Let's go shopping!

Conspiracy theory time! 

Jim and I were talking about the difficulty, as a populous and nation, we are going to have competing with China.  Honestly, it's no contest and they've won.  China has already begun a war and we don't even know it. The initial attacks were, obviously, an experiment....poison our pets and kids and see what we'd do.  Sure, we cried and threatened to not buy anything made in China, but how long did that last, 4 days, a week?  Don't get me wrong I'm guilty of being lazy too but right about now I'm trying to figure out the one product that everyone uses  that will, ultimately, be our complete undoing.  

Sleep tight kiddies. 

Everybody?!

Just added an outstanding book to my list to the right, David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and it reminded me of his scary insight and dedication to honesty, no matter how much it hurts.

Sedaris came to Canton's Cherry Hill Theater last winter. Fantastic venue for it - it was like he was in one of the nearby McMansion living rooms, but smaller and without predictable reprints on the walls and Romney donation slips on the table. He was signing autographs before the show and M wanted to get one of his books signed for me. I never know what to say to even marginally famous people without feeling like Chris Farley in the SNL skit where he asks movie stars whether they remember 'that one part' in that movie they were in so I passed. For a Christmas gift she bought Holidays On Ice and got it signed anyway.
Building up to the show, she'd told me she thought something along the lines of 'Merry Christmas, look out for six to eight black men' would be good to have him inscribe. From how it was told to me, he smiled politely when that was suggested to him but then said he was going to make something up himself. I unwrapped the book at Christmas, turned to the inside cover, and guffawed:

Jimmy,
Everybody thinks you are gay.
David Sedaris

Blanche-d

Caught the Miller family and friends the other night at The Ark. M described them as 'punk country,' apt as Dan John used to play 'cowpunk' as the head of Goober and the Peas, but I always feel like modifying that when she says it to dispel any imaginings of power chords or screaming. Today, after flicking through the presets and hearing a few seconds of Garrison Keillor (a few seconds being about all I can stand), though, a description of Blanche occurred to me that finally satisfies. Blanche is 'A Prairie Home Companion' for those of us raised in the America of Iggy and Bad Religion and Henry Rollins as opposed to the one of Peter, Paul, and Mary and Joan Baez. They're celebratory Americana without the dross of sentimental hindsight; deep, traditional music for a country as steeped in sin and hypocrisy and murder as it is in love and wonder and fine shiny duds for a summer Saturday night show.

And, if you missed 'em, they'll be playing MOCAD September 12th. Wear your finest.

C2ShiningC

I want to keep this information but have no idea where in my sprawling and inconsistent files it should fit, so I'm sprucing it up and putting it here. I'll delicious it if I get the chance.

Bill McDonough, remarking on the exhibitors at Greenbuild 2007, mentioned these companies that achieved, and were instrumental in the development of, Cradle to Cradle Certification:

American Polysteel
BASF
Cabot
Centria
Haworth
Herman Miller - a Michigan company
Hycrete
Icestone
Mechoshade
Shaw
Solutia - Glad to see the company that put me through college is moving in this direction
Steelcase - from same area as Herman Miller - thank goodness western Michigan has them and they're positioning themselves well
Timbersil

goats foraging on Woodward

When we were going to school a couple years ago I mentioned to a friend that wanted to fight hunger in the Third World that the Third World is right down the street. I was pointing to the east, Detroit, not Ypsilanti.

The only question worth asking is how do you get rid of this entrenched, corrupt disease that is the city government? The ridiculous mayor is just the vapid figurehead floating on top of a cesspool that needs to be drained, bleached (racist pun not intended), and refilled with better stuff.

depressingly incompetent at every level

Since about early 2002 I've been repeatedly disappointed, shocked, and raised to indignant rants about our Administration's performance. An article this morning left me feeling just deflated where previously there would have been outrage.

It's no secret that Halliburton and it's subsidiary KBR have woefully underperformed in Iraq after being given who knows how many no-bid contracts; I just hadn't realized that negligence, overwork, or simple beauracratic inefficiency, layered on top of poor work done in the first place, was killing our soldiers.

The Pentagon has ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR, a major military contractor, after the electrocutions of several United States service members.

...Officials now acknowledge that Army experts warned as early as 2004 that poor electrical work by contractors was creating dangerous conditions for American soldiers. But those warnings were largely ignored.

...Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a Green Beret from Pennsylvania, died Jan. 2 when he stepped into a shower and was electrocuted at his base in Baghdad. His death prompted investigations this spring by Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general into evidence that poor electrical work at facilities used by American personnel had led to other electrocutions.

...Last week [Sergeant Maseth’s family] filed a motion in Federal District Court in Pittsburgh that included a new statement from another Green Beret, Sgt. Justin Hummer of the 10th Special Forces Group, saying that he suffered electrical shocks four or five times in 2007 in the same shower where Sergeant Maseth died.

It would be easy to write this off with a glib comment about 'government contracting' if I didn't work right next to a bunch of government contracting specialists. I think they're generally insular, harboring an 'us vs. them' mentality, and the group as a whole seems to suffer from a woefully inadequate process that makes glaciers look like Indy cars, but not one of them would let something like this pass for even a moment, both out of adherence to any number of safety directives and because of their personal standards. This is just beyond the pale. Depressing.