RelentlesslyOptimistic

Before and After: Global Warming

A terrific series of old and current shots of locations affected by climate change from the BBC NEWS | In pictures: How the world is changing via Cake's site. The source of many of the photos is Gary Braasch, who has an amazing website full of photos and information.

Google Maps: Awesomely cool but not perfect

Joe at what about the plastic animals? will soon visit Alaska:

"I got driving directions from Homer to Kodiak from Google Maps.  The ferry trip takes 9.5 hours, but Google estimates that it takes less than six hours by driving."

"Even though the car would save me several hours my gut instinct is to stick with the ferry."

Art, Murals, Fun

My friend Becca's got an embryonic website, and the beginnings of a design and mural business. See her work at Zested Art & Design.

She, of course, does design work for any location. If you want a fantabulous mural and you're in Colorado, or if you're willing to transport her to your exotic locale (yes, even South Sioux City, Nebraska), you should hire her, because you'll have beautiful art from a wonderfully joyful person, and it'll probably appreciate so much that someday it'll be worth tearing the wall out to sell to the museum for more than the cost of putting up a new environmentally-friendly building, except for the part about how keeping the old building is environmentally preferable so you wouldn't really do that, but you could, because it'd be so valuable.

National Poetry Month: "You were deceived by the detonations of bombs"

During the closing years of the Vietnam war, when I was 14, I went to the library at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii for information about Draft laws. I learned that you couldn't be drafted if you were less than 5' or more than 6'8" -- I was already too tall but not tall enough, so I also looked up the requirements for becoming a conscientious objector.

Later that year the earliest waves of released POW's were flown first to the Hickam terminal, which I could see from my bedroom window. In a military family during that time it was too easy to imagine what it would be like to be in Vietnam, to be tortured and imprisoned for years. Their loss captured me, and my family and friends and I often joined the crowd welcoming them home when they landed.

By my senior year of high school the war and the draft had both ended. A speech contest I entered required a dramatic piece and a poem. I had an excerpt from Catch 22 that I'd taken to other contests, but at 17 I didn't know from poetry. I primarily looked for something short that worked with the anti-war theme; Archibald Macleish's Lines for an Interment expressed perfectly what I'd imagined the POW's must have felt about their spent years upon returning to a home that gave them neither acknowledgment nor memory.

Catch 22 and Lines for an Interment carried me to the contest's finals, and the poem's rhythms still bring me to anger and despair over the waste of lives. Thanks to Joe Ivory Mattingly of The Heretik and Roxanne of Rox Populi for the National Poetry Month reminders and the poems, so that I didn't forget, finally, to recognize the importance of poetry in our lives.

Lines for an Interment, Archibald MacLeish

Now it is fifteen years you have lain in the meadow:
The boards at your face have gone through: the earth is
Packed down and the sound of the rain is fainter:
The roots of the first grass are dead.

It's a long time to lie in the earth with your honor:
The world, Soldier, the world has been moving on.

The girls wouldn't look at you twice in the cloth cap:
Six years old they were when it happened:

It bores them even in books: "Soissons besieged!"
As for the gents, they have joined the American Legion:

Belts and a brass band and the ladies' auxiliaries:
The Californians march in the OD silk.

We are all acting again like civilized beings:
People mention it at tea ...

The Facts of Life we have learned are Economic:
You were deceived by the detonations of bombs:

You thought of courage and death when you thought of warfare.
Hadn't they taught you the fine words were unfortunate?

Now that we understand we judge without bias:
We feel of course for those who had to die:

Women have written us novels of great passion
Proving the useless death of the dead was a tragedy.

Nevertheless it is foolish to chew gall:
The foremost writers on both sides have apologized:

The Germans are back in the Midi with cropped hair:
The English are drinking the better beer in Bavaria.

You can rest now in the rain in the Belgian meadow --
Now that it's all explained and forgotten:
Now that the earth is hard and the wood rots:

Now you are dead ...

Scientific American: Now Fair and Balanced, and less filling!

