Lift Up Your Hearts!

Fruitless Fall:  The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, by Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury, New York, 2008)

Fruitless Fall had been my "to read" list since mid-2009 and, thanks to generous family, on our bookshelves since Christmas.  I loved Jacobsen's Chocolate Unwrapped, so why it took so long to begin this book is beyond me.  Once begun, however, I couldn't stop, and finished it the same day.  There are a few compensations for being sick and not having the energy to tackle much of anything else.

Speaking of feeling sick ... Fruitless Fall is scarier than The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food, Inc., and Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal combined.  Or perhaps the effect is cumulative.

That's not to say the book isn't a delight to read, doing for honey and beekeeping what John McPhee's Oranges did for the citrus industry many long years ago.  (I wish someone would write an update, as McPhee's book ends when frozen concentrate was king.)  The overall theme is the recent precipitous and inexplicable decline of bees and beekeepers, with many side notes (some delightful, some frightening) along the way.

Did you know that bees make great minesweepers?  They can be trained in two days, can cover vastly more territory than dogs, are as accurate as humans, and don't get themselves blown up.  This may not be the most important reason for us to worry about their health and safety, but I find it incredibly cool.

Bees, and consequently beekeepers, have faced a daunting couple of decades, especially in Europe and the Americas.  Loss of habitat, savage mites, virulent viruses, the stress of industrial agriculture, widespread pesticide and antibiotic use, and the still unexplained Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), have dealt a near-fatal blow to bees and the crops that depend on them for pollination.

It's a terrifying story, but maybe too much to take in all at once, especially when food is still plentiful on the grocery store shelves.  Here's something more immediate (and familiar) to make you think twice before buying your kids Honey Nut Cheerios.

[I]f you asked [beekeepers] to list the biggest challenges they face, development wouldn't even make the top three.  CCD wouldn't necessarily be number one, either.  That honor would go to China and its deluge of honey—real and otherwise. ... Almost 70 percent of the honey consumed in the United States is imported, with China the top source. ... And Chinese honey producers sell cheap.

That's "cheap" as in about half what it costs to produce honey in the U.S.  Lest you think that this bad news for American beekeepers is good news for American shoppers,

A powerful drug used to treat anthrax and other severe infections, chloramphenicol is banned for agricultural use in the United States, Canada, and Europe to prevent bacteria from developing resistance to it.  It also can cause deadly aplastic anemia—bone marrow failure—in people. ...  Between August 2002 and February 2003, FDA agents seized massive amounts of chloramphenicol-contaminated Chinese honey from several importers....

A February 2003 raid is particularly distressing.  Back on August 19, 2002, the FDA had informed the packer that its honey might be contaminated with antibiotics.  But the packer continued to sell the honey, including 155,000 pounds to Sara Lee, which put that honey into five hundred thousand loaves of bread that were sold to consumers before Sara Lee finally stopped using the honey ten days later.  On September 18, 2002, the FDA informed the packer that its honey was indeed contaminated with antibiotics.  Why it then took the FDA five months to seize the honey, and how much was used in the meantime, is unclear.

A tariff, and a temporary ban on Chinese honey, allowed the price to rise some, but "honey laundering"—sending Chinese honey to the U.S. through other countries—was rampant.  Then, on the strength of a Chinese promise (will we never learn?) to stop using chloramphenicol, the ban on Chinese honey was lifted.  And a loophole was found to circumvent the tariff.

[T]he honey packers, the middlemen, resolved that they would never again be caught short.  Honey ... can stay good for decades.  So now we have walls of Chinese honey in Florida and warehouse after warehouse of clover honey in the Dakotas, ensuring that whatever happens on the world market, industrial honey in the United States will remain cheap.

You may not want to eat it, however. ... In January 2006, [a leading food safety lab] analyzed a random sample of Chinese honey, taken from a Florida honey packer, and found 48 parts per billion ciprofloxacin in it.  Yes, Cipro, the last-defense, über-antibiotic used to treat the anthrax attacks in 2001.  [The top German food safety lab] has found Cipro in numerous batches of Chinese honey.  [That honey, rejected by the EU, eventually came to the U.S.] Apparently Chinese beekeepers are tossing it into their hives to deal with the raging bacterial chaos simmering in a country with rampant pollution, spotty sewage treatment, and few agricultural standards.

An estimated 70 percent of Chinese beekeepers use antibiotics.  One entrepreneur leased a nature preserve of acacia trees from the Chinese government and recruited forty-five beekeepers who agreed to make honey in the reserve without antibiotics and without metal storage containers, which can contaminate honey with iron and lead.  For his troubles, he was ambushed by fifteen other local beekeepers who didn't like the competition, beaten, and left with a concussion.

Does this next situation sound eerily familiar?  It should, because it was just such a situation with home mortgages that precipitated the recent financial crash-and-burn.

Of course, on an ingredients label for honey-mustard dressing or honey-baked ham, you have no way of knowing who made the honey.  Thanks to the international shell games, neither do the food manufacturers.

It gets worse.

[The product] may not even be honey.  Honey is expensive to produce, while corn syrup is cheaper than dirt.  Honey producers in the 1900s got rich cutting honey with corn syrup ... but methods for detecting it soon developed.  Then the adulterators got better. ... [In 1998 American honey buyers received an offer from] a company in India to supply "honey analog" by the ton.  This analog, made from corn or rice syrup, was "enzymatically processed" to resemble honey, physically and chemically.  The company assured buyers that the syrup would pass any test for natural honey....

Sometimes the fraud is chemical, as when rice syrup is doctored to resemble honey, and sometimes it's ontological.  For instance, what is honey?  If you answered something like "a syrup made entirely out of nectar by bees," then consider yourself hopelessly out of date.  Let me introduce you to "Packer's Blend," the latest offering from China.  It appeared on the market in 2006, shortly after the [tariff] loophole was closed by Congress.  Chinese honey may be subject to tariffs, but if a product is less than 50 percent honey, it isn't covered by the law.  This "funny honey," as beekeepers call it, is between 40 and 49 percent honey.  The rest is syrup:  corn syrup, but also rice syrup, lactose syrup—whatever's on hand and cheap.  The importers who bring in these blends may sell them to manufacturers as blends or as pure honey, adding some nice American or Canadian clover honey to give the blend a semblance of the real thing and get it past the manufacturers.

Packer's Blend sells for forty cents a pound and may be in more foods than any of us realize.  You won't see "Packer's Blend" on an ingredients label.  You may see "rice syrup" and "honey," listed separately, or you may just see "honey."  Do food manufacturers understand what they're getting when they buy Packer's Blend?  Are they being told it's honey?  Do they know they're using Chinese honey that may be contaminated?

We can't say for sure.  But what we can say is that American beekeepers can't compete.

The price for industrial-grade honey remains depressed, and one reason ... is that honey laundering is out of control.  Millions of pounds of illegal Chinese honey continue to enter the United States.  The honey is first shipped to the Philippines, Thailand, Russia, India, Australia, and other countries, where papers are forged falsifying the country of origin.  Then the honey is shipped to the United States.  Some of the smugglers know it is contaminated with outlawed antibiotics.  "There is definitely this problem," one Chinese shipper wrote to his U.S. importers.  "I'm worried whether the FDA or USDA may get involved.  Our future shipments will definitely have this fluoroquinolones, and it may take a couple of years to improve."  The honey was sold to major U.S. food companies.  So far, the USDA has made a few arrests, but not enough to staunch the flow of illegal honey.

Nor is our own government squeaky-clean:

[Florida's state apiarist decided]   to quarantine any Australian colonies coming into Florida until he got a cycle of brood out of them, just to be safe.  He was told that if he did that he'd be sued by the government for disrupting international trade.  Somebody really wanted those bees here.

I can't end on such a depressing note.  Much as Polyface Farms is the bright jewel of hope in The Omnivore's Dilemma, Kirk Webster's apiary in the Champlain Valley of Vermont is the sun and air of this otherwise dark story.  As Joel Salatin's Christian faith infuses his farming practices, so Webster's Buddhism led him to conform his practices to nature, rather than the other way around.

