A Free Man

All of you stay at home parents have my respect. One day a week of it leaves me feeling like I’ve been lobotomized with a butter knife. Don’t get me wrong, I love it and am grateful that I have the time to spend with the boy. Call me a masochist.

Thanks for the finger painting idea, Jennifer. Although, the dog is blaming you for his new blue coat.

Back with you all when my brain regains the capacity for cogent thought.

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I’m not a huge Herbie Hancock fan, but this track is as close a musical approximation of a day with Boy Z that I can imagine. Get more music by Hancock (for free) from eMusic.

 

 Herbie Hancock - "Finger Painting" [6:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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About midway through Yann Martell’s Man Booker Prize winning novel “The Life of Pi”, the protagonist finds himself washed up on an island populated solely by meerkats. After a time on the island he begins to suspect that all is not as it seems - the meerkats take to the trees every night and one day Pi takes a bite of a fruit growing from one of the island’s trees and finds human teeth inside. It begins to dawn on him that the island is carnivorous, each night digesting anything that has the misfortune to remain on the ground.

For some reason, Pi’s carnivorous island was the first thing that popped into my head when I heard a news story on the NewsHours with Jim Lehrer podcast recently about what was described as our rapidly growing eight continent. There are no meerkats and it is not strictly carnivorous and it’s not really an island, but the Great Pacific Garbage Dump is as disturbing and potentially dangerous as Martell’s fantasy island.

My initial reaction to the NewsHour report is that it was a typical case of what tends to be a melodramatic and lacking in understanding response of the mainstream news media to a juicy science story. Surely there isn’t a continent of garbage out in the Pacific Ocean. The good news is that the media has overreacted, “continent” is not the right word. The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is not visible from the air (because most of it lies slightly below the surface of the water) nor does it have a particular nautical position (due to the shifting wind directions and currents). The bad news is that there are two massive accumulations of plastic waste swirling around in the doldrums of the northern Pacific Ocean. Charles Moore, the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the man who had the misfortune of discovering the dump, estimates that the plastic garbage in the Pacific covers approximately five million square miles (about 1.5 times the land mass of the United States) and contains over 3.5 million tons of largely consumer waste.

By most accounts the trash finds its way to its home in the North Pacific through a long and circuitous route. Trash is dumped into rivers, in both North and South America and Asia, that empty into the Pacific. Ocean currents carry the trash, picking up more debris as it travels, around the Pacific before depositing it in the doldrums of the North Pacific Gyre. 80% of the trash in the ocean originates on land and a majority of that is from consumer products. Thus, it is a hard truth that we - you and I - are the problem. Here is how it works: say that you inadvertantly drop some innocuous bit of plastic - a clear plastic wrapper from a box of candy. The next time it rains, that wrapper gets washed into a storm drain which will flow into your nearest watershed and ultimately into the ocean. That little wrapper floats its way around the Pacific currents until it comes to rest in the Gyre where it will join the rest of the trash. This plastic waste will be around longer than you and I, longer than our children, longer than our grandchildren, longer than our great-grandchildren. Nobody really knows how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade because it basically doesn’t. Conservative estimates are around 450 - 500 years. We are creating a problem that will outlive us by centuries.

It isn’t just an aesthetic problem. In short, it’s devastating to marine ecosystems. Forty percent of albatross chicks are killed each year by consuming plastic accidentally fed to them by their parents. More than a million birds and marine animals die each year from consuming or becoming caught in plastic and other debris. But there is a less obvious and more frightening consequence to our trashing of the oceans. Moore’s group does a lot of research into the ecological effects of plastic debris on marine ecosystems. Recently they have been looking at plastic particulate levels in and around the Garbage Patch. The small bits of plastic that are a byproduct of the slow degradation of the plastic debris have been found to accumulate a lot of nasty chemicals - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chlorinated and legacy pesticides and hormonally active additives. This latter class are particularly nasty beasties, some of which have been implicated in an increased risk of breast cancer. Moore and his colleagues found that the ratio of plastic particles to plankton in the Gyre was between 1.4:1 and 6.9:1. In other words, there is more plastic particulate matter in this part of the ocean than there is plankton. You don’t have to be a biologist or have an in depth knowledge of food chains to recognize what this means: small fish eat plankton (or plastic particles), big fish eat small fish, humans eat big fish. We are eating our own toxic garbage.

