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"Good grief," says Charlie Brown during times of frustration.
If only grief was as simple as when Lucy pulls the football away and Chuck is about to give it a boot.
Unfortunately you and I know grief as a feeling we get in response to a personal loss we have experienced.
I bring this up as we were discussing grief during a recent MS group meeting.
Our leader spoke about grief and how it related to a member who had just passed away from "complications of multiple sclerosis."
The leader also talked about how grief can be an emotional response to our own MS. That we grieve at our loss of physical function, cognitive ability and so on.
Our group's discussion about grief dredged up several personal experiences I thought I would share—thinking maybe you have a similar memory.
My strongest outpouring of MS grief happened three years ago at my son's high-school cross-country meet. Watching him run the wet, soggy course was magical.
He was doing something I had loved–and it occurred to me that we would never do it together. I cried…I'm talking "Brian's Song," "Other Side of the Mountain," "Where the Red Fern Grows" balled! Luckily, it was raining in a torrential downpour and my tears were hidden behind the rain.
I realize now they were not only tears of pride—but also tears of grief. A finality of what was and what never will be.
The Funny Meter
(Go away Funny Meter!)
I also experience a tinge of grief every time I see the phrase "complications of multiple sclerosis" in a newspaper obituary.
Even though I did not know the person who passed—a little bit of me dies too as I grieve their loss. I feel as though I can relate in some way. Have an understanding that a healthy person will never know.
I wonder…does a cancer survivor, someone with diabetes or heart disease feels the same way when they read an obituary of a person with a similar illness? Like one of their own has moved on.
This is a dark subject, I know.
And I apologize as this topic is WAY beyond the usual yammering one finds on this site. But sometimes the reality of MS goes beyond a pumpkin-headed kid shouting "Good grief!"
Brian's Song, Charlie Brown, Grief, Multiple Sclerosis, Other Side of the Mountain, Where the Red Fern Grows
5 Replies to "Good Grief"
A metaphor that first comes to mind (and if this is the first one that comes to mind, I'm a little cracked) is the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
Despite having his limbs whacked off one by one, he persists in taunting his attackers until all that is left of him is a torso–still hurling insults at the backs of the retreating Knights of the Round Table.
We taunt MS most of the time, jeering things like "Is that all you've got, you bloody coward? Bring it on!" But once in a while, the pain breaks through and we just can't help sobbing.
My Odd Sock says:
I'm just being honest, that's all.
Three years ago I had a major MS exacerbation that was thought to be brought on by "grief". Prior to this exacerbation I had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Caught early it only required a lumpectomy and radiation. The day I returned to work after completing my radiation, my mother had a heart attack and died the same week. I used this "grief" as an excuse and thought I would "snap out of it". The "grief" is gone, but three years later, still confined to a wheel chair. Note: I had been managing my MS for over ten years and taking Copaxone for over 7 years. Sorry to also go to a dark place, but you started it. My Mother used to say, "Only God knows why this happened, and he's not telling".
SpeckledBrain says:
Thanks for posting this Sock. This is always on all of our minds…and keep in mind that it's always ok to shed some tears to get through a loss of any sort…then pick up and go on to make the best of what is still there.
Kim, that's an awesome one…thanks! forgot all about that movie
Margaret,
Yeah, I started it. Didn't mean to dig up old feelings–just something I think about time to time.
Speck,
Right. Pick up & move on. I've wallowed enough. Owe you one.
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The Joke Dumpster 01/05/2021
ORDER IN COURT:
A county in Kansas is moving jury trials to a building on its fairgrounds for improved social distancing and fresh funnel cakes.
YOU WEASEL:
In Colorado, about 120 back-footed ferrets, the most endangered mammal in N. America, were given an experimental COVID vaccine to protect the small, weasel-like creatures.
Experts say the same vaccine worked for the president, a larger, weasel-like creature, so why not with ferrets!
BEARLY ABLE:
Alaskan Airlines bans emotional support animals from ALL flights.
So no more free flights, got that Kodiak bears?
KILL-JOY SCIENTISTS:
A 20-person committee of scientists recommends Americans have no more than one alcoholic drink a day & limit sugar to less than 6% of calories.
These aren't scientists–they're party-poopers!
NO SLEEP:
My body pillow hogs the covers.
++++++++++++++
NO COUPON NEEDED:
Kroger Health, a division of the Kroger grocery chain, will begin to administer coronavirus vaccines.
