A Short Story of Last Night

I just wasted too much time trying to find something online for you all, and so I’ve lost whatever joie de blogger I started the day with. Instead, I will whip up this less-than-stirring bullet post.

Family outings are worth late nights. We went to see Natalie MacMaster in concert last night, and boy, is she an amazing fiddler! She’s also a pretty good step-dancer, too. The girls didn't get to bed until 11 pm. On a school night. But who cares!

Youtube is a wonderful resource. Except when it isn’t. The life-draining search this morning was trying to find a good youtube video of Natalie playing, so you all could get a sense of the energy and fun on stage at one of her shows. Nothing. There are plenty of bootleg videos, but the sound quality is low, the pieces they record are not so hot, and there’s always some-damn-one having to go to the bathroom who is crossing the camera at just the wrong time. This might be OK, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

Natalie is not a liar. You know how every live musician says that their backup band is “fabulous” and “wonderful”? But you think to yourself, “Yeah, yeah, what else would she say? She wants these guys to keep playing night after night, right?” Well, her band members were, each and every one (OK, maybe not the bassist – but really, what future is there as a solo bassist, I ask you?) a fabulous and wonderful musician in his own right. Including the cellist. Take a look at this video. The quality of the sound isn’t good, remember. It was much better in real life. Oh, and that cellist? Fourteen years old. Yep. (I’m not a liar, either.)

The End.

"Subject to Debate"

We have been subscribers to The Nation for as long as we have been married. Over the years, we’ve tried giving it as a gift to a select few, but it seems no one in our family is as enlightened as we are (or, perhaps another case of keeping the peace within a household?). I have, in fact, freaked out a family member when I noted that I get my real news from The Nation. “Don’t you think they’re a little biased?” I was asked. Hell no! They are the only journalists who are willing to call a spade a spade, and I am glad to get that little packet of newsprint joy every week.

Well, I am glad to get it every week, but the joy comes not so much from the articles (which are wonderful, when I have a chance to read them), but from the Katha Pollitt columns and the Frank W. Lewis cryptic crossword puzzles.

I truly believe that, as long as I do The Nation’s cryptic puzzles, my brain is doing Olympic training in Alzheimer’s Prevention. (My worry is that, because Frank W. Lewis recently celebrated his 98th birthday,* I’m not 100% positive he’ll be around until I reach 80. That would be very bad, indeed.)

Katha Pollitt is the only columnist, anywhere, I read religiously. I figure that even if I don’t get to anything else in a particular issue of The Nation, the fact that my subscription dollars go to subsidizing the salary of an unabashed feminist and straight-talker is enough to take the sting out of the weekly columns written by that whacked-out neocon, Charles Krauthammer [*Hack! Ptui!*], that my local newspaper forces on me. (Yes, I know, I don’t have to read them, but … that face … that spooky holier-than-thou dried up old prune of a face! It’s enough to haunt one on the nicest day of spring.)

This is all a very long intro to saying:

If you haven’t read Pollitt's piece in the most recent issue (by the way, the content is all free at thenation.com, and no sign-in is needed), please take a moment and read it now. You won’t regret it. (Let me rephrase: You may not all like it -- or you may not like all of it -- but you can't deny that at least it’ll make you think.)

Europeans Do It Better

*Maybe I’m deluding myself and it was his 100th, I don’t know. Let’s not talk about it, OK?

Oceans are Important

So, I had promised to tell you all why the Consort was hobnobbing with Jean-Michel Cousteau this weekend. Forgive the delay, but then the news made me angry yesterday…

Every year there is a Festival hosted by a church in our neighborhood, in collaboration with the university, which focuses on “strengthening the culture of peace” – using the six points UNESCO uses to define the culture of peace (respect all life, reject violence, share with others, listen to understand, preserve the planet, rediscover solidarity). Every year the festival gets bigger (and better). This year they focused on point 5: Preserve The Planet (specifically, water quality). And the Consort was asked to be on the organizing committee as well as be a participant in several of the sessions. The special guest this year was—you guessed it!—Jean-Michel Cousteau. Now, you saw the pictures from this weekend. We had weather. Which meant (a) that JMC’s flight was cancelled, so he rented a car from Kansas City, where he was stranded, and drove up here. In a snowstorm. (Silly Californian.) But he made it! Although the person who was supposed to be the liason couldn’t make it in from their home in the far suburbs. So the Consort was in charge of driving JMC to and fro, bringing him to the sponsors’ brunch, and escorting him to the event.

