I’ll never forget those long, hot afternoons of my adolescence, huddled with you in the college library, dripping sweat onto overdue term papers, struggling to find words that could compare to yours (but stopping before things got out of hand and I lost a letter grade due to plagiarism.) World Book, Encyclopedia Americana, they just didn’t compare. They didn’t have the heft, the smooth pages bound so seductively in leather and gold, the splashes of tropical color in the sections on Argentina, on Birds, on Cheese. Studying without you has never been the same.
A few days in Fort Lauderdale would have made all the difference.
There’s something jarring about looking around on a beautiful Spring day and seeing teenagers roaming the sunlit streets in Goth gear. Even after all this time, the black clothes, eyeliner, and prison-white skin all seem better suited to overcast skies and dim, windowless indoor spaces than balmy breezes and tulips. I have no particular issue with the look — I was in high school in the 1970’s, so I have much to answer for myself, as far as teen fashion goes — but I wonder if many of these kids realize where the whole thing started.
Sweet Peas, Lathyrus odoratus, from last year’s garden.
I’ve started soaking Sweet Pea (Lathyrus odoratus) seeds that I saved from last year’s garden, in preparation for planting in this year’s flower beds.
The seeds are hard and dry after a winter spent in a zip-lok bag in the crisper drawer of my refrigerator, and a day or two in warm water will increase the likelihood of germination. I’ve built a sort of bamboo trellis that will support the vines when they begin to grow; I still have to come up with a system to protect them from the neighbor’s chickens, who dig relentlessly in any disturbed soil, without much concern for what I may have planted there.
“A man named Nasruddin was sentenced to die (for a crime we don’t have to go into here). Hauled up before the king, he was asked: ‘Is there any reason at all why I shouldn’t have your head off right now?’ To which he replied: ‘Oh, King! I am the greatest teacher in your kingdom, and it would surely be a waste to kill such a great teacher. My skills are so great that I could even teach your favorite horse to sing, if I had but a year to try.’ The king was amused, and said: ‘Very well then, you have one year, and if the horse isn’t singing a year from now, you will wish you had died today.’”
I’ve been hearing otherwise perfectly intelligent friends complaining about gas prices a lot lately; many of them are blaming the current president and his energy policies for the spike, echoing the comments of a number of conservative lawmakers. The consensus seems to be that regulation of the petroleum industry is the source of the problem: with fewer controls, and the freedom to drill wherever the oil may be found, the industry could meet our needs and keep prices down.
According to a neat little Power-Point presentation by the American Petroleum Institute, “…We have enough oil and natural gas resources to power 65 million cars for 60 years.”1
This certainly sound like something that should be taken into consideration when making policy decisions, since Americans are not going to be switching over to bicycles any time soon. “65 million cars for 60 years.” That’s a lot of cars, for a lot longer than I’ll be around. In 60 years, I’ll be dead, and probably most of the people I know will either be dead or no longer driving. A lot can happen in 60 years.
But there’s a problem: there are currently 250 million cars on the road in the US, not 65 million, almost four times as many as in the API statistic. Do the math, and that means we’re talking about not 60 years, but 15.
There’s something surreal about much of the discussion currently going on about fuel prices. Republicans seems to be convinced that making it easier and faster to move Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico and onto tankers to ship to China and India is somehow good for America.
Gasoline prices in parts of the Midwest have been artificially low for years because of a glut of oil at the Cushing, Oklahoma, transshipment point2, a situation which will never occur again if the Keystone Pipeline moves the oil directly from point to point.
What’s more, the idea that a company selling a product for $4 per gallon would voluntarily sell it for half that, especially when they can control supply simply by producing more or less oil, as they see fit, is just ridiculous. The US attempted to force prices down in the 1970s with artificial price controls, and we ended up waiting in lines at the pump — or doing without entirely — as producers simply cut back the amount of oil they were refining until the price went back up.
Fifteen years, and the gas would be gone. I fully expect to still be up and about in fifteen years. I have friends whose kids won’t even be out of college by then. Fifteen years, and then what?