COVID shots?…Kroger has trouble with a clean-up in aisle 5.
Don't forget to visit My Odd Sock on Facebook. Once, then again 3 weeks later.
And follow me on Twitter @myoddsock. A New Year resolution gone terribly wrong.
Making it official.


This authentic showroom is located in the bustling and vibrant area of SoHo. The unique space is ideal for Product Launches, Showrooms and Private Sales.
Located on the 2nd floor, this space has previously hosted a range of retail events and is well-equipped to do so. The interiors here are quintessential to Lower Manhattan with wooden floors, exposed brick walls and a historic white ceiling at 18 ft. The space has a bright atmosphere and is flexible in terms of set-up.
This spacious venue is a rare occurrence in SoHo and is an excellent opportunity for brands to high-end showroom events in a impressive space surrounded by global luxury brands and popular flagship stores.


110° to 120° – Dry heat not as hot as a traditional Sauna.
Choose a Color and Begin to heal and detox.
Red-Red is believed to increase the pulse, raise blood pressure and increase the rate of breathing. Red would be applied to support circulatory and nervous functions.
Strong Pink-Strong pink acts as a cleanser, strengthening veins and arteries.
Pink-Pink activates and eliminates impurities in the blood stream.
Strong Yellow-Strong yellow strengthens the body and activates internal tissues.
Yellow-Yellow, the brightest color used in chromotherapy, has been used to purify the skin, help with indigestion, strengthen the nervous system, treat glandular diseases, hepatitis and lymphatic disorders and assist metabolism.
Green-Green, a color associated with harmony, provides a neutral, positive calming effect.
Strong Green-Strong green provides anti-infectious, anti-septic and regenerative stimulation.
Strong Blue-Strong blue lubricates joints, helps address stress, nervous tension and infections.
Blue-Blue promotes relaxation and calm. Blue exhibits tranquilizing qualities often used to relieve headaches and migraines, colds, stress, nervous tension, rheumatism, stomach pains, muscle cramps and liver disorders. Blue is thought to have a positive effect on all kinds of pain.
Indigo-Indigo is used to address conditions involving the eyes, ears and nose. It has a calming, sedative effect.
Violet-Violet is used to calm the nervous system, soothe organs and relax muscles. Violet has meditative qualities and is often used to treat conditions of the lymphatic system and spleen, as well as urinary disorders and psychosis.


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Lamborghini to launch its first hybrid technology model in 2023
Category: #tech | By Nikita Chaurasia | Date: 2022-03-21 |
Automobile giant Automobili Lamborghini has had a successful 2021 after launching Urus Super SUV (5021 units), and later delivering V10 backed Huracan, which observed surge in sales to 2586 cars driven by the strong stimulus offered by the Huracan STO.
Additionally, 2021 also observed sales of 798 Aventadors (V12 model) throughout the world.
Now, Lamborghini is all set to launch innovations for Urus and Huracan, two for each model, to then conclude the tenure of internal combustion engines and shift to hybridization, starting with the arrival of the model replacing the Aventador by the year 2023.
Lamborghini has also announced its striving Direzione Cor Tauri strategy, which has been named after Taurus, brightest star in the constellation. This will eventually pave the way for a two-phase path to an electric future.
Reportedly, during the first phase which marks the onset of transition to hybrid, the company will launch its hybrid technology model in 2023, before completing the hybridization of the total car range through 2024 and aim for a 50 per cent cut in CO2 releases.
The other phase will mark complete electrification in the second half of the decade, along with an introduction to a fourth model which will be entirely electric, to lay parallelly to the hybrid line-up.
For the record, Lamborghini called off the financial year 2021 with the best results ever in terms of turnover, sales, and profitability, confirming a solid and winning strategy.
Stephan Winkelmann, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman at Automobili Lamborghini, stated that the luxury car brand has delivered tremendous financial and commercial outputs, exceptional in the history, which endow the conglomerate with necessary solidity to make way for a new period of uncertainty like the present one.
Lamborghini aims towards very challenging financial missions for the coming years, which are to drive the profits between 22 per cent and 25 per cent.
Source Credits :- https://www.livemint.com/auto-news/lamborghini-to-introduce-its-first-model-with-hybrid-technology-in-2023-11647773460018.html

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


TundraCam is located in the southern Rocky Mountains about 64 km (40 miles) northwest of Denver, Colorado (USA). The elevation is 3528m (11,600'). Image: Google Earth.