First of all, did you all know his group, Ocean Futures Society, produces an educational television series about ocean life, shown on PBS? I didn’t (one drawback of not watching TV). He had just returned from a visit to the Amazon, where they are in the process of filming an episode on scuba diving aquatic research down there.

To dovetail with the theme of this year’s Festival, Cousteau’s talk highlighted some of the important points from their exploration of the islands and atolls northwest of Hawaii, shown in the episode, “Voyage to Kure.”

He spent a bit of time discussing the trash that has decimated the plant life on some of the islands, and is killing albatrosses (who eat everything, but then starve when their stomachs are full of undigestible crap like toothbrushes, disposable lighters, and pencils).


Now, the team, in order to prepare for visiting such ecologically fragile habitats, had their clothes sprayed with DEET, sealed, and frozen for 48 hours, in order to prevent any invasive seeds or insects from being brought ashore during their visit. After considering that, take a look at this picture, which shows what they found on Laysan Island:


No, I mean really look at it—in fact, look at the enlarged version. Don’t worry, I’ll wait here.

Did you see? They found televisions, computer monitors, glass, plastic, metal—tons of trash. And this stretched for miles. Miles, readers! There was one bit (which I can’t find online anywhere) where you saw Cousteau standing beside a pile of discarded fishing nets that had been collected in a cleanup operation. The pile was taller than he was, and stretched beyond the edges of the screen (I don’t know how deep the pile was, but it looked immense). Wait I found it! Please look. It won’t take but a moment. That’s 82 tons of marine debris collected by NOAA's team at Pearl and Hermes Atoll in a two and a half week period.

Cousteau was a fine speaker. And the work that he and his team have dedicated themselves to is worthy of his father’s legacy. If his series is shown on your PBS station, I recommend you take a look.

If you’re interested, you can do some additional surfing (hah!) here:

About the Kure Expedition

Kure in the Headlines

When Combining Values and Profit = Success

Last night we went to hear Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield talk at “An Evening of Social Responsibility, Radical Business Philosophy, and Free Dessert for All”. Sure, you know them: Ben and Jerry. Of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

I’ll admit, I think the girls were mostly swayed by the “free dessert” bit, but they got a lot more than that out of it. Jerry spoke of the founding of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. He kept the audience laughing with tales of their un-businesslike antics. They were true children of the sixties and when it struck them that, hey, they were running a successful business—one of those things that drained the joy out of people’s lives and sucked communities dry (I told you: children of the sixties)—they thought about bailing. Luckily, one of their mentors told them that if there was something they didn’t like about how business is normally run, here was their chance to fix it.

So they did. The guys care about social issues, so they found an organization in New York City that helps the “unemployable” (ex-cons, the homeless) by hiring them to work in their bakery; this is where B&J’s gets all the brownies for their Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. In Vermont, small family farms were at risk of disappearing under the shadow of mega-farms; B&J’s gets 100% of their dairy from local farmers. Ben and Jerry also care about the environment, so they developed their Rainforest Crunch flavor, which uses Brazil nuts from the Amazon rainforest (Brazil nuts must be allowed to grow wild, they can’t be farmed, did you know? I didn’t) plus 60% of the profits from that flavor goes to rainforest protection groups.

Of course, they were forced to sell to Unilever (a Dutch corporation) a few years ago, so buying B&J’s isn’t as strong a statement as it used to be, but Jerry is president of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, which still does a lot of good.

Ben started out as a less fluid speaker. Until, that is, he got into the topics that he really cares about. He founded TrueMajority (a shorter bullet list of their goals is on their Wikipedia page) and is also involved in Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. (Has anyone else seen their red van with budget pie chart in their localities? Or are they only here in Iowa because we’re the first caucus?)

I found links to the two demonstrations he did for us. First, he used giant oreo cookies to give the audience a sense of the Pentagon budget vs. other discretionary allocations. (This animated video looks like it is a bit on the long side, I didn’t watch it since I’d seen in in real life last night.) Then he asked us to close our eyes and he did an audio demonstration on the size of the US nuclear arsenal vs. others. There is a video version, nice and short, that you can watch.

In the end, seeing as it was after 9 pm, and the line for the free ice cream reception was oh-so-long, we left and bought some B&J’s ice cream at our corner gas station to celebrate an enjoyable evening before sending the girls to bed. If any of you watch the videos, let me know what you think.