I don’t wish to sound melodramatic or preachy but this is a problem that is getting worse on a daily basis and one that we cannot repair. We can, however, do something to slow the accumulation of rubbish in the oceans. 80% of the trash out there comes from us directly, so it is up to us to do something to make it better.

Here are ten things we can do about it:

1. Don’t use so much plastic. Make a concerted effort to reduce the amount of plastic that you purchase. It’s not easy. I’ve been making a concerted effort since I heard this story and it’s absolutely stunning how much excess plastic you get when you purchase anything. Note how much plastic crap you come home with on your next trip to the supermarket. Preferentially purchase items packaged in glass or paper. Virtually any material is better than plastic.
2. I’m a beach bum. Roughly 10% of the crap out in the Pacific comes from trash left on beaches. So, don’t leave trash on beaches and maybe pick some of it up when you’re out there. Boy Z, Timmins and I are headed out to the beach shortly and I’m bringing a bag with me to pick up.
3. Recycle. Plastic recycling is very low efficiency - only about 3.5% of plastic is recycled in any way. This is due in part to contamination of plastics with non-plastics, food waste and non-recyclable plastics. Clean up your plastic before recycling and make sure that you only include recyclable plastics. If your community does not recycle plastic then demand that they do.
4. Along the same lines, buy recycled products or products containing recycled materials.
5. This is kind of a no-brainer. But do not litter. Most of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is thought to be a result of litter working its way into the river system.
6. Consider volunteering or donating to the Algalita Marine Research Foundation or other environmental organizations.
7. Think about the watershed when cleaning up around your hose. Sweep your sidewalks rather than hosing them. Wash your car on the grass so that the water sinks into the ground rather than storm drains.
8. When you go shopping do not take a plastic bag. Use a cloth or other reusable bag.
9. Buy in bulk. Most of the plastic that you bring home with you from the shop is packaging, the higher the product to packaging ratio, the less trash generated.
10. For god’s sake, don’t use so much plastic.

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Image credits:

Plastic trash

North Pacific Gyre Map

Food chain

I was leaning towards Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” for this post, as it seemed appropriately gloomy. But, The Kinks have been in my head lately, possibly because they are apparently reuniting.

 

 The Kinks - "Plastic Man" [3:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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With exams due, lectures to prepare and reports to write, A Free Man has not enough feet in too many camps this week.  My head’s all over the place and I’ve started posts about topics as diverse as sedition, mobile phones, Lyndon LaRouche and my bus ride to work. Instead, I’ve decided to harness all this disparate thought to make a seamless link between Jarvis Cocker and Wee Z.

Jarvis Cocker is one of my rock gods. I selected my last pair of glasses almost entirely because I wanted specs like Jarvis. Really. Like the Barenaked Ladies, Pulp brings me right back to the early days of my relationship with (stalking of) Dr. O’C. She turned me on to the Brit Pop pioneers, among other great bands I hadn’t heard. “Common People” has got to be one of their best and one of the best of the genre.

Almost as cool as Jarvis is Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner. If Star Trek isn’t enough for you, how about his bizarre foray into pop music with another four-eyed rock god, Ben Folds. Agnes, here’s another cover for you - Big Giant Head does Pulp.

Ben Folds is apparently collaborating on a new album with author Nick Hornby who wrote “About A Boy”. The film adaptation of his book starred Hugh Grant in the role of man-child Will.

Hugh Grant also starred as the rakish Daniel Cleaver in “Bridget Jones’ Diary”, a secret guilty pleasure. (”Bizarre what some men find attractive.”). His co-star in that film was Colin Firth.

Colin Firth played Harry Bright, a British banker, in “Mamma Mia”. And speaking of bankers…

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Jarvis Cocker - "Running The World" [4:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Pulp - "Common People" [5:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 William Shatner - "Common People" [2:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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This week is the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, “the 27th annual celebration of the freedom to read. This freedom, not only to choose what we read, but also to select from a full array of possibilities.”