TundraCam lies only 27 km (17 miles) west of Boulder, Colorado. The peaks at the head of the ridge form the Continental Divide. (2x vertical exaggeration, view to NW). Image: Google Earth.
Tundra-Cam is located within a Biosphere Preserve designated by UNESCO, the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. Forest Service. The Preserve has been selected by the National Science Foundation as the alpine tundra component of the national Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, which consists of 26 sites. The Preserve includes portions of Niwot Ridge, Green Lakes Valley, and other areas. Niwot Ridge LTER is the longest-running multidisciplinary, long-term alpine and sub-alpine study site on the continent. Its research facilities are operated by the University of Colorado's Mountain Research Station, part of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Portions of the trail between the TundraCam and the Research Station are visible above. Long's Peak lies 22 km (14 miles) to the north (upper right). (2x vertical exaggeration, view to NW). Image: Google Earth.
TundraCam is mounted on the Tundra Lab Tower in the "Saddle" of Niwot Ridge. The peaks at the head of the ridge form the Continental Divide. (2x vertical exaggeration, view to W). Image: Google Earth.
Perspective view of Tundra Lab and portions of the Saddle. (2x vertical exaggeration, view to NW). Image: Google Earth. The exact location is 40� 3'15.06"N and 105�35'20.48"W. The nearest town is Ward, Colorado. If you want to interactively "explore" the area with 3D mapping software, download your own copy of the free Google Earth application, then download our TundraCam.kml file; once both are downloaded, double click on the TundraCam.kml file on your computer. We reccomend checking the "terrain" box in Google Earth and tilting the view a bit so that you can see the mountains in 3D.
Summer Interactive Panorama: See all around the horizon from a site just uphill of the "Saddle" where TundraCam is located. This 2001 "virtual reality" panorama is courtesy of Tim Riggs and Dave Underwood of The University of Colorado at Boulder.
Winter Interactive Panorama: See all around the horizon from a site just downhill of the "Saddle" where TundraCam is located. This 2001 "virtual reality" panorama is courtesy of Tim Riggs and Dave Underwood of The University of Colorado at Boulder.
More Interactive Panoramas: A number of sites along Niwot Ridge.
Tundra-Cam is located within a Biosphere Preserve designated by UNESCO, the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. Forest Service. The Preserve has been selected by the National Science Foundation as the alpine tundra component of the national Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. (2x vertical exaggeration, view to NW). Image: Google Earth.


Our survey revealed that clarity is a top issue for better regulation, with more than half (55%) of the executives surveyed for our GRO report saying that this is the key issue missing from current regulation plans. Worryingly, not a single regulator currently has clarity listed as a key aim.
It is clearly in the best interests of all concerned if firms feel able to critique proposed regulations openly. As such, regulators should actively encourage this engagement in order to ensure that new regulations are effective, consumers are protected, and the industry remains competitive. Respondents to GRO survey claimed that a growing number of finance firms are unwilling to engage with regulators about regulations they have issues with as they "don't want to upset them".
In a world where regulation is becoming more global and some regulators are merging and working more closely together, how can culture be defined? There is already a great deal of diversity between different regulators, leading to significant differences in interpretation in different countries or regions. As a result, nearly 80% of those surveyed said that regulation has had little impact on the stability of the global financial system, and 77% thought that global regulations may stall new product innovation or development.
Strong business performance is clearly important for CEOs and the board, but management needs to have a sound understanding of risk and compliance in order to be truly effective. Too much focus on risk and regulation could end up reducing choice for customers, for example. Already, some UK banks seem to be withdrawing from the pension and personal financial products market in response to regulator pressure to 'take the risk out of investing', which could reduce opportunities for consumers.
The financial services sector is currently seeing a significant drive towards more global agreements, working groups, standards and co-operation. Whilst our survey reveals that many firms see this as a key ingredient in helping to drive more effective regulation, it remains to be seen what impact this might have for regulators, the regulated and industry bodies.
One assertion that can certainly be made from these findings is that for regulation to work on a truly global scale there must be more interaction between regulators and industry bodies, which themselves, as typically national or regional institutions, need to develop a more global perspective.


