Dan Smith built a fence around the Mercedes 250 parked on the apartment property he manages in the congested Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. The vehicle bears the logo of the car-sharing company car2go. Smith says the car is parked illegally. 
Category: Random Thoughts
What doesn’t fit elsewhere
Monuments: South and West
“The devices and platforms that made Silicon Valley famous were created… by entrepreneurs who risked their investors’ capital, not their lives. It’s not really an underdog story…”
Some parts of the country, mostly in the South, are agonizing over monuments erected to honor and celebrate the Confederacy and its treasonous heroes. Some of that some are taking direct action, removing statues, most of which were put up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their purpose was to deliver a message to former slaves and their offspring that Reconstruction was over and Jim Crow ruled.
Meanwhile, out west, the San Jose City Council is pondering a proposal to install a monument in a city park celebrating the impact Silicon Valley has had on the world, if not on ethnic nor gender employment diversity. If the proposal passes an international competition will ensue for design of a suitably-grandiose sculpture.
The leader of the drive thinks $150 million is a reasonable amount for Silicon Valley’s monument to itself. Others are less than enthusiastic.
David Horsey, editorial cartoonist and political gadfly does not mince words:
“But the technological revolution has not been completely beneficial to civilized life. Hackers working for foreign powers threaten our security and democracy. Internet scammers and criminals steal our money and our identities. Social media distract us, mislead us and intensify outrage, division and extremism. Online pornography has opened a new frontier of misogyny and exploitation to any child who can log onto a computer.”
Some Good News about Bees
Marauding bees delayed for eighteen minutes the first pitch of a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the San Francisco Giants. It was a rare show of strength for the beleaguered insect whose population has been on a precipitous decline over the past several decades. We once feared ferocious killer bees invading from Mexico; now we fear that fewer bees threatens our food supply.
You may worry about the rising price of your Honey Nut Cheerios. You should be even more concerned about pollination. Remember your ninth-grade science? It’s how plants have sex: plant pollen is transferred from the male reproductive organs to the female reproductive organs to form seeds. Wind, animals and insects are the transfer agents. Bees may be the most important of the players in nature’s mènage á trois.
Bee pollination may be responsible for as much as 70% of food grown for humans, possibly 90% of the world’s nutrition.
Much study and speculation has gone into why fewer bees are at work. It could be the changing climate, or chemical fertilizers and pesticides. More recently, there is evidence that corporate monoculture – giant fields of a single crop appear to lessen bees’ interest in flitting from flower to flower. It seems that sexual boredom of bees is a danger to agricultural abundance.
Meanwhile in France, there was concern about the 180,000 bees living on the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral. The Cathedral’s staff shared the honey the hives produced. Shortly after the fire was extinguished, bees were observed flitting around the still-in-tact hives. It is not yet known if most of the bee population came through the conflagration unscathed, but early signs are encouraging.
Decompose or Recompose?
Perhaps you’re concerned about your own or someone else’s death – imminent or far in the future – and what its impact will be, whether environmental or financial. The state of Washington has addressed your concern. Senate Bill 5001, pithily titled “Concerning Human Remains,” is on the Governor’s desk awaiting his signature. (Governor Inslee is quite busy these days running for President, you know.) If signed, the new law allowing the “natural organic reduction” of dead human bodies will take effect May 1, 2020.
A simpler term is “composting.” Rather than putting a body filled with formaldehyde and other embalming chemicals into a non-biodegradable casket and burying it in a crowded cemetery, or releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by incinerating it, the new law will allow after-life remains to decompose on their own and become part of the earth.
The new word is “recomposition.” A new organization is ready. Katrina Spade is founder and CEO of the firm Recompose, whose main purpose is the natural returning of human bodies to the earth after death. She is an advocate of human composting and has worked with scientists studying natural decomposition, including real-death testing in North Carolina.
Of course, some find this appalling. Conservative Catholics ask What about the human soul? and condemn recomposition as another example of disrespect for human life, equating it with abortion and euthanasia.
Serving on Recompose’s board is Caitlin Doughty, owner of Undertaking LA, a non-traditional mortuary in southern California whose declared mission is “to allow families to reclaim their rightful control over the death and dying process, as well as care of the dead body.” She has also gained YouTube fame with her series “Ask a Mortician,” using humor and plain talk to address myriad death issues, from the cost of funeral services to death denial.
Throughout the history of humankind, one wonders what are the relative numbers of deceased who were naturally composted, whether left lying on a battlefield or bulldozed into a mass grave or swept away by a natural disaster.
Looming French-Fry Shortage
Late-winter storms blessed the Pacific Northwest with record snowpack this past winter after years of mostly below-normal snow. Everyone from skiers to gardeners is pleased; everyone, that is, except potato farmers in Idaho and eastern Washington and Oregon. The lingering winter weather has delayed the planting of this year’s crop. In normal years planting starts by the end of February; in 2019 the ground was not ready until April. Farmers are trying to get planting done in a month, a process normally taking two-and-a-half months.
Seventy percent of the nation’s French fries and hash browns and tater tots come from Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Northwest potato farmers did well last year, shipping much of a record crop to the rest of the U.S. as well as Canada and Europe where the harvests were poor.
Farmers have contracts with potato processors that give leverage to the processors. To keep up with French-fry demand, they can require the tubers be harvested before fully mature, thus reducing the yield – and the growers’ income – by thirty to forty percent.
Nothing like the Irish potato blight of the mid-nineteenth century when diseased crops – abetted by the United Kingdom’s refusal to interfere with God’s free-enterprise plan by providing aid – resulted in the deaths of more than a million Irish and the emigration of two-and-a-half-million more. So, if later this year, you’re paying more for your favorite pommes frite, remind yourself that it could be worse.
Jesus and the Easter Bunny
How did we go from the Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection to a bunny hiding eggs – chocolate or decorated – for the delight of children? You may not not recall any mention of it in the Gospels.
The two major Christian holidays coincidentally are observed on the change of seasons, times of celebration for much of humankind: Christmas at the winter solstice when the sun starts its return and Easter at the spring equinox, recognized from antiquity as a time of fertility. What follows may or may not be true.
Whence came the name “Easter?” It is thought to derive from a pagan figure known as Eostre who was celebrated as the goddess of fertility by the Saxons of Northern Europe. She was represented by that symbol of prolific breeding: a rabbit. There is, however no historical evidence for this.
Or maybe it’s because rabbits were thought to be hermaphrodites, able to reproduce without sex. Hence a connection with the Virgin Mary.
Eggs are an ancient symbol of new life and have been part of spring festivals for millennia.
Easter eggs are said to represent Jesus’s emergence from the tomb.
Eggs were considered forbidden during Lent. Christians decorated them to celebrate the end of fasting and ate them on Easter.
What is probably true is German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century brought with them stories of egg-laying(!) hares. Children made nests for the “Osterhase” to lay colored eggs. The Easter Bunny story expanded from there.
So honor the holiday that is the basis for Christianity but whose symbols have few documented origins and only the most tangential relation to Jesus Christ’s resurrection.