Saturday, May 6, 2006
02:03 p.m.
While covering a large business meeting this week and weekend, the comment was made that it often seems as if people are talking and listening with dollar signs in their eyes.
That was something my dad used to say, especially when talking about a long time friend who would often visit us at work in my dad's glass shop. "Sometimes I can't talk to Clete," my dad would say, "...when he has dollar signs in his eyes.
I was talking to Michele about this, noting how strange it is that you can tell the change of somebody's demeanor when the subject of money came up in conversation.
She said, "It would be great someday to see love in everyone's eyes."
In my collection of quotes, it immedately became my favorite.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
08:46 p.m.
The new trend I've started is to shop just a little more at health foods stores, and try to eat just a little better a little more often. I've never had what you might call a bad diet, just that I have gone on a occasional "food bender" and had a rash of bad diet choices while on the road.
Everybody has their vices, mine just happens to be coffee. I'll take coffee just about any way I can get it, and even though I tend to buy the better coffee, I will still find myself in front of a large stainless steel vending tank at some truck stop out in the middle of Iowa somewhere. The tank of coffee is so large, they don't write the hour it was made, or even the day. They write the month. make a batch of coffee in January, and you should be ready to brew another batch about June. The coffee resembles road tar, and tastes about as good.
I started drinking coffee at about 12 or 13, while attending Sunday School classes in my hometown of Spring Valley, Minnesota. I was told it would stunt my growth and one old man said it would turn my insides black. I don't know that either thing would have been a bad thing, if either of them would have happened. But they didn't.
I could go on and on about coffee, but I won't. I will say that on my original subject, I got to thinking about how many times we've tried to improve upon what mother nature has given us. And it just hasn't turned out quite the way we planned. What's the old saying? The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry? A google search says it's a line from a poem by Robert Burns. And it's pretty profound.
Nothing is more plain and simple than when you pick up a strawberry from the grocery store. We grew up eating fresh strawberries from the garden. They were sweet, and often varied in flavor from berry to berry. Now they are all big and watery. They taste like ass, and you have a hard time feeding them to livestock. Why are we still eating them?
Raspberries are being ruined, and just about any other berry that can be transplanted and uprooted to another state with another soil and another climate. They used to be spread by deer and birds, and chose to grow where they wished. Now, I think those animals would be hard-pressed to identify them as food.
I think the biggest problem is that we've lost so many varieties of these foods, it's become a challenge to seek out the smaller, tastier variety and it is no challange at all to find the large size, large quantity version of your favorite fruits and vegetables.
We do this with almost everything except for apples. Go to any orchard and you could find dozens of different kinds of apples. In fact, making cider is all about having the most varieties of apples. The most spectacular of ciders even have apples that are not considered edible. Sometimes an extremely bitter apple, or better yet, half of an extremely bitter apple is used in a batch of cider. The apples are ground up, then smashed down in a cider press. The juice is sometimes cooked, boiled and even made into a hard cider (alcoholic) by adding yeast and allowing it to ferment.
Corn varieties are pretty few, too. There are a few varieties of sweet corn, there are a few different kinds of field corn, popcorn and that colored corn used almost exclusively as halloween and thanksgiving decorations (yeah, like that's not a big waste). But there just isn't the variety like you get with apples.
As you go down the list of foods where you have less and less choices, you pass potatoes, onions, oranges, and it just gets more and more sad. And when is the last time you had something just slightly different than you common, everyday celery?
I'm eating these berries and going to bed.
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
10:21 a.m.
Potent Quotables
I should really pay better attention, because I was at this speech in Manhattan, Kansas last January. And after I heard the question, I just rolled my eyes and stopped paying attention. I missed about the funniest Bushism I've seen in a while.
"I'll be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven't seen the movie. I've heard about it. I hope you go — you know — I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm is what I'm about to say." —George W. Bush, after being asked whether he's seen Brokeback Mountain, Manhattan, Kan., Jan. 23, 2006
It got me thinking about all of the great presidential quotes of the past. I googled some, and came up with some of my favorites:
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
-F.D.R.
"And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
-J.F.K.
"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
-Abe Lincoln
"That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves."
-Jefferson
And one from left field... Hoover!
"Peace is not made at the Council table or by treaties, but in the hearts of men."
-Hoover
... Then I came across this one, and it slays me:
"I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessing on this house (the White House) and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof!"
-President John Adams (our second president)
... and this one!