[Webster writing] "In my own search for a healthy beekeeping future, I have found the World of Nature herself, the old beekeeping books and journals, and the original accounts of the pioneers of modern organic farming to be far more helpful and inspiring than most of what has been published, talked about and done by the beekeeping community during the last 8 or 10 years.  Here were people who worked hard to solve their own problems in a creative way, often with very few resources.  They looked deeply into the world of Nature searching for examples of balance and stability, and always gave their crops and livestock the last word."

[Sir Albert Howard, father of the modern organic movement, believed] successful farming and food production—healthy plants, animals, and people—required balance.  Any agricultural enterprise must achieve a state of equilibrium that mimics nature if it is to survive and prosper. ... When an imbalance took hold, Howard believed, nature let you know.  The heralds of this imbalance were often pests and disease, which could get a foothold only if something was out of whack in the system.  In this way, pests and disease are not the enemies of the farmer; they are actually allies, helping to illuminate weaknesses in the system before irrevocable damage—exhausted soil, genetically weak crops or animals—is introduced.

In 1998 [Webster] decided to stop fighting the mites and instead see what he could learn from them.  By his own admission, he might not have done it if an easier solution had presented itself. ... "I decided this whole thing was a freight train heading for a wreck, and that I was going to go through the wreck early.  And hopefully recover early."

Recover he did.  The years of letting nature take its course and in the process breeding more robust bees were years of poverty, and even now, with a healthy, prospering, sustainable apiary of mite-resistant bees, he's not going to get rich.  Fortunately, he doesn't want to.

For decades ... honey bees have been selected for traits that had little to do with resilience.  Maximum honey production tops the charts, with maximum bee production closely linked to that.  Gentleness is essential.  Qualities that contribute to self-reliance—resistance to pests and disease, overwintering ability, frugality—are less valued because it's more efficient to rely on petrochemicals to solve such problems.  Who needs bees that can overwinter when it's cheap to truck them down to Florida for the cold months?  Who needs to worry about self-reliant bees when it's more cost-effective to buy new [bees] from Southern breeders or Australia in the early spring?  Why find forage for bees when high-fructose corn syrup is cheap and plentiful?  Why spend years breeding mite- and disease-resistant bees when the chemical conglomerates have all these miticides, fungicides, and antibiotics available right now?

You can manipulate a natural system into doing things it wasn't designed for, but you're always running the risk of collapse.

[Webster again] "Beekeeping now has the dubious honor of becoming the first part of our system of industrial agriculture to actually fall apart.  Let's stop pretending that something else is going on.  We no longer have enough bees to pollinate our crops.  Each time the bees go through a downturn, we respond by making things more stressful for them, rather than less—we move them around more often, expose them to still more toxic substances, or fill the equipment up again with more untested and poorly adapted stock.  We blame the weather, the mites, the markets, new diseases, consumers, the Chinese, the Germans, the (fill in your favorite scapegoat), other beekeepers, the packers, the scientific community, the price of gas, global warming—anything rather than face up to what's happening.  We are losing the ability to take care of living things.  Why?"

Did I say that the decline of bees was the overall theme of Fruitless Fall?  Perhaps it is.  But there's a supertext also:  We need to stop working against our environment and start working with it; to observe carefully and take heed to the ways of the natural world, rather than assuming we always know best and can run roughshod over it with impunity; and to recognize that Creation is not a commodity, but a community.  Joel Salatin would call this "honoring the bee-ness of the bee."

Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites ...and Other Lies You've Been Told, by Bradley R. E. Wright (Bethany House, Minneapolis, 2010)

Frankly, my expectations were not high when I picked up this book.  The title may be eye-catching, but for that reason it doesn't inspire confidence that there's serious writing between the covers.

There is, however, and serious research, too.  Bradley Wright is a sociologist, a professor at the University of Connecticut.  His words are aimed at the layman, not the academic, and he writes with a nice sense of humor; even so, the array of facts and graphs and studies is dizzying.

Why are we so quick to believe bad news, and to propagate it?  Bad news titillates, and what titillates, sells.  Bad news also frightens, and that sells, too.

Wright tackles several areas in which both the secular and the Christian world have been flagellating the church:

• Is American Christianity on the brink of extinction?
• Are we losing our young people?
• Are Evangelicals all poor, uneducated, southern whites?
• Do Christians think and do Christian things?
• Have Christians gone wild?
• Do Christians love others?
• What do non-Christians think of us?

Although his research is specifically about Evangelicals (and his definition is problematic; see below), the statistics and studies he uses reveal a broader picture as well.

As you might expect from the book's title, Wright's studies reveal that on nearly all these fronts the news is much better than we have been led to believe, and gets better still with increasing frequency of church attendance.  Contrary to what bombards us almost daily from the media, when you look at well-ordered studies, Christians are doing significantly better than average with respect to personal habits, the strength of our marriages, charitable behavior, and the character of our children.  We are reasonably orthodox in our beliefs.  Young people are not leaving the church in droves, even though many continue to follow the age-old pattern of sloughing off as they gain their independence and returning to the church when they start families of their own.  We are a diverse lot, and on the whole are better thought of by others than we think we are.

The bad news? We still have a long way to go with respect to the second of the greatest commandments:  loving our neighbors.  We're measurably prone to forgetting that the second part of "hate the sin, but love the sinner" is as important as the first.

We're also far too gullible, believing anything that's written down, that comes from a "study," that throws around statistics, or that is said by a popular Christian leader.  Many misleading or blatantly false statistics are used (presumably with the best of intentions) as advertising gimicks by those in our own camp.

A four-page advertisement in evangelical Christianity's flagship magazine boldly states:  "Christianity in America won't survive another decade unless we do something now."  Why?  "This generation of teens is the largest in history—and current trends show that only 4% will be evangelical believers by the time they become adults....  We are on the verge of a catastrophe."

Where did this 4% figure come from?  Ten years ago a seminary professor did an informal survey of 211 young people interviewed in three states.  The question was poorly worded, and the study probably used a convenience sample.  In terms of quality, this statistic is about as valid as someone putting a survey question on their Facebook page and then having their frinends and acquaintances answer it.  There's nothing wrong with doing it, it's just not very trustworthy.  Motivated by this questionable statistic, a Christian organization was asking tens of thousands of youth pastors around the country to spend $39 to attend a conference on how to avoid this coming catastrophe.

What's more, we worry too much about what others think of us, which causes us to circle the wagons, further weakening our attention to the neighbors it is our job to love.

Ever the professor, Wright gives the Church an overall grade of B.  Not what we'd hope for, not what we should settle for, but more than enough reason to work diligently rather than to drop out in despair.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the book, pulled without any of the surrounding statistical justification, so feel free to question them, per Wright's instruction—or better yet, to look them up yourself.

No doubt because of the statistical studies which are available, Wright uses a standard classification system, based on denominational affiliation, to define "Evangelical" and distinguish it from "Mainline Protestant."  Unfortunately for the statistics, this skews the results of many who would self-classify as evangelical but attend churches in "mainline" denominations.

Evangelical parents worry about the faith of their children, and understandably so.  For some, this leads to attempts to shelter the child from "secular" society and its various religious perspectives.  Ironically, however, engaging society might actually be the best way for Evangelicals to strengthen their faith.  Evangelical parents:  Do you want your child to stay with the faith?  Perhaps one of the best things you can do is make sure he or she is well-educated.  At the very least, sending your children off to college is not necessarily something to fear (at least for their faith—for your finances, yes, run away screaming).

Membership figures for the Catholic Church have remained remarkably steady, but that's deceptive, the way climbing a mountain is a level hike, on average.  The Catholic Church is losing people in large numbers, but they are being offset by new immigrants, who are mostly Catholic.

Catholic women were the least likely to have had an abortion, with about 1 in 5 of them having done so.  About 1 in 4 Protestant women have had abortions, and about 1 in 3 religiously unaffiliated women and members of other religions have had an abortion.  Among both Protestants and Catholics, abortion rates dropped considerably with increased church attendance.  About 1 in 3 Protestant women who rarely attended church had abortions compared to about half that rate, 1 in 6, of the weekly attendees.  Likewise, among Catholic women, abortion rates drop from about 1 in 4 to about 1 in 8.

