Aesthetics of Everywhere

16: Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. He’s also won a number of other distinguished awards and recognitions, including the Tony Award. His 1971 play, Old Times, is running at the Shakespeare Theatre (Lansburgh Theatre) through July 3rd. Listen to the Radiolab podcast I linked to last week before you go – Karim Nader’s research into memory is relevant to the structure and dialogue of the play.

17: Meridian Hill is thus named because it lies on the exact longitude of the original DC milestone marker placed by Major Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker on April 15, 1791. In fair weather, Meridian Hill Park (also known as Malcolm X Park) is the gathering place of many DC residents on Sunday afternoons for a weekly outdoor drum circle. It was deemed a National Historic Landmark in 1994 as ”an outstanding accomplishment of early 20th-century Neoclassicist park design in the United States.”

And ever wonder why overheard cell-phone conversations are so much more annoying than conversations overheard in person?

18: Meat can be grown in labs for human consumption. This one turned into a full-fledged blog post, In Vitro-meat: More research, more questions.

19: I learned how to play cornhole. Two ‘cornhole boards’ are set up at a set distance from each other, and players take turns throwing beanbags, attempting to throw the beanbag through the hole on the board (3 points) or land the beanbag on the board itself (1 point). It’s played groups of two. First group to 21 points wins, but there’s something that I’m still not sure about with certain points being cancelled out: I think that happens when two players from opposite teams who are throwing from the same side make the same move (both land it on the board, or both get the beanbag through the hole). It’s a fun, casual game, though many get quite competitive about it and play in leagues. One of my coworkers even builds his own custom cornhole boards.

20: There are many difficulties associated with maintaining a saltwater tank, including risk of death (!) from zoanthids. People often buy live rocks for these marine aquariums, in which case you aren’t really sure what organisms you’re introducing into your saltwater environment… there are often ‘hitchhikers’ living on the rocks. There’s a story my roommate mentioned about a guy who tried to rid his tank of aiptasia (considered a pest in aquarium communities) by boiling the rocks. However, what he didn’t realize was that there were zoanthids on the rock, which released toxins into the water vapor he inhaled as the rocks boiled in his kitchen. In general, saltwater tanks are considered more challenging to keep than freshwater tanks, as they’re more expensive and time-consuming.

21: Pink Amazonian river dolphins (Inia geoffrensis) are the largest and most intelligent of the freshwater dolphin species, with a brain capacity 40% larger than ours. They start off as a greyish color and their skin becomes more translucent as they mature, giving them their characteristic pink coloration due to the presence of capillaries close to the surface of the skin. These dolphins have humps on their backs rather than dorsal fins, an unfused vertebrae in the neck that allows them to turn their heads around 180 degrees while feeding, and rely on their great eyesight and sonar to navigate through sometimes very murky river waters. They’re found mostly in the Orinoco River system of South America.

22: The Mississippi River transports a lot of important cargo, especially for the Midwest. A neighbor mentioned that she didn’t realize how important the river is for transporting goods in that region, having never lived there. I’m the same way – never lived in the Midwest, and I never really thought that rivers were still such an important shipping method. The majority of the cargoes are made up of grains from the Midwest and petrochemicals from the Gulf of Mexico. Recent flooding on the Mississippi caused a temporary halt in barge traffic and the effects rippled throughout the region, including lots of damage to homes and businesses.

Flood waters from the Mississippi River pour over a levee on the Yazoo River, a tributary to the Mississippi River, north of Vicksburg, Miss., May 13. Thousands of residents who live along or near the river from Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana have been forced to evacuate, and thousands of acres of prime farmland have been covered by the record-setting rising waters. (Chris Todd / EPA)

01: The Gerewol ritual performed by Niger’s Wodaabe people is a culturally sanctioned way of setting aside one’s marriage vows for a night. In the rare occurrence of a rain that brings temporary relief from drought conditions, the Wodaabe people come together to celebrate Gerewol. The men make up their faces with a variety of brightly-colored paints and perform an extended dance lasting around 5 hours for the female judges, who can choose a partner to take for the night – whether or not either of them are married. (From Human Planet: Deserts. Described here.)

