Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.”
— Timothy Leary
Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.
No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confettilike pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.‘Pacific Garbage Patch’ expedition finds plastic, plastic everywhere - San Jose Mercury News
“Marine debris is the new man-made epidemic. It’s that serious,” said Andrea Neal, principal investigator on the Kaisei, a 151-foot research ship on the trip.
Neal, a Santa Barbara researcher who has a doctorate in molecular genetics and biochemistry, said crews on the three-week voyage discovered tiny jellyfish eating bits of the plastic debris. The jellyfish are, in turn, eaten by fish like salmon or tuna, which people eat.
But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.
The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. “People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.
Newmark has been working hard to extend the influence of his worldview. His public pronouncements have the delighted yet apologetic tone of a man who has stumbled on a secret hiding in plain sight and who finds it embarrassingly necessary to point out something that should long have been obvious. He seems to have discovered a new way to run a business. He suspects that it may be the right way to run the world.
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“I think the main thing that happened,” said Jay Babcock, “was that you have a lot of kids today who grew up with their parents’ record collections — good record collections. Not everybody was embarrassed by their parents. And when they listened to that music, they wanted to reproduce it in their own terms. … English music festivals like the Green Man show last summer had Joanna Newsom and Robert Plant. It’s not an aberration that people like to sing the old music. That’s what people do when they sit around the campfire — they sing old songs. The Paleolithic people probably used to do it.”
I didn’t. I hated my parents’ music and can’t think of a larger gap than Frank Sinatra and Jimi Hendrix. Babcock thought for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “But another way of looking at it is that maybe that’s the only generation where there was such a gap.”
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— D.J. Palladino, The Grownup’s Guide to Indie Rock
When you get the message, hang up the phone.”
— Alan Watts (via Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
ANNOUNCEMENT: MEET THE NEW OWNERS
We are planning to offer quality products and service that everyone has come to expect from Steph’s Folk Art Studio. We have met many of you and are looking forward to meeting you also. Please check back with our website as we grow.
Sophie & Maurice Summers