Wright cites these statistics to support his case that church affiliation and attendance measurably affect behavior when it comes to abortion.  And so they do.  But what dreadful statistics!   In the very best case (weekly-attending Catholics), one out of very eight women (your pew, or maybe yours and the one in front of you), has had at least one abortion.  This is not so much an indictment against the church, which is in the business of accepting sinners into the family, but of the sheer number of abortions that are going on.  I guess it's like the federal deficit—too large to comprehend.  Following Wright's advice, I seriously questioned these numbers, but even the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is obviously not using the statistic to raise an alarm, admits, "At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, about one-third will have had an abortion."  Given that such numbers are far more likely to be under- than over-reported, this is mighty scary.  I actually support leaving desperate personal decisions in desperate personal circumstances up to the primary people involved—but these numbers bespeak decisions made with less thought and research than goes into deciding which college to attend.  In making abortion legal, we appear to have made it almost casual.

Overall, non-Christians view Christians surprisingly positively—surprising, that is, if you have any connection with academia.

In 2007, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research surveyed the religious beliefs of over twelve hundred faculty members at various American colleges and universities.  As I understand it, this study was looking for anti-Semitism among faculty members, but they instead found something surprising:  a strong intolerance toward Evangelical Christians. One of the questions asked faculty members if they had negative feelings toward various religious groups....  [O]ver half—53%—of the faculty members reported having negative feelings toward Evangelical Christians, and this was far more than toward any other group.  Twenty-two percent of faculty members had negative feelings toward Muslims, 18% toward atheists, 13% toward Catholics, 9% toward non-Evangelical Christians, 4% toward Buddhists, and 3% toward Jews.  The study's authors concluded that "if not outright prejudice, faculty sentiment about the largest religious group in the American public borders dangerously close."

Micro Mobility Systems makes classy scooters, and look what I discovered when I ventured onto their website from a FRK article:

I like to take the bus to the airport, but the mile and a half walk to the bus stop is hard on luggage wheels.  They're not designed to take long distances on concrete.  But this is!  It's a scooter, zipping one to the bus stop and then folding to cabin-baggage size.

On second thought, it wouldn't really solve my problem, as cabin-baggage isn't that hard to haul to the bus; my real problem comes whenever I have to bring a bag big enough to check—the weight is much greater and the wheels no better.   With Lufthansa having an 18-pound carry-on weight limit, the scooter part probably adds an unreasonable amount of overhead, anyway.  But it's still a cool idea.

Micro Mobility's scooters in general look pretty classy.  They might make a nice addition to bicycles and trams in the Swiss commuting arsenal.

I have another post on Free-Range Kids.  You've probably read most of it here already, in my review of the Melendy books, but I mention it because the comments over there are brimming with other good book suggestions that you may want to check out.

Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2,  "The Musician's Stimulus Package"

Okay, so that's not the name Mahler gave to this symphony, but he didn't call it "Resurrection," either, which is what usually shows up on concert programs, so I claim the right to my own title.

Last night was the Orlando Phil's season opening concert, consisting of but this one work.  The ticket-takers thoughtfully warned us, as we entered, "Ninety minutes, no intermission!" causing an immediate run on the bathrooms.

Gustav Mahler pushed the limits of orchestral size, and it was a mite crowded on the stage of the Bob Carr Auditorium.  I counted (in the program, not live) 156 musicians, including two full sets of timpani (maybe more—some percussion was off stage), eight trumpets, ten French horns, and as many strings as could fit.  No wonder Mahler isn't played as much as he should be—who can afford it?  Kudos to the OPO for taking on the problem of musician under-employment in this magnificent way.

This was my first hearing of this particular symphony, and I wish I had had Bob Greenberg to explain it to me.  It seemed disjointed, random, and haphazard—but I know it wasn't.  There's hope that it will grow on me, for I love Mahler's First, and in fact kept recognizing brief musical snatches from that symphony in this.  It was finale of the First that echoed in my mind on the drive home.  Mahler is so Mahler.

The Saturdays
The Four-Story Mistake
Then There Were Five
Spiderweb for Two:  A Melendy Maze

by Elizabeth Enright (Holt/Square Fish, New York, 2008)

I've heard it said—and often by teachers—that it doesn't matter what children read, as long as they're reading.  I couldn't disagree more.

Actually, there's just enough truth there to be dangerous:  When one is learning to read, the very best path to the next level is merely to read, and read, and read.  It doesn't matter if it's Dr. Seuss, Calvin & Hobbes, Star Wars, or Anna Karenina—almost anything will do that is decent and holds the reader's attention long enough for the practicing to work its magic.  When my father was sick and terribly thin, we pressed upon him high-fat, high-calorie, high-sugar foods that would normally have been anathema to a sensible diet.

The trouble with carrying forward a laissez-faire attitude toward the content of children's reading is that our early experiences influence so strongly the habits and tastes we will take with us into adulthood.  If our childhood has been reasonably happy, it's almost impossible not to retain an uncritical fondness for what we enjoyed then.  It's as important to encourage in our children a taste for nourishing books as it is a taste for nourishing food.

I find Elizabeth Enright's Melendy Family books to be exactly this sort of nourishing book, so much so that on a recent rereading I probably enjoyed them not one bit less than my first enchanted encounter.  Maybe even more, because they reminded me so much of my favorite families, many of whom read this blog.  Noisy, lively, adventuresome children who occasionally make bad choices and get in trouble—but always repent and are forgiven by loving adults.  (I do like a book where "bad choices" means things like climbing out the window when one is supposed to be sick in bed—remember when sick kids were supposed to stay in bed?)  Siblings who love each other, and enjoy each other's company, even if they occasionally quarrel a bit.  Children who respect the adults in their life.  Adults who know how to give their children both roots and wings.  (I know it's a cliché, but it's true, and important.)

What struck me most this time as I read the books was how very much they are a Free-Range Kids manifesto.   The kids are far less worldly-wise than today's average children, but far more competent.  They are entertained and even awed by things that would cause most modern American kids to yawn with boredom and make rude remarks.  But they wander New York City on their own at 10 years old (with permission) and even six (without); they love Beethoven, and Shakespeare; they wander over hill and dale (in the country), sometimes gone all day and returning home after dark; they sew, and cook, and build things; they put on plays and arrange benefit concerts for the war effort (the books were written in the 1940's); they get into scrapes and get out of them by a combination of their own ingenuity and knowing when to ask for help from the adults around them.  They know the "don't talk to strangers" rule, and more importantly they know its many exceptions.

Yes, I know this is fiction!  And I'm not saying the family is ideal—no family without a mother can be.  But it's a lot more true to what I knew when I was growing up than most of today's "realistic" children's fiction.  The people over at Free-Range Kids are an eclectic lot, and I doubt they'd all enjoy Enright's books, but to me the Melendys are a shining example of the "normal childhood" that many Free-Rangers are working hard to promote.  Books like these can encourage both children and their parents in that endeavor, promoting simultaneously family love and loyalty, parental authority, and children's competence and independence.  I'm keeping them for the day the grandkids are ready for them (and enjoying them myself in the meantime).

Or maybe I just like the books because the Melendys' attic playroom looks an awful lot like our grandchildren's room even now!

It shouldn't have been so hard, though I'll admit I'm stubborn.  Firefox has been nagging me for days to update my Flash player, but I have to check the box that says I've read the EULA, and every time I tried to download the pdf, it gave me an error at best—and sometimes crashed my machine.

I tried on another computer with the same result.

I don't mind skimming EULAs, and even fudging on the part that requires me to say I actually understand them, especially when half the agreement is in French.  But I refuse to say I've read something when it's not even possible to get a copy of it.

After checking the Adobe site, forums, and Google to no avail, finally inspiration struck:  I copied the url of the recalcitrant file out of Firefox and into Internet Explorer—and it worked.   Then I could go back into Firefox and complete the update.  Even that required several attempts and a couple of Firefox restarts, though.

And that was just for one computer.  For the other I still haven't been successful, as the update refuses to download, telling me a plug-in is missing—without telling me what plug-in is missing, and when I search for the missing plug-in, nothing is found.

