Political Apologies

My fellow Americans, when I wrote a song about Mitch, I never meant to offend anyone by writing, “I like Mitch, even though he’s straight.” Those who know me can attest that this was only meant to be humorous. I don’t look upon anyone due to their sexual orientation. Heterosexual people can’t help the way they are and we should look upon them with tolerance.
Um, just kidding. Great and straight just ryhme so well. I’ll look for a replacement. Please stop sending me hate email. I sincerely hope that Mitch’s feeling were not hurt. I hope that he would contact me directly if they were. I’m very very sorry. It won’t happen again. From now on, I promise to banish perjorative terms, such as “breeders” from my vocabulary. It’s time that we as a nation moved beyond such petty distinctions to a happy utopia where queers and hets can live in harmony.
even though nobody on earth has ever been straight bashed by anyone shouting “breeder,” it’s still a very naughty word, like calling white folks “redneck crackers,” which is something that’s also very very naughty. Naughty Naughty Naughty. Mia Culpa. dern humorless hets…

Consumer Choice

Several months ago, the cafe down the block from my abode changed ownership. The previous owner yelled at my dog (because her dog attacked mine, and so mine must be at fault, right?), so after going there once, I never returned. It was strickly a weekday cafe catering to workers in the area and not residents. Anyway, the new owner opened up the place on weekends and made a definite effort to be part of the neighborhood community, business and residential. He was almost too nice to my dog, giving her many many scraps of meat until she would come home and barf.
The cafe showed some of my neighbor’s art. The percussion group that Christi and I organized playes at the art openeing. The food was good and the staff was friendly. One of the transient people staying at my house got a job there. Christi got friendly with one of the staff who gave us a Rhodes piano that he wanted to see get restored (note to self: spend this afternoon fixing the dern piano). All was well and happy.
And then the food started to suck. They gave me raw pancakes. I vowed never to return. A week later I was back. Something else was not right. We quit eating food there, but just got coffee. Then Luoi started bringing home coffee from Gaylords (on Piedmont Ave in Oakland). Angels sung overhead when I drank that coffee. I really vowed never to return to the place down the street and I didn’t. Once I had Gaylord’s coffee, I was through with their (same priced as Gaylords) swill.
And then yesterday, while walking the dog back from the post office (apparently you can’t just put an address label on a dog and send her to Siberia), I ran into the Rhodes guy. I asked him how it was going. Not well. The cafe is losing money. He’s had his hours cut. They’re all in financial trouble. oh no! So, I’m about to head over to buy a soy chocolate milk which I may drink and I may accidentally spill in a planter on the way home.
Catholic guilt is a pain.

