the throttle and steering wheel from aerial impact. The team considered wearing helmets but dismissed the idea as too dorky. Instead, despite the humidity, Ruebush and Solomon wear waders to repel the slime. Holtman, a burly-looking guy, has gone the other way, opting for a T-shirt, shorts, and Crocs. “I’ll shower afterwards,” he says. “People look at you funny when you reek of blood and fish.”

As they head out from Havana, Ill., and up a side channel of the lower Illinois River, the water starts to churn with agitated fish, and the boat’s hull thumps from underwater collisions. Then the fish start flying—dozens of them, rising like a storm cloud. One ricochets off the boat’s guardrail; another leaps in from behind the boat, getting tangled in the motor’s steering cords. The air is so thick with fish that some bash together mid-flight, showering everyone with a snot-like splatter.

The fish come in at close to 30 miles per hour. That’s enough to cause bruises and broken noses—even concussions have been recorded—but Ruebush and his crew seem unworried. “This is Ground Zero for Asian carp,” Ruebush says, steering forward as his buddies stand at the front of the boat. They won’t have to endure the barrage much longer, though. They’re about to electrocute all the fish.

Solomon and Holtman lower two 10-foot booms attached to a generator capable of producing 5,000 watts. Ruebush starts the generator’s engine. It’s like a giant underwater Taser. As Ruebush motors ahead, fish that swim into the field will be stunned, then scooped off the surface by Solomon and Holtman with dip nets and dumped in a tub in the center of the boat, where they are identified, measured, weighed, and counted.

As the generator goes hot, they jump even higher. A fish hurdles the guardrail, skittering to a stop at Ruebush’s feet. “Hey! There’s a volunteer. We count those, too,” he adds, chuckling. Within a minute the water quiets and unconscious fish begin rising to the surface.

The electrocution, one of four that will occur in the area today, will last 15 minutes and cover about 200 yards of shoreline. INHS runs thousands of these “fish community assessment” collections a year—a mix of shock fishing and other techniques such as netting—to track changes occurring in the river. The group is looking for two different species of Asian carp. The jumpers surrounding the boat are Asian silver carp. The Asian bighead swims closer to the bottom of the river and is harder to zap. Both are filter feeders and thrive on plankton, a flotsam of algae and other microorganisms.

In the 1970s, fish farmers in mostly Southern states began importing Asian carp from China to help clean their commercial ponds. Some escaped in floods, making their way into the Missouri River, the Mississippi River, and the Illinois and Ohio River basins. They breed fast, grow fast, and eat piggishly. Females can spawn up to three times a year, releasing millions of eggs per drop. Young fish easily eat their weight in food daily, while adults can consume up to 20 percent of their body weight. That yields silver carp as big as 50 pounds and bigheads up to 100 pounds. After their first few months, the fish outgrow their natural predators in the river system. And they pick it clean.

Thanks to the interconnectedness of America’s waterways, Asian carp now infest more than 23 states, mostly in the Midwest. But they are not yet in the Great Lakes, home to a $7 billion fishing and $9 billion boating industry, according to the Great Lakes Boating Federation. Havana and the 210 river miles north to Chicago represent the last stand in the battle against the carp.

by Ben Paynter, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: Minnesota Public Radio

2 Cuisines, Both Full of Themselves: Chez Sardine

One major theme of modern restaurants is what we might call Asian stoner food. This is the cuisines of Japan, Korea and other places as seen through bloodshot eyes, the cravings of a hipster whose late-night munchies send him out in search of tacos stuffed with bulgogi, pigs’ tails cooked in root beer and the like.

Another competing theme is fat-on-fat cuisine. It challenges our notions of appropriate caloric intake, treats foie gras as a sacrament and has rarely seen an ingredient that couldn’t be improved by cooking it with some part of the pig.

If these styles were two friends of yours, you would think they were both narcissistic, a little dangerous and more fun to be around than almost anybody else you knew. And you would pray that they never, ever hooked up.

