I considered doing one of those "365 days" things on Flickr. If you're not familiar, that's when a photog takes at least one photo every day, numbered for the day, for a whole year. But I figured you probably don't need to see a 365 pictures of my office computer, my laptop, my home computer, an mostly-unfinished drink I woke up in front of, etc.
The optimistic version of that list would have read: the readout on my treadmill, Maggie in her running gear, a freshly-mown lawn, what's cooking on the grill, the ingredients for a mojito. There's the power of positive thinking for you.
I still am considering it.
I like the word "photog" because it reminds me of the early days of my relationship with Maggie. We must have used the word jokingly. And it reminds me of Peter Parker.
If I were to be Peter, I always thought of Maggie as Gwen rather than Mary Jane. Until they got married and they seemed to try to make Mary Jane into a better character, Gwen seemed to me to be the much more desirable. More brains, a better family. Unfortunately, a tragic character.
People talk about "market forces" like they're magic, and like they can cure anything. I can't count the number of times that people tell me that markets just give people what they want. It's simply a fairy tale. Markets and corporations give people what they want in much the same way mobs do what the constituent people want.
In any case, it seems to me to be more accurate to say that corporations give the money what it wants, and damn what the people want. People are just along for the ride, mostly.
And the first few chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma are telling me that we're all just giving corn what it wants. Fascinating book.
Mark Bittman discusses our diet in a TED talk here. "Us" meaning the western world. When you talk about where our food comes from, many people think of exposés and think that they're just going to be grotesque stories that are either meant for you to lose your appetite or will inadvertently make you lose your appetite on a visceral level. But the story of our industrial/agriculture is interesting well beyond The Jungle (for historical perspective) and, more recently Fast Food Nation (both the book and the film).
The film version of Fast Food Nation struck me as almost more about the tragedy of poor immigrants than it was about the food supply.
The subject of our food supply is so huge, and so multifaceted, that there is no one subject for it to be about. All the way from the beginning of the food chain (which has always been the Sun, but lately it is surprisingly by way of petroleum, which itself is inedible) down to the preparation of our food which has been fascinatingly recounted in books like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. It's not always gross. And if you eat, you really ought to be interested.
Ignorance is unbecoming, and willful ignorance is a downright turnoff.
It's never surprised me that intelligence is a turn-on, because a component of intelligence is intellectual curiosity, which is another way to describe intellectual energy. Energy is where it's at. The physical form may be great as a subject for art, or selling cigarettes and cars, but it is just a shallow reflection of our reliance on our sense of vision. You can't airbrush a person's personality.
Not just sexual attraction, but just attractiveness in friendship; who wants to be friends with the intellectually lazy? How will they ever challenge you to grow?
A challenge of capturing the individual in personal photography must be not to highlight the most pleasing aspect of the physical form, but to reflect the energy of the individual. My favorite pictures of people I know are ones where they're physically moving; that's the easiest kind of energy to capture.
And we're back to photography, so I guess I'm done.
Posted by James at June 17, 2008 11:27 AMI've got a long list of tiny subjects that I've been wanting to blog about for ages, but didn't have enough on any one subject to merit more than a couple of sentences. I like this random s-o-c format for dealing with them and will probably steal it tomorrow. :)
Posted by: Julie at June 17, 2008 11:46 AM"...who wants to be friends with the intellectually lazy?"
Who indeed? What a dull one-sided relationship that would be!
The question makes me ponder who on earth George Bush's friends are? Does he have true friends or just hangers on?
Posted by: Patti M. at June 17, 2008 11:51 AMIt is a curse to pass intellectual laziness down to one's children, and it is perhaps one of the challenges of growing up rich that you have the resources to do great things, but not the drive.
Bush fulfilled his destiny to pay back those who put him there by corralling this nation's growing prosperity into the hands of the rich and powerful. Talk of "economic stimulus" in the form of tiny checks is a joke when all the real economic stimulus has gone to those who invest it elsewhere because of greed.
If the middle class doesn't share in the nation's prosperity, it stops spending and the economy tanks. It's an oversimplification, but my space and knowledge of macroeconomics are limited.
I understand enough to know that tax cuts for the richest failed this country by allowing the rich to keep pointing to numbers that told us how great the economy was (for them) while the middle class was shrinking.
Posted by: James at June 17, 2008 11:59 AMSo true. And it is funny that you mention "The Omnivore's Dilemma". She-who-is-now-anti-corn heard a bit about it and suggested we read it.
Posted by: briwei at June 17, 2008 12:01 PMOh, honey, I'm still waiting for my trickle-down mink coat from the Regan years.
Posted by: Patti M. at June 17, 2008 12:02 PMRead the book and perhaps let us know what you think on your blog. I promise to chime in once I'm done. A bunch of us over hear are reading it and we're going to discuss it afterward.
So, if any of my blog readers are interested, perhaps I'll start a thread on it later.
I'm not sure to what extent it's possible to be anti-corn anymore. "We have met the corn and it is us." You can quote me on that.
Hey!!! I don't see ANYTHING wrong with Mary Jane. Best character ever in a comic strip.
mj
Posted by: mjfrombuffalo at June 17, 2008 8:16 PMSarah read The Omnivore's Dilemma last year, and would frequently quote passages to me. I've been meaning to pick it up; maybe now's the time.
From what I've seen, I think you're absolutely right - it will be nigh impossible to get the country off the petroleum driving corn (and the remainder of our agriculture) feeding our livestock feeding us without some BIG TIME repercussions.
Economists and corporations make me laugh. They work so deeply in theory to try and convince you that the reality is so far off. I read a piece from the Federal Reserve Bank of Texas on what's driving oil price - it was an attempt to use pure hypothesis and assumption to explain how oil prices will be hard to sustain above $80/barrel in the coming years ... are they serious?
Posted by: Bull at June 17, 2008 10:07 PMI think it is easy to become friends with somebody who's intellectually lazy if they're very different. That difference can be interesting until you find out it's static.
Anybody who's also intellectually lazy will enjoy an intellectually lazy friend. Not everybody wants to think and many people don't want to question themselves or be questioned. In the case of our prez, I think he gets by on charisma (I hear he has it) and the fact that he's in circles with a lot of people who aren't intellectually lazy, not by merit, but because somehow he's already there (daddy's influence, I suppose). I imagine it's very frustrating for those people.
Posted by: Maggie at June 18, 2008 6:31 AMThat's why I like Robert Reich.
Here he is on that same subject:
http://robertreich.blogspot.decenturl.com/robert-reich-on-gas
Posted by: James at June 18, 2008 6:32 AMon economics and economists in general, check out PJ O'Rourke's take on Adam Smith's book(s) that started it all "The Wealth of Nations".
He does a good job of translating the 18th century language and ideas of Smith who everybody like to point to but nobody seems to have actually read (or if they have read it they've cherry picked the ideas that support theirs).
Plus he's funny, as anyone who's a fan of the NPR show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" is well aware of.
Posted by: B.O.B. (bob) at June 18, 2008 7:57 AM