furbishment

2007-09-30T21:46:00.000-07:00

BPA

It’s Bisphenol A, or, you know, BPA for those of us who need more acronyms in our lives. That is the chemical leaching from the inside of the #7 plastic eco-groovy Nalgene water bottle you bought to help save planet earth. Remember? So you could drink tap water? It’s healthy and refreshing.
The Nalgene “Lexan” is the water bottle I owned up until a few days ago when I attacked mine with a hammer for poisoning me. It creatively obeyed the laws of physics and struck me in the head. I returned it to REI. The green-vested sales associate was not explicitly judgmental about the return. But I could tell that she noticed that our dishwasher has not been performing impressively of late. I think it’s the hard water. Or maybe I am not using the correct amount of soap. But everything is coming out with this nice milky film and a coarse grainy texture. It is perfect for impressing dinner guests. Anyway, the water bottle had seen better days, but REI Lady took it off my hands and I went shopping for something that would carry my water without causing neurological damage (I have had quite enough, thank you). I bought a stainless steel “Kleen Kanteen” and a cheap-looking #2 plastic Nalgene. Now I am safe from ever getting cancer.
I would be, anyway, if I could avoid the other kajillions of polycarbonate plastics BPA is used to produce. According to the National Institute of Health, BPA is present in food and drink packaging, coatings of food cans, bottle tops, water supply lines, and even dental sealants and tooth coatings. Yes, it is in my pipes, and on my number 2 maxillary molar. Grand.
Thankfully, the National Institute of Health, National Toxicology Program loves me and cares about whether or not I can fall asleep without fixating on the BPA dripping from my teeth. The NIH convened an expert panel in the first week of August to “review and assess scientific studies on the potential reproductive and developmental hazards” of BPA. This panel of 12 independent scientists (which included Gandalf the Gray and Yoda) looked at a whole bunch of data with lots of charts and graphs and statistical formulas. Then, it released its conclusions on the effects of BPA on pregnant women and fetuses, infants, children and boring old adults.
The American Chemistry Council (which “represents the companies that make modern life possible”) was extremely happy with the study’s results. In a reassuring press release, Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council’s Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group is quoted as saying, “The safety of our products is our top priority. The conclusions reported today provide strong reassurance to consumers that they are not at risk from use of products made from Bisphenol A.” Yay!
But before you go and start eating packaged food or getting dental work done, read the Draft Meeting Summary. It is available online at (big long web address alert) http://cerhr.niehs.nih.gov/chemicals/bisphenol/draftBPA_MtgSumm080807.pdf.. It is true that in the report the 12 scientists express “minimal” or “negligible” concern about BPA affecting the prostate, accelerating puberty, or causing birth defects and malformations, which is pretty good news. But then, the panel goes and expresses “some concern” that exposure to BPA causes neural and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children. I wonder, how did the panel of experts express that concern? Maybe with a collective low volume, slightly agitated, “oh no?” Or maybe a “good gracious?”
Hard to say. Perhaps that information will be included in the final expert panel report, which will be available this fall. When it arrives you (and every environmental group and chemical corporation under the sun) will be able to submit comments before the NIH releases its final word on whether current BPA exposure levels are a risk to human development and reproduction. Then we’ll all know for sure for sure for sure. Meanwhile, I am drinking filtered rain water from my stainless steel water bottle. And, I am getting wooden teeth.

2007-09-13T20:37:00.001-07:00

Portable Water

In last week’s column I lectured you about bottled water. I waved my hands all around and tried to convince you that it is way less eco-friendly and no healthier or safer than tap water. In fact, I informed you, much of the bottled water we drink (including Aquafina and Dasani) is nothing more than enthusiastically marketed tap water. I encouraged you to drink the water from our pipes. Remember?
At the risk of sounding egotistical, but in the interest of full and honest disclosure, I need to admit that I am aware of the far-reaching influence I possess. I do see the power this weekly column affords me. Please know that I do not wield this power lightly. I know, for example, that when I suggested that you stop drinking bottled water, you did. Right then. You poured whatever was left in your # 1 plastic bottle onto a thirsty looking plant, dropped the bottle into a recycling bin and you haven’t looked back.
Ummm… but here’s the thing. I may have left out a few pieces of information that were important. I may have poisoned you. Sorry about that. It’s not the tap water. It’s what you put it in.
As soon as you finished reading this column last week, you rode your bike or carpooled straight to REI and bought a Nalgene “Lexan” water bottle, didn’t you? You thought, “Well, shoot, now that I am drinking tap water and saving the environment, I need a water bottle that will broadcast my eco-grooviness to the world.” And because you are perceptive and kind of hip, you knew that the official water bottle of the eco-groovy is the Nalgene (wrapped, for some unknown reason in a single strip of duct tape and clipped prominently with a $12 rock-climbing caribiner). So that’s what you bought, (along with a red handkerchief to tie around your dog’s neck and a topographical map of your neighborhood) and you have been drinking from your Nalgene ever since. At all meals. Even in restaurants.
I have bad news. According to the Green Guide (www.greenguide.com – it’s handy!), your eco-groovy water bottle is poisonous. It is made out of #7 polycarbonate plastics (Look in the little recycling symbol on the bottom. See the number?), which according to frightening new studies can cause obesity and breast cancer even in low doses. The effects can even skip a generation. Pregnant lab mice that were exposed to the chemicals that leach from #7 plastics apparently developed chromosome abnormalities that caused birth defects and miscarriages in their grandchildren.
OK, now, you know me. I am not one to be alarmist or melodramatic. But… run for your lives! When I discovered this information about the water bottle I have been drinking from for years, the water bottle that defines me as a tree-hugger, I pulled it down from the shelf and attacked it with a hammer. Betrayer! Back Stabber! Contaminator of generations of lab mice! It bounced up and hit me in the head. I wonder if the chemicals cause problems with hand-eye coordination, too? Or maybe with impulse control?
Even if you didn’t rush out and buy a Nalgene, you are still in for it. Maybe you thought you could get away with just reusing that one Aquafina water bottle. That would solve the problem of portable potable water, right? Sorry. Those bottles are made from #1 plastics, polyethylene terephthalates (try saying that without spraying crackers everywhere). When these bottles are re-used they leach carcinogenic and hormone disrupting chemicals and a heavy metal – antimony - that is a lung, skin and eye irritant in large doses.
So what are you supposed to do (besides live off of Dr. Pepper)? Start by returning your Nalgene. REI will take anything back (even your nasty 3 year-old Teva sandals). And, there are safer plastics available. Buy those. Plastics labeled #2, #4, and #5 are supposed to be OK based on what smart people know at this point. Or, you can use stainless steel canteens, or your ten-gallon hat. Or, have your heard of these special cups they have at Crate and Barrel? They are made of glass. You could use those. Finally, you can take heart in the fact that there are so many other potential causes of cancer out there that there is no way that the tiny amounts of chemicals leaching from your water bottles will get you first. Hey, you might not even die of cancer. You could die in a car wreck, or of a heart attack, or from a dumb Nalgene bashing you in the head.

2007-08-18T20:42:00.001-07:00

Tap Water

Poor bottled water. Banned in city buildings by the San Francisco Mayor, prohibited from use at public events by the city council of Ann Arbor, slated for elimination by department heads in Salt Lake City; it’s under attack from all sides. The non-profit, Food and Water Watch has launched a “Take Back the Tap” campaign. Think Outside the Bottle and The Bottled Water Blues.com are also working to convince consumers to stop buying the stuff. What is with that? What’s to hate about the handy little ridged cylindrical containers wrapped in pictures of jagged mountain ranges and filled with cool refreshing goodness?
Fear not, dear reader, I have done several minutes of internet research and I am here to inform you that there are at least two good reasons to “ban the bottle.” Are you ready for them?

Reason Number One: Environmental Impacts
According to the Pacific Institute, the process of making the plastic for water bottles consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per year. 20 million barrels of oil is a lot of oil. Eyes glazing. Statistics being employed. Systems shutting down. Nap time eminent. Wait! Wait! Don’t go to sleep yet. Here is another way to think about it. The energy cost required to make a bottle, transport it, and deal with its disposal (also according to the Pacific Institute) would be like filling ¼ of each bottle with oil (eww).
It also takes a whole lot of water to make a plastic bottle for you to inflate and deflate with your mouth, making loud cracking noises and irritating your cubicle-mates to no end. For every one liter bottle, five liters of water are required to make the thing. So, if we use the Pacific Institute metaphor as a model, that would be like filling up every bottle with five more bottles of itself!... umm never mind. Anyway, what other environmental impacts are there? Oh, just the usual: aquifer depletion, saltwater intrusion, habitat destruction, melting ice caps, tsunamis, incontinence, and restless leg syndrome. Plus the kajillions of empty bottles that end up in the trash. Many of them are floating around in your oceans right now. Maybe they will be occupied by hermit crabs who are looking for new digs with a better view.