But hook up they have, at a friendly and demented Greenwich Village tavern called Chez Sardine that Gabriel Stulman opened just after Thanksgiving. Mr. Stulman, an increasingly busy restaurateur, described Chez Sardine as “a very inauthentic take on a Japanese izakaya.” This is the kind of izakaya where a bite-size piece of hamachi sushi is crunchy with fried pork rinds, and where sashimi is slipped into a stack of flapjacks.

For connoisseurs of Asian stoner cuisine, this will sound like high-grade chronic. But the chef, and one of Mr. Stulman’s partners in Chez Sardine, is Mehdi Brunet-Benkritly, who spent four years at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal, the Stanford of fat-on-fat cooking. So this is also the kind of izakaya where you can order a grilled cheese sandwich stuffed with foie gras, garnished with cucumbers pickled in rice-wine vinegar.

The first face you see when you walk into Chez Sardine is Pat Morita’s in a framed close-up from “The Karate Kid.” Mr. Morita, who spent part of his childhood during World War II in an internment camp in Arizona, holds his chopsticks midair, midlesson, although the lesson here is a nuanced one about the strange things that happen when Japanese culture comes to America.

by Pete Wells, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Rebecca Greenfield for The New York Times

Christian Boltanski
via:

User-Renters in SimCity

[ed. Addresses the concept of ownership and what it means when computers and software are more dependent on cloud-based computing: music, books, games, etc. Be sure to click on this link.]

And so it came to pass that SimCity was released and no one could play it.

It was a disaster for EA, its distributor. Within hours the game blogs were humming, and the comments sections were humming even more. People had paid for the game; many people had pre-ordered it. Everything should have worked. People were angry. The problem quickly became obvious: SimCity’s Always-On DRM was gumming up the works. To clarify: the game requires a constant internet connection to play, with the game syncing to the servers every twenty minutes or so. The servers were overloaded. When people were able to connect, the game was frequently unplayable. Some games simply didn’t unlock on time.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t anywhere near the first time this very thing has happened. Games with primarily online components have often run into server problems at launch, with the issues resolving within a few days, after everyone has calmed down a bit. No big deal, people have said. This is just the new face of gaming. It’s growing pains. Things will sort themselves out.

Then other things started to come out. EA released statements to the effect that the game would be nigh-impossible to reengineer to run offline, because “with the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud.” Gamers responded that this was probably ridiculous bullshit, but we didn’t have proof of this until the last twenty-four hours, wherein a modder was able to run the non-regional version of the game offline without any significant issues. A Maxis insider has confirmed this. Clearly a “significant amount of engineering” isn’t actually required in order to make the game playable without an internet connection. The DRM that was presented by the game’s distributor as a fundamental part of the game’s function is not fundamental, practically speaking.

So either EA was misinformed by Maxis, or they’re lying.

Why should we care about this? Most simply, because it’s a continuation of an ongoing trend: The recategorization of technology owners as technology users, of the possession of private property transformed into the leasing of property owned by others, with all the restrictions on use that come along with it. And what’s most worrying about this are all the ways in which we as owner-users are being encouraged to view this as a normal part of our relationship with our stuff. When the very concept of “our stuff” is up for grabs.

by Sarah Wanenchak, Cyborgology |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Bonobo

Bonobo : Cirrus (Official Video)
via:

via:

Bert Jansch

Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art

Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen—to private agents or state organizations. One result was that some of the most influential modernist artists, from Paul Gauguin to Mondrian and Rodchenko, died in abject poverty, not because their work was unpopular but because the economy produced by the circulation and distribution of their work was entirely controlled by others, whether under capitalist or communist regimes.1 While a concern with labor and fair compensation in the arts, exemplified by such recent initiatives as W.A.G.E. or earlier efforts such as the Art Workers Coalition, has been an important part of artistic discourse, so far it has focused primarily on public critique as a means to shame and reform institutions into developing a more fair system of compensation for “content providers.”2 It seems to me that we need to move beyond the critique of art institutions if we want to improve the relationship between artists and the economy surrounding their work.

