Saguaro carrot appeared one morning,
hoping nobody noticed.
Am I a little too ghostly?
Did I get the color wrong?
(Photo modified from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coyote_Mountain.jpg, by Florian Boyd, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. This modified photo is herewith licensed for distribution on the same terms as the original.)
A local farm stand I visited yesterday had a sign saying “Peaches $2.50 per pound, $28.00 per half-bushel, $25.00 per bushel” I asked the woman behind the counter, and she said it wasn’t a misprint and that she doesn’t set the prices, just makes the signs. She assured me it was neither a mistake nor a joke, but that she was not at liberty to explain her boss’s reasoning.
Recently there has been a lot of talk about deflation, where the price of everything gets lower every week, investments lose value and no rational person buys anything today, since it will surely be cheaper tomorrow. The received wisdom on deflation is that it is a kind of financial apocalypse, though there are those of us who might thrive in a non-growth, non-money economy. I was wondering if this price structure might be designed to counteract deflationary pressure in the peach market: something like “if you buy enough to last you a long time, I’ll give you a price commensurate with the expected loss in value.”
On the other hand, it’s probably just that old cyclical farming dilemma that everybody’s zucchini, peaches, tomatoes, etc. are ripe at the same time, and there are few customers prepared to do the hard work of preserving them for future use.
At the Lowell Folk Festival, we saw a group of improvisational musicians from South Korea who base their work on two ancient shamanic traditions from different parts of Korea. The call themselves the Sai Ensemble and they have very little web-presence yet. This was the first time they had performed in the US. I took a little low-quality video footage, but I found a better video posted by someone else:
Here are scans of their program brochure:
Here is my low-quality video:
Telephoto Futures
In the course of our work at openindicators.org, we wanted to make an interactive map showing various factors involved in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. We found maps that were somewhat useful from NOAA (the Weather Bureau), and we discovered the Minerals Management Service had an enormous database with about 5000 records of offshore oil rigs, with thousands marked as “active”. We would have liked to show who owns and operates the rigs, which ones have had accidents in each year, what the output of each was, etc. This sounds like the kind of task a citizen ought to be able to do with this data, but it would take an impracticably large number of person-hours, since the MMS data seems to have been structured to make this kind of generalization difficult or impossible to make. The nominal owners and operators of the rigs (some 1200) are probably subsidiaries of a few big operators. The definition of “active” is not at all helpful or transparent. I got this video from an excellent blog:
http://deepseanews.com/2010/06/oil-platforms-in-the-gulf-how-many-and-who-owns-them/
It seems that the MMS has not only been a very bad “watchdog” over the oil/gas/drilling industry, but that it has actively sought to obfuscate (hide) vital information from the public. This is partly explained by Bush/Cheney administration changes in the personnel of the agency, but it seems to have always been the nature of the agency that it has existed to protect the extractive industries rather than to regulate them.
