Lettuce prey.
My lettuce experiment didn't go well. (It took me a while to get around to doing it, since I kept forgetting about my plans to experiment whenever I went grocery shopping.) I bought two heads of green leaf lettuce, put one on the fridge in the usual plastic produce bag and set the other upright in an old Earth Balance container filled with water. I left the latter on my kitchen counter. It wasn't more than few hours before one of the leaves had wilted and flopped over. I then tried putting it in the refrigerator to see if that would help, but it only slightly slowed the wilting.
I had had plans to photograph the day-by-day results of the experiment, but I scrapped that plan as soon as I saw how quickly my lettuce wilted. I'm just going to continue storing my lettuce like I always have. Fortunately, a wilted leaf of lettuce doesn't taste bad if it's just being slapped inside a veggie burger. Unfortunately, I can only eat so many veggie burgers before wanting to eat something less processed.
I spent several hours yesterday in the north part of Tucson, helping Gabe and Naz with a moving sale. When another friend of theirs showed up to help out, and I thought there might be too many of us there, but it worked out really well. Gabe acted as a cashier, Naz talked to people who asked about prices, and the other two of us helped load larger items and brought more items out as things sold. It worked beautifully. The morning was busy, but shortly after noon things let up, and we were able to sit down and have a somewhat random lunch of frozen foods they needed to use up before moving. I bought a few items while I was there, the best of which was a nice laptop bag that will be much better for traveling than the one I already had. It has better padding and more room for other things.
A week or two ago I thought that waiting to read greg_palast's new book would be made easier if I used one of his documentaries, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans, as a crutch of sorts. It was good, but angering, as I should have expected.
When Hurricane Katrina happened, I did my best to pay no attention to it. More importantly, I paid no attention to its aftermath. At least I tried not to pay attention, and for the most part, I succeeded. I was already too angry at the time. I caught enough about the Katrina story that I knew I shouldn't pay much attention. I was so full of rage about the war in Iraq that I didn't think I could follow the Katrina story without turning into the kind of moody, brooding person no one wants to be around.
Six years later, at a book sale, I bought a copy of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, and it brought Katrina to the present for me. I'd seen the book in bookstores, but I always thought the cover image was off-putting. It was an image of a man in a canoe. Somehow I missed that the canoe wasn't floating on a river. I missed that there were houses in the background, and it was floating through a neighborhood. The cover image made me think it was an outdoor adventure of some sort, the kind of book that might appeal to people who go camping at least four times a year and are known on a first-name basis by all of the staff members at the nearest REI. But at the book sale I took a closer look at the cover and then turned it over to read the back cover. I was holding the story of a Muslim immigrant caught in the post-Katrina disaster (whose last name serves as the title). Instantly, I decided it should be one of the next books I read. I could barely put Zeitoun down once I started reading it.
The anger I had deferred for half a decade was palpable as I read Zeitoun and then watched Big Easy to Big Empty. Here was a disaster made possible by the incompetence and negligence of private companies--in the oil and disaster "management" industries, among others--and once the disaster happened, more private companies used it as their opportunity for a coup. It was a bonanza for real estate developers and Neil Bush's software company Ignite! Learning, among others.
The evacuation plan for New Orleans was a farce. Those left behind were not only neglected, but many, like Abdulrahman Zeitoun, were punished by the same mercenary thugs who were profiting from the occupation of Iraq.
I'm sure many New Orleanians wish George W. Bush, the fly-over president, were spending his post-presidential retirement in an orange jump suit, eating mystery meat, instant mashed potatoes, and green beans that smell like ball sweat. Instead, he enjoys the afterglow in a cozy little white supremacist neighborhood in Texas. Membership in a dynasty has its privileges.
I had had plans to photograph the day-by-day results of the experiment, but I scrapped that plan as soon as I saw how quickly my lettuce wilted. I'm just going to continue storing my lettuce like I always have. Fortunately, a wilted leaf of lettuce doesn't taste bad if it's just being slapped inside a veggie burger. Unfortunately, I can only eat so many veggie burgers before wanting to eat something less processed.
I spent several hours yesterday in the north part of Tucson, helping Gabe and Naz with a moving sale. When another friend of theirs showed up to help out, and I thought there might be too many of us there, but it worked out really well. Gabe acted as a cashier, Naz talked to people who asked about prices, and the other two of us helped load larger items and brought more items out as things sold. It worked beautifully. The morning was busy, but shortly after noon things let up, and we were able to sit down and have a somewhat random lunch of frozen foods they needed to use up before moving. I bought a few items while I was there, the best of which was a nice laptop bag that will be much better for traveling than the one I already had. It has better padding and more room for other things.
A week or two ago I thought that waiting to read greg_palast's new book would be made easier if I used one of his documentaries, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans, as a crutch of sorts. It was good, but angering, as I should have expected.
When Hurricane Katrina happened, I did my best to pay no attention to it. More importantly, I paid no attention to its aftermath. At least I tried not to pay attention, and for the most part, I succeeded. I was already too angry at the time. I caught enough about the Katrina story that I knew I shouldn't pay much attention. I was so full of rage about the war in Iraq that I didn't think I could follow the Katrina story without turning into the kind of moody, brooding person no one wants to be around.
Six years later, at a book sale, I bought a copy of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, and it brought Katrina to the present for me. I'd seen the book in bookstores, but I always thought the cover image was off-putting. It was an image of a man in a canoe. Somehow I missed that the canoe wasn't floating on a river. I missed that there were houses in the background, and it was floating through a neighborhood. The cover image made me think it was an outdoor adventure of some sort, the kind of book that might appeal to people who go camping at least four times a year and are known on a first-name basis by all of the staff members at the nearest REI. But at the book sale I took a closer look at the cover and then turned it over to read the back cover. I was holding the story of a Muslim immigrant caught in the post-Katrina disaster (whose last name serves as the title). Instantly, I decided it should be one of the next books I read. I could barely put Zeitoun down once I started reading it.
The anger I had deferred for half a decade was palpable as I read Zeitoun and then watched Big Easy to Big Empty. Here was a disaster made possible by the incompetence and negligence of private companies--in the oil and disaster "management" industries, among others--and once the disaster happened, more private companies used it as their opportunity for a coup. It was a bonanza for real estate developers and Neil Bush's software company Ignite! Learning, among others.
The evacuation plan for New Orleans was a farce. Those left behind were not only neglected, but many, like Abdulrahman Zeitoun, were punished by the same mercenary thugs who were profiting from the occupation of Iraq.
I'm sure many New Orleanians wish George W. Bush, the fly-over president, were spending his post-presidential retirement in an orange jump suit, eating mystery meat, instant mashed potatoes, and green beans that smell like ball sweat. Instead, he enjoys the afterglow in a cozy little white supremacist neighborhood in Texas. Membership in a dynasty has its privileges.