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Jefferson, I Think We're Lost
By Charlie Bertsch
Posted on 22 August 2017 27 August 2017
Posted in Politics, United States
Like most Americans, I witnessed the scenes from the right-wing march on Charlottesville, Virginia with horror and dread and was delighted to see the President's response to the violence excoriated by Republican leaders. But the more denunciations I saw, the more I worried. Attempts to marginalize Donald Trump have failed spectacularly because his supporters tend to see them as evidence of his political autonomy. Maybe a different approach was needed.
Let me confess. While I am usually cautious to the point of timidity, there are times when a contrarian impulse overtakes me. When truths appear a little too self-evident; when almost everyone in a position of power seems to agree; when it seems obvious what doing the right thing means: that's when my thinking is most likely to go against the grain, even if it will bring me trouble. And that's what happened when I began to reflect on the meaning of Donald Trump's refusal to repudiate forcefully all the right-wing marchers who descended upon Thomas Jefferson's city. Although I had no desire to defend the President's actions, I was overcome by a desire to understand what he really wanted to achieve with his remarks.
In order to follow through on this desire, I had to respond to a question which felt rather dangerous. What would it be like to feel as though he were speaking to me instead of speaking against everything I profess? Before I share the results of this possibly misguided experiment in immanent critique, it is important to clarify my initial conclusions about Trump's most controversial statements. While he clearly didn't want to repudiate everyone who marched on the city in defense of "European identity," I was pretty sure that courting extremists was not his primary goal.
Whatever else you may think of him, he is an extraordinarily talented confidence man in the best — or, worst — American tradition — an insight that inspires me to revisit Herman Melville's baffling final novel, among other things — and not likely to waste political capital on a demographic that is still far too small to benefit him. That's why I became convinced, with the help of less hysterical commentaries on his response, that he was actually speaking to that much larger percentage of the electorate who, while unlikely to endorse white supremacism in public, sometimes express support for its tenets when talking with friends and family.
The President's repeated attempts to establish equivalence between the marchers and those individuals who were protesting against their racism, while firmly rejected by his two predecessors on the Republican presidential ticket and other prominent party leaders, reflected the comments of Fox News pundits and conservative talk radio and podcast hosts who have been working diligently for years to make it seems as if right-wing extremists only returned to prominence because of the need to fight back against their left-wing counterparts. It's a conspiracy theory I know a good deal about, thanks to the weekly letters one of my mother's old friends sends to my father. While a tireless volunteer for humanitarian activities such as feeding the homeless, this woman boarded the Trump bandwagon in the summer of 2015, back when he first announced his candidacy, and remains, despite some misgivings about his coziness with the super-rich, a strong supporter of his ambition to "make American great again."
Her words have repeatedly confirmed the degree to which this argument about the dangers posed by an insurgent Left has been woven seamlessly into a larger narrative, much commented upon by mainstream pundits since the 2016 election, in which conservatives conceive of themselves as an oppressed minority in desperate need of what you could plausibly call affirmative action — including efforts to gerrymander electoral districts to ensure that more Republicans win state and national elections — because they will otherwise be facing political extinction. To most of the people in the real-world and social media circles I frequent, this story represents the apex of absurdity. But it seems pretty clear that millions and millions of Americans are willing to believe it without hesitation.
Trump's entire presidential campaign pivoted on the conviction that America is under attack by internationalists who repudiate the values that made the nation great. For some, this message translated into a call to arms. But most of the people who ended up voting for him stopped short of such radicalism. To my mind, that's the most pernicious aspect of his approach to politics. The further he pushes his rhetoric into controversial territory, the more space opens up behind the militant vanguard of the extreme right, making it easier for the majority of his supporters to seem reasonable and restrained.
You don't have to be a fan of the Nazis or KKK to worry that the nation needs defending from this assault on traditional American values. You can disapprove of those groups' methods and ideology, but still acknowledge the need for "soldiers" who are willing to get their hands dirty in this struggle. You can publically lament the negative publicity they bring to the conservative resistance, while privately confessing that it doesn't exactly break your heart that the Black Lives Matter protestors, tenured radicals, and ANTIFA thugs who give patriotism a bad name are feeling afraid.
At least, that's what the President has wanted people to believe. Even as his periodic "dog whistles" serve to legitimate the Far Right, I am convinced that most of his words have been directed at an updated version of the Silent Majority that won Richard Nixon the presidency in 1968 and 1972. Regardless of how many boundaries Trump transgresses, regardless of how poorly informed he seems, Trump never loses sight of those Americans whose anxiety about the future makes them susceptible to a contrarian conservative ideology.