Reason Number Two: Health
Bottled water is not, by definition, healthier than tap water. In fact, it may be less so. OK, OK granted there have been no recent stories about horrible bacterial contamination in bottled water. And, true enough, not all public water sources are completely trustworthy. Nevertheless, the idea that bottled water is more healthy or safer than the water from domestic sources is a scam perpetrated by people who want your money. In fact, up to 30 percent of bottled water is tap water (as opposed to, like, “natural spring water,” which comes from some specific, supposedly cleaner/ better top secret location). You may have heard that Aquafina (tap water, bottled by Pepsi… Coca Cola owns Dasani , also tap water), will begin printing the words “public water source” on its labels thanks to pressure from advocacy groups and politicians.
Federal regulations require only that bottled water be as good as tap water, not better, safer, or healthier. And, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, bottled water is “subject to less rigorous testing and purity standards than those which apply to city tap water.” Additionally, there are many requirements for municipal tap water that are more stringent than those imposed on bottled water. For example, tap water can have no (zero, none, zilch) confirmed E. coli or fecal coliform bacteria levels. Whereas, the US Food and Drug Administration rules for bottled water allow for some E. coli and human poop contamination. Drink up!
Also, cities are required to send annual drinking water quality reports to residents. These reports (you get them in your bill) provide sample dates and detection ranges and explanations of the various contaminants cities are required to monitor. They tell you exactly how many parts per million there are of lead and nitrates and perchlorate in your water. Has Pepsi ever sent you that information? And apart from the contaminants in the water, there are the chemicals that can leach from the water bottles themselves, especially when they are re-used.
So, good citizens of the San Gabriel Mountain foothills, be healthy, save energy, conserve water, stop global warming - drink the water from your pipes. It comes from wells and natural springs. It is filtered and monitored and tested. It is good enough to bottle. Better even.

2007-08-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

Little Swing Set in the Foothills

Did you ever read Little House on the Prairie? It’s a classic. Written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, illustrated by Garth Williams, it is an autobiographical account of the Ingalls family move from Wisconsin to Kansas in the late 1800s. First published in 1935, it was made into a popular TV show not long after that. It provided the raw material required to make Michael Landon a household name before he tragically succumbed to brain cancer and was memorialized in a moving Boys II Men music video.
This is exactly the book I want to have with me if I am ever stranded on the Kansas prairie in 1870 with nothing more than a covered wagon, a bulldog, a breech loading rifle, 2 panes of glass wrapped in cloth, a barrel of molasses, a bag of corn meal, a team of oxen, and a wife and three daughters. Disguised as a book about a loving family working together to overcome obstacles, it is really a how-to guide on crossing the Missouri River, choosing the best homestead site, and constructing a log cabin with a “good oak door, solid and strong” (this involves lots of hewing and pegging and whittling).
As you read this book you come to pretty much hate Pa Ingalls. And it’s not because he illegally settles his family on Native American land (which he does) or because he snorts cocaine and gambles away the nest egg (which he doesn’t). You hate him because he is better than you. At everything. He always knows just exactly what to do and just exactly how to do it. The foundation he lays is perfectly level and square. His dog obeys him immediately. His roof doesn’t leak. He whistles when he is afraid. He never cheats or gets cheated. He hangs all of his clothes from one peg on the wall.
Showoff. So you made all of your furniture, Pa. Big wup. So did I. I shop at IKEA. Who cares if I used the hex wrench that came in the box instead of pegs and leather straps?
But what does Pa Ingalls have to do with anything, oh weekly columnist in one of my eight small town newspapers? you may be about to ask. Well, certain recent events in my life have got me thinking a lot about construction and tool use and what it means to be a man. Plus, I’m insecure.
Last week, delivered directly to my backyard by two men wearing those black Velcro back braces that don’t actually do anything for your back, were two large and heavy boxes filled with pre-cut, pre-drilled, pre-stained pieces of lumber, 42 baggies filled with all manner of nut, bolt, screw and washer, and a Tolstoy-sized owner’s manual and instruction booklet for the Durango Wooden Playcenter – 2007 (Model 1APO16-07). It’s a swing set.
There’s a fort and a slide and two ladders. There are monkey bars and three different kinds of swings… at least according to the bucolic, festive scene featuring a sturdy-looking swing set on the outside of the box. The structure that I have achieved varies somewhat from the one photographed.
I just spent 12 hours in my backyard wielding a tape measure, cordless drill, level, and rubber mallet (optional). I swear to you that I attached the Fort Rails (R) to the Uprights (C) and that they were even with the previously placed Floor Joists (G)… But then I suppose it is possible that I mistakenly used The Middle Floor Brace (T) or the Tarp Cross Brace (E). None of the pieces of wood are actually labeled with the numbers used to designate them. This may be why I have assembled a structure that my daughter has begun using to launch river rocks at the neighbors’ houses. I have built a trebuchet. And, I am still not quite sure where the wavy slide is supposed to go. I think I am going to nail it to the pepper tree.
So, fine, Pa Ingalls, you win. You are more of a man than I. You built a cabin on the prairie and I can’t even assemble a swing set in my backyard. But don’t you start talking smack, or I’ll let loose this boulder at your head.

2007-08-06T16:22:00.001-07:00

No Mercury in Your LEDs

What’s the big deal about mercury, anyway? Thanks to broken thermometers, I have wiled away at least several hours of my life rolling little balls of multiplying and dividing quicksilver around in my hands, chasing them around the bed covers, losing them on the floor, breathing their fumes deep into my lungs. And I’ve suffered no ill efablucratnts. I mean, zablanz ramacrans. Umm, help? Doctor, how many brain cells have I sacrificed to liquid mercury? Whatever. It was worth it because slippery shiny mercury is fun! Drkhdlkh!
So apparently, even though the epically heroic (handsome, winsome, fetching and kind) compact fluorescent light bulb contains an amount of mercury that is only equal to the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen, there are certain sayers of nay out there who claim that this small amount is still too large. Mercury will poison our homes (they say) and our planet and will bring us all to ruin. But is anybody listening to them? Not really. This is what is fun about environmentalists; they make histrionic predictions of doom - based on scientific fact - that everyone ignores until Al Gore makes a documentary.
Maybe you can see the point of these marginalized anti-CFC militants when you consider that the entire continent of Australia is banning incandescents by the year 2010, and Canada and California will be incandescentless 2012. The European Union is considering a ban on the incandescent light bulb, and a US Senate Committee is working on a bill that would ban them in all of the states by 2017.
That adds up to a whole lot of people who will soon be legally required to put little ballpoint pen sized pieces of mercury in various outlets in their houses (or to stop reading after sundown). After 8,000 or so hours, most of these light bulbs will go straight into the trash. How many people do you think will actually go out of their ways to recycle the bulbs correctly? How many will make that extra trip to IKEA with the single bulb riding in the back of their Suburbans? And what will the environmental impacts of all of those extra trips to IKEA be? And why are all of the people who work there so aloof and intimidating with their purple hair and tattoos?
But wait! I have a solution to the environmental disaster caused by the first solution to the original environmental disaster. It will cost you even more money. Are you surprised? It’s the Light Emitting Diode bulb. (yay applause hooray)
An LED light bulb will last 50,000 hours (which is basically the life expectancy of a cat) and will save you $100 in electricity costs over the life of the bulb.
Now, if you do a little bit of math, you will realize that an LED that takes 14 years to realize a $100 savings is probably not going to be what anyone could really call “cheap.” In fact, the 1-watt LED (meant to replace a 40-watt normal bulb) will run you $40. The “premium” 10-watt bulb (to take the place of your 100-watt normal one) is only $99. You can buy these at ecoleds.com.
There is only one small drawback (other than the fact that it costs 50 times more than the bulbs you are currently using). The LED bulb is a “directional light” – a spotlight, which according to Mike Adams, founder of ecoleds.com, makes it “very useful for dynamic lighting, accent lighting or projecting light on a certain part of the room.” You can’t really stick it in a lamp. Unless you happen to be very fond of that one part of your ceiling and you want to show it off.
You might, though, consider shining your environmentally friendly eco LED onto the signed “Certificate of CO2 Emission Reductions” (suitable for framing) issued by Mike Adams and company when you make a purchase. The certificate “allows you to publicly display the number of tons of CO2 you are preventing from being introduced into the environment.”
Sadly, it doesn’t say a thing about mg of mercury not used. But you know that it’s not in there. And, at least when your LED burns out (around the time your three-year-old graduates high school) you can smash it on the floor or burn it in the back yard along with your bald tires or just toss it in the trash. Just like in the good old days.

