A documentary project is in the works about one of my coolest college friends, Amy Van Meter.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Santa-Barbara-CA/The-Angriest-Unicorn/118583831515056?ref=sgm
Amy’s got pretty much the worst kind of MS that you can get, and this documentary is telling her story. You can support the film and buy swag at http://www.cafepress.com/amydoccie .
New song up: Implement of Destruction.
Hydrologists have a technical term they call “depression storage.” As it seems, it’s the volume of water in an area of interest held at any given time in recesses in the ground. Most people call it puddles. It’s an interesting case of jargon at its worst and best. At its worst, because it takes a simple concept and makes it more complicated, more opaque. At its best because it has an unintentional effect of describing the emotional state that many people have in dark and wet weather: storage of depression. One of language’s unexpected beauties. It’s the third of a series of rainy days here in New England. Remember that children in rubber boots encounter joy when they jump into depression storage.
Posted in Environment, Language, Water
Dan R. reminded me of the experiment a while back that the Washington Post arranged where world famous violinist Joshua Bell played his Stradivarius next to a subway escalator at rush hour in DC http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html .
My thoughts: Good one, Dan. Yes, I remember that article. I thought how in some ways, “quality” in the arts really is a social construct, depending to some extent on validation by others in the form of nice venues, favorable reviews, advance publicity, and simply giving ourselves permission to stop and observe and support what we like, rather than simply charging past to the subway, or thinking it’s somehow wasteful or a sign of weakness to give a busker a dollar rather than saving it for ourselves. Motivation to open up to artists that we like, whether they are selling tickets or simply opening an instrument case on the subway platform.
When was the last time that you supported an artist when Visa wasn’t a payment option? Myself, I can’t remember.
My friend John Haugland singing a song we wrote together: Singers Glen. I think of it as the love child of “Ashokan Farewell” and “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.”
Tagged civil war, mennonite, rockingham county, shenandoah, virginia, west virginia
U.S. EPA has recently published a long bibliography of key reference book titles:
Core List for an Environmental Reference Collection
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Office of Environmental Information
EPA 260-B-10-001, March 2010, 155 pp.
Table of Contents.
“A listing of information resources in the areas of environmental protection, management, and science as selected by librarians supporting the United States Environmental Protection Agency. […] Many of the entries include a brief description of the resource as well.”
To help librarians and other interested people quickly see if it would be of use to them, and to facilitate printing, here is a picture of the table of contents as it appears within the document. To find pages online, add three to the page numbers in this image of the table of contents.
Posted in Environment, Librarianship
–From the Vault– Environment, October 2007 and November 2007. A two part column on suburbia:
Part 1: Unsustainable Suburbia. “One-half of the U.S. population lives in suburbia, and the proportion is growing—by comparison, 30 percent live in cities, and 20 percent live in rural areas. Meanwhile, suburban land use, development, transportation, and consumption patterns foster a host of environmental ills. For example, the presence of impervious surfaces, such as concrete or asphalt, coupled with pollutants from lawns and automobiles, can change the composition….” (more)
Part 2: Seeking Solutions for Suburbia. “As suburban population grows, so does a complex constellation of environmental ills—and as last month’s column showed, many of these ills revolve around car travel. As a result, the most familiar efforts to solve them strive to make commutes and other drives less harmful to the environment. Public transportation is an obvious choice, but coverage and convenience leave much to be desired in many metro areas. A look at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s website….” (more)
Environment, March 2010 — “People who care about the environment should care about the news. The quality, quantity, and topics of information, analysis, and opinion from news providers influence what people do to the environment, who gets elected, and what laws get passed. Whether by choice or circumstance, people get their news from different media and on different platforms: print, TV, radio, the Web, mobile devices, and mixtures of all of these, each source having its own….” (more)
Posted in Environment, bytes of note
Tagged bytes of note, communication, Environment, internet, news, radio, social media, TV, video, web 2.0
Environment, January 2010 — “Design for sustainability is a confounding concept. On the one hand, there is much good information about how to make the products that we buy and use more environmentally friendly to produce, use, disassemble, and recycle. On the other hand, popular design, even of products specifically marketed to simplify our lives, is, in the end, about comfortable households consuming more—not exactly the embodiment of sustainability. Fortunately, there is an area of design practice that has a loftier goal: to meet the needs of the global poor….” (more)
Posted in Environment, bytes of note
Tagged design, development, poverty, sustainability
 | Ros on The Arts When Visa Isn’t… |
 | John Ferguson on Singers Glen |
 | Toby Kiser on Bytes of Note — Academic… |
 | Emily on Suburban Hymn |
 | geoclark on Music |