Anti-war protest

Wish I could give a more in depth review. We showed up. Watched people march for a while. Listen to a speech by somebody who plays a hippy on the TV show Dharma and Greg, waited in a hella long line for the bathroom, picked up flyers from almost every socialist group there (the Spartacus folks are pushy) and then decided to go get food. I suck at protesting. Anyway, I got on some email lists and talked to some of the biodiesel people. I wish they’d had a stronger presence. I think biodiesel is definitely a solution to many environmental, social, and politcal problems.
Anyway, we walked from the Civic Center to a restaurant at 22nd & Mission that Christi likes. It’s a tapas place called Esperento. None of the esperanto people were there. (yet another under publicized idea that can solve many problems. Did you know that more than 10% of the UN budjet is spent on translators?) The food was really good, but the background music was that song where the refrain says, “If you love me, say yes. If you don’t then confess. Just please don’t tell me Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.” Over and over and over again. The song played in a sort of a flamenco style the entire time we were there. I used to like that song.
I feel like yuppy scum, I show up at a protest as an excuse to try fine dining. Anyway, there wasn’t any chanting. I’m good at chanting. There were just a whole lot of people milling around. I felt kind of like a spectator, since I didn’t have a sign or anything marking me as a protester. So I picked up flyers instead. I also have a copy now of every socialist newspaper that was there. I also nabbed a copy of the The Little Red Song Book. So it wasn’t just fine dining, it was also shopping.
Anyway, I think the bad that I’m in should play a cover of the socialist anthem. The songs in the songbook are designed to be sung on picket lines, so many of them are set to familiar tunes. They’re wayyy too catchy. My factory lies over the ocean. My factory lies over the sea. My factory lies over the border. Bring back my factory to me. Bring back, bring back, bring back my factory to me to me. Bring back, bring back, bring back my factory to me. (it’s been stuck in my head since saturday.) Other songs are folk tunes. The ones by Judi Bari are very interesting, but I can’t talk too much about this because Christi hates Judi Bari. This stems from a summer job where Christi opened mail sent to the team working on the Spotted Owl Environmental Impact Statement. Christi’s dad was on the team. Apperently, Bari sent death-threats to Christi’s dad and Christi read them as a young teenager. When radicals threaten your family, it has a way of turning you against them, I guess. Renee hates Angela Davis, because Renee’s uncle was a prison gaurd and was killed by an inmate whom Davis successfully defended. Or participated in the defense or something. Anyway . . .
The next protest is in February, and I might be in Portland or Seattle when it happens. Wherever I protest, I’m going to show up earlier and bring a sign. Maybe it can say “Peace” in Esperanto or something about biodiesel. I should join or found a radical biodiesel group that can hand out flyers about liquid solar power and the existing diesel fleet. I think that there’s some good possibilities on this. Maybe we could grow algae in waste water (read: sewage) and harvest the oil out of it in a centerfuge kind of thing. Algae is about 50% oil. That oil could be used for fuel. Perhaps it could be heat-treated to kill germs. Tammy just got a job designing waste water treatment plants. I should talk to her about this.
Matthew reported that most of the Portland protesters were Baby Boomers. There were almost no folks his age. That’s confuding to me because Matthew is draft age. Why aren’t the folks with the most to lose out there? The San Francisco crowd had a ton of young people. It really was a huge crowd. Bigger than other thigns, I think. Ususally, when I go to gay pride, I see tons of people I know and we chat for a few minutes. At this event, pretty much all of my friends, queer and het were there and I didn’t bump into anyone that I didn’t arrive with.
The newspaper reported that a small group of black-clad protestors broke off from the march and broke some windows in the financial district. It was very targetted, apparently. They broke windows of banks that are war profiteers and Starbucks. Anyway, it occurred to me that if we were protesting an acual war in February, there were enough people there to shut down the entire city. Groups could fan out and stop all car traffic. We could block the Bay Bridge. Blocking BART would be harder, but it’s part of the solution to oil wars, not the problem, so that’s ok. If everyone decided that there was going to be a city-wide shut down, it would be impossible for the cops to clear it. They’d have to arrest thousands of people. More than they have jail space for. There’s not enough cops. How could you arrest 50,000 people who have fanne dout across the city with the goal of sitting down in every interesection? You couldn’t. They’d have to use other (bad) crowd control tactics, but honestly, I don’t think they want to. (I saw somebody carrying a sign that said, “cops for peace.”) First of all, a lot of them are probably anti-war. Secondly, anti-war protests are great for city tourism. People came from all over the west to protest in SF. Every restaurant for miles around the city center was packed with protesters. I hate to be so shallowly capitalistic and crass, but the hotel and restaurant business are probably overwhelmingly pro-protest, at least, unless they’re Starbucks or the cops starting shooting out all the windows. And the protest was on a Saturday, so most non-tourist businesses are not affected. So if we did shut down the city, as long as we kept going into restaurants, staying in hotels and buying tourist trinkets (some from the protests, stay for Fisherman’s Warf), and it was on a weekend, would the city really care? It would certainly be a great symbolic gesture to halt automobile traffic, if only for a few hours.
I bet it’s illegal to talk about the pros and cons of blocking traffic. Maybe the FBI reads my blog!! Total Informatin Awareness is out to get us. I miss civil liberties. I hope that in the next presidential election, the votes actually get counted.