2007-08-01T10:16:00.001-07:00

Mercury in Your Light Bulbs

Can it be that the diminutive, unassuming, intestine-like Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb is really going to be the single-most important piece of technology in saving ourselves from ourselves? Is the path to a greener, more eco-groovy future to be lit by the Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio (and my mother-in-law) endorsed CFL? This little greenhouse-gas-buster seems to have everything going for it.
One of those things it has is that it takes electricity and actually turns it into light, which is not something that can be said for the incandescent bulb, which turns 90 percent of the energy it consumes into heat. Another is that a CFL lasts, like, eight times longer than an incandescent bulb. And, even though you pay more for a CFL up front, all of the experts in white lab coats tell us that a CFL will save you 30 bucks in energy costs over the life of the bulb as compared to the old school Thomas Edison model. There is no denying (unless you are really bad at math and are very stubborn) that if everyone started using CFLs there would be a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (lighting accounts for about 10 percent of all household electricity usage), and that the polar bears would dance clumsy polar bear dances of joy on their non-melting icebergs. Also, if there were ever any doubts as to the mainstream viability of the CFL, let those be banished by Wal-Mart’s commitment to sell 100 million of them this year.
Thanks to the CFL, you can save money as you save the planet. So if you already happen to have a shopping cart filled with typical Wal-Mart fare (maybe a shotgun, toilet paper, Cinderella underpants, goldfish, hair dye, and a bocce ball set) throw in a pack of planet-saving light bulbs, too.
There is just one little hang-up. Mercury. Not the planet. The element – it’s used to make CFLs, and is somewhere in those twisty little white tubes doing something important. I don’t know what it’s doing… reacting with ultraviolet light? Exciting the white phosphor? Whatever it’s purpose, work hard to make sure that it keeps doing that thing and does not get spread all over the kitchen floor in a tragic accident involving gravity and clumsiness and dropped light bulbs. But even if a little mercury does end up on the kitchen floor, the US Environmental Protection Agency says not to freak out. Just sweep and ventilate. There is not enough mercury in a single bulb to warrant deployment of the Haz-Mat team.
The real problem is in the landfills where all of the 3.3 mg of mercury per old broken bulb could add up to potentially significant environmental problems (not global warming, though). So, when you are all finished with your CFLs, after they have flickered their last flicks, make sure that they do not end up in the trash with regular waste that you just throw into the landfill, like, you know, batteries and paint thinner. We don’t want lots of mercury floating around out there causing things like neurological disorders, speech impairment, muscle weakness, and decreasing cognitive function. That would be bad.
But listen, don’t get too agitated about a little mercury in your light bulbs. You can still save the planet. Make the trip to the city yard on that schedule hazardous materials disposal day. Or, even better, go to IKEA (the only retailer offering the service) to turn in your old CFLs for proper disposal and recycling. While you are there, you can hit the cafeteria and enjoy the kid’s Mac and Cheese for 95 cents among the brightly colored disposable furniture. Feel good. Be satisfied. The polar bears are dancing.

2007-07-24T21:19:00.001-07:00

50 Simple Things You can Do to Save Earth

I found a book today. Apparently it’s a book I own because it was in my house, but I have no idea how it came to rest in the basket of children’s board books beneath my coffee table. But then, there are lots of things moving mysteriously around my house these days. Thanks to my one-year-old daughter, the TV remote is in the fridge and the yogurt is under my bed. So it is possible, I suppose, that she picked up this book from, like, a box in the attic and brought it downstairs and put it in this basket full of other books. Although, such straightforward classification of an object would be somewhat out of character for her.
The book is called “50 Simple Things You can Do to Save Earth.” It caught my eye because I very much enjoy (some might argue am only capable of) doing simple things, and it has long been my life’s ambition to save the earth (But usually in my fantasy I have an impressive combination of super powers that enable me to do this. Or I am a transformer).
However, when I opened the book and saw that it was older than dirt, I experienced disappointment. It was published in 1989 by the Earthworks Press (Berkeley, CA). This, I realized, was a list of things people could have done to save the earth back when computers stored data on cassette tapes and telephones were large and attached to the wall by squiggly cords. It was obsolete. A waste of time. What could such a book have to offer to us future-living folk?
Funny I should ask, because while yes there are a few obviously dated suggestions (snip your six pack rings, don’t use leaded gas), there are many that make me wonder just a little bit what the hell you grown-ups have been doing for the past two decades.
Like for example, the very first page of this book breaks down the greenhouse effect and explains the importance of carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons and methane and ozone. Here is a little quote: “For the first time in history, human activities are altering the climate of our entire planet.” Umm, hello? This was written back when Bon Jovi was popular. The first time. Robin Yount was playing outfield for the Milwaukee Brewers. Hawaii wasn’t even a state yet. It was the Sandwich Islands. You got there by steamer. Mark Twain was filing humorous dispatches about hula dancers.
Anyway, “50 Simple Things You can Do to Save Earth.” goes on to outline the problems of earth circa 1989 – air pollution, ozone depletion, acid rain, vanishing wildlife, groundwater pollution, inadequate citizen input into local planning decisions (Ha! Just kidding about the last one. Nobody ever cared about that). And because you didn’t seem to be paying attention way back when, here are a few of its suggestions:
- Stop Junk Mail (the average American, in 1989, spent 8 months of his life opening it). If a million people stopped their junk mail, 1.5 million trees would be saved per year (and 999,989 people would have no reason to check their mail boxes each day).
- Use a clean detergent, one that doesn’t have phosphates – they cause algae blooms, which aren’t pretty, smell-good “blooms” like the ones on your Mr. Lincoln roses. They stink. They kill fish. They bad.
- Set your water heater to 130 degrees – hot enough to kill Legionnaire’s Disease, cool enough to save the planet.
- Buy efficient appliances – stop wasting gas, electricity and water you lazy bums.
- Replace (get this!) incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs (a suggestion from 1989? Really? Really? Really? Al Gore? Really?)

Boy, what a helpful list of suggestions. It’s a good thing we made all of these changes back before things got really bad. Thanks a lot baby boomers. Do you feel that? It’s called guilt. Or maybe it’s regret. Or maybe it’s that special irritation you get just before you crumple up a pain-in-the-neck newspaper column. Wait! Wait! Recycle it.

2007-07-15T21:16:00.001-07:00

Yearbook

For those of you who have chosen professions that do not require daily interaction with thirteen-year-olds, the yearbooks have arrived. They are currently being passed and signed. In code. With indecipherable acronyms. What do they mean? It is best that we don’t know.
The yearbook is a frightening and dangerous thing. Did you know this? It may seem to be nothing more than a happy collection of passport photos spiced with candid shots of the walk-a-thon, the spring musical, the volleyball team in action against Northview, and microscope labs. But don’t be fooled. The middle school yearbook is far from innocuous. It is concrete, published and distributed, evidence of how little we matter. If there were any doubts about a person’s status in the middle school social hierarchy, the arrival of the yearbook, and the (actual, literal) self-examination that follows, makes it crystal clear that most of us are fleas on the stray dog that is about to be euthanized at the humane society of the middle school campus world. Dorks.
You must have done this back when your own yearbooks arrived in your first period class or your “homeroom” or wherever. You looked through every single page of the new yearbook, searching for pictures of yourself. Admit it, you scoured the thing. Of course, there was the one picture you could always count on (unless you were absent on picture day and make-up picture day. What is with that? Did you have mono or something?) That would be the alphabetized one next to the girl you had been standing in line behind since kindergarten. But you were looking for other pictures, pictures that showed you standing in the world with people who may have even looked like friends. You probably made a list, an index, of all of the pages on which you could be found. Maybe you even shared this list with your peers as you signed their yearbooks. “See me on pages 6, 14, 82, 112 and 114. KIT. Let’s party this summer! Call Me! BFFFFFF”
Did you really appear on all of those pages? I hate you. We all do. Those of us who weren’t in the yearbook class with you, I mean. The ones you teased when you came in and took our pictures while we had our social studies textbooks open on our desks, or while we were standing in line to buy powdery white donettes at snack time. You made us think that we had a prayer of showing up in the Illustrated Who’s Who of Middle School. But we never really did. Did we? There wasn’t even film in the camera. Whatever.
Am I coming across as bitter or resentful or damaged? Sorry about that. I’m OK, now. Really I am. The electroshock therapy is really starting to stick. Seems like it anyway… this time around. It’s because when I was a 7th grader, I spent four hours pouring through my own yearbook, seeking any evidence of my existence. Foreground, background, anyground. I was looking through photographed windows, at reflections and shadows, trying to figure out, with the help of context clues (sun position, other people in the picture, type of activity being undertaken) if I was anywhere to be found on that campus.
Eventually, I was able to find a picture that showed two people running in P.E. clothes. These were people that I know for sure (probably, I think) I may have run next to in P.E. at some point during the school year. And, if you look to the left of them, just at the edge of the frame there is an elbow. It is a goofy looking elbow with freckles. It looks insecure. I think it’s mine.
I wish that as a 7th grader I would have had it in me to find this funny. I wish I could have made it in to a joke. I could have gone around signing everyone else’s yearbooks right on top of that picture, drawing arrows pointing at my elbow and talking loudly during class (but in a way that my teachers found charming and disarming.) All of the girls would have been impressed. But I wasn’t that kind of 7th grader, was I? If I had been, you can bet there would have been more than just a picture of my elbow in the yearbook.