I got busy and missed this until Torrez pointed it out. In their April 1 issue the editors of Scientific American come clean and admit how biased they've been towards facts and peer-reviewed theories, and even science. That's going to change, though.  In Okay, We Give Up -- We feel so ashamed the editors admit to their errors, and promise to change:

"True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.[...]
Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.[...]
Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But [Intelligent Design] theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.[...]
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. [...]
Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Image from here

"perhaps Jesus, like Wolverine, has amazing regenerative powers"

Just about any religious dogma, carried to its logical extreme, can seem less than awe-inspiring. Excepts below are from jwz as he looks at "transubstantiation, the belief of many branches of Christianity that when you take communion, the bread and wine transform physically into the flesh and blood of Christ. According to the Catholic Church as late as 1965, this is literally true, not just symbolism: the flesh is present, the bread is gone."

"So let's run some numbers.

Which gives us:
23,000,000,000 people
× 12 %
× 200 communions
= 552,000,000,000 servings
× 0.25 fl. oz.
= 138,000,000,000 gallons of blood
× 2 grams
= 2,433,903,400 pounds of flesh
= 1,216,952 tons of flesh

So how big is Jesus?
If you conservatively assume that these are the End Times and that Jesus will soon be completely consumed (a detail that I do not believe is a part of mainstream Christian dogma), then he weighs twenty million times more than you, and contains ninety-two billion times as much blood. (20,282,528× and 92,000,000,000×).
However, perhaps Jesus, like Wolverine, has amazing regenerative powers (in which case, it's surprising it took him three days to return from the dead. But maybe he was just taking a little time-out.)
I'm told that the average person sheds 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime, and that 70% of household dust is dessicated human. I will leave further research along this line of thinking to others."

So there you have it. Math, Christianity, and dessicated skin. Jesus dieted for our sins! And it isn't even Friday!

How well do you know your anatomy?

For those with science geek tendencies, the Anatomiae images group pointed to this Smithsonian National Museum of American History quiz. I got 7 out of 10.

lunatic rules imposed on our demented system of government by a crazy Constitution

Master of the short form Busy, Busy, Busy today gives a summary of Charles Krauthammer's Washington Post column today:

"Conservatives have been driven stark raving mad by deranged judges insanely following lunatic rules imposed on our demented system of government by a crazy Constitution."

and notes Julia's even shorter version:

"Tom DeLay shouldn't have said that, even though I totally see his point."

All this in response to the discussions swirling around Justice Sunday, the Unreality TV simulcast by the Family Research Council and dachsund-beating James Dobson's Focus on the Family, where we will hear judges who don't follow the right-wing-christian line condemned as "thieves in the night, [working] to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

Meanwhile in the "someone you'd really really hope would know better" department, Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,  "There does seem to be this misunderstanding out there that our system was created with a completely independent judiciary," he said. [emphasis added]

Heh. God is on whose side?

Bad Weather Forces Change in Bush's Earth Day Plans.

NOXVILLE, Tenn., April 22 - President Bush's plans to celebrate Earth Day in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park were undone by nature on Friday, as stormy weather in the area forced him to cancel and instead speak about the environment from inside a hangar here at the McGhee Tyson Airport.

A Message From The Heretik: Your Mother Called . . .

From The Heretik: Your Mother Called . . .

Happy Earth Day!

Environmental Irony?

On Wednesday BlogKC posted the following criticism of Bridging The Gap's Earth Day event; my reply is posted in their comments and below.

"This bit is almost a satire of itself.  Bridging the Gap has moved KC’s Earth Day celebration from the Zoo to Shawnee Mission Park, in the heart of the suburbs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Johnson County is not the geographic center of the region… This new location puts Earth Day almost 45 minutes away from the majority of the region’s population and provides no public transportation access. Environmental supporters will have to get in their cars and drive up to twice as far as last year, putting quite a bit more pollution into the air. Perhaps the environmentally friendly thing to do is just stay home this year."

Environmental problems are complicated, and require holistic solutions. In a similar way, making environmental choices in organizing an event like Earth Day is complicated: every option has effects on the environment and on the success of the event. Criticizing the event only in terms of a single factor – its public transportation options – without a holistic consideration of all the other factors involved reflects the kind of deconstructive thinking that led to many of the environmental problems we face today.