Here I am not particularly interested in the power relations between artists and the art market, a cyclical conversation that seems to dominate much of art writing today. Historically, art and artists have existed both with and without a market. Important art was produced in socialist countries for most of the twentieth century, in the absence of an art market. Much of art production today occurs in places without a market for art, or in countries where a capitalist market system is not the dominant form of social and cultural organization. Art can clearly exist without a market, but artists fundamentally rely upon a certain economy in order to live and make art in the first place. Furthermore, it’s important to note that “economy” and “market” are not synonymous terms: a market is just one facet of the economic sphere, coexisting with many other forms of exchange, from barter, debt, and favors to a gift economy.  (...)

In 1878, the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler took Ruskin to court for libel. Ruskin had written a rather positive review of an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery—a privately owned space exhibiting works that had been rejected by the Royal Academy. Ruskin singled out Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, accusing the artist of charging too high a price for what Ruskin thought was a hastily made painting:

For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.4

Whistler was outraged and sued Ruskin for a thousand pounds and the costs of the trial. The trial became a public spectacle, the first of its kind. It also became a public seminar on art. Whistler’s case was based on his argument that a painting is about nothing but itself; Ruskin’s case was based on his belief that art should have moral value. The court heard arguments about the duties of art critics and the role of labor in art. Ruskin was too ill to attend the trial and was represented by lawyers who asked Whistler how long it had taken him to make the painting. Whistler replied that it was completed in a day or two.

Lawyer: The labor of two days, is that for which you asked two hundred guineas?
Whistler: No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.5

Whistler won the case but received only a symbolic settlement: a quarter of a penny. Ruskin’s friends covered his legal expenses; Whistler went bankrupt covering his own.

Ruskin did not single-handedly invent positions and notions popularized through his book and lectures on the economy of art; rather, he articulated existing Victorian attitudes regarding the role of artists and culture, which themselves reflected the British and Dutch art systems of the time, emphasizing a certain element of commerce in art. A somewhat different system of cultural organization existed in France, where in 1648 a royal decree established a government-funded Art Academy. The Academy removed painting and sculpture from the control of artistic guilds, which emphasized craft, and instead created a centralized institution that treated visual art more like the liberal arts, such as literature. While poets and writers like Baudelaire were often compensated per line of text for publishing their work (Baudelaire’s rate apparently was 0.15 francs per line), as far as I know, no one in France proposed subjecting them to wage labor.

by Anton Vidokle, e-flux |  Read more:

Image: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), circa 1875. Oil on panel. Detroit Institute of Art.

Knocked Out Loaded

I’m going to share a truly amazing story with you, but I must confess something first: None of the parties involved want to deal with the events I am about to describe any longer, and we need to respect their wishes. What I request is that you consider the facts of the story without wasting the time of those involved.

For what I am going to share with you are some occurrences that led to and then emerged from a period of thirteen mysterious minutes during which no one really knows what happened. Dozens of people have spent dozens of months trying to figure it out. Thousands of dollars have been shelled out, too, and untold amounts of stress. Lives have been derailed, careers have suffered, relationships been strained or lost. Violations took place, and crimes. Blood was shed. Yet what happened during those thirteen minutes remains a mystery — one that nearly destroyed the lives of some very nice people.

At the heart of this story sits time: Who controls it, who records it, who mourns it, who allocates its usage. And how and why this happens, and, of course, when. One particular substance upends all our presumptions about the control of time, but we think we know where they land again. Yet who is in control of what and for how long is not so easy to discern.

I will tell you this story, but you must promise not to take up any more of the time of those involved.

But first, a question: How much do you know about Rohypnol?

Early one new year — doesn’t matter which, exactly, since we’re going for the “Once upon a time” sense — a quiet and charming and alarmingly tall man, let’s call him Frank, went to an informal dinner party hosted by an ex-girlfriend, a sweet and kindly teacher, a bit of an artistic soul. We’ll refer to her as Zelda. The two had dated for close to a decade about a decade ago — it doesn’t matter exactly how long or when. The point is that they used to date, and then they stopped, and now they’re friends, but it was all such a long time ago that all you need to know is that they still like each other.