2007-07-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

Who’s Confused?

When, at the end of May, President George W. Bush read a speech on Global Warming, out loud and (basically) in public at the United States Agency for International Development, one of us (he or I) was very very confused.
George W. is the same president who, in a 2001 press conference expounded on the “global dimming” benefits of sulfur particles in the atmosphere (which is silly, right?). Under him, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant, and that its emission from automobiles can’t even be regulated (the Supreme Court disagreed recently). And, here he was, in this new speech, doing his best Al Gore impersonation.
At first, I was convinced that George W. was the confused one. I thought that he must have misheard one of his “staffers” or misread an important memorandum somewhere. Or maybe there was, like, a series of Pink Panther-esque blunders including, possibly, switched briefcases, lost notes, earwax, typos, and functional illiteracy which resulted in George W. making an impassioned speech on what he thought was the dangers of not stirring the chicken soup (Globular Swarming) or on the product recall of an especially dangerous glow-in-the-dark high bouncy ball (Glow Ball Warning). Because, I knew for sure for sure that if there was one person on this planet I could count on to NOT call for global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (other than that guy who wrote in to the paper two weeks ago) it was president George W. Bush.
Apparently I was the one who was confused. For, that is just exactly what he did. He called for the top dozen (or so) greenhouse gas emitting countries to take part in a series of talks to set a “long-term global goal” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But don’t get too excited about the environmentalist green superhero tights George W. has been hiding beneath his free market Texas business suit (with pointy boots and a large belt buckle) these past six years. The goals in his plan would be “aspirational” and would not be binding unless individual nations chose to “bind themselves,” according to James L. Connaughton, the president’s environmental advisor.
Not surprisingly, George W.’s call to action has been met with a certain degree of, shall we say, skepticism. Especially in parts of the planet where people have actually been worrying about this issue and taking action… places where government officials signed this little thing called the Kyoto Treaty (which President Bush refused to sign in 2001, claiming that it would hurt the US economy and that it wasn’t fair because it didn’t include China and India), places which (thanks to mandatory reductions and carbon trading) have reduced greenhouse gas emissions over the past fifteen years as U.S. emissions have risen 16 percent.
My favorite response to George W.’s proposal came from German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. She also holds the presidency of the European Union and has proposed that greenhouse gas emissions there be reduced by 50 percent by 2050. She is pressing the group of 8 industrialized nations (the famous G-8… the U.S. is one of them), which will be meeting this week on the Baltic Sea, to adopt such a plan as well. The U.S. has rejected her proposal, which makes sense because now that we have our own separate set of aspirational meetings, we’ll be too busy to worry about any truly binding G-8 climate proposals, or for that matter, the second phase of the Kyoto talks, which will begin in Bali later this year.
But anyway, Chancellor Merkel, speaking to reporters in Berlin, said, “What is positive is that we can see from the speech that the president made… that nobody can ignore the question of climate change.” Although, maybe a little bit of ignoring wouldn’t be so bad in this case. A redundant, irrelevant plan, the sole purpose of which seems to be to derail other legitimate efforts that have been going on for years is not exactly the kind of attention Global Warming is looking for… unless I am still just really confused.

2007-07-10T22:50:00.001-07:00

Sports Injury Diagnosis

One thing I appreciate about my doctor (other than his ability to prescribe high-powered pain medication when my cornea is scratched by stupid pieces of cheap pressboard that fly directly under the safety goggles I swear I was wearing while I operated that circular saw) is his sense of dramatic timing. This is a man who knows how to deliver news. No hemming and hawing, no sidestepping or tiptoeing around from him.
He just holds up my X-ray and says, “hmph.” Then he sits there all comfortable and relaxed (well, as comfortable and relaxed as a person can be on a 2 foot tall rolling stool) for about three and a half years while I, in my underwear, seated on crinkly paper, am left to imagine all of the possible meanings of that one little vocalization. It’s not even a word. Does it mean, “Here is a pathetic reason for a person to make a doctor appointment… even if he does have a laughably low pain threshold?” Or, “Now that’s something I’ve never seen before?” Or, “Oh lordy, where’s my bone saw?”
Then my doctor looks me in the eye (straight down into the depths of my soul – I cringe) and tells me, “There’s a fracture all right.”
This is not the news I came to hear. There is not supposed to be a fracture. A fracture is the worst possible outcome. And not because of casts or crutches or anything like that. A fracture means that my wife is right. I should not have waited a week to see the doctor. It means that I definitely should not have hobbled around the mall yesterday, or around work the two days before. A fracture means that her shocked look was justified. That I deserve her charitable sympathy. That I am, as she put it when I was lying on the couch with ice on my ankle as it swelled to elephantine proportions and turned the beautiful deep purple of a Maui sunset, “so broken.” It means that playing soccer on Thursday nights with the other slightly chunky 30 plus has-beens and never-wases is, in fact, a dumb idea, and that I need to resign myself to a sensible form of exercise. Lap swimming. Exercycling. Eating corn chips in front of the TV. That’s what it means.
But wait. Here comes my clever doctor with My Dramatic Sports Injury Diagnosis Part II. “However,” he says, “it’s not the fracture I am most worried about.”
Ahh! What? What? What are you most worried about?! What is worse than my broken foot? Cancer of the ankle? Consumption? Bird Flu? Ebola? How can you even tell by looking at an X-ray image? Tell me the bad news, Doctor!
OK, um… so the bad news turned out to be the sprain. And it turned out that (strangely) the fracture didn’t even really count as news at all. It was just the warm-up portion of the doctor patient shtick we were performing.
My fractured bone is apparently an extra one that some people are born with and other people aren’t. I think it’s floating around somewhere by my Achilles tendon. Broken. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares because it bears no weight. Its only purpose is to help make a doctor sound smart when he tells his patient what it is called. Something with many syllables, maybe starting with a “g”? I asked my doctor to repeat it four times and I still wasn’t able to get it properly stored in my brain. This was bothering me a lot (I even did some lackluster internet research) until I remembered that I can only name like 12 bones of my skeleton anyway. Why should I worry about this little one nobody else has?

The real bad news was that I had/ have an ankle sprain, a “grade two” or “grade three,” he told me. Which means that when I landed all gracefully and athletically (stupidly and doofusly) my ankle experienced “significant tearing of the ligaments,” making the joint “very loose or unstable” (according to my stapled info sheet).
My doctor presented me with a piece of stretchy plastic bag and a sheet with various ankle exercises that I have been diligently carrying out. My three year-old daughter is copying them and creating some of her own. She pushes against walls and lies on her back with her feet straight up in the air. “Look, Dad, I’m doing my exercises.” She now skips the Strawberry Shortcake Band Aids and heads for the couch to elevate her boo boos.
So anyway, I am not “so broken” thank you very much, beautiful kind wife. I am merely “completely torn” and “very loose and unstable.” Hmph.

2006-10-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

You Matter

How much time do you spend thinking about insects? Just give me like a weekly average. Minutes? Seconds? What? Can you name the twelve main types of antennae? The three segments of the thorax? The relationship between the mandible and the maxillae?
One of my favorite things about human beings is that we somehow produce a certain very very small (but enthusiastic) percentage of eleven-year-olds who become experts in this kind of arcane information. They’ll tell you: “Oh no, that’s not a ‘bug’, that’s a ‘true bug,’” and they’ll tell you why, citing things like forewings and metamorphosis stages. Meanwhile, all you can do is wonder how they have time to learn all of this stuff in between soccer practice and managing their myspace pages. These kids are wonderful because they grow up and discover that desert ants are in fact counting their steps to find their way back to the nest. They (the kids, not the ants) also produce guidebooks like the one my brother bought me for my birthday.
It’s the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders, and it holds such valuable information as: Adult Sandhill Hornets sip nectar (which sounds nice) while their larvae eat food pre-chewed by the adults (which doesn’t). This book also has a picture of the Ferocious Water Bug (with eggs) and the Mormon Cricket (he’s being carried off by a seagull).
The creepiest pictures, by far, (and that is saying a lot in a field guide such as this) are the ones taken of insects that have landed on people. They are massively enlarged photos of things like the Bodega Black Gnat crawling through a thicket of someone’s arm hair (But whose? Is this person a professional? Does he have “arm hair model” on his resume?), or the Deer Fly resting next to an irregularly shaped mole that someone really ought to get checked out. I hope it’s not too late.
What else do you want to know? There are incomprehensibly complex economies of flying insects with transparent wings eating aquatic insects that are also eating their own offspring. There are 40 to 100 oval white eggs clinging to the bark after the female Oyster Shell Scale has died from frost – from these eggs whitish nymphs will disperse over the course of two days in the spring. Bark Beetles are boring into trees. Scorpion Flies are scavenging for food on the surface. The larvae of Drone Flies are underwater, breathing through exceptionally long snorkel-like tubes. And, Wooly Bear Caterpillars are methodically, bravely, crossing roads on warm days in late fall.
Meanwhile you are paying your bills online. You are ironing shirts and packing your lunch for tomorrow. You are trying to decide between Grey’s Anatomy and CSI, wondering why would they put those shows on the same night? Or, maybe you are eleven and you are busily committing a bunch of information that nobody else cares about to memory. Even so, you matter. But you’re not in a field guide, are you?