Back when Nixon was in the White House, the wildly popular Norman Lear situation comedy All in the Family presented Americans with the character of Archie Bunker, a blue-collar white man from Queens who articulated the misgivings of the Silent Majority. Today, we find ourselves being led by a billionaire from Queens who acts just like Archie Bunker did, possibly because he internalized Carroll O'Connor's iconic portrayal from his youthful television viewing.
I have a feeling that a major reason the president and his wife Melania will not be attending the annual Kennedy Center Honors show, as was recently announced, is that Norman Lear is one of this year's recipients of the prestigious award. Lear declared to NPR in early August that he would be skipping the presidential reception connected to the event, because, "As an artist and a human being, I cannot celebrate this incredible honor. . . at a White House that has no interest in supporting the Arts and Humanities." I would argue, though, that Trump's biggest problem wasn't that Lear might denounce him at the ceremony, but that the clips from All in the Family they will surely show during the televised ceremonies might make it a little too obvious where this billionaire's angry "regular guy" persona comes from
Whether living through the Nixon Era or the Trump Era, Archie Bunkers types are not the sort to march around with torches, shouting button-pushing slogans. Their preferred domains are the comfy chair, the car seat, and the barstool, places from which they can communicate their disdain for liberal elites without too much risk of having to defend themselves against counter arguments. They are the sort who, while taking in the news from Charlottesville, would likely have said things such as "I don't like the looks of them, but they do have a point" about the marchers, while getting riled up by the antics of the counter-protestors, in part because the media they consume keep reminding them that they need to be outraged.
As I have written before, Archie Bunker scared me as a small child because he reminded me of my own relatives from Queens, particularly a hard-drinking uncle who had served in the army during World War II fighting actual fascists and liked to take out his frustrations on his sons. At the time, the elder one was fresh out of law school, an idealist not unlike the son-in-law "Meathead" on All in the Family, who debated Archie endlessly on subjects like racism. I specifically remember talking to this cousin about how much I liked the character of Lionel on the show, the well-spoken son of the African-American neighbors who were threatening, in Archie's view, to ruin the neighborhood.
The joke was on Archie, though, because this family, the Jeffersons, ended up "moving on up to the East Side" of Manhattan "to a deluxe apartment in the sky," as the theme song for their eponymous spin-off show explained it. Before all that, though, my cousin defended these fictional Jeffersons against the periodically racist grumbling of his father, confusing my young mind with a spectacle of infinite regress in which the show reflected the reality of people like my relatives while my relatives reflected on the show.
I remember these familial tensions so clearly because they simply did not exist within the space of my own nuclear family. My father had done everything in his power to get distance from his family, particularly his father and brother-in-law, while still remaining a dutiful son. And my mother, raised by two college-educated parents who "summered on the Cape" — because that was what intellectuals like them, however impoverished, did — had been committed to the Civil Rights Movement as long as she could remember.
Because my father didn't talk much back then — it had been his way of avoiding conflict with family members — my mother was the parent who focused on instilling values in my sister and me. A radical Protestant who identified with both her progressive Jewish friends who went south to organize in the black community and with the left-wing Zionists who were working to keep her kind of democratic socialism alive in Israel, she always went out of her way to let us know that any discrimination on the basis of race or religion was a terrible offense against humanity.
I still remember one time, during my grade-school years, when she overheard me acting out a dogfight from World War II with my model airplanes and gave me a stern lecture about how disappointed she was to hear me use the term "Japs," which I had first encountered not long before in a comic book. To this day, very little makes me feel more ashamed than that isolated incident. By the time the television mini-series Roots and Holocaust aired in the late 1970s, I already knew exactly who to identify with and why. My father's German heritage did not stop me from always wanting to defeat the Nazis. Nor did my whiteness prevent me from siding with black characters whenever they experienced mistreatment on the basis of race.
To be fair, my mother had a much easier time of teaching us to identify with minorities than would have been the case for previous generations. For the most part, the culture I consumed growing up reflected a mainstream consensus that discrimination was backward and wrong. While sexism and sexual exploitation were still rampant, the conviction that women deserved to be treated as the equals of men was becoming more widespread; in the circles my mother frequented, it was practically taken for granted. The pursuit of gay rights, while still taboo in most parts of the country, was also becoming a cause for many progressives. And black pride extended beyond the African-American community in ways that seem downright remarkable today.