What a waste of time!

Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy Sayers (Avon, New York, 1967)

Dorothy Sayers is one of my favorite authors, both fiction and non-fiction, and her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories among the best of that genre.  I've read them all so many times that quotations from them worm their way up from the depths of my brain unbidden, enabling me to appear knowledgeable in fields where my ignorance is nearly complete, as happened earlier this year while I was sitting in on a class about medieval manuscripts.

The beauty of Sayers' writing makes re-reading her murder mysteries delightful even when you know whodunit.  I was nursing a cold, and trying to forget the agony of descending from high altitude with completely clogged ears, as well as the frustration of not being able, at that hour, to purchase real Sudafed, but only the ersatz variety that proudly proclaims on the box that it contains none of the ingredient that really works.  In the mood for something that would distract without taxing to my befogged brain, I shunned my burgeoning "to read" pile and reached (again) for Murder Must Advertise.

This tale of Lord Peter's ventures into the British equivalent of Madison Avenue is a full of philosophical observations as it is of murder and intrigue, and the following passage struck me as particularly appropriate today.  Sayers—who herself worked as an advertising copywriter for a number of years—wrote Murder Must Advertise in 1933.

Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell's-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, redecorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much?  Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

Having family all over the globe makes for an interesting life, but sometimes it's hard to know which end is up—or more importantly, who is up when.  Enter FoxClocks, an add-on for FireFox, which has made that task much easier for me.  There's also a version for Thunderbird, and I use both to my advantage.

My two favorite display formats are (1) showing the city, time, and day in the status bar:

and (2) a tiny icon in the status bar which pops up that information when I hover my mouse over it.

Regular readers of Lift Up Your Hearts! know I'm a fan of Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids blog, though I blush to admit I haven't (yet) read her book of the same name.  I've written quite a few comments there, and a recent letter I sent evolved into a guest post, which you can find here:  A List that Sums Things Up Nicely.

To anyone who may have wandered over from the link at FRK, welcome!  Things are pretty random here, as this is where I post, for family and friends, whatever happens to be on my mind.  That way they don't have to hear me talk about it quite so much.  Okay, so it's really just a small portion of what is buzzing around in my brain; fortunately, life imposes time limitations.

In the upper right hand corner you'll find links to what it's all about here, and various disclaimers and disclosures.  Thanks for visiting!

The Chronological Guide to the Bible (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2010)

My review copy of this book arrived from the publisher at a fortuitous time:  I happened to have recently begun reading Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World.  Each book is good; together they are a great window on the historical and cultural settings for Biblical events.

The book meant to be read with the Chronological Guide, however, is the Bible, and I look forward to that adventure in the future.  A Bible itself, arranged in chronological order, would be easier than flipping back and forth, but the Guide is small (not much over 200 pages) and easy to read even though dense with facts, works with any Bible translation, and lets the reader decide how to proceed in places where historical order is uncertain or controversial.  It really is just a guide; you must do the work of actually opening the Bible yourself.

Each book of the Bible is set in its historical and cultural context, which both brings it to life and provides clues for understanding.  It also leaves me hungry for more—there's only so much a book this size can do—which is not a bad thing.

I have but one complaint:  Although the Guide touches on the Apocrypha and the historical period between the Old and New Testaments, it provides none of the informative analysis for the Apocryphal books themselves that it does for the Canonical books.  Even Martin Luther called them "useful and good to read," and it would be helpful to understand more about the history, culture, and philosophies that set the stage for Jesus' time.

Even so, The Chronological Guide to the Bible is a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone who wishes a better understanding of the Bible and how its stories fit into their cultural and historical context.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal:  War Stories from the Local Food Front. by Joel Salatin (Polyface Inc., Swoope, Virginia, 2007)

Until now, I've written more about Joel Salatin than I've read by him:  almost a year ago in Strange Bedfellows?  Not Really, and three months later in my review of The Omnivore's Dilemma.  Wanting to correct that sin of omission, I grabbed the only one of his books available in our local library:  Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.

On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system.  And it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical and free societies.  How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength.  The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe.  The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.  When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol. — Joel Salatin

Salatin wants to opt out of a little more of the system than I do, but I hear his cry.  You could call him bitter, but if you consider the miracle that is Polyface Farms, you have to wonder why our government is working so hard to stamp out such elegant, inexpensive, healthy, delicious, and truly "green" (in a conservationist sense) endeavors.

There's another whole blog post in the answer to that—involving sustainable agriculture, home education, midwives, family businesses, free-range kids, raw milk, and even the Duggar family—so for now I'll move on to the quotation section of this review. Otherwise I'll never get it back to the library tomorrow today, when it's due.

The quotes are selected from collection of pink sticky notes bristling from pages all over the book, as I marked passages I found especially interesting.  Unfortunately, they're rather random, and generally miss the most important thrust of the book, which is that

• Both governmental regulations and societal expectations (i.e. the belief that governmental regulations guarantee safe food) have devasted small, local, sustainable agriculture, because they greatly favor large corporations and factory farming.
• Governmental regulations and inspections do not, in fact, promote a healthier food supply, because the big guys (from Archer-Daniels-Midland to Wal-Mart) can afford high-powered attorneys and lobbyists, and because too many bureaucrats are more concerned with healthy paperwork than with healthy food.  (When you read about what the bureaucrats and  big companies did to the very word "Organic," you will no longer be so happy in that section of your grocery store.)
• Small, local, sustainable agriculture is our best hope for producing safe (from salmonella to bioterrorism threats), healthy food.  And taste!  Don't forget about taste!

When it comes to trying to protect our food system, both from internal carelessness and external attack,

[T]he things we're moving heaven and hell to stop are not the things we need to be concerned about.  The stuff that we turn a blind eye to and don't even care about is the bigger problem.  We really do worry about the wrong things.  And we devote precious resources inspecting, measuring, and vilifying the antidote to the wrong things.

Did you really think food regulations were all about ... food safety?

I spoke with an attorney who represents one of the largest food businesses in the world.  He came to the farm for a visit, a delightful gentleman. ... He said he would put it to me straight, "People don't trust the large corporations.  If you're a large corporation, you need that trust to survive.  How do you get that trust?  You create a system that makes it look like you care.  People want to see you doing something that protects them. ... But, and here's the other part of the equation, if you're the chief executive of a large business, you don't want to pay for it.  Instead, you wine and dine politicians to convince them that they will curry favor with their constituents if they demand this program.  Now you have people's faith without having to pay for it."

 And what did you think an ambassador's job was supposed to be?

Allan Nation, editor of Stockman Grass Farmer magazine ... took a group of American grass farmers to Argentina to tour the world's best grass-based farms and ranches.  When the American ambassador found out a group of American farmers and ranchers was in town, he invited them over to the Embassy for refreshments.

"What are you all doing in Argentina?"  he asked.

"We're here to study grass-based agriculture and see firsthand how to finish beef on grass instead of in feedlots," replied Nation.

At that point, Nation said the ambassador nearly kicked them out of the embassy, proclaiming, "Don't you understand why I am here?  I am here to make Argentina quit grass-finishing beef and begin using corn in a feedlot."  There's the good o' USA, friend of environmental agriculture, respecter of other cultures.  Yessireee.

Salatin may be strident at times, but he's not a conspiracy theorist.

At the risk of sounding completely naïve, I will say flat out that I do not sense a conspiracy behind this effort.  Like so many other government plans, this is another well-intentioned idea with incredibly terrible consequences.  I happen to believe that when the food police say raw milk will kill you, they actually believe it.  When they say my outdoor chickens are dangerous to the Tyson houses, they sincerely believe it.  When they say consumers are too stupid to make food choices, they actually believe it.  I think people sincerely believe a lot of stupid things.  This is just stupidity, not conspiracy.  It's a fraternity of stupidity, to be sure, but we need not label it a conspiracy.

