You can read the Arches NP press release here.

I had my opportunity to see Wall Arch on my first visit to Arches NP, back in 2003, when Justin Powell and I went on a late afternoon hike to Double-O Arch. After Landscape Arch, the trail becomes rugged and difficult and shortly thereafter we would have had the opportunity to admire and photograph Wall Arch. As we kept going, we walked along the narrow backbone of rock fins with at least a 100 foot drop on one side, looking for obscure and nearly hidden arches and marveling at the setting sun, which had started to make the red rock glow in red and orange hues. Maybe we managed to see it from a distance, pointing it out to one another as we hurried on to our destination.

After making it to Double-O Arch we quickly realized that with sunset the trip back to the car would become dangerous as we backtracked along the trail with some of its dangerous drops. It was around the time that we returned to the Wall Arch area that we had to break out the flashlights and head lamps.

You see the huge boulders and rubble at the base of some of the arches and you don't know whether those were deposited there 1 year or 1 million years ago. It'll be interesting to go there the next time and realize that this geologic change happened in my lifetime. Wish I could tell my kids that I "remember" this arch, but I'm now curious to dig around in my files for photographic proof that I admired it once upon a time.

Update: No picture of Wall Arch in my collection. I do vaguely remember being low on film that evening, so I may have been conserving my shots. However, when looking at the park map, I notice that going to the arch requires turning off the main trail onto a short side trail. Considering that we were in a hurry to hoof it out to Double-O Arch, I now doubt that we took this side trip.

How depressing. You take for granted that one of these arches will be around for centuries to come. Wall Arch was apparently a "next time" arch and now I'll never see it.

No, I'm not posing as a tourist, that's a V-sign for victory!  I played the drinking games version of Jenga this weekend, where there are scribbled commands on the side of the little logs --  "Take a shot", "Pinch the butt of the person sitting to your right"... yeah.  Since there were only two of us and the hardest thing I drink is coffee, we stuck to the simple version of Jenga to find out who has steadier hands.   And apparently that's me. 

How fun would it be to have an online Jenga, where you can play with friends, and it would be realistic with lots of jiggling, and a tilting tower as logs are pulled out.   I'd play!  Anyone out there wanna make that??    You never know... it could be the next Scrabulous!

"Bananas, bananas, and more bananas!"

When a band goes on tour, they have what is called a rider backstage.  On this rider are items that they have requested.  It can be anything from beer, cigarettes, candy, beer, napalm, beer, cigarette flavored beer, beer soaked cigarettes, or kittens. Some examples of items include:

*Clarence Clemmons, of E Street Band fame, requests a whole roasted chicken be delivered to his dressing room mid-concert

*Christina Aguilera wants soy cheese, oreos, dried cranberries, and Flintsones chewable vitamins (doesn't she know that they taste better when you sneak them from the medicine cabinet, when your parents are in the other room?)

*Limp Bizkit's backstage lights must be dimmable. or else. 

*Jennifer Lopez wants a white room, white towels, white couch, white tables, white tablecloths, white drapes, white candies, whitelion

(for even more examples of rider insanity, click here)

So all of this begs the question: what would we, the staff of Random Ramblings, demand to be in our backstage rider? While the possibilities are endless, we have narrowed it down to the following:

*one 8 foot tall die cast metal statue of Optimus Prime in robot form-no plastic!

*a Jenga game with pieces made out of steak (cause Jenga makes us hungry)

*2 small chimpanzees

*1 miniature wrestling ring, complete with turnbuckles/ropes, for aforementioned chimpanzees to wrestle in (minature steel cage is acceptable too)

*access to a chocolate river, like the one featured in the Dairy Queen commercials of old.  Ice cream mountaintops are optional. (apparently there is some realistic consideration going into this idea. Glad to see others are thinking of it too). 

*one stegasaurus

*60 inch TV showing a continuous slideshow of monkeys dressed up in human clothes 

*1 pair of parachute pants

*3 leaf blowers

*1 clown (please do a background check)

*The racing guys from Better Off Dead as MC's for the backstage party

We trust these demands will be met when we make it big.  Feel free to leave us comments on what you would have on your rider.

I honestly don't know whether to be awed or frightened. The whole thing spins around a central pivot, and by whole thing, I mean that each individual apartment rotates independantly of the others. Presumably, there's some very good, rooted-in-physics reason why it won't come tumbling down in a fiery wall of doom, but still, my brain keeps screaming: centrifugal force!