Electronic Ballots: GW Bush Elected Pope!

Sneezy the Squid - BREAKING POPE NEWS.....

In a stunning turn of events, the latest news report has been submitted to the StS Deep-Sea Newsdesk. The election of Benedcit XVI has been overturned on recount!
George W. Bush Elected Pope...Cardinals Stunned!
Reported by Monsignor Guido Sarducci
The almost 120 Cardinals from around the world who gathered to choose a successor in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel were stunned by the election returns and expressed complete amazement.
Cardinal Mahoney, the Vatican spokesperson, had this to say:
"We in the Conclave are all shocked. We cast our votes using these new electronic voting machines. The results overwhelmingly favored George W. Bush over all the Catholic candidates. The last Pope, John Paul II, was a superb linguist, fluent in 11 languages; this one, Pope George, can't speak fluently in one language. We just don't know what to say, but a vote count is a vote count, dammit!"
The White House has announced that Dick Cheney will assume command as President of the U.S. tomorrow morning, when George Bush travels to Rome to begin his duties as Pope. His Holiness has already announced that Cheney will be anointed Archbishop of the Sunni Triangle. Cheney's wife Lynne will be named an honorary Virgin. His Lesbian daughter, Mary, will be declared a heterosexual 'in pectore' (secret). Bush daughters Jenna and Barbara have already entered the Convent of Our Daughters of Hip-Hop and First Pope-Lady Laura Bush has taken control of all the keys to the Vatican Library.
George W. Bush had this to say moments ago as he spoke from the Rose Garden before departing for Rome: "I am honored to be the spiritual lighthouse, and the first War Pope. I appreciate it, I appreciate it.I promise Evangelical Catho-licks and Prostates alike that I will be embodied in salvation and fair in the performance of my Popie duties. I am a Unitifier, not a Divide-a-cater. I am obliged to try to save as many lost souls as I can, at least the Devout Wealthy Elite Souls, because my Momma done tole me that Heaven is a very select place, more exclusive than even the best Texas country clubs. I may have to put a fence around it.
I will supervise the Rapture and the Reunion with our beloved deceased family members and with our departed purebred pets. I will not allow those awful Liberal Sissy Homosapiens to marry each other and I will put and end to the Clergy marrying Choirboys. I promise I will continue old Johnny Paul's ban on conundrums."
Pope George vehemently denies that he plans to move the Vatican to Miami, Florida, He added.

Bacon Bandages

Via what about the plastic animals comes Bacon Strips Bandages from the McPhee catalog. I wonder if they're scented?

Swoon

I always have mixed feelings about street art and graffiti. I see the amazing creativity and beautiful artwork, and I also see the effects of graffiti on neighborhoods.

With that caveat, Lex's Folly highlighted a work today by Swoon, who creates work on paper and then pastes it up. Since I wanted to post only a single photo, I used one that had been posted at Bluejake, but Alexis' photos are beautiful and have more detail.

The Monarchs need you!

MonarchWatch, an organization started by University of Kansas professor Orley Taylor, announced today that they are looking for 10,000 volunteers to set up "way stations" to help Monarch butterflies in their annual migration from Mexico to Canada and back.

Development of open land and the widespread use of herbicides are reducing habitat that provides nectar to feed the butterflies on their journey, and milkweed plants on which they must lay their eggs.

An article in today's Kansas City Star said that Monarch watch would sell a “way-station kit” with seed packets and information on how to create the best habitat, but I couldn't find it in their store (although there are lots of cool gardening and nature things there that I want!). You can find an online guide to gardening for butterflies that will tell you which plants provide nectar, and tons of online information, photos and resources for teachers. There's also a blog of last year's trip from KU to the wintering grounds in Mexico, though for some odd reason it reverses the blog practice of having the newest entries on top.

The Star article also says that Monarch Watch also plans to set up a registry of way-station sites and will give registrants a sign they can stick in their garden identifying it as a monarch way station.