Steven Marx » 2006

October, 2006 Archive

Betrayed by NPR

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

To All Things Considered
Your story on the controversy about the ballot intiative on the shopping center in San Luis Obispo California (All Things Considered October 27) was sadly underresearched. The angle on the story came straight out of a feature in the L.A. Times a few weeks ago that emphasized butterfly viewing”one of the trivial trinkets promised by the developer’s public relations firm. It ignored the serious negative consequences of the proposed development that have been clearly delineated in the ballot arguments, the impartial analysis and public opposition by the Council of Local Governments, the Arroyo Grande City Council, and dozens of public officials. Shame on your reporter for not even reading the opposition website (http://nomeasurej.org) that would have made the important issues of traffic impacts and infrastructure financing obvious, and instead producing a puff piece for the developer.

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LA Community Colleges to produce solar energy

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

LA Community Colleges go solar. Los Angeles community college officials have announced a plan to take campuses “off the grid” by having each school generate its own electricity.

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Being and Nothingness

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Monday night, on a whim I decided to make a campfire in the backyard to burn pieces of a broken lawn chair and barbecue chicken and vegetables. We’d picked up our grandson at preschool as usual and kept him till his dad came by to take him home after a long day at work installing fire sprinklers. I invited him to stay for dinner.

We chattered while cooking the meal on hand grills in the warm light of one of the last evenings of daylight-saving time. After hearing about how he almost came to blows with a fellow worker who had punctured his 64 oz bottle of Mountain Dew, Jan asked how his aunt was doing now that she’d moved down south.

“Not too well,” he said. “She’s not getting along with her relatives.”
“She wasn’t happy here either,” said Jan.
“Life’s what you make of it,” replied my ex-son-in law.

Spoken by him, that tired old proverb took on depth. Our fractured and happily reconstituted family was testimony. It struck me that this was a more direct way of saying what seemed terminally hip during my adolescent days in Greenwich Village: “existence precedes essence.”

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Bill McKibben

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

How Close to Catastrophe? An upcoming piece in the New York Review by Bill McKibben. Cutting edge on Global Warming.

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wealth distribution

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

Who Rules America? In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2001, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 51%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).

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google goes solar

Saturday, October 21st, 2006

Google goes Solar This project will be the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S. … The amount of electricity that will be generated is equivalent to powering about 1,000 average California homes.

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Proverb

Saturday, October 21st, 2006

It’s as hard
To control your children
As your parents,
But harder yet
To control yourself.

Jan Howell Marx

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Welcome

Friday, October 20th, 2006

One day and inches from this world
A presence greater
Than all things real
Yet tentative, unknown.
Boy or girl
Will it survive the passage?

Swelling incertitude burst
By the ringing phone
And grandmother’s cry:
“He’s here, born 8:05
Abel Henry Marx.”

Expired questions
Your life the answer
And to what new questions
Now that waiting is over?

August 23 2006

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2006 Yom Kippur Fast at Sycamore Glen

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

October 1 2006 7:30 p.m.

Inside tent after a clumsy pitch in the early dark, flashlight hanging from a loop in the roof. The first time in dozens of overnights on Cal Poly Land I’ve brought a tent. Only a light rain, but enough to warrant it.

Left home on my bike at 5:30 to get settled by the sunset start of the holiday. Headed for the high ground and a view. But the overcast created a sense of quiet that made me want to stop and listen rather than look.

I parked the bike at the trail leading to Sycamore Glen. Normally dry this time of year, the creekbed was full of watercress and yellow monkeyflower, so wet I couldnt cross without getting muddy boots. My usual trail was overgrown this time, but I found a new one made by horses higher on the bank. The sycamore leaves were black green, thick, a foot across.

I walked slow and wide-eyed, ready for surprises. At the end of the little canyon leading to the Glen, I heard the plash of flowing water. There was the source: a broken steel pipe. On another visit I’d found a slump in the hillside grown over with rushes, and above it a break in this pipe where a plastic coupling had come undone. I’d repaired that and wondered how the landscape might change as a result. In the waning light of this afternoon I sauntered up the Glen and saw that the former little wetland had turned to dry grass.