Bornfamous

My friend Mary Beth is back. Yay!

My friend Naiades went to New Orleans and took some great photos, including this one:

I want my balcony to look like this some day. So beautiful. But it does look a lot better than that photo you see at the top of this site. That was taken over a year ago. Now, I have so many big pots of herbs, there’s barely room to hang the laundry. And it smells so nice!

[Note to self: must get camera working with computer again so I can get back to posting pics of my gardening progress.]

This is the place I revisit in my dreams over and over, the place I think of as home.

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We lived above what was then a linoleum store on the corner of Washington and Broadway, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The black door on the right was a hideous mint green with the large word,

painted in black and white next to it. The door opened to a long, narrow staircase that ended with another door that required a key to open. My room was those two windows you see above the black door.

I was fourteen, almost fifteen, in 1961 when my mother married my stepfather and we moved here to live with him as caretakers of the rooming house on the second and third floors. It was a way to save on living expenses while they put everything into my mother’s small diner a few blocks up Washington. [I'd show you Dotty's Diner, but there's barely anything there any more.]

But the old rooming house is still standing–a miracle. I wonder if people still live there. If you pan around this image, you will see that there’s not much left of the neighborhood. I-94 has since mowed down the businesses that once made this a fascinating place for an imaginative teenager to live. Mickey’s Diner was kitty-corner from us, a country-western bar next-door throbbed tunes and parking-lot arguments at night where the liquor store is now, more bars dotted Broadway where I walked to school, and a nearby movie theater provided escape. Washington and Broadway, now just a stoplight to thousands of cars on their way to and from the freeway, once bustled with actual people. I loved to watch them from my window perch, imagining stories about their lives.

I wanted to be an artist so I could paint this corner. I never did, but I memorized it so well I can still see the heat shimmering off summer sidewalks, still hear the winter chink, chink, chink of chains on tires. I almost wish I hadn’t looked up the old address. My memories are so much better.

I’ve never met him and I probably never will, but I consider this man my guru:

Imagine a White House Web site where the home page isn’t just a static collection of transcripts and press releases, but a window into the roiling intellectual foment of the West Wing. Imagine a White House Web site where staffers maintain blogs in which they write about who they are and what they are working on; where some meetings are streamed in live video; where the president’s daily calendar is posted online; where major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces, or wikis; where progress towards campaign promises is tracked on a daily basis; and where anyone can sign up for customized updates by e-mail, text message, RSS feed, Twitter, or the social network of their choice.

And that’s just for starters. Because the Internet doesn’t look kindly on information that just flows one way. To live up to their promises, the president and his staff are going to have to do more than just talk – they’re going to have to listen, and respond. So imagine a Web site where the president regularly answers questions sent in by citizens; where ordinary people can vote up or down items they want brought to the president’s attention; and where Americans from across the political spectrum engage in honest debate.

Read more >>

What a concept: our next President actually wants to hear our suggestions. So I submitted the following on his web site, Change.gov. Why don’t you try it too?

Two things really concern me as I listen to and read all the talk about energy and the environment:

1. Why aren’t we talking about conservation? The less energy we use, the less we will have to produce. President Elect Obama really needs to get that message across, not only to the public but to business. He can lead by example too, by making energy conservation a priority in the White House and the government at large.

2. Food production, on factory farms, is a huge contributor to global warming. I was heartened to hear President Elect Obama say that he read Michael Pollan’s NY Times article about this a few weeks ago. It is crucial that Americans begin to hear, from the top, that we need to start growing at least some of our own food.

I live in a tiny apartment with a small balcony, but I am growing herbs and salad greens, and hope to grow some vegetables next spring. We can all do something to make food production more energy efficient by supporting our local farmers too. Will President Elect Obama lead the way? The best way he can do that is by following President Roosevelt’s example and planting an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn, and using the harvest to feed his own family and guests, donating the surplus to local food pantries.

This is what I want to see in my city, San Diego.

Edible City Trailer 1 from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo.

Edible City is a documentary film that explores the issues of food justice, security, and sovereignty through a comprehensive view of urban farming in the Bay Area - a grassroots effort that sees people responding to climate change, rising food costs and gas prices, and increasing health concerns by strengthening connections to the food they eat and reaching out to their local communities.

Visit: ediblecitymovie.com Edible City is slated for release in the Fall of 2009. [via Groovy Green]

My dream is to see apartment dwellers able to grow food too, not just on their balconies and window sills, but on apartment grounds and even rooftops. What I can’t figure out is how to persuade landlords to go along with this. Wait — I can’t even make myself try to persuade my own landlord because of my stupid fear of rejection. And if I’m not willing to try, why should I expect it of anyone else? Gah.

I’m sure you’ve already seen this, but I put it here so I can watch it again and again. I’m in love with this man and his family.

My one and only commenter [and a good friend], Divya, likes this theme, and so do I. Although I liked the other one too, and the old one. But I bore easily. So this is what it is. Until I get bored again. Hope you like it too.

What I really want to know is, what do you think of this new Wordpress theme? I can’t decide.

I am so alarmed by the way things are going in our country right now that blogging about what’s going on in my life feels irrelevant. Forget about the economy and politics for a second and ask yourself why this crisis happened so close to the election.

Think about it.

Then watch this 27-minute interview with Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries:

I sure hope she’s wrong…

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
–Thomas Jefferson, 1802

McCain and the POW Cover-up

The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam

By Sydney H. Schanberg
September 18, 2008

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.