More Like Marlow's Two Babes

Sean and Dave get Poetical on the Information Superhighway!

posted by DRUNK N SAILOR at 12:55 pm

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6/12/08

I feel confused...

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008: New York Post Page 35

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008: New York Post Page 47

posted by DRUNK N SAILOR at 9:38 pm

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6/10/08

Today In The News

On my way to work today I bought the Daily News? For its front page as pictured here. Sifting its foully ink drenched pages I began to question my decision. Obviously a hilarious, effective, and important headline to anyone living in a fast food city such as New York, as well as directly pertinent to the industry and political platform (local food, know your farmer, seasonal etc.)we often perch on. I still felt a tiny wave of discomfort or unease. And I realized it had nothing to do with the proximity my brain waves were to the ultra-saturated gossip page. I started this morning, moving slowly through the hell wave that is our climate today, wondering about how I ingest information.

In my inbox when I sat down this morning was an article on South Korea's Prime Minister and Cabinet resigning in hopes to quell riots over US Beef being allowed to be imported after a 5 year stay due to fear of Mad Cow disease. The issues here run deeper, wallowing in what seems to add up to a deep rooted mistrust of the three-month old presidency of Lee Myung BakThis. The article was from the Times Online listed under the category of World News. Fair enough. Again an article aligned in some way with my concerns with the world, to make a possibly unfairly sweeping statement.

So I recognize a thread here. One from the World News section of the Times Online to the front page of the Daily News. For more investigation I moved my attention to the New York Times Online today. Here I found an even more complex system of shoots and ladders.

In the Nation Section (and I'm aware as I write this that the New York Times Online is tricky, moving an article from one section to another it might pertain to, creating a Rubik's Cube of qualified information) an article on how the aforementioned tomato crisis will most likely pull in an extra 275 million in next years budget for the failing FDA. In Well, a health blog, Tara Parker-Pope discusses the dangers of lawnmowers, without ever mentioning the environmental ramifications of a perfectly manicured and pedestrian lawn. In the BUSINESS section is an article on farmers (mostly of corn and soy etc.) expecting a harrowing harvest due to water logged land. In the Magazine/Home and Garden section a somewhat tritely in depth article on a hipster in London who "guerrilla gardens" for what seems to boil down to street cred.

Quote:Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says "tasted dirty," Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature's order; he gladly plants invasive species if they're aesthetically appropriate to the setting.

Also in Home and Garden a timely little piece about growing your own tomatoes and an interesting, if surface, instructional on how to live off the grid in your early retirement home without sacrificing your microwave. Thank you Sun. In Regional you will find out how Economic Development Corporation owes 45million dollars in water bills. In Business and World a mention of Mad Cow and the South Korean unrest, in Technology a treatise on plants and the possibility they recognize their relatives and are nicer to them. Similar to us? I'm not sure. Also a question mark on climate control, class and infectious disease in Dot Earth/Science.

Perhaps the most poignant article today is also found in Science. The dubious future of our friends the horseshoe crab, who like most ocean inhabitants are fighting for survival.

Quote:The loss of the horseshoe crab would be tragic, researchers said, not only because the creatures are fascinating and cute and predate the dinosaurs by 200 million years, but also because so many contemporary life forms depend on them. Their annual spawns draw hundreds of species of migratory birds, predatory fish, reptiles, amphibians and various other alimentary canals eager to brunch on the freshly deposited Limulus eggs. "Horseshoe crab eggs are like filet mignon around here," Dr. Mattei said. "They're a very popular item on the menu."

At first the scattering of environmental issues bugged me. Why do I have to scour the paper or the internet for what I find interesting and vital when someone else can check the golf scores in about .5 seconds. Maybe not a totally apt metaphor but you see what I mean? Then something else happened. Looking at the information I had gathered from each section it started to mean something more. I began to recognize that just as I find our earth tangibly present in most moments of every day, be it the 98 degree weather, lunch or the pop art littering the cover of the Daily News, so does the newspaper or rather the information stream. It might be quite impossible to limit these articles to one section or "streamline" them everyday because they are everywhere, in everything, informing the air around us. Our land, farm or asphalt, is our lens, our sphere, our metaphor as well as our sometimes scarred reality.

Much like the horseshoe crab, what we stand upon depends on us just as much, if not more, than we depend on it.

posted by DRUNK N SAILOR at 2:59 pm

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6/5/08