The Problems of Urban Composting

Permit me, dear reader, (if I have any), to think aloud for a moment about composting in the city. There are some problems specific to urban composters that suburban dwellers and country folk don’t have. One of these is a space limitation. Also, urban people are less likely to have gardenning tools such as pictforks or shovels. Your city resident may only have a containrer garden (if that) and no actual plot of dirt to call her own. Also, urban dwellers are more likely to have a ready supply of “wet” matter (also known as “green”) than “dry” matter (also known as “brown”). In short, the urban composter may be an apartment dweller with a small deck, no dirt lot or shovel who only has food wastes to compost.
What the is the ultimate compost bin for such a person? First of all, any compost bin on earth must be free of toxic stuff that will leach into the dirt that’s being made. This seems to rule out bins made of pressure treated lumber and some plastics, like PVC. Any bin that contains food wastes, even just carrot tops, must be rodent-proof. An ideal apartment bin would additionally be space efficient and not require a shovel of any kind. The ideal solution seems to then be worm composting. You can feed your worms all sorts of food wastes including cooked foods, afaik, and I’ve heard of some self-straining models, where removing the compost from the worms involves no more than pulling two pieces apart. Instant dirt. Takes up as little space as you want ti to. the worms are even edible. There are a few (as in one or two) cookbooks for how to eat your worms, should you get to be very hungry or decide you have an excess population. What criteria you would use for that, I don’t know.
However, worms die. Lazy people continually have to go get new worms because they dry out or go hungry for a while. I guess you could eat half of your worms before going on vacation, but that seems like an intense dedication to composting would be required. Also, all of the worm bins I’ve seen have been made of PVC. So then, what would be an ideal solution for a lazy apartment dwelling composter who doesn’t want to eat worms before travelling?
Since both space and brown matter are at a permium, the apartment bin should contain some form of brown material storge. Perhaps a hopper could be positioned over the main part of the bin so that brown matter, such as peat could be stored in there and then released into the bin via a lever or something. Also, an ideal bin would have a turning over mechanism built in. I have a PVC bin that’s round and on rollers, so that it can be turned over just by rolling it around. It’s efficient for space usage and requires no tools, although the plastic is a problem. Using a shovel to turn compost seems to have the side effect of breaking up big pieces of things. Periodically, a grapefruit will sit too long uneaten and be sent whole to the composter. Right now, this has a tendency to attract fruit flies, since the grapefruit does not get broken into little pieces. This design also is a bit hopper unfriendly, since the bin openeing and the hopper would need to be lined up before peat could be added.
Compost bins also need to sit a while before dirt can be removed. It’s necessary to have two or three bins, so one can be aging while material is being added to another. So the ideal bin would spin, would have some sort of brown matter storage, would break up big pieces of things, would, perhaps, store aging compost in addition to “active” compost (which is being added to daily) and would take up very little space. Additionally, it would be created out of non-harmful materials that ideally are somehow recycled, recyclable or both.
Ok, so this had me thinking. What if the brown matter was somehow built into the bin. I began picturing a bin made somewhat out of metal, but also out of the kind of compressed peat used for some pots. Then a hopper is no longer needed. So what you have is a big metal box, in which there is a round holder of aging compost. There is an identical round holder above this to hold active compost. It’s basically a wire frame with strong pegs sticking out the ends, at the center point, so it can rotate. The frame is light, since it’s designed to hold a heavy peat composting container. This container keeps out rodents and provides brown matter. The frame has some long spikes that stick inwards. These are designed to piece the peat. They have a dual function of holding the peat in place and breaking up large objects like whole grade fruit. The frame can split open to completely empty it and to load in a new peat frame. It also has a door on it, which must line up to a door punched in the peat, so that the uer can add new vegetables. Both the top bin and the bottom bin should be spun periodically. The bottom bin is in a box (with no top), to catch the dirt that falls out as the peat completely degrades along with the compost. The whole thing, including the bottom box, the two round frames and the mount above the box (which holds up the top round frame) is made of recycled steel. Except, of course, for the peat pieces.
Maybe it’s too big. It’s probably too expensive. buying new material every go-round may put-off some users. I’d write more about this endlessly facinating topic, but I must go do something about the dern fruitflies getting into the house again.

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Behind the times

When I was a kid, I was a big beleiver in protest. My mom always told me I was born in the wrong decade. I should have been marching in the sixties instead of being trapped in the suburbs in the eighties. I still harbor all these dated radical notions, even though I’m trying to get more postmodernist.
My queer identity is often similarly old-fashioned. Some mock me for wanting to move onto a Womyn’s Land Collective (otherwise known as a Lesbian Seperatist Commune) or liking Alix Dobkin or whatever. For this I blame my upbrigning. The Cupertino library didn’t have a single lesbian-topic book printed after 1973. I read every lesbian book in that library and absorbed all the pre-1973 notions. Also, my parents were a generation behind. They were not baby boomers. They were over thirty when you weren’t suppossed to trust anyone over thrity. They did not share identity or values with boomers, but instead looked down upon them with the disapproval of the establishment. (Although my mom did go to some hippy gathering in Golden Gate Park once. Someone there got a contact high. It gave her a terrible headache. anyway…).
On Saturday, before going to the anti-war protest (retro is in!), I helped my friend move. After getting the truck to the destination house, we were all taking a breather in the living room. Somebody brought up the topic of Miss Manners. “I love her!” said one boomer gay man. The other boomer queers concurred. They started quoting her. “‘What do you say when introduced to a so-called homosexual couple?’ ‘How do you do? How do you do?'” and “‘What is the proper way to eat potato chips?’ ‘With a spoon and a fork . . .'” (that last one is ironic, btw.)
Good lord! Gay folk of the age my mom said that I should have been all adore Miss Manners! This must be how gay men who come out and find out that everyone else loves show tunes too must feel. I think that this is not entirely randomness. Miss Manners is a voice for equal rights and feminism. That “so-called homosexual’ question and answer was published right in the midst of the struggle for gay liberation. She’s brilliant because she showed that manners are necessarily compatible with a progressive agenda. To deny rights would be rude. She is a leftist in establishment clothing. Miss Manners is a friend to the opressed and a comforter of the polite in rude times. I’ve got to go get her new book.