02: Anaheim peppers are a mild pepper that look like a longer bell pepper. I hear it’s a good choice if you can’t handle the spicier kinds of pepper.

03: Greenfield economics describes building on new territory – on land that has no prior restraints or regulations, or previous land-use history. It’s the tactic of building big new homes (think suburban sprawl) rather than renovating old ones. Greenfields are usually found in suburban or rural areas, sites that haven’t been developed previously. Brownfield economics, on the other hand, is based on redevelopment of existing sites, which may be abandoned or have fallen into deterioration. There’s a great discussion on greenfield vs. brownfield economics in the comments section of this post.

04: The ovenbird is an adorable little brown-and-white warbler with a stripe across its head and stripes on its chest. With the help of a friend, we were able to identify this bird I saw in Franklin Park as an ovenbird. More on its name, via Wikipedia:

The nest, referred to as the “oven” (which gives the bird its name), is a domed structure placed on the ground, woven from vegetation, and containing a side entrance. Both parents feed the young birds. The placement of the nest on the ground makes predation by chipmunks (Tamias) a greater concern than for tree-nesting birds. Chipmunks have been known to burrow directly into the nest to eat the young birds.

05: Mitigation is a strategy used in court that aims to tell the defendant’s life story. Its use may be one of the factors in the decline of death sentences in the United States.

06: Pabst Blue Ribbon (or the beer whose name is often shortened to PBR) gave us the ‘six-pack.’ At the time, it was called the ‘Handy-Six.’ Marketing research showed that this was the maximum amount of weight a housewife would be willing to carry with her groceries. Watch the commercial for the Pabst Blue Ribbon Handy-Six here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyMEDCu2CgI

07: The Elks Club, officially dubbed ”The Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks,” is a society formed in 1868 in NYC to perform charitable acts. According to a friend who lives near one in DC, they’re also committed to drinking and loud parties which often upset the residents of the neighborhood (as with most fraternities, I guess).

08: In Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, there’s a postscript that talks about a tropical biodome habitat that’s become home to over a hundred albino crocodiles. The glasshouse in which they live is heated by a nuclear power plant that’s a few miles from the Chauvet caves in southern France. I need some verification that this exists, however – the only references to it that I can find online point to this same film.

Going through old emails is a fun jaunt into the past. You never realize quite how much you’ve grown until you’re looking back several years in your inbox.

I dug up a few emails from July/August 2006, when I took a trip to Switzerland with one of my best friends to visit her aunt’s family, who lives in St. Gallen. Comments and excerpts, for nostalgia’s sake:

• The first day we arrived in Switzerland was the first time I tried grappa, a strong Italian drink.
• I noted that the calcium levels in the tap water were very high: “…so it’s good for you, but showers hurt if the levels go unchecked.”
• One of the main things I noted was how much environmental consciousness informed all aspects of daily living:
• Bike lanes are ubiquitous because they discourage driving if you can bike instead. Example: At the train stations, the bike parking area is much closer to the platforms than the car parking spots are.
• Trash bags cost 15 francs (at the time) for 10 bags. This works out to about one US dollar per trash bag, and the only way your trash will be collected is if you use these special bags that are specific to the area you live in. The money you pay for the trash bags covers some of the local government’s cost to pay for the maintenance workers and trash servicemen. People default to recycling if at all possible – it’s just too pricey to throw a lot of garbage out in Switzerland.
• We were told it was typical that most houses aren’t air-conditioned. I wonder if that’s still the case now, or whether it’s changing. It’s also not common to have a refrigerator in a Swiss household; my friend’s aunt had to special order theirs (she grew up in the United States and was used to having a fridge in the kitchen). I found out that fresh eggs don’t need to be kept refrigerated, like we see in most US grocery stores.
• “Beautiful mountains.” (You know I’m a fan.)
• Huge drug problems among the teenagers there. Some public restrooms have blue lighting installed, so that intravenous drug users can’t find their veins to shoot up.
• While in St. Gallen, we slept with the windows open and breakfasted on the terrace. Such idyllic days.
• “The cheese is wonderful, and the Swiss are very proud of their cows, so you see cows wandering everywhere, even across roads. They are sweet and wear cute bells.”