I've never worried much about eggs and salmonella—always let the kids lick the cake bowl and eat raw cookie dough, if they beat me to it.  But I'm less worried about the eggs I scooped from under the hen myself at a local farm than about the free box of factory-farmed eggs I picked up at Target.  The recent salmonella outbreak, due to tainted eggs from large, federally regulated egg farms, makes even more significant the following story of Salatin's encounter with a health department representative who had accused his unwashed eggs of carrying salmonella:

Although she admitted that the regulations did not require washing, she simply sniffed and said, "An unwashed egg is inedible."  Then I told her we did in fact culture the eggs, including the manure, and they were clean.  It was like talking to a fence post:  "An unwashed egg is inedible."  End of discussion.

I hung up and immediately the phone rang, even before I could take my hand off the receiver.  I answered and it was Allan Nation. ...  He and his wife, Carolyn, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Europe, with a heavy emphasis on range poultry in France.  Without any prompting from me, he started the conversation with, "Hey, guess what?  In France, you can't sell a washed egg.  If it has to be washed, it must go into a pasteurized product in liquid form.  Only unwashed eggs are legal to sell as shell eggs."

More about eggs in Europe:

I was showing my eggs to a chef once and he wanted to buy them right away.  To be perfectly transparent, I warned him that in the winter they wouldn't be as deeply orange as they are in the green grass season. ... He immediately cut in.  "Oh, that's no problem.  In chef's school in Switzerland we had recipes for March eggs, recipes for June eggs, and other recipes for October eggs in order to accentuate the nuances of that particular season's eggs."

Of animals, people, and politics.  One reason I like Salatin is his rejection of the political boundary lines that are hardening like arteries in our society and constricting the healthy flow of ideas:  Republicans and Democrats are both helpful—and hurtful—to his cause.  His views land him squarely on both the Left and the Right.

When the only interaction between people and animals is in a pet situation, it jaundices the historical and natural relationship between the two. 

Amazingly, the [animal rights activists who object to] abortions in the third-trimester of a bovine pregnancy tend to support that action in humans. ...

... It's as inconsistent as the pro-lifers eating disrespected, factory farmed meat out of Costco ... The people who should be most concerned about respecting and honoring animals are the members of the religious right.  Instead these folks defend the right to abuse animals, to disrespect their chickeness and pigness.  And they even applaud their own ability to find the cheapest food.  I wonder if they think the best church comes from hiring the cheapest pastor.

What good is the freedom to worship, the right to keep and bear arms, and the freedom of the press if we don't have the freedom to choose what to feed our bodies so we can go sing, shoot, and speak?  The only reason the founding fathers did not grant the freedom to choose our food was because it was such a basic, fundamental personal right that they could not conceive that special protection would be needed.  Granting citizens the right to choose their food would have been similar to granting them the right to see the sun rise, or to breathe.

We believe that our pluralistic society is stronger for allowing home schooling and private schooling alongside public schooling.  Our culture is stronger by letting people buy different kinds of cars or none at all; have health insurance or none at all; build a house or none at all.  The freedom to opt out of the mainstream paradigm is the cornerstone that preserves the minority view, differentiating between top-down societies and bottom-up societies.  Our opponents favor coercing consumers to buy only government-approved food, thereby denying opt-out freedoms.

[Modern society thinks] we can save things from the top down ... but ... the only safety comes in our communities, our homes, our families, from the bottom up. And these institutions must be free to experiment, to innovate.  I confess that I do not hold optimism for our culture as a whole.  Indeed, we are destroying agrarianism and seeing the same political graft and moral debauchery that brought the Roman culture to ruins.  I am, however, optimistic about the power of one.  The strength of you and me and others, touching our spheres of influence, taking individual responsibility.

And finally, this is a minor side story, but I love it:

I have a friend who at 13 decided he wanted to cut firewood for a living.  His family had an old 1965 International loadstar dump truck with a two-speed rear axle.  A little big for his age, he began cutting firewood—yes, with a chain saw.  He could drive that truck as well as any adult, and delivered a load to a customer in Waynesboro about 15 miles away.

A neighbor saw the load being dumped and walked over to ask for one himself.  The boy said he'd be there the following Saturday with the load.  He cut the wood after school and in a week had another dump truck load.  He arrived at the man's house on schedule.  The customer was dubious about the boy's ability to back the truck around a crooked driveway, swing set, picnic area, and dump it onto a concrete pad in the corner of the back yard.

The boy assured the customer that it was no problem and proceeded to back the truck expertly right up to the pad.  He dumped the load and pulled out.  What I didn't tell you was that this man happened to be a city policeman, and this week happened to be in uniform because he was getting ready to go to work.  When he got ready to pay the boy, he asked him:  "Son, how old are you?"

My friend, who confesses that his heart skipped a beat when he pulled in and realized he was delivering wood to a policeman's house, just looked down from the cab and confidently but with a mischievous grin responded, "How old do you want me to be?"

Taken aback, the policeman asked him, "Do you have a license?"

To which the 13-year-old replied, "I have a couple, but I'm not sure I have the one you're interested in."

Completely enthralled by the whimsical youngster, the policeman said, "Listen son, I'll follow you to the edge of the city limits.  And please, please don't drive that truck back into this city."

Two weeks later, the boy had another load to deliver to Waynesboro.  As luck would have it, when he entered the city, there on routine traffic patrol was his firewood customer friend.  They locked eyes, and the policeman just shook his head, took off his hat, and covered his eyes.  Now there is a true public servant.  That boy could drive that truck as expertly as any adult.  Ho could anyone deny this self-motivated, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed boy his firewood business?  To be honest with you, I wouldn't let my 13-year-old do this.  And it probably wasn't the wisest thing to do.

But for crying out loud, must we criminalize everything we don't think is wise?

For friends and family who prefer to ignore Facebook:

Jonathan:  Dad, the spaceship book gave me an idea, and I'm going to be working on a project. It requires liquid oxygen....

Anyone have some spare LOX for an ambitious six-year-old?

I wasn't going to write about the two recent examples of September 11-related hysteria run amok, because (a) there has already been too much reaction, and (b) believe it or not, the fate of the world does not hinge on what I write on the Internet.  But in another context I was invited to share my opinion, and you know how I love to get double duty out of the effort it takes to write.

First, the "Ground Zero mosque" flap.  Whether a mosque, or Islamic center, or church, or store, or apartment building, or library, or strip club is built in New York City is none of my business.  Nor is it the business of 99% of the others who have weighed in on the issue, including President Obama, foreigners, and talk show hosts.  It is New York City's business, at whatever level zoning regulations are made. If the neighbors object to a proposed project, they have the right, and possibly the duty, to oppose it at zoning board hearings, to write letters to local papers, to make local speeches, to go from door to door with petitions.  My opinion is irrelevant, as is that of the President of the United States.

The second bruhaha hits closer to home, because Terry Jones is in Florida, not much more than two hours away from me. I've been trying to ignore him, because he seems to be the kind of person who revels in publicity, be it positive or negative.  (Like rebellious teenagers, and like terrorists.)  His actions should also have been none of my business:  he's not my pastor, nor my neighbor, and I would no more forbid him to burn a Qur'an—or a cross—on his own property than I would forbid the building of a Mosque within sight of Ground Zero, even though both get people hot under the collar.  But he and the news media together have made it my business, threatening my family, my state, and my country.

Fear and anger make people do very unwise things, and one of the unwisest is the willingness to set aside the Constitution, the very foundation of our country.  I was asked about using hate speech laws to shut Jones down:  the very idea chills me to the marrow.  Freedom of speech is one of our greatest treasures, and that includes the freedom to say very unpopular things.  Even hateful things.  Labelling someone's opinion, however much you think it wrong, as "hate speech," and trying to control it, makes a very wide gate though which totalitarianism can enter.

Refusing to outlaw something is not the same thing as approving or deeming it wise, however.  And in the case of Jones, he himself has deliberately made his actions public business.  The First Amendment notwithstanding, there is precedent for controlling some forms of speech:  laws against slander/libel, yelling "Fire!" in a crowded but flame-less theater, and giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" in time of war, for example.  Jones is most definitely doing the last, giving credence to the enemy's propaganda and deliberately undercutting both military and civilian efforts to promote peace.