That final point is one that keeps coming to mind as I try to make sense of the president's response to the conflict in Charlottesville. I am fond of saying that I am part of the Sesame Street generation. My mother sat me down to watch its first season when I was a baby and I continued to watch the show almost every day through my sister's preschool years in the mid-1970s. Even as I type this, I'm experiencing body memories that confirm just how powerfully it shaped my worldview. This delights me. But it also provides an important clue in my efforts to figure out what it would be like to feel like Trump was speaking specifically to me.
I'll explain. Although I grew up in the heart of the most heavily populated portion of the United States and was able to watch both Philadelphia and New York television stations — thanks to the aerial my father had installed on our roof — I had almost no real-world experiences of racial diversity until we moved to the Washington D.C. area when I was 11. With the exception of the mixed-race children from one professional family, every single person I encountered in my elementary school was white. The children I saw on Sesame Street, by contrast, were usually black or brown. And many of the authority figures on the show were people of color as well.
Because I had internalized the belief that children's television depicted the world as it should be, I found my own surroundings to be lacking. I desperately wanted to feel included in the diversity I witnessed every day on Sesame Street. To give just one example, I remember being beside myself with joy when, while on a family vacation in Los Angeles — to give you a sense of how detailed my memories from that time are, I know that I weighed myself at 52 pounds on the scale in our hotel room— I made an African-American friend at a park and played with him for several hours. Finally, I thought, my life was starting to look like the world I saw on the screen.
If I'm going to be absolutely truthful here, though, I have to confess that my racial consciousness was just as powerfully shaped by a movie I had watched several times on television at my paternal grandparents' house, one that is now deemed so problematic that is no longer shown in the United States: Song of the South, Disney's treatment of the African-American folktales Joel Chandler Harris collected and retold as Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. While this film is undoubtedly a troubling relic of a time when racial segregation was commonplace, my own reaction to it as a toddler was overwhelmingly positive. And the primary reason, I'm convinced, is that I was a Sesame Street viewer.
Were I able to watch Song of the South today, I'm sure that I would wince at the racial stereotyping of Uncle Remus's character, as well as its idealized representation of life on a nineteenth-century plantation. As a toddler, however, without the historical knowledge necessary to perceive its offensiveness, it struck me as the story of a young white boy who is better cared for by an older black gentleman than by his own family members. To my innocent mind, Uncle Remus seemed very similar to the African-American characters of Gordon and Gloria on Sesame Street, who served as surrogate parents for the children who would visit the show's idealized urban neighborhood and, by extension, all the those who watched them on television.
I've often wondered what deeper meaning this convergence of outwardly antithetical influences meant for the development of my own racial consciousness, particularly while floating along on the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland, which reproduces the characters from the film's animated portions while ignoring its live-action sequences. And now the violence in Charlottesville and the President's response to it has helped me to see this aspect of my upbringing in a different light.
What if the overt racism that returned to the spotlight with the 2008 presidential campaign were somehow connected to the diversity positively represented on shows like Sesame Street? Might at least some of the resentment towards liberal elites that Donald Trump capitalized upon be grounded in the sort of childhood experiences of race that I had? Could government-supported efforts to redress the marginalization of people of color on movie and television screens have led to a backlash against multiculturalism? And could the parallel banishment of retrograde entertainment like Song of the South also have contributed to this unanticipated outcome? Obviously, these are disturbing questions that cannot be adequately addressed in this piece. But it will be helpful to bear them in mind as I turn my attention back to the conflict in Charlottesville.
Introspection is often painful, particularly when it calls long-held views into question. Not once in my childhood did I ever hear my parents say anything negative about a person of color. Nor did it ever occur to me that a person's behavior had anything to do with the color of their skin. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous dream of a society in which people would be judged solely by the "content of their character" had come true in my home, thanks primarily to my mother's tireless efforts to instruct my sister and me. I can't imagine, to recite the list favored in contemporary social justice circles, a boy growing up white, male, straight and cis in the United States of America with less prejudice towards individuals unlike myself.