2006-09-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

Better Than TV

My beautiful kind wife is a rational, intelligent person nearly all of the time (for real). But, she is the only person I know who makes use of those flyers that magically appear on our neighborhood’s screen doors in the middle of the night. She actually reads them, and then, calls the numbers to invite people into our home to design us a new kitchen, or to test the water that runs from our taps (even when nobody knew that we needed a new kitchen or that we were especially concerned about the contents of our tap water). This is not a common occurrence, but it is a regular and familiar one. The visits are spread out just far enough that each time one happens I am surprised. I think she decides that since there is nothing good on TV, and since there were no other plans for the evening; why not invite someone over who can show us how with this special brand of siding, we’ll never have to paint our house again?
These guys can be pretty entertaining. Like the one in the kitchen with a machine that takes 40 minutes to determine that our water is “hard,” that the only solution to this problem is a large tank full of salt tablets that he can install in the basement for $9,999.99. Then, we won’t get the crusty build up on our faucets. And, we’ll use way less soap (now that’s worth ten grand). Or the guy with his “anionic surfactant” that he’ll put on his tongue to illustrate just how safe it is. It’s soap. We know you can do that with soap.
Don’t get too high and mighty; we never spend money on these people. We just kind of watch them, and when they are done, they disappear for a couple of months until beautiful kind wife gets bored and invites another one over.
I especially enjoyed the energy efficiency expert of a couple of years ago who was going to cut our energy bill in half. He was so sad when he found out that we didn’t have air conditioning. He did, though, have a proposal that we entertained for about half an hour in our back yard: solar panels on the garage roof. Generate your own power! (he said). Make extra money! (he said). Apparently 0.5 percent of the extra energy we generated would be bought back by the power company, which sounded pretty exciting to us until we pulled out the calculator and figured out that the system wouldn’t pay for itself before the sun burns out.
But now, interestingly (to me at least), there is an exciting new development on the exciting “solar panels on the roof of your suburban house” scene (did you know about this scene? It’s exciting.). This past August, the Kindergarten Cop signed a bill that has the goal of installing solar electricity generation systems on one million homes in California by 2018. You may be surprised to learn that it is known as the “million solar homes bill.” There are developer requirements (which you probably know about if you are Fred Bowden) and there is $2.9 billion available to incentivize (made-up word alert) homeowners to install these state-of-the-art fancy shiny panels on their roofs. The basic idea is that the state splits the cost with you 50/50. So after spending $6,000 or $8,000 of your own money you will be energy independent, and you can reallocate what you used to spend each month on electricity for gasoline.
But what does all of this mean for me? It means that an attractive and neat brochure from an enterprising state approved installer of solar panels will eventually end up lodged in my screen door. And when that happens, I can look forward to a comprehensive home energy needs assessment being performed for me in my very own dining room. It will entertain my wife. And I’ll be forced to admit that, yes, it is better than TV.

2006-09-04T21:19:00.000-07:00

Lake Casitas

This summer I made the pilgrimage that we all make at some point in our lives. It was, I have to admit, surprisingly moving to actually be standing there at the very spot where Bradley Lewis and Paul Enquist achieved athletic immortality by pulling really really hard on water. Remember how they completed the men’s Double Sculls in 6:36.87, nearly two seconds faster than the Belgian team of Pierre-Marie Deloof and Dirk Crois? Is that moment as vivid in your memory as it is in mine? All of the Norwegian and Belgian and United Statesian Flags waving above the crowd… everyone tightly grasping their Uncle Sam Patriotic Eagle Dolls (with paddles sewn to the wings) to their chests… the deep and moving collective “huzzah!” as Brad and Paul came knifing across the finish line, just pulling their hearts out? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?
Maybe it will be easier if I simply say; Lake Casitas, in Ventura County, is where the paddling and rowing events took place during the 1984 Olympics. I went there with my family. We camped.
This body of water is a great big (one might say Olympian) drinking water reservoir behind an earthen dam that has no alarm system to alert people living below it when it starts to leak. So if you are considering a move to the greater Ventura area, may I suggest that you consider plots of land that are uphill from the lake?
Aside from the floating port-a-potties, and its glorious Olympic history, my favorite feature of the lake is one of its rules. You are not allowed to touch it - no body contact whatsoever (even though I saw a bunch of ducks floating around with their butts right in the water). This rule forced us to become innovative in the launching of our canoe. The most successful method involved two trees and a bunch of linked bungee cords. Don’t tell, but we still got a little bit wet.
Lake Casitas has, like, 15 campgrounds, and since they are all owned by the private Casitas Municipal Water District, you are still able to have a campfire even if the National Forest Fire Danger Warning Sign down the road is in the process of burning into ashes. The campsites are all situated along a series of inlets on the northern shore of the lake. They are shady and the bathrooms are clean and there is a general store where you can buy life-saving popsicles and straw hats. Some of the campsites, though, are better than others. For example, where it says “model airstrip” on the map, don’t think; “How quaint, a model railroad club for aviation enthusiasts… I wonder if it is ever used?” Think; “Flying leaf blowers. Every morning starting at 8:00.” The most satisfying sound I heard on the entire trip was the crunch of a failed landing. So you might want to stick with the more easterly campsites; “Grebe” and “Egret” look like they’d be pretty good. And make sure you bring lots of quarters for the showers because that’s the only water you’re allowed to touch.

2006-08-23T22:40:00.000-07:00

Action Plan

Did you hear me on the radio the other morning? KPCC assembled an expert panel for a roundtable discussion on the San Pedro Bay Clean Air Action Plan. The panel included attorneys and senior policy advisors and presidents of harbor commissions, all talking about this plan’s goal to reduce air emissions caused by the operation of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Over the course of the panel discussion, important and intimidating acronyms were offhandedly employed. Complicated technical reports were referenced in ways that made it clear that they had been both read and understood. Big words were used. I was not on this panel.
I was in a folding chair in the audience carefully observing a group of smart people talking smartly, trying to imagine what I would imagine these people to look like if I were listening to their voices on the radio. This was a difficult task, but I am pretty certain that S. David Freeman (Port of Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners President) and Peter Greenwald (Senior Policy Advisor for the Southern California Air Quality Management District) both looked the way I would have thought they should have. But the others, they were talking funny.
Unless you are naked right now (weirdo), chances are you are wearing something that arrived at the continent of North America in a great big corrugated shipping container that came through one of the San Pedro Bay ports before it caught your eye on that retail rack. But according to the smarties on the panel, running shoes and costume jewelry are not the only things being delivered to us by the ships and cranes and trains and trucks humming along down there at the Ports. We are also receiving dangerous and unhealthy doses of diesel particulate matter, and nitrous and sulfur oxides, among other chemicals. Not only do they have remarkable names, they also cause cancer and respiratory diseases in people living in the South Coast Air Basin. That’s where you live.
But never fear, for now we have a San Pedro Bay Clean Air Action Plan. It will require ships to turn off their engines when they are berthed (fun fact: this is called “cold ironing”), and use low sulfur content fuels, and will require other equipment to meet all kinds of EPA standards. These new control measures will reduce the number of horrible deaths caused by the import and distribution of all of our life necessities: twelve dollar plaid shirts, high bouncy balls, disposable razors with moisturizing strips, little gangsta Homies toys you can buy out of vending machines. Read the report at http://www.portoflosangeles.org/environment_studies.htm. If you care, send a comment to the Ports before the end of the month and tell them that you want more! Stricter standards! Fancier sounding control measures!
But back to what’s important; my radio appearance. The reason you heard my deep melodious voice coming from your speakers was that I got to ask a question, remember? I submitted it on an index card, which they gave back to me. Thank goodness, because it turns out that it’s really tough to talk into a microphone and think at the same time. My question was a good one. It was all about other ports in the world with similar action plans or something. I need you to tell me the truth, though. Did I sound fat?