"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
-James Garfield
I think even Adams would agree with Scottish poet Robert Burns, who reminded us the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. We the people have been and will be lied to by the people under the roof of the White House. It apparently has become our lot in life to decide which lie we like better when we choose who will lead. Perhaps we are looking for entertainment value, rather than leadership skills.
It's no small wonder why books like Da Vinci Code are best sellers, when we the people have been taught to look for truth through all of the fiction.
But when I think about Garfield; a man who spent no more than six month and fifteen days as the President, a man who was the last President to grow up in a log cabin, and a man who spent most of his life as a carpenter and teacher actually finding a new proof for the Pythagorean theorem (there are hundreds of proofs, but it is rare to find a new one), James Garfield apparently wasn't afraid to tell people what they didn't want to hear.
I had a college professor who told us over and over again that "Power abhors a vacuum" a direct quote of Alexis de Tocqueville, a french man giving a alleged third-party interpretation of the United States of America.
In his books, Democracy in America, de Tocqueville starts off giving a sketch of Politics in the U.S., speaking plainly about the Federal Constitution, jurisdiction, the ruling political associations and the idea of majority rule.
The second volume becomes much less kind, as he begins his text:
"I THINK that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them."
Oooohhhhh. Burn! Well, you're right.
For the most part, de Tocqueville was writing about his view that America had a relative equality of condition. Conditions were pretty equal in the early days. That is not the case any more. Furthermore, it is the middle and lower classes who become caught up in the worst of what our country has to offer, especially when it comes to war.
De Tocqueville argues that Democracy was not an original idea, rather a most ancient and permanent tendency found throughout human history. Wars fought over Democracy are also found throughout our history, quite possibly the fastest and most drastic case of power abhoring a vacuum.
Great debates surround and haunt every war, especially regarding why the wars were fought in the first place. And they are fought for many reasons, not limited to wars over territory, liberation, religion, ideology, resources.
A good historian knows that no war is completely about only one issue. And even a war fought over salt, or slavery, or appearing and disappearing nuclear weapons can't be dumbed down to one person's power, or one person's actions, or even one person's opinion.
But when it comes to Europe, where power came from the Kings and Queens down to the people, Democracy was formed in a different way. De Tocqueville says:
"The heads of the state have made no preparation for it, and it has advanced without their consent or without their knowledge. The most powerful, the most intelligent, and the most moral classes of the nation have never attempted to control it in order to guide it. Democracy has consequently been abandoned to its wild instincts, and it has grown up like those children who have no parental guidance, who . receive their education in the public streets, and who are acquainted only with the vices and wretchedness of society. Its existence was seemingly unknown when suddenly it acquired supreme power."
Like the wars fought over salt, will we the people come to find our sons and daughters were sent in part to fight for oil (something researchers are now finding can be extrapolated from something as simple as pond scum), and in part to fight evil dictators and corrupt social regimes (who typically die in a few decades anyway, putting power back to the people for a short time before their next regime gathers power). Will our efforts seem so petty? Did we fight communism in the middle of the last century, only to find that communism fell because there just wasn't enough money to be made from it?
Reagan patted himself on the back for putting an end to communism as we know it, but he had about as much effect as Pink Floyd did in singing the wall down.
No one person is ever right, and we are all wrong, always.
And when it all comes down to my favorite quote of all, something that must be reflecting back to the beginning of time... to the civilizations far before biblical times is the one I listed before by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The man rolled around in a wheelchair, was loved by the people, and died in office. And he feared nothing.
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
03:14 p.m.
Strong Stuff!
We were doing a shoot about ethanol, and I just had to get a shot with some 200 proof!
Now, if I were to drink this, I'd most likely go blind. It's best to drink the non- or un-denatured alcohol, or at least something that has been filtered of all impurities. Actually, it's best not to drink something that strong... ever.
I have a feeling we'll be doing more ethanol and biodiesel stories in the near future. It's really an amazing process, and they have it all down like clockwork. At the plant behind me in the picture, they can bring in up to a million bushels of corn. And if I remember right, the process takes 70 hours. There's a fermentation process, then a distillation process. The co-product (they do not call it a by-product) is sent to feed animals, in the dry and wet form. Water is recycled inside the plant, they have their own electrical substation, and they utilize the nearby railroad to help keep transportation costs low.
It's hard to not be impressed by such a well-run co-op.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across this little gem in Grain Valley, Missouri. Since I call my site "Plastic Sled Quarterly" I'm always on the lookout for something about plastic sleds. Of course, the statue is actually the more dangerous wooden sled, but I still love it.