From the ALA, here is a list of the ten most challenged books of last year and the reason for the objection:

1. “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell 

Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

2. “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier

Reasons:  Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Violence

3. “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes

Reasons:  Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language

4. “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman

Reasons:  Religious Viewpoint

5. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain

Reasons:  Racism

6. “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker

Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language,

7. “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle

Reasons:  Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

8. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou

Reasons:  Sexually Explicit

9. “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris

Reasons:  Sex Education, Sexually Explicit

10. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky

Reasons:  Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

Here are some suggestions on how to support banned books week. I’m going to make sure and take some of these on board this week. I’m going to read one of these banned books, “The Golden Compass”, which I’ve just never gotten around to tackling. I’m going to read out to my son, so he’ll learn a love for the written word. And I’m going to speak out by posting about Banned Book Week and reposting a book banning post that I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

Just a warning in advance, I am in a bad mood today. Not in any kind of mood to mince words…

Strange Scottish Girl, who has a snazzy new site by the way, asked me the other day for a political post. I’ve not written one in a while, largely because the whole Sarah Palin nomination/ Republican circus has just depressed me. I’m depressed at the cynicism of the McCain campaign thinking that disaffected Clinton voters will flock to Palin just because of the number of X chromosomes that she bears. I’m depressed that the Republicans are falling back on extreme social conservativism to engorge their base. Again. I’m depressed that the oldest presidential candidate in history has selected a viciously pro-life, creationist, anti-science, book banning neo-fascist to be a malignant melanoma away from the reins of my homeland.

Mostly I’m depressed that it seems to be working. The most recent Real Clear Politics aggregate polls have McCain up three points on Obama, the first time he’s led since he became the presumptive Republican nominee back in the Spring. This isn’t because of McCain’s slightly histrionic and more than slightly disingenuous speech last week, it’s because of Palin.

I don’t even want to post about Palin, I just can’t drum up the words. She represents everything that I think is wrong with the Republican Party and American politics as it stands today. I was really pretty optimistic about things because it looked like things were changing - even the G.O.P. had weeded out the wing nuts and nominated a socially moderate candidate, but then Palin.

But this isn’t about Sarah Palin, it’s about book banning….

Read the rest of this post.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Just a warning in advance, I am in a bad mood today. Not in any kind of mood to mince words…

Strange Scottish Girl, who has a snazzy new site by the way, asked me the other day for a political post. I’ve not written one in a while, largely because the whole Sarah Palin nomination/ Republican circus has just depressed me. I’m depressed at the cynicism of the McCain campaign thinking that disaffected Clinton voters will flock to Palin just because of the number of X chromosomes that she bears. I’m depressed that the Republicans are falling back on extreme social conservativism to engorge their base. Again. I’m depressed that the oldest presidential candidate in history has selected a viciously pro-life, creationist, anti-science, book banning neo-fascist to be a malignant melanoma away from the reins of my homeland.

Mostly I’m depressed that it seems to be working. The most recent Real Clear Politics aggregate polls have McCain up three points on Obama, the first time he’s led since he became the presumptive Republican nominee back in the Spring. This isn’t because of McCain’s slightly histrionic and more than slightly disingenuous speech last week, it’s because of Palin.

I don’t even want to post about Palin, I just can’t drum up the words. She represents everything that I think is wrong with the Republican Party and American politics as it stands today. I was really pretty optimistic about things because it looked like things were changing - even the G.O.P. had weeded out the wing nuts and nominated a socially moderate candidate, but then Palin.

But this isn’t about Sarah Palin, it’s about book banning. Sarah Palin likes the idea of banning books by most accounts. Sarah Palin asked the librarian in the town she ran how she would feel if Palin asked her to remove some books from the local library. The librarian said she would never do anything of the sort. The librarian was “asked to resign” a few days later. The McCain campaign has tried to quiet this story by saying that Palin’s request was speculative and that the librarian wasn’t fired because she said no to Palin, but for other reasons. Whatever.

I know book banners and I know what they look like and sound like. I grew up in a small town on the steaming pine flats of north Florida. This particular town was famous for two things. One, Ted Bundy killed his last victim there. Two, they banned Chaucer from the schools. When I was a Freshman in High School, my county school board banned a humanities text book that contained excerpts from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. That’s right, 5^th century B.C. Greek drama and 13^th century English frame tales were too dirty for our developing minds. A local preacher’s wife was helping her daughter with her homework one day and came across the mere mention of the existence of sex in Lysistrata and the “The Miller’s Tale” – a farcical story in verse that includes medieval fart jokes – and went all histrionic. She got her husband on to the case, who used his own little bully pulpit to get a rise out of his Southern Baptist congregation. As these things do in small towns, in a matter of weeks there was fury from the community about their precious innocents being forced to read such smut. Smut that 99% of them hadn’t bothered to read. Smut that the vast majority of them couldn’t pronounce, never mind spell.