2006-08-02T21:54:00.000-07:00

A Small Request

If you are the guy I saw outside of your house the other evening with the fancy plastic Round Up spray bottle attachment on your hose, I thought you might like to know that I was just swimming at Huntington Beach. And, if you want, I could come over and roll around on your lawn and apply a second coat of your weed killing chemicals, if you think it’ll help.
The problem with swimming at the beach and then coming home and reading about water quality in the ocean is that you find out that you were frolicking in sewage discharge and urban runoff, which doesn’t come as a surprise, because, duh, you flush your own toilet uphill from there. But all the same, this realization is not exactly classifiable as “heartening.” It does, though, explain why you couldn’t see your feet.
You probably saw the Sunday Los Angeles Times with its front page toxic ocean article. Did it make you all itchy, too? The article (by Kenneth R Weiss) explains that the millions of tons of chemicals from fertilizers and pesticides and the burning of fossil fuels that we are pumping into the ocean on a daily basis are causing all kinds of nasty consequences: algae blooms, tumors on sea turtles, the disappearance of kelp and coral, and the creation of these so called “dead zones.” There are now 150 of these low oxygen areas in the oceans of the world, areas where organisms that can leave do so, and those that can’t leave die. If you looked at the graphic, you probably noticed the little red dead zone square right on top of southern California. That’s where all the sea stars suffocated.
This article made me curious about the Huntington Beach water that was still stuck in my sinuses, so I made the mistake of looking for more information. A couple of highlights: I found a 2005 Associated Press article describing a UC Irvine Study that determined that swimming at Huntington and Newport Beaches costs people (conservatively) 3.3 million dollars per year (No, not each. Total - parking is not that expensive). This amount was based on lost wages and medical treatments for over 74,000 incidents of stomach illness, respiratory disease, and eye, ear, and skin infections due to exposure to polluted water. And, even more frightening, according to the Surf Rider Foundation 2005 “State of the Beach” Report, male fish with female characteristics are showing up in beaches off of Southern California. Scientists believe that treated sewage is disrupting fish hormones and deforming the sex organs of these fish. That’s when I decided, enough research. I went and took a long, long shower.
So, just a small request; if you wouldn’t mind, like, whacking those weeds (string trimmers are fun!) and/or eating only organic food produced with no pesticides, and walking to work (a bike would be OK, or even roller skates), and becoming vegetarian, and wearing hemp, and powering your house with solar panels or an exercise bicycle, I’d really appreciate it. I might feel comfortable about body surfing again, too, if that’s something you happen to care about.

2006-07-20T21:53:00.000-07:00

The Color of Sunscreen

Is it reasonable for me to complain that I have been to Hawaii too many times? Even if it’s not, I am still going to complain; I have been to Hawaii too many times. Out of a whole planet of potential vacation destinations (Morocco, Iceland, New Zealand, Oaxaca, Toledo, Laughlin), why do I keep ending up on stinking Waikiki Beach? Enough already. I have experienced the International Marketplace with its seven dollar incredible shrinking beach towels and engraved Zippo lighters, and its booths where you can buy the chance to find a pearl inside of a poor sad oyster who is too young to say “ah.” I’ve been to Hanauma Bay and snorkeled in a solution of 60% seawater 40% sunscreen and snapped murky pictures with a disposable underwater camera. I’ve traveled the road to Hana (that one’s on Maui). In fact, I’ve been nearly run off the road to Hana by an angry Hawaiian in a raised up 4x4 with those round lights all in a row on the roll bar (the official truck of rural Hawaii). He was angry because there was a traffic jam on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; 36,000 tourists in rented Chevrolet Cobalts (the official sedan of rental car company fleets) all driving this two lane highway that he, an actual resident of Maui, also had to travel. Maybe he was extra cranky because of his low paying service sector job, or the astronomical house prices in his neighborhood, or the second-rate education provided by his public schools. I don’t know. But whatever the cause of his frustration, its result was the use of his four wheel drive capability to crush the roofs and hoods of these poor mainland schmucks, monster truck style. That’s a lie. But I am telling the truth when I say that I had (and have since) never seen such intimidating use of a vehicle and a voice to move traffic out of someone’s bleeping way. Not even in the Target parking lot.
So OK, I know that Hawaii is not all horrible tourist trap nastiness. I promise. I’ve seen Jurassic Park, and a few minutes of that show Lost on a couple of occasions. But when I flew to Oahu last weekend for my second equatorial resort destination wedding this year (I went to Panama in February, remember? remember? Didn’t you read my column on March 9th?), I was struck by the sad and ego-deflating fact that it is only in these tourist trap locations that I fit in. I think it has to do with the color of my feet. Or maybe it’s my face, arms, legs, torso and hands, all of which are impressively pale, even by mainland standards. But when I arrive at a Pacific Island, my Caucasiosity becomes my most defining characteristic by far. I am the color of sunscreen. I stop traffic. There is just no possible way for me to fit in. Even when I am eating a shaved ice with those little red beans in it, and I am wearing clothes that my Hawaiian friend has loaned me from his closet, and I am sprinkling key phrases from the guidebook into conversation, people still ask me if I am enjoying my trip. Where am I staying? Have I been to Pearl Harbor?
All things considered, this epidermal self-consciousness is probably a healthy experience for little old white boy me. But it is not exactly something I would classify as “fun.” And it is getting harder and harder for me to justify spending hundreds of dollars to obtain it over and over and over. I get it. I am not cool. I don’t belong on the beach. I have a fanny pack with spf 50 and sugarless gum. I am the stereotype. And the only solution I can come up with for my problem is this; if I want people to be wrong about the assumptions they make when they look at me in Hawaii, I am just going to have to move there - with a shipping container of Coppertone Water Babies Sunscreen in the pink spray bottle. That’ll show ‘em.

2006-07-16T22:48:00.000-07:00

Goats

When you have a daughter who is almost three, your life does this funny thing where all of the stuff that used to be astonishing and crazy becomes normal, and all of the stuff that used to be normal becomes astonishing and crazy. Can you provide specifics please, dear bi-weekly columnist? You ask. OK, here:
Me: “Hello beautiful kind wife. How was your day?”
Beautiful Kind Wife: “It was nice. We went to the park. Your daughter swung on the swings and slid on the slides then she took off all her clothes and peed on the grass. After that we had lunch and…”
Two years ago, nudity and urination outside of the confines of a bathroom would have been cause for consternation, alarm, shock, astonishment. Today, I hardly even notice. Lying in the mud? Drinking it? Nothing.
On the other hand, things that used to go nearly unnoticed now result in Oprah-sized celebrations. Like for example, have you seen this fantastic machine called a “Dustbuster?” If you press the button, all of the Kix cereal on the rug gets sucked away like magic! Or spackle, have you heard of this? You put it on the wall. The wall. With a knife!
So the other day, we were all out doing our happy stroller family health walk in the foothills when we found something that nearly blew all of our minds right out of our skulls. There were goats! They were right next to the road and down there in the ravine. Of course we stopped next to the electric fence and entered into a lengthy dialog about the goats and why the goats were there and what the goats were eating and why we don’t touch the goats and the coyotes that don’t eat the goats because of the dogs that are with the goats. It was a sort of panel discussion with many questions coming from the audience, which consisted of a single 2.75 year old female who could not have been more riveted.
Then, as we were standing there beside the road, admiring the goats, all of our dreams came true. Jorge the goat man (he said it, not me) pulled up in his Subaru Outback with a “Jesus Saves” three-dimensional decal. He said hi and told us that he was Jorge the goat man (told you), and he offered to take us down to meet the goats. (!!) Come to find out, these goats are professionals. They clear brush and prevent fires. The neighborhood homeowners all pitched in to hire the goats to eat their poison oak (what must that be like?) so they can avoid fire department fines. Jorge’s friend Jose whistled the goats into the chain link holding pen, and along with Jorge, began feeding them alfalfa and oats, and something called “sweet licks.” The goats mobbed Jose and he had to kick them in their bellies to keep from being trampled. It was wonderful.
Jorge was not shy. In about four minute’s time we learned that he is a happily married Christian philosophical goat man. He told us that “the goats are like the world. They are selfish and petty and they’ll stab you in the back.” And I believed him. When I looked one of the goats in the eye, I could tell that he wanted to cut me. Jorge said that we were sheep, and up above is our shepherd. I asked him what the dogs were. He said they were Great Pyrenees. He made us smell the alfalfa. Meanwhile, just on the other side of the fence, there were 140 South African Boer goats and Spanish goats kicking the snot out of each other just to get a mouthful of something not poisonous. It was basically the best day ever.

