Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, which marks the half-way point of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are already noticeably longer, but the cold weather has been hanging on with unusual tenacity this year, and so all eyes turn to Punxsutawney Phil to tell us if the weather will cut us a break or if we are destined to grind on with the bitter winds and biting temperatures. Because it’s still so cold, the maple syrup producers in New England are undoubtedly hoping Phil will not see his shadow — they are usually getting geared up in February for their production season in March, but when the weather stays cold, the sap doesn’t flow much.
I guess conditions are a bit milder in the New York City area, because here’s a first-hand account in the NYT from a woman who got to help out with a small sugaring operation right in the heart of Brooklyn. And by “small operation” I mean one sugar maple in some guy’s backyard, but they still do the whole thing with the taps and plastic tubing and buckets just like the farmers in Maine and Vermont. She got two gallons of sap for her efforts and then set up her own evaporator station in her kitchen to boil it down into Grade A syrup. You need 10 gallons of sap for 1 quart of syrup, so she didn’t get much finished product, but the very idea of boiling your own maple syrup on your stove seems like it would be a kick.
Here’s a clip from my favorite TV show, Dirty Jobs, where Mike Rowe, the host, helps a maple syrup farmer tap his trees, to help you get a sense of what the job is like. You can do it in your own backyard, too, if you have a sugar maple tree. This webpage has a video that tells you how to distinguish a sugar maple from other maple trees (which do not produce edible sap), since sugar maples are not as common in settled urban areas as Norway maples.
You may or may not have heard of the TED Talks. I run across links to them all the time on a fair number of the more intelligent blogs I follow, but I don’t know if they’re well-known in a wider context. Anyway, it’s basically an invitational series of lectures by various Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker types and other assorted smart people, attended by their fellow Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker types and other assorted smart people. It’s been going on for 25 years, so it’s not just some “hey, let’s have a conference, dudes!” like SXSW, it actually offers quite a lot of top-name speakers spouting Very Important Stuff.
So why the heck is Mike Rowe giving a TED Talk? Turns out that Mike is actually a very smart guy; he plays a smirking everyman on his show, but if you pay attention to him you’ll eventually discover that he’s a nerd like the rest of us. It’s easy to see where the entertainment value of having Mike Rowe at your conference would come from: show a few clips of the various forms of shit he has had to handle, tell some cute anecdotes, entertain the crowd in between the “we’re all doomed” lecture from Al Gore and the “how to make a million dollars” lecture from some VC shark.
But that’s selling Mike short. In this talk, he does indeed do the anecdote about the episode where he had to castrate baby lambs by biting off their testicles, but instead of going for the big laughs, he turns the topic around and discusses how that particular job made him have a bit of an epiphany about the value of labor. He whips out the classical rhetorical terms anagnoresis and peripeteia to explain how he came to this realization, and I will leave him to define those terms for you in the video clip.
I don’t think he does a particularly good job of really explaining what his moment of anagnoresis was, but I think what he wanted to get across to the people in the audience is that as a society, we are going to have to re-evaluate our relationship to work, just as we are going to have to re-evaluate a lot of the basic elements of our life over the next couple of generations. Much of the material presented at the TED Talks is about the amazing world of the future, and what he is doing is giving them a very gentle nudge to let them know that the pie-in-the-sky visions of tomorrow are going to collide very hard with reality soon, and that even the high-falutin’ CEOs and wizards of Silicon Valley might need to reconsider the possibilities the world will present them with.
It’s a long video (about 20 minutes), but take the time to watch it if you can.
boobcheese
tickle fights
child actor suicides
Betty White
Zombie Farrah Fawcett
Canadian pissing habits
that milkaholic Lindsay
ChatRoulette
whatever half-assed thing Google did this week
out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with:
Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the hole
GateCrashGate
Meredith [...]
Nowhere near enough responses to fill in all the blanks on the Mad-Lib Post game, so I guess we’ll chalk it up as a loss and try it again some other time. Maybe I’ll try it on Facebook instead.
More additions to the list:
Levi Johnston
Carrie Prejean
Blue Dog Democrats
The Entire Lohan Family
The 2012 Apocalypse
The Republican “Comeback”
“ordinary heroes”
More effluvia:
Those Northwest Airlines pilots
Zombie Michael Jackson
Sexy ____________ Halloween Costumes (in fact, anything to do with adults and Halloween)
Celebrity Twitters
Balloon Boy and His Crazy Dad (thankfully, this one has already faded quite a bit)
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]