After a couple glasses of wine, the group of several at the party agreed to go out to karaoke at a tacky disreputable bar. If I were to tell you details about this bar, you would accuse me of inventing them, so let’s pretend it was called Gone Fishin’!. The interior of Gone Fishin’! (the exclamation point is part of the name) was decked out in bait and tackle-related geegaws, including a talking wall-mounted trout and various doctored photographs of white men in obtrusive vests with giant walleyes, and all the specialty drinks had names like Wonderbread Standard and Worm on a Hook, and they were supposed to be cute references to picking people up, but they weren’t. I’m setting a scene here (albeit a fake one), and what I want to convey is that the bar was maybe going for hipster in a slightly-more-authentic-than-TGIFriday’s way but nothing about it worked. So people just went there to sing pop songs to each other.

And order cheap drinks. Zelda and her friends and Frank had a few. Frank had never done karaoke before, so he may have had more cocktails than he usually does. Songs were sung, more drinks were consumed. New friends! Rounds were purchased. More songs. One of Zelda’s friends had driven them all there and wasn’t drinking. When someone at the bar sent her and Zelda a couple drinks, the teetotaler passed her gift along to Frank.

Karaoke became aggressive and weird. It was that kind of place, Gone Fishin’!. Stages were stormed, maybe a wall-mounted trout was given a solo, the house got a round, that sort of thing. Some of the new friends began drifting away, other new ones replaced them. Two suspicious dudes, on their way out of the bar, jerked a thumb toward Zelda and Frank and made a snide comment about “Roofie and Friend.”

Their pals agreed later that the two were pretty trashed.

by Anne Elizabeth Moore, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937

Living Rooms by Usona
via:

The Cyprus File – Why it Matters, Even to Americans

[ed. As one journalist noted, this isn't a tax, it's theft. Ostensibly directed at Russian depositers, the common Cypriot resident will likely get hosed in the process. It remains to be seen how other EU countries will view this development. As Paul Krugman notes, if you want to start a run on the banks this is a good way to do it.] 

It would be ironic if Cyprus, one the smallest countries in Europe with little over 1 million people and about 0.5% of the European Union (“EU”) economically, were to prove a key inflexion point in the crisis.

Since June 2012, it has been known that Cyprus needs around Euro 17-18 billion to recapitalise its banks (around Euro 10 billion) and for general government operations including debt servicing (around Euro 7-8 billion). While small in nominal terms and well within EU’s resources, the amount is large relative to Cyprus’ Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) of Euro 18 billion. It is unlikely that Cyprus can realistically repay it, in the absence of a dramatic change in its circumstances such as the mooted oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The various options considered to generate the required funding included: privatisation of state assets, increases in corporate taxes (from 10% to 12.5%) and withholding taxes on capital income (to 28%) and restructuring of existing bank or sovereign debt. Debt restructuring options included a “bail-in” of creditors (the new fashionable term for a write off of principal). It would also entail easing terms and lengthening maturities of (up to) Euro 30 billion in loans from Russian banks to Cypriot companies of Russian origin.

The package proposed by the EU incorporates almost all of the above measures. Most controversially, ordinary depositors will face a “tax” on Cypriot bank deposits, amounting to a permanent write down in the nominal value of their deposits. The deposit levy will be 6.75% on deposits of less than Euro 100,000 (the ceiling for European Union account insurance) and 9.9% for deposits above that amount. In return, the depositors will receive shares in the relevant banks.

The unprecedented write down of bank deposits expected to raise around Euro 5.8 billion is motivated by a number of factors. (...)

Whatever the case for the Cyprus package, it risks significant side effects.

Firstly, it may trigger capital flight from banks in Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain, based on depositor concerns about loss of capital in any future debt restructuring.

Europe has total bank deposits of around Euro 8 trillion, including around Euro 6 trillion in retail deposits. Around Euro 1.5-2 trillion of these deposits are in banks in peripheral countries.

In the period leading up to July 2012 banks, these peripheral countries lost between 10% and 20% of their deposits. This only abated when the ECB made its extraordinary announcement in July 2013 that it would do whatever it takes to safeguard the Euro.

