thisiswhatyoushalldo

This was a fun little bit of Internet time wasting fancy. I will be revisiting:

From their “About Page”

“We live in a time of an ever-consolidating media industry. Fewer news outlets inevitably give way to fewer perspectives.

What happens is the news.
The news is what happens.”

weekinreview

An article in this month’s Discover magazine (read the whole great thing here) outlines the woes of Mercury and what we as a world are and are not doing about it.
Tieing most of the mercury woes to industrial waste, and more specifically waste from coal burning power generation plants, the articles is a stunning slap to the noggin. We are ignoring the waste and the effects of mercury at our peril. If we don’t take drastic measures to stem that pollution and its long term effects from even small dose exposure to this dangerous chemical vapor, then we face a path of industrial pollution and environmental ruin that may very well be impossible to fix.
The Clinton administration proposed reducing mercury emissions in power plants by 90 percent by 2008. But, thinking he knew better, Bush has decided to slow that wagon down and instead is proposing to reduce those emissions by 70 percent by 2018, as well as to shun the Kyoto protocol, a world wide treaty to stem ozone layer eroding emissions (of which mercury is certainly one of) I would hate to think that business and industry concerns from Big Coal and Big Oil guided him in those decisions.
But environmental groups, city and state health departments and others are now preparing to sue the EPA to get enforcement in line with the Clinton proposals. It may work. It wasn’t too many years ago that we began to understand the problems seen from exposure to lead and asbestos. And the EPA dragged its feet on those issues as well. The courts finally got involved and now lead and asbestos issues are managed and regulated, easing many, many health and environmental issues.
If you value eating fish; consuming dairy; breathing air; eating food grown in farms, harvested from non polluted soil or drinking water; if you are concerned about preventing cancer, especially rare and untreatable cancers; if you want to ensure you suffer from no auto immune diseases or want to make sure your children don’t develop ADD or autism you have a vested interest in reducing mercury exposure in our environment. Hmm, that list should just about cover everybody.
As a kid, I remember the neighbor kid had access to liquid mercury, apparently once used in welding. We used to play with it for hours in the garage. Probably not too wise. And looking at my home town, plagued with lots of Multiple Sclerosis patients, lots of lupis patients, lots of twins (?) and lots of ADHD, I have said over and over again it is all because of the coal dust. With what I am learning about mercury exposure, there just might be something too that.

Addendum:
Apparently, even my slightly polluted home town is starting to see the light.

Lookout is a plug in for Microsoft Outlook (download from Microsoft for free is here) and one of the most useful things I have come across in a long time.
It indexes your Outlook files and makes them quickly and easily searchable.
If you have used Google Desktop Search and are familiar with the quick search capabilities it offers, you will have a good idea of how Lookout works – except that it is specific (so far) to Outlook (It doesn’t work with Outlook Express)
But the speed and ease of how it works makes folders and filing emails almost reduntant. If you can remember some very simple simple stuff, like words in the body of the email, who sent it, a subject or whatever and enter that in the Lookout search bar, any and all email you are searching for will pop right up.
I subscribe to perhaps too many Yahoo Groups mailing lists and have more than I need to keep track of in my email box. But for the last few weeks it has been easy to manage because, well frankly, I don’t manage it anymore. I let Lookout manage it for me and simply scan them for basic info and then simple let the mail rest unsorted in my inbox. I don’t have to worry about finding anything later because the application will do that for me, in less than two seconds.
It is so useful and powerful, I may very well give up using Gmail and go back to Outlook now that someone has made Outlook a tool that I can embrace once again.

(I just read their homepage a bit and discovered that Lookout will index your whole system if you want it to . . . So I guess this is a quiet MS answer to Google’s Desktop Search tool. It might bare watching how this plays out.)

John Reeves is dwarfed as he walks by the nearly 150-foot Fox Ice Tower outside Fairbanks.
Photo by John Hagen / Fairbanks Daily News-Miner via The Associated Press.

I stumbled on this via That’s My Blog!. Apparently a charming Alaska resident (Alaska is one of our states -it’s really far up north) decided to leave a fountain on and add pipes to it to extend its height and see how high the towering structure of ice will get this winter. Reading along on That’s My Blog!, we learn that this is a bit of common thing in Alaska and clubs actually seem to compete annually for some bragging rights to see who can build the highest structure.
There used to be an apartment complex in Denver that did this for a couple of winters, a few years back. But we haven’t had a real severe winter in a few years, I doubt the towering ice fountain of doom will not be crafted in the Queen City of the Plains.

America – Why I Love her.

I’ve been deep into the pages of Chronicles, Vol. 1 by Bob Dylan for the past few weeks. It is unlike any celebrity reminiscences I have read before – I guess as should be expected. Dylan’s look at his life, told in an almost stream of consciousness, folksy style has me hanging upside down and delighted, clear down to my toes.
He talks at great length of celebrity and his need for privacy. He talks about his loss of the love of music and how he went through the late 70s and the 80s sleepwalking through his fame. He tells the story of how he picked his name.
He talks at length about living in Greenwich Village, NYC in the early 1960s. And of composing the songs for his stunning “comeback” album: Oh Mercy in 1989. He talks about his love of Sinatra and Ice- T. He talks of drinking a case of Irish ale with Bono and U2 and the lengths he would go to listen to records while still a struggling musician, new to New York City and the coffeehouse scene that would eventually lead to his fame.
He talks about a visit to Woody Guthrie’s’ home to find the box of songs in the cellar that Woody told him about (a box of songs that eventually was recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco). He explains in cryptic detail his newly crafted guitar and singing process that he claims has reintroduced him to his own volume of work and has helped him understand the music and songs he has written over the course of nearly 50 years.
The book is great.
Written in imprecise, image-fantastic Dylanesque prose – it rambles in places then suddenly the narrative is on fire. Imagery so fierce and precise you feel you are reading shear poetry – which I guess, coming from the poet of a generation, it is. You can just hear his gravel, scarred voice, perhaps a little drunk or high, weaving the story in your mind.
Dylan is an enigma. Peaking into his life as told through his pen, you understand the enigma a bit. Or perhaps you understand the “Dylan enigma” is not meant to be understood. That even Bob Dylan understands. He has warred with it. He has made peace with. He understands his muse and lets his muse do his work and at the end of Chronicles, he seems happy to have been along for the ride.
More books are perhaps promised. Dylan has completed his press junket for this work and has said it was a joy to compose and he can’t wait to tell more of his life. He is at a happy place in his life, which is kind of rare, if you have followed any of his career for any period of time.