2006-06-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

Election Season

I am way less lonely since election season started. Up until last month, all I was getting in the mail were cable offers and two or three Pottery Barn catalogs a week (all because we bought that dumb magazine rack four years ago… It’s like smiling at the goofy new kid when you are in third grade. Ah! Leave me alone! It was only a magazine rack. Please stop following me. I just want to play tetherball with my friends). But now all of these strangely cheerful, yet sort of antagonistic, people keep contacting me with such vital information as: “Judy Chu is the only candidate for the State Board of Equalization who is endorsed by the California Teachers Association.” (OK, sorry, but have you ever seen someone work as hard as Judy Chu to get elected to this heretofore completely unknown state board? She has sent me more mail then any other candidate, including people who are running for real elected positions).
Today, for example, my mailbox was bursting with colorful patriotic fliers filled with helpful, unbiased information. I received a picture of Russ Warner, his wife of 35 years and their three sons. The oldest is a sergeant in the army, which is why you should vote for his dad. I also got a document with someone’s frightening grandpa admonishing me to “Save prop. 13.” The way, I am supposed to do this, apparently, is to vote no on prop. 82 (I am confused); a watchtower style reproduction of a watercolor painting of Steve Westly’s face; and a brochure that is working as hard as it can to convince me that Phil Angelides personally poured cement over thousands of acres of wetlands, somehow using the (pictured) yellow bulldozer, after which he (in all likelihood) cackled maniacally and spat right on the spot where the wetlands used to be.
I very much enjoyed a piece of campaign literature from a group that identifies itself as “Christians for Honest Government” (does that mean that it’s some sort of splinter group?) It is a plain white card that reads, “If you are happy with $4.00 a gallon gasoline, freeways being turned into 10 lane parking lots, your house taxes being raised to pay for welfare and education expenses for illegal aliens and their children, factories moving to China and India and other Third World countries, then do not read any further…” I don’t know what else it says because that’s where I stopped.
But, yeah, it’s been nice to be on the receiving end of so much meaningful correspondence, to be included in the “debate,” so to speak. And, in addition to the mail, I have been getting a series of exciting telephone messages from, I am not ashamed to admit, some pretty influential people. The Chairman of the California Democratic Party, the President of the California Teachers Association, Jerry Brown, and Al Gore (!) have all called me up to ask my support for various candidates and propositions they thought were worth my attention. So, I guess it does kind of feel like things are starting to turn around for me a little bit.

2006-06-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

Allergies

Spring is the splendid season in which all of the flowers open and Bambi and Thumper make friends. Song birds land on your windowsill, days get longer, and suddenly middle school kids of the opposite gender notice that one another exist. Baseball starts. Hockey ends. It is time to go outside and be all pastoral. Time for picnics in the park, and plant potting, and probably a bunch of other stuff that starts with “p” that I can’t think of right now.
It is also the season in which my nose and eyes go into open revolt. You have probably seen me around town with tears streaming down my cheeks and eyes so bloodshot that it looks like I am leaving Las Vegas. And, if you haven’t seen me, then I am sure you have heard me. Every two minutes or so, I hold a soggy handkerchief to my raw and bleeding nostrils, and I let loose a trumpeting schnoz-blast that can be heard everywhere within a mile and half radius.
Yet, spring is also the season in which I thank my lucky stars that I have hit the jackpot of human existence. For, I live in a time and place with readily available access to early, preventative, orthodontic treatment (yay, no overbite!), hot water on demand (yay, morning shower!), and, best of all, Claritin. Nectar of the gods, giver of life, stopper of the cross country relay race that is my nose, thank you. I don’t know if life would be worth living if I had to face the full horror of my allergies without the aid of pharmaceuticals. I know it’s just “hay fever,” but have you ever thought about what those trees are actually trying to do to the insides of our noses? Just think about this: according to my official scientific sources, pollination is “the transfer of pollen from a male reproductive structure to a female reproductive structure.” All of those male trees out there, the ones planted and maintained by our friendly public works department, they are trying to reproduce! Inside of my head! No wonder my body flips out and gets all oozy and runny and sneezy and agitated. It’s working as hard as it can to repel the unwanted advances of overbearing, perverted, trees.

2006-05-21T22:16:00.000-07:00

Public Spaces

The other week I was walking past the library in Monrovia with my family, Neo-Norman Rockwell style. I was pushing the stroller, but my daughter wasn’t in it. She was running ahead and then running back. I was holding hands with my wife. The sun was out, but there was a nice breeze. Bluebirds were singing. Firemen were playing cards or napping in the station, waiting for a call to rescue a kitten from a well maintained tree. If I could whistle, I would have been. Get the picture?
OK, so public spaces; parks mostly, but also downtown benches, bus stops… where else? Any place outside of the gated compound with its razor wire and crew of 401kd security guards… The problem with these places is that you don’t really get a say in who else occupies them.
Like, for example, you may be walking along with your family, zipadeedoodah, when next thing you know four kids from the continuation school are stepping up on three kids who sort of used to go there, and then they are throwing punches and rocks, and one of them grabs another one’s bike and rides off, and they’re all expressing themselves in language that is at least PG-13. So then you run over and grab your daughter and march straight over to the police station to call the red phone in the lobby and tattle. This is still Mayberry, after all.
Now, I am not going to come out here as being opposed to all rumbles in the park. I am as big a fan of S.E. Hinton as the next guy, and I realize that the Socs and the Outsiders need to have some way of settling their differences, of deciding who sits where in the cafeteria and who controls the cold drinking fountain. But, I do propose that we implement a more rigid schedule for park use. When rumbles overlap with happy family walks, I think we can all agree that there is a problem. Dog training, hangover recovery, sleeping while homeless, riding the swings, taking part in role playing games, patriotic music concert attendance, frisbeeing, tai chi, happy family walking, and rumbling are not all compatible activities. I think we should get together and talk about who gets the park when. It doesn’t seem to me that we should have too much trouble dividing the day into reasonable sections that will satisfy all of our diverse public space use needs. We’ll have a convention! But where should we meet? Maybe we could get together at Library Park.

2006-04-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

Laughlin

For some reason I had it in my head that Laughlin, Nevada was a real city with, I don’t know, houses and grocery stores and outdoor swing sets. This was before I traveled there last weekend and found it to be a row of ten casinos in the Mojave (that’s Mohave, if you speak Arizonan) Desert. It’s the place where Don Laughlin showed up with his Minnesota farm work ethic, a bunch of slot machines, and a strong, ardent, and abiding desire for your money. Back in 1966 (this is according to the official Don Laughlin biography printed on almost every single disposable paper surface in the Riverside Resort; napkins, placemats, coasters… not the toilet paper, though) it was nothing more than a desolate stretch of Colorado River bank, baked and brown, in the middle of nowhere. My how it’s changed.
I have nothing new or original to report on the over-the-top Nevada gambling aesthetic with its seizure inducing lights and four dimensional carpet patterns. Nor can I reasonably complain about the astonishing amount of money raked in by these establishments, or ponder the surprising variety of people from whom the money is raked… none of this is breaking news, but holy smokes, have you seen these people? Have you seen these places?
So there I was in downtown Laughlin, NV (Don only named the city after himself after receiving inexorable pressure from the post office.… He is quite humble, you see. Did I mention that he enjoys piloting his helicopter and taking part in competitive ballroom dancing?) with 30 dollars (cash!) and a perfect system for the roulette table. One small problem. The system didn’t work, and my 30 dollars, which could have bought two goats for a farmer in Kenya or could have helped my alma mater meet its class of 1999 alumni fund raising participation goal, was gone faster than you can say, “Hey that old man is smoking a cigarette and pushing an oxygen tank at the same time.” I was at the roulette table just long enough to get one single free drink (if you are one of my students it was NOT a stinky Don Laughlin Special Riverside Brew Light Beer, it was a Dr. Pepper).
OK, so two words about losing money. It sucks. And losing at gambling, I realized, belongs in a whole separate category than losing at normal things like scrabble and street races in your tricked out Honda. See, they are not just using those pretty little chips to keep track of the score. It’s not hypothetical matchstick gambling with your dad. It’s real! They actually keep the money. It leaves your possession. You already knew this.
But, you feel way worse than you would if you just misplaced the 30 dollars. Strangely enough, it’s the score keeping aspect that is most painful, in a sort of cosmic way. Once you are down against the universe (or something), the only remedy is to put more money on the table to try to at least get even, reestablish balance, get your stinking 30 bucks back from Don Laughlin. I didn’t even try, though. I am just going to attempt to come to terms with the fact that I’ll be in the red against the universe (and Don Laughlin) for the rest of my life. I spent the rest of my time playing a change machine I found in the corner; five dollars in, 20 quarters out. At least I was breaking even. They stopped serving me the free drinks, though.

