The cats were obnoxious this morning. They still don't understand the schedule on Furlough Friday. Maybe they'll get it after a few more weeks. I certainly hope so, as it's tiring to be awakened at 4:00 A.M. So there will be not cute cat pictures this week. At least none of my cats.
I haven't done much commenting on the issue of health insurance reform, mostly because there's so much information and commentary out there that I'd just be one more voice in favor of single-payer (a system like Medicare where the government establishes pay rates for doctors, drugs, hospitals etc.), and health insurers bite the dust. Even if a single-payer system did nothing else, it would wipe out the 15-20% of health care dollars that go to administration and profit. Medicare is run far more efficiently; even Medicaid (which is means-tested) runs more efficiently. I'll shut up before I get going...
Everyone should watch Glenn Beck on Fox at least once. As an entertainer he leaves Bill O'Reilly in the dust. Outrageous, ignorant, just plain silly, but fun. His latest victim is Van Jones, in charge of green industry for the Obama Administration. I assume that he actually understands what Jones' work has been (developing green industries as a job source in minority communities and forcing the clean-up of toxics in those same communities), but in BeckWorld, Jones is a black nationalist and a commie! Huh?
And I have no idea why my Azalea Rutherfordia Alaska is blooming in August. The sage is supposed to bloom at this time of year.
This morning Emma decided to wake us up. She began by pulling on the cupboard doors--the ones that have kitty-proof latches to keep the cats from getting into the cupboard and playing with the toilet paper. (This activity appears to involve tearing it to ribbons.) Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. J closed her out of the bathroom. Then she got up on the bed and tried to wake J by nipping at him. She never nips at me; she doesn't care if I get up. J threw her out of the bedroom. They always look so innocent in pictures.
I don't shop at Whole Foods. I was in the Berkeley store once and the only thing I wanted was a pair of earrings at the jewelry counter. I've never been in the store again. It's not only the anti-union policies. It's that the basic strategy of the store is to sell overpriced stuff to stupid rich people. And it doesn't matter whether it's overpriced clothes or cars or vacations or food. Unlike farmers' markets or co-ops, Whole Foods doesn't worry about how we can provide food grown sustainably for the the world's population, but how they can make money selling it to the rich in industrialized countries. The Michael Pollan plan. Given the size of that population relative to the population of the world, that's not much sustainability.
What stuns me about the boycott of Whole Foods is that people didn't know what the corporate strategy was. Really, folks, they're based in Texas. And they hate unions and have devoted lots of time and energy to keeping unions out of their stores. But that hasn't really been all that difficult, as the target market is one that neither comprehends nor cares about the condition of the people who serve them. They're the people who want those who serve them to commend their purchases as they go through the checkout line, remind them that their shopping choices make them worthy of environmental gold stars. And that's what Whole Foods checkers are trained to do. It's part of the establishment of "community." But what kind of community doesn't care whether the checker can take her kid to the doctor or has to spend the day in the emergency room?
Maybe the Whole Foods "community" will learn from this experience--that the corporate interests have as little interest in them as they do in those who serve them.
Now that we have Furlough Friday, the cats have gotten confused. And when cats are confused, they seek help. Instead of patiently waiting for their humans to rise from bed, they remind them that it's past time to get up. And as time passes, it's not only time for the humans to get up, but also to open the doors to the back patio. Sunbeams are being wasted and bugs are flying about with impunity. We also think that Dash who, at 14 pounds, does not need it, breakfasts at home and then with the cats in the next yard over. But he's got to get there in time, or those cats will have eaten all their food.
A couple of years ago I was sitting--actually reclining--on the sofa with the TV remote in my hand. It was a Monday which, for those of you who know television, is a TV wasteland. (Yes, some days are worse than others.) Our limited basic cable service gave us access to the public service channels which, during the school year, broadcast classes from the local community colleges. Anyway, I found one of these classes, Cultural Anthropology and, for lack of other options, started watching. Within minutes, I was hooked. The professor was a really good lecturer--something that's very important on TV school. And the course was fascinating, particularly the historical stuff. (Yeah, I did major in history.) Not only did I get hooked on it, but I addicted J to it as well, and we took up eating dinner in the living room while watching class. (This enabled me to load the dishwasher during the break.) It was a lot better than the programs shown during the constant fundraising on our local public television station.