So I guess we have moving houses now, although the concept of flying cars has, presumably, been sublimated by the need to build any car, flying or otherwise, that viably runs on something other than petrol, because despite what Reuters says, there can physically be no such thing as a car that runs on water. If there was, it would rewrite the laws of thermodynamics. Just FYI. (For those interested in a musical explanation of the laws of thermodynamics, Messrs Flanders and Swan are happy to oblige.)

Still, if asked to choose, I'd prefer Howl's Moving Castle to a glass Jenga statue any day. At least it comes with Christian Bale.

Tom’s article isn’t specifically linked to strawberries alone or the higher food prices.  What he does talk about is being paid a living, sustainable wage.  It’s like we’ve siphoned all our resources from producing food, maintaining the land to do so or even maintaining people (our communities, our health, our contentment) and moved it all over to everything else (endless stuff as Annie Leonard would put it - see the 20 minute animation at http//www.storyofstuff.com/, how many techno gadgets do we really need?  it’s obvious that gluttony extends far past the palette).  

My best analogy:  a jenga tower.  We’ve been ripping out all the blocks from below while we’re standing on it (using a long reach mechanical arm made of jenga blocks) and putting them on top.  Soon we’ll be so top heavy it’ll all collapse like a house of cards.  Capiche?  How do you put the blocks back down (rebuild the infrastructure that you’re standing on)?  Are you willing to?  Are power hungry elites or bureacrats going to?  (mwahaha)

Our food crises may simply reflect our inability to control ourselves all the while striving to control everything and everyone else.  Oh ho, try doing some philosophy contemplations on that one!

Anyways, if you can’t fight this trend can we adapt?  What about urban farming (my past thesis work shows there’s lots of potential)?  If you build up it might be possible.  The fellow in my LinkedIn network, Dr. Dickson Despoimer, who I ran across during my work on urban agriculture came up with vertical tower farming (check out his site http://www.verticalfarm.com/).  

The mad thinker,

Sunny Lam

Ffenyx Rising

http://ffenyx.wordpress.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnylam

******************************************

Farm Hands Down

To create a truly sustainable food system, we'll have to confront the farm-labor crisis

BY TOM PHILPOTT

30 May 2008

When I think about what a truly healthy, vibrant food system would look like, I envision more farms: small farms serving specific communities, and diversified, midsized farms geared to supplying their surrounding regions. 

Many hands make site work.

Of course, there would still be interstate and global trade -- you can't grow olives or coffee in Iowa, or enough wheat in Florida to supply the state's bakers. But with more farms across the nation, we could all generally eat much closer to home, consuming fewer resources and throwing off less pollution in the process. Traveling would be more interesting as well. Imagine finding region-specific, seasonal specialties -- not standardized burgers -- at train stations across the land. (Oh yeah, in my vision, there'd also be a high-functioning national rail system.) 

In some ways, this scenario -- the food part, anyway -- isn't so far-fetched. I've watched people's zeal to "eat local" rise dramatically over the past 10 years. And now, even the business media are taking it seriously. Just last week, BusinessWeek joined the chorus heralding the "Rise of the Locavore," noting that, "Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands." Nationwide, the number of farmers' markets ballooned by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006, BusinessWeek reports. 

But consumer demand alone can only create so much change. Though the locavore movement is heartening and necessary, it remains a tiny organism compared to our great lumbering beast of an industrial food system. By some estimates, local-oriented farms supply something like 2 percent of U.S. food calories. To move beyond the farmers' market box, farms producing for local and regional markets will have to multiply in number far more than that impressive 50 percent figure.

I've already identified one major obstacle between my reverie and reality: infrastructure. As I wrote in a recent column on the need to revive the dismal fortunes of midsized farms, the infrastructure needed for such farms to thrive -- locally owned grocery stores, dairy-processing plants, slaughterhouses, canneries -- has withered away as the food industry consolidated over the decades. 

In the weeks since that column, I've hit upon another roadblock: a growing labor shortage that's falling particularly hard on midsized farms. 

Belaboring the Point

At first glance, New York would seem a particularly ripe state for a midsized farm renaissance. It boasts a bustling metropolis -- the nation's largest -- with a strong and growing locavore scene. Combined with population centers like Albany and Rochester, the vast organism that is greater New York City might be expected to provide a robust market for the midsized farms that dot the state's landscape.

Yet those very farms are struggling to harvest their produce because of an ongoing labor shortage. And produce unharvested means produce unsold -- and farms in trouble. 

According to a recent New York Times piece, upstate farms are suffering because very few U.S.-born citizens will accept agriculture jobs -- and the undocumented workers who have been staffing them for years are being hounded out by anti-immigration zeal. 