2006-04-14T15:23:00.000-07:00

My Spleen

Right now I can’t really put any weight on my left leg, and my spleen (I think it’s my spleen… maybe a kidney?) feels achy, like I was punched or elbowed or something. I probably was. I can’t remember.
Before you jump to conclusions, let me assure you that I have not been taking part in the official San Gabriel Valley Fight Club. I did, though, drive to Rancho Cucamonga today, and when I got there, I played a game of soccer. The funny thing about playing a game of soccer is that while you are doing it, all kinds of crazy traumatic things happen to your body that in another context would be cause for serious concern, and even, legal action. Like today, I kicked a guy in the leg so hard (it was an accident, I promise) that he had to lie down on the grass and weep (or at least pretend to weep until the referee came over and showed me a fancy yellow card and wrote me down in his little book). What if I did that outside of a movie theater or waiting in line to buy a Boba drink? I’d probably be arrested. But on the fields of grass outside of the Quake’s Stadium such attacks are perfectly (or at least relatively) acceptable. And you don’t even really remember how any of it happens. You have to wait until you try to climb out of your car before you realize, ah, somebody elbowed me in my spleen/ kidney, or ooh, someone’s knee impacted my thigh with great velocity.
But, what concerns me more than the nice purple bruise on my leg, is the fact that I am unable to take a deep breath without coughing. And, that’s not even thanks to the jabs and blows of my fellow amateur athletes; it’s because of the fine (and I do mean fine) bits of particulate matter that help comprise the air we breathe here up against the San Gabriel Mountains.
I’ve stopped worrying about bird flu. Now I am staying awake at night thinking about this new EPA study that came out. You probably heard about it. It says that Californians are breathing some of the most toxic air in the US, and that people living in Los Angeles County are exposed to a cancer risk that is about twice the national average. So even after I soak in my bath tonight, I am still going to have all of these unpronounceable chemicals (benzene, butadiene, ethylene bromide, tetrachloroethylene, tetrachloroethane, acetaldehyde, naphthalene) in my body just because I went outside and breathed a lot (a lot!).
According to the EPA, one in every 15,000 Californians is at risk of contracting cancer from breathing our air over the course of his or her lifetime. But wait, good reader! According to my calculations, of the twelve people who read this column, only 0.00073 will go to their final rest because of air pollution. So spread the word; local weekly newspapers prevent cancer.

2006-03-29T22:03:00.000-08:00

Bird Flu

From deep within the bowels of an asbestos floor-tiled building in Downey, one with storage closets full of mimeograph machines and mop handles (I made that up), the County of Los Angeles Department of Health Services Veterinary Public Health – Rabies Control Program (good luck fitting that on a business card… when you visit, they probably have to give you two or three) has issued an edict: “Backyard Bird Owners Beware the Bird Flu” (It’s an alliterative group, that CLADHSVPHRCP).
Dated February 2006, this is a document that explains that the bird flu is a virus that makes birds sick, that there are many types of bird flu, that most types of bird flu don’t infect people, but that because of Asian H5N1 we are all going to die. Wait, it doesn’t say that exactly. It does say, though, that if the virus mutates and becomes contagious between people, “billions (!!) of people could catch this disease around the world.”
And, what does this have to do with backyard bird owners and their families, you may wonder? Well, CLADHSVPHRCP addresses this very question. “Backyard bird owners live close to their birds, and handle them often,” they tell us. “They have more physical contact with the feces, blood, feathers, secretions, and tissues of their birds than do workers at poultry farms” (who actually know what they are doing)… “If their backyard birds get infected with bird flu, the bird owners and their families may also get sick.”
Now, please, if you will, step over to this window and take a look at my backyard. That one right there is named Sophie. She lays greenish blue eggs and seems to be pretty smart and sensitive for a chicken. The other one over there is Peep. She used to live in Santa Monica. We didn’t name her. These are the chickens that will get sneezed on by some house sparrow that is carrying H5N1. Then, they will pass it on to me through their feces, a feather or a secretion (ew, I hope it’s a feather), so it can mutate in my body before I grade your kid’s homework at Clifton Middle School with a contaminated pen, and the next thing we know it’s London 1650.
So, that’s the good news, just in case you didn’t have something to think about at two a.m.

Rainforest Adventure

2006-03-19T22:12:00.000-08:00

My favorite artifact that I brought back from my friends’ wedding in Panama last weekend is a certificate that documents my participation in a “Gamboa Rainforest Adventure.” Our guide, Ana, wrote my name on it while we were all riding back to the Complejo Principal del Resort (that’s Panamanian for “Resort Main Building”) in an open air tour bus/ tram with wooden seats. Since we were in motion my name is a little bit squiggly, but that makes it more authentic, right?
I earned this certificate by spending 35 American dollars (which happen to be exactly the same as Panamanian dollars) to catch an open air tour bus/ tram to the Estación Principal del Telefércio (that’s the Aerial Tram Main Station), where four of my friends and I were to catch the Telefércio for the “Canopy Tour.” This was to be an hour and a half trip, so we were reminded to use the restrooms before embarking for the Torre de Observación (Tower of Observation) in the heart of the Panamanian rainforest. Hydration had been a priority of mine in the preceding 12 or so hours, so I made sure to empty my bladder. Plus, I was pretty excited, having just witnessed my first authentic specimen of Panamanian rainforest wildlife, a blue butterfly that had skirted the deck of the aerial tram station before disappearing around the corner of the building. Ana, already earning her keep, had informed us that it was …are you ready? …a Blue Morpho. So, after I flushed and washed my hands in the rainforest restrooms, I was set.
We all entered the green aerial tram vehicle. I am in an ongoing debate about what such a vehicle is properly called. I think I’ll go with “gondola” here, but if you have other suggestions, I will happily entertain them. I got the front seat of the gondola. I had my brochure map of the Gamboa Rainforest Resort, which I‘d obtained at the front desk of the Complejo Principal del Resort (Resort Main Building, remember?). This map has (in addition to the actual locations of the tennis courts, jogging path, and full service marina) pictures and fanciful locations of many different species of rainforest wildlife. There are toucans, tree sloths, turtles, alligator-looking-things, a black and white checked frog, a snake, orchids, parakeets, black monkeys with white faces, and white monkeys with black faces supposedly available for tourist ogling at various locations throughout the resort. But, now that I look more carefully at my map, I notice that none of the hypothetical flora/ fauna locations correspond with the route of the aerial tram. Instead, I learned, on the 35 dollar canopy tour, you get a Blue Morpho, the sound of a beetle that brings to mind far off Pacific Northwestern National Forest clear cutting, and a slow, soothing ride through every broad-leafed palm-like houseplant known to humankind. Maybe floating along forty feet above the ground at 12 miles per hour isn’t actually the best way to experience the rainforest. Don’t get me wrong. I am not complaining. You get a nice certificate with your name on it.

2006-03-03T20:17:00.000-08:00

Field Guide

I have in my possession a Kaufman Field Guide to the Birds of North America. This is a book that took an unimaginable number of person-hours to produce. It has more than 2,000 images digitally edited by Kenn Kaufman himself, which are based on photos taken by more than 80 photographers. This book includes information on migration patterns and bird calls (FYI the voice of the Bald Eagle is a “rather weak, harsh chatter”). It can help you distinguish between a Hermit Thrush, a Veery, and a Swainson’s thrush, all seven-inch-long brown birds that you can’t even see in real life anyway.
And, if you take into account factors like the number of hours he spent pursuing advanced degrees in ornithology, developing film, and tracking the Canyon Wren through the arroyos of the west, it becomes clear that the author of this book hoped that it would be used for much, much more than the humble purposes for which I have employed it; namely, squinting at the mini flock in front of my garage for forty minutes before making a positive identification of… a… bunch of… House Sparrows.
I am pathetic. I don’t need this book, the result of years of scholarly and naturalist endeavor. I need the pathetic San Gabriel Valley neighborhood edition. It would have, like, four birds in it. They would be: 1) The vacant-eyed Mourning Doves that just stare up at you from the sidewalk. Fly bird! Can’t you see I’m a predator? I have binocular vision and sharp teeth; act scared! 2) The Crows dropping acorns in my street and on my car. 3) The ever-elusive, difficult to identify Monrovia Backyard House Sparrow, and 4) Those Parrots. They wake me up on the weekend. They eat all of the apples from my tree. They frighten children and intimidate joggers. And I’m pretty sure they are responsible for the graffiti that is showing up everywhere all of the sudden.
That’s the field guide I need. Because, I know that somewhere in the wilderness, Kenn Kaufmann is cringing every time I see a woodpecker with a red head, and go, “ooh, a woodpecker with a red head. I wonder what kind of bird that is.” Then I flip through my field guide, through the Nighthawks, and Kingfishers, and Trogons until I find the bird I am looking for.
It’s a Red Headed Woodpecker.