August 28, 2007 archive

Mission Statement/FAQ…The Latest Iteration

Man, this is hard!

I think I am putting way too much importance on it after all the legal wrangling and Troll Wars at Daily Kos. ugh

I also feel very self conscious about being , the Man…even though I am very convinced that there does need to a The Man…..so Help Me, my friends

PLEASE give me feedback! (let me know if I am being too egocentric, etc)

PLEASE let me know what I am leaving out! (It feels VERY incomplete.)

Please point out my errors in Spelling and Grammah (I suck at that shit!)

When humanity prevails.

It’s not often that genuinely good news comes out of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today, there is some. It’s small, but it’s huge.

As the Associated Press reports:

Palestinian police rescued an Israeli soldier Monday after he mistakenly drove into this West Bank town and was surrounded by a mob that later burned his car. Israel praised the rescue as a sign of the growing strength of Palestinian moderates.

Roof Gardens, Wine, and Urban Agriculture

In the past few days, two news stories have captured my imagination. The first story came from the Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney’s skyline turning green. The second story was in the Washington Post, Iraqi Past Ferments in An Unlikely N.Y. Winery. Both stories deal with urban agriculture – the potential for it and one man’s reality of it. From the SMH story:

Rice paddies and orchards on city rooftops could become reality with a plan to green Sydney’s roofs… “It’d mean an enormous increase in parkland in the city,” [architect Tone Wheeler] said.

The rooftop gardens could also have commercial potential. “There could be organically grown food grown on the roof and sold in the cafe below,” Mr Wheeler said…

Garden designer Jamie Durie’s company, Patio, has worked on several Sydney rooftop gardens and is working on projects in Chicago and New York, where the concept is more advanced.

Wherever the sun falls there’s an opportunity to grow a garden,” he said.

The idea of rooftop gardens isn’t a new one, but I think it has untapped potential for growing food in the urban environment. I love the idea of inviting you to a cozy corner restaurant in a favorite part of the city. We’d sit down at a table and, perhaps, order a fresh salad made from tossed greens grown on the restaurant’s own roof garden. Throw in a few slices of cucumber and wedges of tomatoes from the garden and a dash of a light vinaigrette dressing and we’re dining in urban agricultural style.

But, there’s more… our young server suggests that we order a bottle of wine made by the neighborhood winery. She can see by our dubiously raised eyebrows that we were unaware that there was a vineyard nearby. After a couple, gentle but leading questions, she begins to tell us about Latif Jiji, a 79-year-old “engineering professor originally from Iraq, [who] has made his townhouse into a vertical winery…”

Midnight Cowboying – Monster of the Pozo

Stingray and I had been long hauling in the jungle for a solid month at this point. The mysterious bug bites and shady comidas had been worth it, we had found what we were looking for. But that is easy when you have a map, especially one from NASA. Hidden in plain view in the mountains of their forefathers, there were still Mayan temples with pre-Columbian pottery on the ground. We had not come to loot, we had only come to see, and that’s why we were welcomed. And even lead.

We had met Poncho down in the valley where I do my best work, on a barstool in a cantina. When he saw our map and gear he knew we were serious and lead us deep into vines and history, all the way to his village. All the way till we were the first gringos seen, all the way to the lands where they don’t even speak Spanish.

The funniest part of this trip, before we hunted the monster, occurred 150 feet inside a mountain miles away from anything that resembled civilization. And as usual in this part of the world, it involved gold.

my diary today on dKos

read MY f’cking rant, kos

read MY f’cking rant kos

posted on dKos today…

read my f’cking rant kos