As a result, farmers are scaling back production of labor-intensive fruit and vegetable crops and investing heavily in labor-replacing machinery. Substituting human labor with machinery not only boosts agriculture's fossil fuel use, it also makes farms more vulnerable by strapping them with debt. 

Not surprisingly, their lenders are getting nervous. In testimony last fall before the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, an official from Farm Credit of Western New York estimated that more than 800 farms in the state, representing 750,000 acres in farmland, were "highly vulnerable to going out of business or forced to [become] part-time farms from a severe labor shortage." 

These operations, whose average size is less than 100 acres, essentially represent New York's base of midsized farms. The Farm Credit official predicted that if those farms fail, much of that land would likely remain in some form of agriculture, but that "hundreds of thousands of acres would be vulnerable to being discontinued from crop production and converted to non-farm uses." 

In other words, what's left of New York's most productive farmland may soon be sprouting second homes and vacation condos where it once produced tomatoes and green beans. 

U.S. Farms Migrate to Mexico

The problem is by no means limited to the Northeast. In California, the Associated Press reports, Mexican farmworkers are having trouble heading north over an increasingly well-patrolled border -- but U.S. farm owners are crossing the other way freely. According to AP, "Many [U.S. growers have] moved their fields to Mexico, where they can find qualified people, often with U.S. experience, who can't be deported." 

When they jump the border to buy land -- presumably without having to risk their lives in the desert or hire "coyotes" to ease the passage -- U.S. farm owners find an oasis of cheap and compliant labor. AP reports that U.S. farm employers can buy a whole day's worth of labor for a wage ($9.60) equal to an hour's worth of work at the going rate north of the border -- while still doubling Mexico's minimum wage of $4.80 per day. 

Now, the AP article is talking mainly about large-scale agriculture here -- the kind that keeps your local Wal-Mart stocked with little bags of baby spinach and asparagus all year. In the logic of industrial farming -- where food is grown in vast, centralized monocrops, and then distributed in thousand mile-plus radii -- the shift from California to Mexico makes a certain sense. "Mexico is closer to eastern U.S. markets than California," Associated Press reports. "Shipping times to Atlanta are a day shorter from Mexico's central Guanajuato state."

But the labor crunch is surely also squeezing California's midsized operations -- the farms that will be needed to broaden local-food access in one of the nation's most economically stratified states. In farm fields larger than even a few acres, diversified vegetable farming is extremely labor intensive -- and in the modern U.S., farm labor generally means immigrant labor.

What, then, is the answer? In the short term, the U.S. should end its ridiculous nativist immigration policies. As I've written before, Mexican farmworkers don't sneak across one of the globe's most militarized borders to freeload off of U.S. taxpayers, despite the fantasies of certain cable-TV commentators. Rather, they're fleeing a near-complete meltdown in small-scale Mexican agriculture -- one that directly implicates the free-trade zeal of U.S. policymakers and corporations. 

But even if U.S. policymakers did open the border -- highly unlikely -- we can't build a sustainable food system in the United States on the backs of former Mexican farmers who have been driven off their land by NAFTA and other binational U.S.-Mexico policies. The time has come for the U.S. sustainable-food movement to develop a North American consciousness -- to foster a farmworker movement of its own, and to seek coalitions with Mexican small-farm advocates to rebuild local and regional food networks on both sides of the border. 

Simultaneously, it's time to develop an idea floated by Anna Lappé on Grist a couple of months back: farm work as a green-collar job. Heard of Teach for America, the federal program that draws college graduates into critically important, but horribly paid, public-school jobs? The time for Farm for America is ripe -- as ripe as the fruit that will soon be rotting on vines across the country for lack of pickers.

http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/05/30/?source=most_popular_rss

North Carolina-based Tom Philpott is Grist's food editor.

You can also use a kind of reverse-Jenga game called Bandu (published by Milton Bradley and based on a game calls Bausack). In Bandu, the goal is to build a tower on a base using pieces that are all differently shaped. The wooden pieces range from "normal" shapes like rods, beams, cones, and hoops to "unusual" trapezoids, cut cylinders, a goblet, and even an egg! Players take turns choosing a random building piece that they must integrate into their tower without making it fall. The winner is the player (or team) with the last tower standing.

