think you don't drive an SUV?

"A new study of how much greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere by the production of food shows that the difference between a meat-based and plant-based diet amounts to the same as driving an SUV versus a small sedan."

The Discovery Channel can claim this is late-breaking news, but the vegetarian community has always been aware of this.

Also of interest: birds can learn grammar better than your kid.

more parallel universality

Lawmakers arrested for a good cause? Maybe the world is getting better after all.

parallel universe

Elvo tells me that "meeting yourself" is a Flemish expression for a close call. When he first commented on it after braking at high speed on his bike, I thought he was describing some quantum mechanical phenomenon of travelling at a high enough velocity to meet yourself...

In a parallel universe?

I felt as if I'd been plopped down in one when I read that Bush is advocating alternatives to oil.

But maybe I've just been thinking too much about the next Trek revival.

chthonic ambiance

More quake celebrations are going on in SF, now at the Exploratorium, within a magnificent classical Roman complex built in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (photo to follow). A new exhibit at the museum where I attended my junior prom with my best friend Janice, contemplating neutrino tracks and blowing giant bubbles while dressed in ballgowns, allows you to hear sounds created by the movement of tectonic plates, although my quick skim of the article didn't reveal how the sound is reproduced. Chthonically cool.

420

Europe: The perfect place to celebrate 420. More stoner cartoons.

By the way, take me to Raleigh's on Telegraph.

deep thought

"A man is what he thinks about all day long."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mr. Emerson...?

One small but fun aspect of living in Europe is that packages come labeled in at least half a dozen different languages. Today I noticed a funny Finnish word: Imukykyvaihtoehdot. Don't ask where it's from.

Okay, a tampon box.

Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Great Quake of '06 (1906 in San Francisco, that is), marking the event with a study finding that the same quake today "would cause 1,800 to 3,400 deaths, damage more than 90,000 buildings, displace as many as 250,000 households and result in $150 billion in damage." Yet the author of the sanguinely-titled "The Great Earthquake And Firestorms Of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself" himself still lives in old SF. We may be fools, but we'll hang on to the last and rebuild it from rubble because there's no place like it in the world.

Aprill

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Chaucer are commemorated just a couple meters away from each other in Westminster Abbey. Two men of terrific brilliance, two diametrically opposing visions of one month. Last year I had an Eliot April. This year Chaucer has snuck in.

flee to Canada!

Outrageous: There are still up to 300 protesters in jail for the Tiananmen Square protest of '89. One dude just made it to Calgary, Ingrid's 'hood. How much of the world is actually civilized? Far less than privileged people like you and me will probably ever comprehend.

geeks shall inherit the earth

"Society is paying people more for their brains than for their brawn," Vedder said. "The nerds and the wimps and the geeks are ruling the world."

A shocker to find in an article about college grads being attracted to cities that can sustain the interest of the educated, not for its content, but for its particular turn of phrase. Also surprising and not surprising, many cities with a high concentration of college grads have expensive homes (surprising: fresh out of college, one has no money; not surprising: eventually out of college, one makes decent money). San Francisco, with one of the highest concentrations, was the costliest in 2004, with a median home value of $662,000, more than four times the national median of $151,000.

I figured that the half-a-million median home value of my high school days would have gone down with the deflation of the Silicon Valley boom. But IIRC, it's gotten a wee bit higher.

Having been reminded by my cough over the past few days of my mostly sick childhood, I thought again of how I may well not have lived to twenty-three without the help of modern medicine. At least within economic classes able to afford health care, humanity has circumvented survival of the fittest based on physical traits. Where will that leave our physiques in another few centuries (if we don't blow ourselves up first)?

an apology

In the past few weeks we've grown so much closer. I'm glad. Thank you for patience and honesty and understanding--more than I could have mustered.

But can I ever escape wanting to stay far away? I keep trying, but my record, though improving, has been poor.

fluttering over the Amsterdam CS tracks

Sonnet II

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). Renascence and Other Poems. 1917.

wi-fi sf!

San Francisco is getting Wi-Fi citywide to bridge the digital divide and bring the internet to everybody, and the city is paying nothing. How does that work???