If there is anything good about his motives, he is at least incredibly stupid and not acting in accordance with his professed faith.  I haven't read much of the hoopla, but I did catch that he responded to questions of offense with the retort that he, himself, is offended when "they" burn the American flag, or the Bible.  What he obviously misses—besides the idea that we're supposed to love our enemies, or at least behave better than they do—is that an insult to the Qur'an is not nearly the same thing as an insult to the Bible, let alone to a flag.  To a Muslim, if my understanding is correct, it would be more like spitting on the consecrated Host.  The book itself is sacred.  I don't know if that applies to translations, which aren't considered the "real thing," but I suspect the insult would be taken similarly by most Muslims.  And the analogy I made probably wouldn't mean anything to Pastor Jones, since I suspect his church doesn't have a sufficiently high view of Communion to understand it.  But my point is, his analogy is flawed, maybe fatally.

I heard great story about a Canadian medical team in Afghanistan, known for its very good treatment of Taliban prisoners.  Explaining this, the doctor pointed out that, first of all, it was the right thing to do; second, since the battle was over a difference beliefs and values, it was important to act upon those values at all times.  That's also the attitude of the U.S.-based aid organizations that I know about, even though the Taliban is attacking them, verbally and physically.  And, come to think of it, that's the attitude of Jesus on the Cross, which one would hope would give Rev. Jones food for thought.

What's more, the doctor said, good actions, especially in the face of danger and provocation, will cause a cognitive dissonance between what the soldiers have been told by the Taliban and their own experience, which might lead to them questioning Taliban authority.  The Taliban knows this, of course, which probably explains their antipathy towards those who are sacrificing themselves to bring health, education, and infrastructure to these countries.

Jones, however, is doing exactly the opposite; I'm quite sure the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other militant Islamic groups are thrilled with his Qur'an-burning plan, no matter how personally offended their members might be.  There are better ways to express your belief that not all religions are equally true, or good, or beautiful (and with that I agree), without making your own look odious, and defaming the name of Christ.

I blame the news media, also.  We would have been much better off if Jones had been ignored, but he makes great copy.  The vast majority of Americans, who think he's nuts, and who are bending over backwards to say so, in word and action—are just boring.  The press is pouring (metaphorical) gasoline on Jones's flames.  Freedom of the press is another essential First Amendment right, but I do wish we all had more common sense.

In George MacDonald's novel, Salted with Fire, I encountered the following statement:

He would never rise from a finished job, however near might be the hour for dropping work, without having begun another to go on with in the morning.

I read it long ago, but it has never left me, and is the inspiration for this month's resolution.   It's likely that Getting Things Done has also inspired me, with its emphasis on "next actions."

Whatever the impetus, I know from experience that finishing a job, however satisfying, soon gives way to feeling at loose ends, uninspired, and sometimes depressed.  I still have plenty to do—so much that I can't seem to get started on any of it.  Life goes much better when I'm in the middle of a project and know just what the next step is.

So this is the crux of this resolution:  to keep my GTD "next actions" lists well-populated with specific, actionable, non-threatening tasks; to remember that a task or a project is not completed until the next task or project is ready for action; and to sleep well, knowing that tomorrow's work is ready to begin when I awake, and needs no attention (a.k.a. "worry") until then. 

Progress Report

#1  Read More Books  August proved once again that it takes determination to read, even for someone who loves it as much as I do.  One of the two books in August's tally I began months ago, but at some 800 pages I'm not beating myself up over having taken so long to finish it.

#2  Rediscover Feasting  Having been away from it for a month and a half, I found it hard to readjust to Fasting Wednesdays—I'd eat breakfast before realizing what day of the week it was.  But I think I'm back into the pattern now.  What still needs a lot of work is an Ordinary Time pattern; too many days still qualify as feasts to make feasting as special as it should be.

#3  Learn to Relax  I continue to think about consciously relaxing my muscles, and it does help.  The GTD process (see #8) is also helping.  But I still have a long, long way to go.  I now have a friend whose working on this whole stress response/reduction thing with me, so maybe that will help.  What I really need to do is give it higher priority.  In a go-go-go society, working on relaxing is hard.

#4  Like More Things  I can now eat very small portions of olives without gagging.  Does that count?  I need to make this less about food and more about other parts of life.

#6  Cast Away Fear  There were a few occasions where I did remember to respond to fear with praise, and it helped.

#7  Talk Less, Listen More  Not much to report here.

#8  Enjoy Spontaneity  I still fret too much about what I could be doing if I weren't trapped in this stupid X situation—but I am making progress.  My GTD post needs an update; the progress I have made thus far in implementing the program has helped me know better both what needs to be done and when I will have a chance to take care of it.  More than once I have been able to say, "I can give my full attention to Y now and enjoy it, because I know W and X are done, and Z can wait till tomorrow."

The resolution I need most is apparently one to remember my other resolutions, so I've added "review resolutions" to my Tickler File.  :)  We'll see if September shows more progress.

This is a short post, because I don't have a lot to say about electricity in Switzerland, but I like their home outlets.  I'd rather the world adopt our 110 volt system, for safety reasons, but if I could I'd change our plugs to the Swiss type.  See how sturdy the prongs are?  No worries about accidentally bending them when you stretch the cord too much, straining to get the vacuum cleaner to reach to the far corner.  Some outlets are combined with light switches, and many are recessed—a neat safety device that makes it impossible for the prongs to be connected to the electricity and touching your fingers at the same time.

Maybe this post should be "readjustments," since I'm now home and experiencing reverse culture shock, but it's still worth talking about transportation.

Basel is a city, albeit one of the nicest cities I know.  It's the third largest in Switzerland, a little smaller in population than Providence, Rhode Island or Tallahassee, Florida, but a lot more dense.  I'm not fond of cities, in general, but if you wanted to design a situation that is perfect for public transit, walking, and biking, you could hardly do better—and Basel made a conscious choice, back in the 1970's, to encourage those modes of transport.

Trams and buses   The best I've ever experienced.  Clean, quiet, frequent, dependable, on time.  You can count on the schedule—for a tram to be late by three minutes is shocking—and at most times, if you miss a tram, there's another coming in just a few minutes.  I love their innovative approach to ticketing, too.  You must have a ticket—which you can buy and punch at the tram stop if you don't have a pass—but don't expect someone to collect it.  You simply hop on the tram or bus, ride it to your destination, and hop off.  (I only wish you could by your ticket on the tram.  It's frustrating to miss your ride because you're still fighting with the ticket machine.)

Do some people ride without buying a ticket?  Sure.  But the penalty, if you're caught, is stiff enough to encourage good behavior.  Rarely—but you never know when—the tram police (in plain clothes, so you get no warning) block all the exits and ask to see everyone's tickets.  If you don't have one, the fine is 80 francs (about $80), and it goes to 100 francs if you don't pay right then and there.  The system works because it is consistently enforced—and not sabotaged by lawsuits, which is what I suspect would happen in this country.

Biking  Trams are great, especially in inclement weather or if you're carrying bulky packages, but they're not as fast as biking from A to B.  Bikers are everywhere, and are accommodated with ramps like the one to the left, and plenty of parking places.  This is one reason backpacks are so popular.  One of my favorite memories is of a nattily-attired man biking along in a business suit, with proper tie—and bright orange backpack.  In the U.S., bikes and backpacks for anything other than recreational purposes are too often associated with children—or losers who have had their drivers licenses revoked.  Switzerland wins this one big time in my book.

(That said, the only way businessmen could reasonably bike to work here in Florida would be if their place of employment provided showers—and in that case, they wouldn't be wearing their suits.)

Bikers are second only to trams and pedestrians when it comes to right-of-way on the road, and drivers are much more aware of their presence than in America.  Still, I wish more of them would wear helmets.  (Kudos to our son-in-law for setting a good example.)