If depositors withdraw funds in significant size and capital flight accelerates, then the ECB, national central banks and governments will have intervene, funding affected banks and potentially restricting withdrawals, electronic funds transfers and imposing cross-border capital controls.

by Satyajit Das, The Big Picture | Read more:
Image via:

Kay Mc Donagh, Cat Nap
via:

The Least Sustainable City

If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.

Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures — grids going down, levees failing, backup systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns:infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.

Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. If you want a taste of the brutal new climate to come, the place to look is where that climate is already harsh, and growing more so — the aptly named Valley of the Sun.

In Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought, and violent winds, interacting and amplifying each other, that you worry about. Generally speaking, in contemporary society, nothing that matters happens for just one reason, and in Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention.

If, in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of Superstorm Sandy look mild. Sure, people will hunt madly for power outlets to charge their cellphones and struggle to keep their milk fresh, but communications and food refrigeration will not top their list of priorities. Phoenix is an air-conditioned city. If the power goes out, people fry.

In the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe and killed 70,000 people. The temperature in London touched 100 degrees F for the first time since records had been kept, and in portions of France the mercury climbed as high as 104 degrees F. Those temperatures, however, are child’s play in Phoenix, where readings commonly exceed 100 degrees F for more than 100 days a year. In 2011, the cityset a new record for days over 110 degrees F: There were 33 of them, more than a month of spectacularly superheated days ushering in a new era.

by William deBuys, Grist |  Read more:

Photo: Shutterstock

via:

[ed. I remember doing this...rolling down the window and giving a black bear a sandwich. Yellowstone, circa: another lifetime ago.]
via:

To Build a (Better) Fire

Two men walked into a bar called the Axe and Fiddle. It was a Thursday night in early August in the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and the house was full. The men ordered drinks and a vegetarian Reuben and made their way to the only seats left, near a small stage at the back. The taller of the two, Dale Andreatta, had clear blue eyes and a long, columnar head crowned with gray hair. He was wearing a pleated kilt, festooned with pockets and loops for power tools, and spoke in a loud, unmodulated voice—like a clever robot. His friend, Peter Scott, was thinner and more disheveled, with a vaguely Biblical look. He had long brown hair and sandaled feet, sun-baked skin and piercing eyes.

The featured act at the bar that night was a burlesque troupe from New York called Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad. Just how they’d landed in the Oregon woods wasn’t clear, but they stuck stubbornly to their set list and met with only polite applause. Finally, near the end of the show, one of the performers—a spindly comedian with thick, black glasses and a T-shirt that said “Freak”—peered out from under the spotlight and fixed her eyes, a little desperately, on Peter Scott. “Do you have a job?” she said, almost to herself.

Scott said no, then yes.

“That sounds fishy. What is it you do?”

Scott fidgeted for a second, then mumbled, “I make stoves for Africa.”

“You what?”

“I make stoves for Africa.”

Scott was being modest. In the small-but-fanatical world of stovemakers, he is something of a celebrity. (“Peter is our rock star,” another stovemaker told me.) For the past seven years, under the auspices of the German technical-aid agency GTZ (now GIZ), Scott has designed or built some 400,000 stoves in 13 African countries. He has made them out of mud, brick, sheet metal, clay, ceramic, and discarded oil drums. He has made them in villages without electricity or liquid fuel, where meals are still cooked over open fires, and where burns are among the most common injuries and smoke is the sixth-leading cause of death. In the places where Scott works, a good stove can save your life.

He and Andreatta were in Cottage Grove for Stove Camp. A mile or two from the Axe and Fiddle, a few dozen engineers, anthropologists, inventors, foreign-aid workers, and rogue academics had set up tents in a meadow along a willowy bend in a fork of the Willamette River. They spent their days designing and testing wood-burning stoves, their nights cooking under the stars and debating thermodynamics. Stove Camp was a week-long event hosted by the Aprovecho Research Center—the engineering offshoot of a local institute, education center, and environmental collective. Now in its tenth year, the camp had become a kind of hippie Manhattan Project. It brought together the best minds in the field to solve a single, intractable problem: how do you build cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves for 3 billion people?

by Burkhard Bilger, Conservation |  Read more:

Illustration by Dan Page

Gotan Project

[ed. Wow, just watch the whole thing.]