Jenga Rules

• Split players into teams.
• Ask questions of individual players on teams in rotation so that everyone has a chance to answer.
  • Team A's Player 1, Team B's Player 1, Team C's Player 1, THEN Team A's Player 2, Team B's Player 2, Team C's Player 2, THEN Team A's Player 3, etc.
• Students who INCORRECTLY answer a question must remove a block. The block removed must be below the top-most completed layer of the tower.
• Students who CORRECTLY answer a question choose a person from another team to remove a Jenga block. The block removed must be below the top-most completed layer of the tower. No one can be chosen more than 3 times in a row.
• The winning team is the one that causes a player from another team to knock over the tower.

Bandu Rules

• Split players into teams.
• Ask questions of individual players on teams in rotation so that everyone has a chance to answer.
  • Team A's Player 1, Team B's Player 1, Team C's Player 1, THEN Team A's Player 2, Team B's Player 2, Team C's Player 2, THEN Team A's Player 3, etc.
• Students who INCORRECTLY answer a question must choose a piece randomly and integrate it into the team's tower. No one can be chosen more than 3 times in a row.
• Students who CORRECTLY answer a question choose a person from another team to integrate a random piece into their team's tower.
• The winning team is the one that causes a player from another team to knock over the tower.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/24348079@N00/306430750

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.561815&w=425&h=350&fv=] from www.metacafe.com posted with vodpod

Last week was the most recent Revolve and it was about patience. The skit this time around had to do with a game of Jenga and learning how to be patient enough to win the game and keep the tower from falling over. Another skit had to do with slowing down when you're reading your Bible and taking the time to understand what the people did and why.

After each of the Revolves, Kaley, Daniel, and I hand out the "thing" that is supposed to help the kids remember the virtue. Well, the "thing" was candy (AKA the Bit-Of-Patience Bar) and the kids had to wait a week before eating the candy. I picked out a packet of Starbursts (Mmmmm)! Now, if you know me at all, from YouTube, from MySpace, from real life, whatever, you know that I am EXTREMELY impatient.

I am proud to say that I have not eaten my Starbursts yet. It was extremely hard, but I'm really glad that I actually did it. :]

Okay, so I know this post was pointless, but I have a dance recital at 5 and I can't think of anything to write about, so I decided I'd let you guys know a little bit more about me! Toodles!

-Bee-

Oh, and I'd like to show you the beautiful state I live in; Texas!!! :] (This is just in my front yard.)

This next one is one of my all time fave pics!

Location: Tyler State Park

Homesickness is not an issue for me. Of course, I miss my friends, family, dogs and other parts of my daily routine, but that’s not homesickness. That’s simply a change of habits. On the other side of the spectrum, any and every study abroad prep program warns about the eventual downturn; the “post-honeymoon” effects of your time away from home. They love the word “post-honeymoon.” They will push and frighten and tell you how awful, how debilitating the ailment is once you come down with it. I’m not about to say that I rose above homesickness, because there have been moments I take to reflect, but only moments. 

My father studied in England and Ireland between semesters when he was in college, and my brother spent maybe one month of a summer in Oaxaca, Mexico, but neither had much advice for me. They simply didn’t spend enough time away to have any kind of crisis. “It was enough time to find a routine, or get used to not having one, you know?” I awkwardly paraphrase my father to have said. And my brother was so overwhelmed by the language he didn’t have time to worry about anything back at home. Like most people, they came to the conclusion that I would be fine. I was just to call home when I felt I needed too, and to not make it a priority. They seemed to trust me to land on my feet, despite never before having a harder landing.

I was a little concerned that noone was concerned. I looked to literature, which is a lame thing to admit, but I avoided the touristy recommendation books stacked like a game of Jenga on my desk. The great writers had the answer. Adventurers and travellers, while not exactly in a formal study abroad program I could relate to, definitely garnered respect from me. So wishing I had the time to re-read the classics, I reviewed what I learnt from my favourites. As it happened, practical advice was scarce and what I could recall were mostly tragedies.

My next resource was a book of favourite quotes. I have a few, but one picks up the more obscure authors. Some of which certainly make you work harder to connect to their writings. It attracts me because of how refreshing it can be to have someone push you to find a feeling or memory that resonates with what they write. The book didn’t hold any advice or answers, but a title of one contributor caught my eye: “poet and hematologist.” Who writes prose and studies blood? Apparently Leo Vroman. I jumped on-line and found a list of his works and favourite passages. Finally, I found what I was looking for.

“I’d rather be homesick than home.” 

Quick, direct, and true to my own life. What opportunities might I miss by worrying about some prospective lump in my throat or ache in my gut? Everything. Why not embrace this and any opportunity fully? Problem solved. Homesickness is nothing to worry about anymore.