Walking  I walked nearly everywhere I wanted to go in Basel during my visit:  to the grocery store(s), the post office, the train station, the organic farm delivery stop, school, church, the park, and a lot more.  I thought I was getting a lot of exercise tramping all over the city, but a few calculations showed the shocking truth.  Walking distances from home to:

• the corner store:  about 350 feet
• the tram stop:  0.2 miles
• the train station:  0.3 miles
• the big grocery store:  0.5 miles
• the Basel Hilton:  0.5 miles
• Barfüsserplatz: 1.0 miles
• Marktplatz: 1.1 miles
• church: 1.5 miles
• all the way across the Rhine to Claraplatz:  1.7 miles

By contrast, back in Florida, it takes 0.8 miles just to get out of our neighborhood, which is nothing fancy at all, I would say a pretty average middle class neighborhood with comparatively small lots.  We also live in a city, though a small one—the population is a quarter that of Basel.  Walking distances from our house to:

• the bike trail:  0.8 miles
• the playground:  0.8 miles
• Best Buy:  1.3 miles
• the bus stop:  1.4 miles
• the post office:  1.5 miles
• the park:  1.6 miles
• the grocery story:  1.6 miles
• Office Max:  1.7 miles
• the mall:  2.7 miles
• the library:  5.5 miles

Claraplatz seems far away from Janet's home, because it's clear on the other side of the city.  Office Max I consider very close, "just down the street."  Yet they are the same distance.  Blows my mind.  The effect is probably because I go by Office Max more often by car than on foot.

What really makes walking nice in Basel is the traffic lights.  First of all, if there is no light, a pedestrian in any crosswalk has the right of way over anything except a tram.  (That doesn't mean it isn't sometimes necessary to stare down the approaching cars, and it's always important to look before stepping into the intersection, as non-resident drivers do not always know they are expected to stop if they see you at the curb.)  If there is a light, the pedestrian must stop, but the great thing is that the wait is always short.  The cycles are designed to keep pedestrian traffic flowing, unlike the walk lights here, at which a five-minute wait is not unheard of.

Car sharing  By car is not the nicest way to get around Basel—parking is a big problem, for one thing—but there are times when you need one.  For this you can take advantage of a car sharing system, sort of like a short-term rental.  It works quite well, at least if you don't mind driving a stick.

I'd love to import Basel's transit system here, but—as I keep telling European friends who think the only reason the U.S. doesn't have such a system is that we're all a bunch of lazy SUV-lovers—it's not that simple.  What I think could and should be imported is the farsightedness and strength of will that made Basel decide, some 35 years ago, to turn away from the more cars / more and bigger roads transit model, and commit to a cleaner and friendlier path.

I am republishing my initial comments, made in December 2008, when I checked The History of the Ancient World out of the library then discovered I didn't have time to read it.  Now, nearly two years later, I have finally read the book, and my additional comments are added below.

The History of the Ancient World:  From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, by Susan Wise Bauer (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007)

Despite having some initial negative reactions to Susan Wise Bauer, I've continued to find her work delightful and invaluable.  (See my reviews of The Well-Trained Mind, The Story of the World, and The Well-Educated Mind.)  I haven't read more than a small part of The History of the Ancient World, but borrowed it from the library in order to determine whether or not to buy it for myself.  I've so enjoyed—and learned from—listening to Jim Weiss read The Story of the World, which was written for elementary-age children, that I wondered if Bauer could bring as much delight into a history book for adults.

Time does not permit me to read through the book, much less review it properly, but let's just say I wish I didn't have to take it back to the library as soon as possible to remove temptation.  The History of the Ancient World is delightful to read.  Much of the delight, I think, comes from the philosophy of her approach, which she explains much better in the introduction than I have time to write, or even to copy, here.  Bauer is interested in people:  their lives, thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams, actions, and relationships.  She minimizes the general and the theoretical in favor of the personal, and includes the myths and stories of a culture as well as verifiable facts.  The stories that have come down with a people from before recorded time should inform our historical speculations as much as potsherds from an archeological dig.

This approach no doubt will anger many, some because she finds historical value in passages from the Bible, and others because she gives similar respect to the ancient stories of other cultures.  To me, it makes for great story-telling.  The History of the Ancient World has earned a place on my wish list, perhaps for the next time Borders offers me a 40% off coupon, and I certainly hope Susan Wise Bauer is working on a sequel.

UPDATE, 1 September 2010. Bauer was, indeed, working on a sequel, and managed to finish writing The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade  before I finished reading its predecessor.  I've already purchased it, and am looking forward to diving in.  But first, some thoughts on this one.

I enjoyed The Ancient World a good deal, though I expect to enjoy the Medieval book more because of the time period.  I find stories of kings and battles and political intrigue interesting up to a point, but ancient times take me to that point rather quickly, as often that's about all we know about them.  Bauer does a good job of trying to put flesh on the bare bones, but it's still pretty much "second verse, same as the first."  And third, and fourth, and nth.

I can't help feeling the same way about the Old Testament of the Bible at times, too.  One thing Bauer's book has done is to give me a much better feel for the context in which the Old Testament events took place, and the knowledge that as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as they sometimes are, it helps to know that the OT stories are nowhere near as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as stories from the rest of the ancient world.  There's a limit to how much improvement even God can make in human beings all at once, I guess.  Or, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, before you can judge where someone is, you have to know where he came from.

Speaking of the Bible, in parallel with Ancient World I've been reading the Chronological Guide to the Bible, as part of Thomas Nelson's review blogger program.  (So you'll see a review here when I'm done, but I've only just started the New Testament section.)  That was a brilliant move on my part, as the books dovetail and complement each other nicely.

But back to Bauer's book.  My head is swimming with dates and places and unpronounceable, highly forgettable names.  It will take a lot more learning before I can say I have a good picture in my head of the ancient world.  But I now have a good sketch, and that's better than any of my history teachers were able to give me.  I especially like Bauer's attempt to cover more of the world than just the Middle East and Mediterranean countries, though if I can't keep the Roman rulers straight there's no hope of remembering China's and India's.  Helpful parallel timelines attempt to provide mental links from one culture to another.

I'd give The History of the Ancient World an R rating for sex and violence, but anyone likely to be overly disturbed by reading what those ancient kings did to their enemies—and with their friends—probably won't be reading an 800-page history book.

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, by Robert Greenberg; a Teaching Company lecture

I've said it before:  For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, CD, mp3 download) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company.  Robert Greenberg is one of my favorite lecturers, and this—so far—my favorite of his courses.  

Here are the titles of the 48 lectures, as you can buy the course today.  It is now onto its third edition; our version, which is so old we bought it on cassette tapes,^* differs in minor ways.

1. Music as a Mirror
2. Sources—The Ancient World and the Early Church
3. The Middle Ages
4. Introduction to the Renaissance
5. The Renaissance Mass
6. The Madrigal
7. An Introduction to the Baroque Era
8. Style Features of Baroque-era Music
9. National Styles—Italy and Germany
10. Fugue
11. Baroque Opera, Part 1
12. Baroque Opera, Part 2
13. The Oratorio
14. The Lutheran Church Cantata
15. Passacaglia
16. Ritornello Form and the Baroque Concerto
17. The Enlightenment and an Introduction to the Classical Era
18. The Viennese Classical Style, Homophony, and the Cadence
19. Classical-era Form—Theme and Variations
20. Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio: Baroque Antecedents
21. Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio Form
22. Classical-era Form—Rondo Form
23. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 1
24. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 2
25. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 3
26. The Symphony—Music for Every Person
27. The Solo Concerto
28. Classical-era Opera—The Rise of Opera Buffa
29. Classical-era Opera, Part 2—Mozart and the Operatic Ensemble
30. The French Revolution and an Introduction to Beethoven
31. Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 1
32. Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 2
33. Introduction to Romanticism
34. Formal Challenges and Solutions in Early Romantic Music
35. The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 1
36. The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 2
37. 19th-Century Italian Opera—Bel Canto Opera
38. 19th-Century Italian Opera—Giuseppe Verdi
39. 19th-Century German Opera—Nationalism and Experimentation
40. 19th-Century German Opera—Richard Wagner
41. The Concert Overture, Part 1
42. The Concert Overture, Part 2
43. Romantic-era Musical Nationalism
44. Russian Nationalism
45. An Introduction to Early 20th-Century Modernism
46. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Claude Debussy
47. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Igor Stravinsky
48. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Arnold Schönberg

Forty-eight lectures of 45 minutes each sounds long and intimidating, but even at that length this is a brief, introductory, whirlwind tour of music history—and it never drags.  I find it easy to listen to while driving, and well worth hearing more than once.