The irony, of course, is that in the late 80’s most of these delicate flowers were having more sex than Aristophanes could ever conceive of and the jokes I heard in the halls of my school would have caused Chaucer to blush. But logic and reality tend to be irrelevant when a community is stricken with a righteous fury and the school board, with a cowardly unanimous vote, caved under the pressure and banned both the humanities book and the original text.

At the time, I didn’t know Greek comedy from situation comedy and  I didn’t know that Chaucer was the father of English literature and laid the path for seven centuries of words to come. I was 15 and had bigger issues to deal with and I just didn’t really care about the ban.  I was young and still labored under the illusion that elected officials knew best and had my best interests at heart. I’ve always been a little bit ashamed that I wasn’t angry at the time, that I didn’t get angry until I went away to college and read “Lysistrata” and “The Canterbury Tales”. It was at that point that I realized what had been done to me by the preachers and the school board.

I have no problem with anyone’s religious beliefs, none whatsoever. Largely because what  anyone else believes is absolutely none of my business. If you don’t want to watch a movie or read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine. If you don’t want your child to read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine, though you probably ultimately do your child a disservice. Nonetheless, none of my business. But the Christianists that banned Chaucer and Aristophanes went a step too far, they didn’t want anyone to read, watch or listen to something that offended their faith. This is where I have a problem. This is where your religion offends me. This is where your beliefs tread on not only my beliefs, but my freedom to practice them. This is where it becomes my business.

I learned that in my first year of a private Christian college in South Carolina. I learned that I should be angry about what had been done in my hometown. I learned about book banning. It didn’t just happen in that small town in north Florida. It had happened throughout history when zealots with a modicum of power and more than their fair share of influence convinced an ill informed population that a book threatened their morality. And I got angry. And I wrote an essay for a literature class about book banning and book banners. My professor encouraged me to send that essay to my local newspaper and they published it as a guest editorial.

My small salvo in the war against book banning got me my first job as a writer. The surprisingly progressive publisher of our local paper gave me a summer job as an intern reporter. I spent two summers reporting on the local politicians . It was during those two summers that I became a liberal, that I began to question authority, that I learned the dirty truth about small town politics. During those two summers I got to know Sarah Palin. I got to know small minded people that are so convinced that their personal morality is right that they are willing to force it on everyone else by any means necessary. I learned that if people wouldn’t listen and change, the Sarah Palins of the world will litigate their world view. There are lots of Sarah Palins on school boards and county commissions and, yes, in mayors offices in small towns around the country, particularly in the South. I know her, I’ve worked for her and I’ve worked against her and I have had enough of her.

Now most of the time, these people don’t get far in politics. But every now and again one of them is clever enough, glib enough or charismatic enough to climn the political ladder. Sometimes they get elected to the State legislature, sometimes they might be elected to the House of Representatives. Occasionally one of them becomes governor or even a Senator. Increasingly, these small-minded proto fascists are making a dent on the national stage. Recently they’ve made their way on to the U.S. Supreme Court and into the White House itself.

I had high hopes that this year was going to be different. But then came Sarah Palin, with her snide, sarcastic speech and her fundamentalist agenda and I realized that it was just the same old shit from the G.O.P. So, I don’t want to hear from Sarah Palin. I don’t want to be polite about this election anymore. I don’t want to try and balance the two parties and try to be fair. I’m angry and I’m tired of these people and I want them to go away. I want their mandate taken away.   I want them beaten and beaten soundly. Am I a member of the “Angry Left”? You’re damn right I am.

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Image credits:

Chains

Freadom

Columbia County Courthouse

Eye chart

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Belle and Sebastian’s “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” is available from eMusic.

