I'm a lasagna boy!

Anchoas

This isn't some kind of metaphor

Prayer To God from the album 1000 Hurts by Shellac

Listening to "History Lesson - Part II" by Minutemen.

Round up the usury suspects

Heard Muhammad Yunus, the Bengali economist and founder of Grameen Bank, speak today.

His autobiography, Banker to the Poor, touches on Bangladesh's historical patriarchy, terrible fight for independence, and periodic natural disaster as sources of its contemporary poverty.
Yunus is plain-spoken and inspirational: in fact, many of his stories sound too good to be true. While the economic ideas behind the bank are revolutionary, the social aspect is rooted in an almost unbelievable faith in human nature. But it works, and has worked for almost three decades; moreover, the system of microcredit he pioneered has been implemented in dozens of countries and cultures worldwide.

Shifting gears

Events rolled neatly one into th' other today. Got up and rolled out down Market St., expecting to see crowds for San Francisco's Bike-to-Work Day. I grabbed a banana and a sticker, chin-wagged with a few cyclists, and then scooted down to the Embarcadero BART station.
The motto for the event was "Shift Gears, Bike to Work". I was riding the trusty ol' Dutchess.
A volunteer for the SFBC tried to get me to sign something in favour of the Jefferson St. transit plan. He was surprised to hear me offer an objection ("There's another point of view?" he asked naïvely, disingenuously, stupidly). I jumped down into the Embarcadero BART station, where I met up with Peter; we rode down to the Union City station, met up with Lupe, and then rode through the baylands, over the Dumbarton, and through the bird preserve in to work.

The power of independent trucking

After about two hours of steadily pounding the keys yesterday, I took off my headphones and wondered why I was feeling so energetically angry. And then I looked at the iPod and realised that I'd been listening to a mix called "Surgically Precise" full of Shellac and Big Black. And I've got the 8-track playing really fucking loud. The mix also has a song ("Il Duce") from one of the very first CDs I bought: The Wailing Ultimate. I got it from the Phantom of the Attic back when they sold vinyl as well as comix.

Independent truckers in the Bay Area are on strike to protest rising gas prices (an increased monthly expense of $1500).

Me, I'm a-lying on my back enjoying the sunshine. To-morrow is Bike-to-work Day.

The Boxer of Berkeley

Jen and Pete complete their domestication trifecta with Maxx, the handsome four-year old boxer they rescued.

Because they were squirrels

While waiting on the Palo Alto platform for the 20h21 northbound Caltrain, a tattooed youngish man rolled up on a tricked-out downhill bike. We were talking about how or why the train was late ("possibly because they're testing new electronic switches," offered a cheerful German riding a bike-boom Fuji). The very shaved-scalp young man wandered around the platform. "That's your bike?" he asked. "That's sick!" and I felt a swelling of pride.
On the train he and the German talked triathalon ("You swam Escape from Alcatraz in 40 minutes? That's sick!"), and I saw jimg climb on board at the San Mateo stop. He had been counting on the train running a few minutes late. We rode back to the Lower Haight together.

Today was a good day and a bad day for trains. Caltrain has enjoyed successful tests of its new "Baby Bullet" high-speed Peninsula rail service; but the long-rumoured high-speed rail from North to South is stuck on the siding.

Poop-powered and then some

While organic dairyman Albert Straus fixes up the masses of manure into useable energy on his Marin County farm, the entire country of Denmark hopes to be fossil-fuel free by 2008.

California has invested $10 million in a program to explore the use of biogas, primarily through methane-digesting systems such as the one in use at the Straus dairy:

The tax incentives of the late 1970's and early 1980's encouraged the construction of approximately 18 commercial farm scaled digesters for energy production in California. Only 5 of those systems are running today and 3 of these are on pig farms and 2 of these are on dairy farms. Only 0.37 MW of power is generated from existing 5 digesters in CA although the total potential for animal waste to energy in California dairies is over 105 MW. Energy can be produced from different types of livestocks including dairy, swine, poultry, turkeys and sheep and lambs wastes in California. California dairies have 1.4 million milk cows and is the second leading state in total number of milk cows. There are 2,308 dairy farms in California with an average size of 602 cows. Currently, only less than 1 percent of the livestock manure generated in CA is utilized.