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We're not, in fact, Number 1

This is an excerpt from Tom Friedman's piece in the New York Times today.


So, on Sept. 23, the same group released a follow-up report: “Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.” “The subtitle, ‘Rapidly Approaching Category 5,’ says it all,” noted Vest. “The committee’s conclusion is that ‘in spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.’ ”

But I thought: “We’re number 1!”

“Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today,” says Vest: sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.

- end quote -

We really need to invest in entrepreneurs, particularly in the education sector. I'm going to business school. Who's with me?

Old

Apparently Wyatt isn't the only person who thinks I'm an old lady.

Harvest Party

First we went apple picking...













Then we cooked up a storm.






DC made epic beer can chicken. If you look closely you can see that he went so far as to tuck sage leaves in the chickens' little armpits.






After thoroughly stuffing ourselves with harvest goodies, we strolled down to the Jamaica Plain Lantern Festival, which was fraught with babies and dogs in different fluffy little costumes. On the banks of the pond, a local afrobeat band played, cider was pressed, and homemade lanterns were sold.

Voter Fraud and Voter Registration Fraud are Different Things

I've always thought voter fraud was a crock of sh*t. I'm glad the New York Times is highlighting the newest flavor of this disgusting, unAmerican waste of time.

http://nyti.ms/9qgqol

broke

I thought I was over the whole lyme thing but I think it's back. I have at least a few moments everyday when I feel like I've been hit by a truck. If anyone has any good, inspiring stories of people who have overcome personal health obstacles lying around, do share them with me. I need inspiration.

Cold frame building canning machine

Today I made pickled green tomatoes with some little guys who didn't look like they were going to turn red anytime soon.


Those are huge cloves of garlic at the bottom.

Here is my super jerry rigged cold frame, a.k.a. a poor man's greenhouse.


I made the walls of the existing cinder block raised bed taller by adding a second row of blocks. Then I painted the blocks black to attract heat and covered the whole thing with plastic sheeting. I used old sunflower stalks as tent poles. It's super ugly but it was cheap. I hope the neighbors don't mind too much. We'll see if anything grows. I just planted fennel and carrot seeds and there are already cabbages, swiss chard and collards growing. Fingers crossed!

Tiny, tiny vegetables

Ben Walsh gets married!

My dear friend, Green Corps classmate and former house mate Ben Walsh got married in Vermont last weekend. Here are some of the highlights.

The Round Church in Richmond, VT.


Part of the crew.
Jess, Ben and the priest who looked like an LA model.

Vermont cheese platter, complete with local grapes.


Breakfast in Warren, VT.

One year anniversary in photos

Wyatt and I had an awesome one-year anniversary. We went to the Boston Local Food Fesitival and Haymarket (a wild market of SUPER cheap produce that happens every Friday and Saturday in downtown Boston), before cooking ourselves a 3 course meal.


At the local food festival, I got to meet the man who started Grillo's pickles and he told me some of the secrets behind his delicious products. I highly recommend the pickled green tomatoes, though they won't be around again until next summer.


Wyatt and I made maple-glazed pork, pumpkin soup and bacon meatloaf meatballs with a roasted bell pepper sauce.

Cory Branan in Boston!

Here is my Performer review of Cory Branan. In other press pieces, he has been compared to Ryan, Adams and John Prine. I didn't do that but hopefully my piece still does him justice.

http://performermag.com/Blog/OCTOBER#coryb

Learning: It's what's for dinner

This week I learned that the internet is far from carbon neutral. The energy necessary to maintain ever growing servers might as well be the mountain top removal of the future, another problem that could go largely unnoticed and unchecked for decades. Ugh.

I'm still on this big entrepreneurship kick and I wonder if someone can create a creative business to alleviate the issue. I've started to think of social entrepreneurship as the answer to all social problems, especially in this time of high-unemployment. For example, what if, instead of fighting with coal companies in West Virginia about the value of environment vs. jobs, we just gave local communities the tools they need to create their own companies and economies? Surely there must be some alternative to the coal economy.

Seeing people speak at Harvard has been neat, although I do it so often now I didn't go to the Obama rally today because I didn't feel like seeing another person talk at me. But - back to the positive - I am learning a lot of new things.


At a recent talk called "Understanding the Yemeni State," I learned that part of the reason the U.S. and Yemen butt heads is that Yemen is unwilling to give up its unusual security arrangement. The official army is only about 60,000 troops and the government relies heavily on tribal reserve units for big conflicts and to keep tabs on the country's hard-to-patrol areas. Additionally, poetry is a huge part of the political process in Yemen and there is a long tradition of using words rather than coercive force to influence actors. Throughout Yemen's history, leaders who were not especially eloquent would hire poets to help push new policies forward.

Thursday, I went to a seminar about the floods in Pakistan, said to be one of the most devastating natural disasters of this decade. Even though not that many people died, the flood wiped out much of the livestock in the poorest region of the country, where people typically don't have titles to their land and assets are held in livestock. It's been estimated that it will take $30 billion to replace what's been destroyed. Only a few billion has been pledged by the international community so far so basically, the situation is really bad.

Rescue efforts in Pakistan have been hindered by poor record keeping and a lack of access to real time data. A lot of villages affected by flooding just simply aren't on the map and neither are the nearest hospitals. Luckily, there is a small group of civilian computer engineers working on the problem. More about that here.

Much of the discussion at the seminar addressed challenges to emergency preparedness and response. Harvard Kennedy School's Dutch Leonard discussed issues with the current trend in actions by the international community: underinvestment in prevention, overinvestment in recovery and the tendency of Western countries to abandon people mid-recovery. I was shocked to hear him say that, while the earthquake in Haiti happened almost a year ago, not a single US dollar has made it to Haiti yet. What!?! Apparently, if we help countries decentralize both emergency preparedness and response efforts, we can expect better results in the future. Bangladesh has done a good job in this category as a poor country that has managed to address natural disaster preparedness, in their case for cyclones. So, that was all kind of neat to learn.

Wednesday, we had our second ever Article Club meeting, co-hosted by Wyatt and Kaz. The article was about friendship and we ended up talking a lot about how Facebook impacts friendship and how strong friendships, or lack there of, influence the divorce rate in America. I enjoyed our discussion, but I'm hoping the next article has nothing to do with the internet. I still like to think it does not completely rule my life. We had around 15 people in attendance, lots of chili and lots of chocolate chip cookies. Drew, an Article Club member and recent Portland, OR transplant, has a great little blog of daily poems that incorporate the top Google hits of the day.

GOOD magazine has an interesting blog post about the word "like", and how it is not an "Americanism inflicted on us by the Valley Girls of the eighties" but rather an older habit used by English-speakers all over the world. Les Janka, an avid anti-"like" advocate, will be disappointed to hear that.

It's starting to get chilly again in Boston and already I am fearing the worst. I'm remembering what it's like to feel the draft blow through my living room as I, wrapped in all the clothes I own, hold my nose to keep it warm while trying to read a book. I thanked God every time I walked outside this week and discovered that, although my house was freezing, I did not in fact need to be wearing long underwear. Cory Branan recently tweeted that he was starting a petition to move New York to the South. Can I do the same thing with Boston? I think Boston in North Carolina would be ideal.

If anyone has any tips for baiting mouse traps, please hook a sista up. More than a year into our epic battle against the rodents, they've gotten too smart for us and stopped going in the traps. I recently resorted to buying poison but they appear to be too smart for that too. Little bastards.