In addition to the anthropology, I learned a lot about teaching in the community college system. First, Sacramento has a diverse population, but the communities tend to be fairly segregated. Except in borderland areas, African-Americans live in one area, Latinos in another, Russians and Ukrainians in still another etc., so there's very little unconscious mixing. We have to travel a fair distance to get to a Russian bakery, for instance, and the Vietnamese sandwich place (best Vietnamese sandwiches I have ever eaten) is 25 minutes from our house on a good day. But school is where everyone meets up. And for a cultural anthropology class, that is joy. Because you can ask students to provide examples that illustrate points, expose cultural differences and similarities, without every having to turn to a reference work. Really fun.
And you learn how another diversity makes teaching at community colleges so difficult. The students have a wide range of skills and abilities, so that, as a friend of mine once said, "You have students who could be at Harvard and students where it's remedial 7th grade." And everything in between. Then, of course, there are the students who didn't bother to read the book. Teaching under those circumstances is very difficult, as you want to engage the students who are getting it, help those who are clearly struggling, and suggest that reading the book is a good idea. Not an easy task.
The next year I started searching for other classes. I found Statistics, which had bored me in college, and still bored me. I found Macroeconomics, which would have bored me had it not been for the fact that the session coincided with the financial meltdown last year. So I took up Macroeconomics and, while I did learn a few things, was more interested in the commentary on the financial meltdown. Like the anthro instructor, this one had a good sense of television teaching as a performance, and had charts and graphs and cartoons to illustrate his points. (Taking this class, though, really required that you have the text, as there was technical information that wasn't presented fully in the lectures. And I'd missed the first couple of sessions, so I didn't know what text he was using.)
Now I'm looking for new classes. There's art history, or astronomy, both of which I'd have to record for later viewing. But that's what VCRs are for.
First I've been surprised that various of the mainstream media have been noting that retail sales ain't going so good. Those of you who are regular readers of my blog (all five of you) will remember (if you pay attention, as two of the five do) that I first pointed out the problem with expecting all to be well when people headed back to the mall last year, in that people just didn't have any money to go shopping with and only had enough money during the bubble because of the bubble. Various observers have suggested new bubbles, but there doesn't seem to be a good candidate on the horizon. So our government and its corporate sponsors seem to be at a loss. Increasing wages, providing secure pensions, and actually reducing the cost of health care by reining in the profiteers, aren't on the table at this point, although they're likely the only policies that will actually work. So we may spend the next couple of years diddling around with any number of policies that don't work, and only with a new administration have any hope of working our way out of this mess.
I haven't written much about the garden this summer, and I'm not sure why. I've done a good deal of revision this year, tearing out the weak and non-performing, rearranging the survivors, and finishing out most of the front. Two of the cape mallows died, and were replaced by red fountain grass, which is a great performer here. (I cannot say the same of the green feather grass, which grows gangly and spreads so much that it may be invasive.) I added more agastache, as it grows well here and attracts all sorts of garden life. Our butterfly bushes seem to attract mostly the standard white butterflies, but we've seen a swallowtail several times, and one monarch! The lizards and the frogs are still in residence, but I don't see them very often.
The weather has ranged from almost comfortable to miserable. We've had a couple of long spells of temperatures in the 80s, which is tolerable here, punctuated by nasty stretches of 100+ degree days. We've only had a few days of smoke, as wildfire season didn't start in June this year. We got some smoke from the La Brea fire though--it's several hundred miles away! It all depends on how the wind blows. It's nothing though like last year, when the smoky haze hung near the ground for weeks, giving us some of the worst air quality in the country. (Public health officials recommended just staying inside.)
I don't have many new pictures. August isn't a month here for new flowers, as the spring-bloomers are long gone, and the fall bloomers haven't come in yet. How often can I expect anyone to be fascinated by yet another picture of my coneflowers? But I should have Tagetes lemonii and Japanese anenome soon, as well as some rebloom of plants that went dormant in the heat.
The cats were obnoxious this morning. They still don't understand the schedule on Furlough Friday. Maybe they'll get it after a few more weeks. I certainly hope so, as it's tiring to be awakened at 4:00 A.M. So there will be not cute cat pictures this week. At least none of my cats.
Everyone should watch Glenn Beck on Fox at least once. As an entertainer he leaves Bill O'Reilly in the dust. Outrageous, ignorant, just plain silly, but fun. His latest victim is Van Jones, in charge of green industry for the Obama Administration. I assume that he actually understands what Jones' work has been (developing green industries as a job source in minority communities and forcing the clean-up of toxics in those same communities), but in BeckWorld, Jones is a black nationalist and a commie! Huh?