One of the things the API objects to is the imposition of fuel taxes to fund the exploration and development of alternative sources of energy, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal generators. So let’s say we do what they suggest: no taxes, no fees, so support for alternatives, no limits to drilling.
Fifteen years from now, we will have finished off the domestic oil, and we will have no alternative energy sources in the pipeline. Will Exxon-Mobil then donate the money to build electric trains? Will BP be providing us with new raw materials for pharmaceuticals and plastics that are made from petroleum products? Will Shell take over the burden of guaranteeing oil supplies from places like Nigeria and Iran? It seems unlikely.
Am I having a problem with paying $4.00 per gallon at the pump? Sure. But I’d rather be paying four dollars now, than making my grocery trips to Fayetteville on foot when I’m 68.
High fuel prices encourage conservation, which extends the lifetime of the supply. High fuel taxes fund the research that will help us survive after the oil is gone. Limits on drilling not only protect ecosystems, but also ensure that some reserves will be just that: reserves, untapped until needed.
“Drill, baby, drill”. Isn’t that the mantra? But then what? What happens to our children and grandchildren then, when all that’s left behind is the hole? Maybe we’re just buying a little more time, but isn’t that worth something? Back to Nasruddin:
“When he returned to his cell, a fellow prisoner remonstrated with him: ‘What will you do now? You know you can’t teach that horse to sing, no matter how long you try.’ Nasruddin’s response: ‘I have a year now that I didn’t have before. A lot of things can happen in a year. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die.
When my destiny calls, I hope I’m somewhere where I can get a damn’ signal.
Today, March 10, is the anniversary of an achievement about which I have always had very mixed feelings: One hundred thirty-six years ago today, Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant, Thomas Watson, into his office by transmitting his voice through a pair of wires, and the telephone was born.
The temperature tonight is descending into the thirties. (Single digits, centigrade, for those of you who measure things that way.) After having fretted for weeks about the unusually warm winter we’ve enjoyed so far, this evening I feel the need to fret about the cold.
Nights like this I think back fondly on the ten years I lived in what is collectively referred to as South Florida: a few years in Hollywood, then a few more years in Fort Lauderdale. In that context, a cold winter meant wearing socks — and there, of course, I fretted about the absence of a traditional cycle of seasons.
No, really. Stop me. I keep drifting into politics in my posts, despite my best efforts. It’s as if this year’s Presidential election has created some kind of low spot in the universe, and I keep rolling downslope, no matter what direction I start out in.
Every day I sit down with the spark of an idea that I’d like to pursue, something that I hope will rise above politics, and I begin to type, and things look fine for a paragraph or two, and then gravity takes over and up pops Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich — there. Just like that, dammit.
Things can get lost in translation. Or sometimes added…
This afternoon I found myself looking for a specific historical reference to use in one of my incredibly erudite Facebook posts. (I forget what the topic was: I suppose it says something about me that I remember making the extra effort to sound really smart, but I don’t for the life of me remember what we were talking about, or why it was necessary to impress anybody.)
Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome shows a bearded man with two horns sticking out of his forehead. This was because by Michelangelo’s day the Old Testament had been translated and re-translated, and some inevitable confusion had crept in. The original Hebrew text had described rays of light coming out of Moses’ face, but in the process of translation the words used to describe Moses’ halo were misread as referring to horns. Eventually, scholars learned to rely less on the work of other scholars and to check these things for themselves, but by then the damage had been done.
Baby? Maybe women have not actually come all that far.
Rush Limbaugh’s bizarre tirade against Sandra Fluke generated headlines, but was not completely out of left field; his remarks seemed to reflect attitudes that are widespread, if not so explicitly stated, far beyond the walls of his radio studio.
Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum — and in somewhat less strident tones, Mitt Romney — keep telling us that we as a nation are going to hell in a handbasket, and that only God can help us, and that He will only do so if we allow organized religion to exert more overt control over such institutions as education and government. Many Americans are clinging to these statements as if they were — well, gospel. The facts, however, may confuse things a bit.