Cows allowed to wander. After I returned from the trip, I summed it up this way: “It was amazing and refreshing and I ate tons of delicious food and took many photos (all while missing the DC heat wave).”

09: Seed bombing is about spreading seeds in inaccessible or otherwise unreachable areas through a variety of methods, which you can read more about here. Employ at your own discretion.

10: Followed continuing politics in the Ivory Coast. Laurent Gbagbo, who was president of the Ivory Coast for a decade and democratically voted out of power in a November 2010 election against opponent Alassane Ouattara, was holed up in a bunker and refused to step aside, causing forces on either side to resort to bloodshed… with severe consequences to citizens in these areas, as there were many civilian casualties from the bombing, the rapes, and the village-burning.

11: Did my taxes. Not too much else other than work and taxes.

12: The Rashomon effect describes the situation in which a group of people come together but the individuals leave with different perceptions of what has passed (which are, in a sense, all “true”). In Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, several versions of an afternoon’s events are recounted as they were experienced by these individual subjectivities – yet reality can, and often is, broken up into single truths that can’t quite be repaired into a coherent whole.

13: Certain cities – including LA, DC, Sausolito (California), and SLC – have implemented some combination of low-power sensor systems in the road or special ‘smart’ meters which can communicate which parking spots are open, take NFC payments, alert traffic police about violations, or even help drivers find where there’s open parking using smartphone apps. One example of a company who runs this kind of technology is Streetline.

14: DC’s Metrorail system opened for operation on March 27, 1976. Then, it consisted of 5 stops along the Red line: Farragut North, Metro Center, Judiciary Square, Union Station, and Rhode Island Ave. The planning stage for the Metro started much earlier, however – in the 1950s. Construction began in 1969. See an animated history of DC’s Metro system on Greater Greater Washington: http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9831/happy-birthday-metro/ It’s come quite a long way!

15: camelCase uses median capitals to join multiple words together, and although it feels a little outmoded, it’s still very much alive. Example include: iPhone, WordPress, PayPal.

History of gender-specific colors in America, or why baby girls are expected to be dressed in pink and boys in blue: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html (Not what you might expect!)

16: Crocodiles have some of the most sophisticated hearts in the animal kingdom, four-chambered hearts well adapted for their survival. For example, there’s a valve in the heart that blocks off the pulmonary system (which pumps blood to the lungs, the system they don’t need operating underwater) as the croc dives into the water, allowing them to be more active for longer periods of time in the water as their energy is better spent on systemic circulation of blood. There’s a pretty cool documentary by National Geographic called ‘Ultimate Crocodile’ which goes into a lot of the specifics of crocodilian anatomy.

Things that gradually become just a part of the landscape: storks’ nests, date palms, mules draped with colorful carpets, the desert, narrow mountain roads, Imazighen men sitting outside with mint tea watching the motions of the world and its people, olive trees, clay walls, Coca Cola with Arabic labels, musharabi windows.

Back in the States now, and things like toilet paper in public restrooms and orderly queues seem like downright luxuries. You’d need a lot of vigor to live as a foreigner in Egypt.

While we were in Dahab, a group of us decided to take an overnight hike up Mount Sinai. This is the mountain where, in Biblical tradition, Moses received from God the Ten Commandments. However, the exact location of the event remains disputed.