 

 Belle & Sebastian - "Wrapped Up In Books" [3:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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“Tires type black
Where the blacktop cracks
Weeds spark through
Dark green enough to be blue
When the mysteries we believe in
Aren’t dreamed enough to be true
Some side with the leaves
Some side with the seeds…”

-Wilco - “Side With The Seeds”

Some folks have asked why I don’t do certain things on this site and in the interests of pleasing the audience, I thought that today I would “do” a couple of those things - food and books. Continue Reading »

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It was a Harry Potter filled weekend in A Free Man’s household this weekend. I finished the book in an orgy of laziness on Saturday - don’t worry, no spoiler from me. Although, Dr. O’C’s Mom spoiled it for both of us by passing along some gossip she’d heard about the ending, and people wonder why your loved ones’ mothers are hard to deal with. In addition to finishing the book, on Sunday we went to see the new Harry Potter film. It was good, what you expect from a Harry Potter movie. But what I found amazing was the number of advertisements before the movie. There were no less than 20 standard 30 second TV commercials before the previews, advertising in themselves, even started. We don’t get to the movies often, so I think that this seeping in of TV commercials before the films is stands in starker contrast than if we went every week. I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but I imagine very similar. When we were leaving in 2004, there would be a couple of commercials prior to the films, so I suspect that number has risen since then. What annoys me is that I’ve paid £7 to go and see the film and then I have to be subjected to 20 minutes of ads before another 10 minutes of ads before the film? Harry Potter is OK because product placement can’t be slipped into the film, but in a lot of cases you are then subjected to another 2 hours of advertising in the form of product placement.

Advertising is nothing new, but it’s become ubiquitous in the past couple of decades and its crept beyond the places we expect it - TV, radio, newspapers. I wonder how long the average person goes without seeing an advert. As I type this virtually any website (this one included) that I go for sourcing or information is festooned with ads. When I venture outside, I will see advertising on peoples’ clothes, cars, buses, trains, sides of buildings, and so on. When I go shopping anything that I purchase and place in a bag is like a little kick back to the shop in which I’ve just spent money. If I buy a coffee, I advertise with their takeaway cup. Can anyone in the States name a sports arena not named for some company or another? These things are often a blight, while in Crete this spring we were driving along the north coast, enjoying the rugged hills rounded a curve and were confronted with a bright red Vodafone billboard that was the size of an office building. Nice.

And one could continue. What’s troubling is that advertising is perhaps the only media (and I use the term loosely) in which deception or even outright lying is inherent. This is particularly insidious in advertising to children and there is less and less government control of advertisers. The ultimate goal is to sell the product, and any means necessary is OK. I don’t remember the last item I purchased solely because of an advertisement, but I am brand loyal. I buy Apple computers, Levi’s jeans, Sainsbury’s groceries and I could go on but I am, in effect, advertising. My point is, where does this brand loyalty come from? In some cases, maybe the brand I use is superior, but in other cases (groceries, coffee) it is not. So, despite thinking myself an intelligent discerning consumer, I am susceptible to some sort of advertising.

A few years ago a novel called “Jennifer Government” by Max Barry came out - yes I realize this is an advertisement. It’s a novel of a dystopian future, “1984″ or “Brave New World”, in which giant conglomerates run the world. People are named based on the company for which they work - Julia Nike-McDonalds, for example. The police and the NRA are publicly-traded security firms; and the U.S. government only investigates crimes it can bill for. Hmm - privatization of public services, private security contractors running war zones and parents, God knows why, are already naming their children for corporate brands. Maybe we should auction off the naming rights for Baby D, or shall we just wait until they go to work?

Image credits:

Harry Potter Bus

Jennifer Government

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“Our aspirations are wrapped up in books
Our inclinations are hidden in looks…”

-Belle & Sebastien - “Wrapped Up in Books”

I, like millions of other people, am now the proud owner of the latest Harry Potter book. I’ve joined the ranks of people that turn up to work or school slightly bleary eyed from staying up later than usual to press onward in the final story of the boy wizard. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to reveal any of the plot to those who haven’t read it yet. I do find it strange that one of the top web searches this week is Continue Reading »

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“Soma is what they would take when hard times opened their eyes
Saw pain in a new way
High stakes for a few names
Racing with the sunbeams
Losing against their dreams…”

-The Strokes - “Soma”

Al Gore’s son was recently arrested in LA for driving a Prius over 100 mph while in possession of drugs - including a muscle-relaxant called Soma. I wasn’t really interested in the story itself, don’t care what Al Gore’s son is doing, but Soma?

This caught my eye because I’ve been re-reading Alduous Huxley’s “Brave New World” recently. “The Independent” has been releasing a series of banned books with each edition of their Saturday paper and the obsessive in my has decided to collect all 25. Whenever I read this book Continue Reading »

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