I have encountered a few moments that called for reflection. A trip to the Basin National Park to find Aboriginal carvings led me to a water mass that too closely resembled the lakes of the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas where I’ve spent many summers. The shallow water and high valley walls, crowded with weekend campers and proud sail boats hit me like a brick when I saw it. I left the group and wandered nearly a kilometre out to a short bluff where I perched alone for nearly twenty minutes. Thoughts about family trips and close friends crowded my head and I had to make sense of what I was feeling. It wasn’t regret or a soreness in my gut, just memories. They are things that I love, that haven’t left me, and I felt comfortable knowing that I won’t leave them.

Weekends later I travelled to Bowral, a three hour train ride south of Sydney, with friends from the university. From everything I heard it would be the small country town community I came from. Sure enough, buildings and industry gave way to trees and hills, and I found myself surrounded by grazing cattle, horse farms and paddocks of crops. All I needed was a patch of sunflowers. I could tell I was better prepared for this trip. I knew sitting on the back porch looking over the “South 40” of their family land that I would instantly connect with my home on the Flint Hills of Kansas. It never overwhelmed me, though later that day I spent a few minutes writing a journal entry and a message to friends back home about what I’d found in Bowral. It was a great way to sort out my thoughts and prove to myself that this experience was healthy.

Homesickness isn’t a weakness. It’s a testament to someone’s close connection with their history. In the end, though, I’m glad I’ve found this introspective middle ground where I can deal with these emotions in a mature, optimistic way. Don’t be fooled, though: I’m dying to see some sunflowers and buffalo next month.

Jenga es un juego de habilidad que consiste en ir quitando bloques de una torre por turnos para ir poniéndolos en lo alto de ésta, siempre cruzando la orientación en cada piso. Aunque originalmente en el juego si un participante tirara la torre ganaría el que puso correctamente el último bloque, nosotros normalmente jugamos de forma que quien tira la torre queda eliminado o simplemente se lleva unas cuantas collejas. Podéis encontrar un pequeño juego en flash para haceros una mejor idea de cómo se juega a Jenga aquí.

La palabra jenga es la forma en infinitivo de kujenga, el verbo "construir" en idioma Swahili. El juego tal como lo conocemos hoy fue inventado en 1970 por Leslie Scott. Todo comenzó como un juego infantil alrededor de unos bloques de madera recibidos como regalo en Ghana. Leslie llevó el juego a Inglaterra en la década de los 80 y se lo enseñó a sus amigos de la Universidad de Oxford. Llamándolo Jenga, comenzó a vender el juego y registró las reglas para poseer el copyright. Más tarde Hasbro se hizo con los derechos del juego, comercializándolo en Estados Unidos y en otros muchos lugares del mundo. Hoy día además de la versión original del juego, que consta de 54 bloques de madera y en el que se ponen 3 bloques por nivel, existen otras variantes del juego comercializadas como Throw 'n Go Jenga, Jenga Truth or Dare, Jenga Extreme o Casino Jenga.

Por último quería mostraros este video divertido que vi hace algún tiempo de un tipo que realizó una torre con 12000 bloques de Jenga (algo que le llevó unas dos semanas) y que tuvo un pequeño percance cuando la estaba presentando en sociedad...

Sin comentarios...

Cyan came over and hung out with Cal and I for a little bit while Abra and Ocia took some cat naps. We decided to play some Jenga. Cyan hadn't played before, but he really liked it. He kept track of whose turn it was, and played like a pro! He likes to build things, so, no surprise there, and it's even more fun when it all crashes down!

Playing games rules.
My life is great.

Fixing the Canucks seems like a game of Jenga. There's always the risk of cracking your foundation in the pursuit of climbing higher. Dan, one of my friends, has some very interesting thoughts on the whole Canuck fan phenomenon and the perception of the current team. Click HERE to read his blog post. I agree with a lot of what he has to say except for a couple points.

I consider Cooke an important part of the team composition.  No one gets under the skin of the opposition as often and with such brazen aggression.  Being one of the smallest Canucks, I tend to cheer him on the same way I rallied behind the diminutive Arturs Irbe when he was in net.   And then there's Cowan.  I can't help but want to keep him around, just in case he explodes for a stretch like he did last year.  That's probably a fool's hope, but I'm a sucker for flying underwear.

Going along with the same idea behind the scrabble idea I decided to bust out the Jenga and take some pictures today.  I will post the rest into the gallery later but here are the first two.  The top one I used an age look with a little gothic glow and the second one I decided to add some vignetting with a little brown.  I don't know if I actually like the second one but I thought I would give it a shot.

Gallery