The goal was to make it up in time to watch the sunrise from the peak of the mountain. We took a bus from Dahab to the base of the mountain, arriving around 1am. The hike itself takes about 3 hours and the peak’s elevation is 7,497 feet. We took the shallower main route up with a Bedouin guide and many other hikers armed with flashlights, but were wholly unprepared for the cold at the top (hey, we were just a bunch of a friends who planned on spending a few days on the Sinai coast).

Sunrise was very welcome after the dark trek up.

On the descent, we opted to take the alternative route which leads you down the gorge behind the Monastery of Saint Catherine. It is steeper, so I can imagine it would not have been safe to take at night – especially since we only had one flashlight for the our group. Not as many people were on this path. Beautiful.

Beat the heat. Whew, anyone who has spent their summers in DC knows why most people opt to leave the city at the first opportunity (and every long weekend). The humidity plus the heat combine to form a formidable force. Ha.
All I want to do is go swimming, drink iced tea.

Some outside reading on water: the environmental impact of bottled water. Better: filter your water and bottle it yourself in reusable bottles.

Amongst the many actions Beijing is taking to prepare for the Olympics is the removal of dog meat from restaurant menus. Yeah, because eating dog meat is so much different than eating, say, cow or pig meat.
I’m also interested in seeing how effective the car ban during the Olympics will be in bringing down pollution levels. The Beijing government has posted a notice stating that beginning July 20th (and lasting for two months), cars with odd- or even-numbered plates will not be allowed on the roads on alternate days.
Haile Gebrselassie, an Ethiopian distance runner with asthma, has already announced he will not be traveling to Beijing for this year’s Games. Other athletes have plans to fly in solely for their competition because they do not want to submit their bodies to the poor air quality any more than is necessary, rather than staying for the duration of the Olympics. I really don’t blame them. When I visited Beijing this past winter, nothing was more clear than how unprepared they are to host this year’s Olympic Games. The city always looked like it was under a dense layer of fog (really smoke – it was depressing), and breathing was difficult even for day-to-day activities. That level of air pollution isn’t something you can solve in a few months.

A bit of light reading for you this morning:
Restaurant critic Jay Rayner goes vegan for a week.

It’s entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously (militant vegans, he may piss you off). Rayner writes very humorously and provides good perspective on what a vegan diet appears like to those out of the loop, including the frustration of hidden animal ingredients and the difficulties encountered when dining out.

Also, a photo website comparing what packaged foods actually look like, contrasted with how they appear on the box. Heh!

Reusable bags. A topic very close to my heart, because I spend so much time bagging groceries.

They aren’t limited to the handled bags sold at the grocery, your own backpack or canvas tote bag is as good. Even bringing back the “disposable” (okay, I detest this description but that’s another topic altogether) bags is better than getting new ones on every grocery trip. According to TreeHugger, the average plastic shopping bag is only used for 20 minutes and takes at least 500 years to degrade.

Do not get discouraged and believe that your action will get lost in the world of overconsumption. There is a growing movement towards greening one’s lifestyle. In the past few years – okay, even just in the past several months! – I have noticed more grocery stores selling reusable bags and offering incentives for using them, usually something like 5 cents taken off the bill. They cost about a dollar each, so if you use them regularly they pay for themselves. Reusable grocery bags are now available in most mainstream supermarkets such as Giant, Safeway, and Harris Teeter. It works for them because it saves some money and gets them free advertising, too.

Working in a grocery store, I see that every week more people start reusing bags. It’s really a snowball effect here. The more people bringing along their bags, the more visible this option becomes, and the more it becomes the norm. I actually get customers stepping up to my register with their food and apologizing for forgetting their shopping bag. The guilt isn’t necessary, but it’s definitely positive that bringing one’s bag is more expected.
We go through so many paper/plastic bags each day, it is unbelievable. So every person who brings their bags is helping. Hey, it’s not the end-all and be-all, but it is a simple change to make. Because remember this: reduce and reuse before recycling! Just a note from your friendly grocery store worker.