My recommendation for this course is as high as I can give, with one small caveat.  Greenberg gears his lectures to adults, specifically college students, and he has obviously learned how to keep the attention of the teenage boys in his classes:  his brief composer biographies sometimes include their sexual proclivities, and if there's musical reference he sees as orgasmic, he doesn't hesitate to mention it.  (He also describes musical stomach rumbles and heartbeats.)

As music history, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music has received the endorsement of our favorite graduate of the Eastman School of Music, so I know it's good.   

Gabriel Kron. Of all the amazing people who have intersected with my life, he is probably the safest to write about, since he died more than 40 years ago.  So I will; he deserves to be better known.

I knew him as my father's friend and mountain climbing partner; my father knew him from their days together at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.  Dad, a Tau Beta Pi engineer (like his father, two of his children, and a grandchild), was no intellectual slouch, but he never pretended to understand anything of Gabe's work. 

It didn't matter.  I myself joined the Kron Klimbing Klub at age seven, and was mighty annoyed when I later learned that some other organization had usurped the acronym, "KKK."

One firm rule of the Klub I remember distinctly:  No eating until you reach the top.

Unfortunately, I don't remember much about this brilliant and unusual man, other than that I enjoyed climbing with him. Here is one memory from Dad's own Remembrances Along the Way.

Beginning in August 1959 Linda went with me on nearly all my climbing trips, her first climb being Buck Mountain on Lake George. There were three trips in 1960 and 1961 up Hunter Mountain, a 4000+-foot peak in the Catskills.

We climbed as members of the Kron Klimbing Klub. Gabe Kron was a mathematician of considerable note who worked for General Electric and who liked to climb mountains that were close enough at hand that he could leave Schenectady at 8 o’clock, drive to the mountain, climb it, and return by 5:00 p.m. Hunter was one of his favorites but such things as inspiring views meant nothing to him. He would get to the top, get out his lunch, sit on a rock and eat lunch and read the New York Times. Then he would go down and home. Ted Dietze and his son Rick also went on these trips and Gabe was infinitely patient with the children.

They were very enjoyable trips. Everyone who climbed with Gabe was a member of the Kron Klimbing Klub. One day we planned to climb Snowy Mountain. We left Schenectady with decent weather that turned to rain before we arrived in the town of Speculator. The children were not shod for wet weather so we bought them overshoes in Speculator. As we started to climb the weather turned cold and the rain turned to snow. The snow began to build up, the trail became slippery, and the climbing became very difficult because of the slipperiness. We turned around and headed back down well below the summit. Linda was so cold that all she wanted to do was to sit down and rest. Of course I would not allow that and I practically dragged her down the trail for several minutes until she warmed up and all was well for the rest of the way down.

The trip up Snowy Mountain I remember for three things:  (1) my new boots may have kept my feet dry, but they did nothing to stop them from getting very, very cold; (2) I was determined not to give up before Ricky Dietze did, as he was older, stronger, male, and thought he could beat me in everything; and (3) my chief fear in turning around before reaching the top lay in believing I would then not be entitled to lunch!

For much more about this remarkable person, read The Evolution of an Engineering Scientist, by Philip Langdon Alger (no relation, that I know of).  You must scroll down a bit to find the beginning.  I'll add some tempting excerpts below.

[T]he youngest child in a family of eight children, [Gabe] was born on July 23, 1901, in ... a town of about 10,000 people in a remote region of the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. ... A boyhood friend described Gabe in elementary school as plump, always lively, always joyous, always having something to tell.  [P]eople who knew him well understood quite clearly that for him the environment of his home town was too confined and that a day would come when he would act to broaden his horizons."

Before he could escape, however, he needed to learn English.

"Being subjected during my life time to several inoculations with a new language, I gradually developed a technique of my own; that proved to be quite practical for acquiring a reading knowledge of a new language in a place which offered no contact with people speaking it. As young children we had been instructed in Hebrew ... In the Gymnasium we were taught Latin for eight years, German for six, and Greek for four years, each with the aid of the most elaborate grammar the human mind could devise. Under the guise of classical education the professors crammed our heads with an infinite variety of useless rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions, so that languages were the most lugubrious subjects taught...."

"Realizing that the manner in which languages were taught was one of the hundred possible ways that should not be employed, I started out to use just the opposite tactics. Instead of memorizing grammar, I memorized the German dictionary. Our school dictionary had about twenty thousand words in it, a hundred words on a page; so, I tore out a page a day and committed it to memory. Then the page was thrown away. When there was no dictionary left, I considered myself an expert in the language. I could sit down, open up a French or German book anywhere, and proceed. Slowly and painfully at first, but nevertheless I could make headway in understanding the text....."

"[Finding no suitable English dictionary available, what] I did was to borrow an English book, which happened to be H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods, and beginning with the first page I wrote out a hundred words each day and committed them to memory. After eight or ten pages the text began to assume more human form, and past the first chapter the content even became enjoyable."

In 1921, Kron and his brother came to the United States, ending up at the University of Michigan, a school which met their criteria:  "an engineering school that would cost no more than $150 for tuition, located far enough inland to be away from the flood of immigrants."  Gabe graduated in three years despite working to support himself.  He wasn't a typical UM student.  In his words,

"As always happens when a free spirit is obliged to undergo a prescribed routine, I wanted to study everything except what the curriculum called for. How to find time to study what one wishes, and not what the teacher thinks best for one's own good, must be a perennial problem to many an anxious pupil. Finally, I hit on the idea of arranging my schedules so that by Friday noon the classes would be all over. Three full days then each week from Friday noon to Monday morning I was free to pursue my own private schedule of study without the interruptions of regular classwork. The rest of the week I considered as a sacrifice on the altar of mechanized education." 

After securing American citizenship in 1926, he rode a tanker from California to Tahiti.

He lived as a guest in the family of a native in Tahiti for some weeks, then sailed to the Fiji Islands. He walked through the back country, shared native hospitality, swam rivers, and admired the tropical forest. ... In all his travels, his custom was to spend the usual siesta hours under a tree, studying mathematics.

Then he took ship to Sydney, where his money ran out....  After working long enough to clear £35, be bought [another math book] and took to the road again ... On the way he spent many nights in the company of the "sundowners," the Australian tramps who lived without working, with the aid of free food tickets handed out in police stations to anyone who needed them.

Kron sailed from Townsville to Borneo, and thence to Manila, Hongkong, and Saigon. Here, he started out on foot to Angkor Vat, and walked on to Aranha, where he took a train for Bangkok, then joined a caravan that followed the ancient trade route to Cockrake in Burma. He walked to Rangoon, took a boat to Calcutta, walked on to Agra, where he admired the Taj Mahal. He crossed the Indian desert to Karachi by train, took a boat across the Persian Gulf and went on by train to Baghdad, stopping to see the ruins of Ur on the way. He spent $5 for a truck ride across the Arabian desert to Damascus, then set out on foot again to Gaza. He hastened on to Cairo by train, saw the Pyramids, sailed from Alexandria to Constantinople and went by train to Bucharest, arriving at midnight at the home of a friend, with just small change left in his pockets. After an all-night talk, the friend financed his ticket to Baja Mare, where his parents welcomed him. The neighbors wanted to know why he had come home from America with his toes sticking out of his shoes, while every one else came home rich. No one asked about his travels.

Eventually he ended up, as stated above, working for General Electric in Schenectady.

Kron was a puzzle to the company executives who were responsible for his assignments. They wanted to tell him what to do, and to put him in a place where his talents would yield immediate, commercially useful results, and to adjust his salary accordingly. This was difficult, because Kron's value was largely in the inspiration he gave to others and in distant objectives that seemed to business managers to be merely dreams. As they tried to make the best use of him, he was shifted hither and yon. ... Kron had to pursue his own ideas outside of office hours.

This was no real hardship, however, as the company did give Kron complete freedom to publish his ideas, and to maintain contacts with a wide circle of interested men, outside as well as inside the company. Some commercial men, who did not like the engineers to talk about new developments, said that it would do no harm for Kron to write, as no competitor would understand him anyway.

What a dinner guest he must have been!