This is the self-congratulatory story I told myself and others over the years, whenever I wanted to communicate my incredulity that anyone would discriminate against another person because they looked or acted "different." It's a story that made me feel good, particularly when my motives were being questioned. To be honest, it still does. I am proud that my parents raised me right and even prouder that I have done little to suggest otherwise where race is concerned. Unfortunately, this pride conceals the fact that there are other stories in my head, ones that would create a different impression if I were less circumspect about sharing them. Until now, I haven't wanted to take that risk. But Charlottesville has convinced me that I must.
For the most part, these other stories were rooted in make-believe. In preschool, I loved to play with my Matchbox vehicles — "car" was my first word, months before "mommy" — and my blocks, managing imaginary traffic flows. Second grade marked a significant shift. As the nation's Bicentennial approached, I started to act out Revolutionary War scenarios, siding with the Americans. I enjoyed this new approach so much that I soon extended it to World War II, where I also always took the side of the Americans or, in a few instances, their British allies. Once, I received a grown-up board game as a present, the sort with a map divided into hexagons, that required playing either as the Germans or the Russians. As cool as it looked, though, I couldn't muster the resolve to play it for very long, because I didn't want to imagine myself supporting either fascism or communism.
Although the peak of my childhood war-playing coincided with the release of several high-profile films about the Vietnam War, such as Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, I never wanted to act out scenarios from that conflict. Somehow the news I had absorbed in my preschool days had made me understand that pretending to be an American pilot or foot soldier in that conflict was problematic. But that wasn't the only reason I shied away from imagining myself in Indochina. The stories I liked best were the ones in which my side was struggling against a stronger or better-equippedi'm proof opponent. For example, my favorite World War II narratives were from the early stages of American involvement, like the Battle of the Coral Sea or the landing at Anzio. By contrast, there was never a time when the American side could legitimately be considered underdogs in Vietnam.
I also sometimes played Civil War. In that case, I could obviously take either side and still be rooting for the Americans. Because I had started reading military history written for adults, I knew that the Confederacy faced serious geographic and technological disadvantages. The President back then was a Southerner and a man I admired. But I was also watching Roots, in which white Southerners were naturally presented as the enemy. Torn between conflicting impulses, I decided to ask my mother what she thought.
I expected her to tell me that it would be wrong to side with the South, even if I were just playing war, much like she had admonished me for using the slur "Jap." Nothing I knew about her suggested otherwise. Imagine my surprise, then, when she instead proceeded to tell me tales of the dashing Stonewall Jackson and honorable Robert E. Lee. Despite her strong opposition to all forms of racism, she had fallen for the same story that Southerners liked to tell themselves. And I fell further under their spell, too, because I trusted her opinions more than anyone else's. With her implicit endorsement, I went on to side with the Confederacy in many of my imaginary battles.
Soon, this identification with the legacy of the antebellum South made itself felt in other ways. I became a big fan of stock car racing, as opposed to the open-wheel sort at the Indianapolis 500 or Grand Prix races in Europe, partially because I associated it with the romance of rebellion associated with the "Lost Cause." To this day, the sight of the two-tone 43 car gives me a thrill, even if I know that its iconic driver is a Trump supporter. I also fell in love with the famous Confederate battle flag and collected iconography associated with it whenever I could, such as at the Mexico-themed tourist trap South of the Border. Yes, I was way into The General, even if the show that featured it bored me. When we visited the lovely cities of New Orleans and Charleston, I sought out landmarks and artifacts from the decades prior to the Civil War without ever stopping to consider the implications of this interest. And one of my most treasured possessions, which I own to this day, was a set featuring reproductions of Confederate currency.
That's a big reason why, when I learned that my father was being transferred to his non-profit organization's headquarters in Washington D.C., I was able to counterbalance my sadness at leaving the rural home I adored with excitement at the prospect of living south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was a difficult time to purchase property, with interest rates approaching 20%, particularly if you weren't selling your previous house, as my parents did not wish to do. Finding something affordable that also had enough land for the garden my father insisted on creating was an arduous task, requiring a succession of weekend trips to look all over the suburbs in Virgina and Maryland. As tedious as the search was, though, I consoled myself with the little flashes of Southern living I detected in the landscape and the lilt I detected in some of the conversations I overheard.
Over time, the impressions I collected during these trips settled into a fantasy of what it would like to live there. Even though I generally hated hot weather, I came to like the idea of looking out at a lush, green horizon through the softness of humid air. I imagined flowers that didn't grow well on our heavily shaded, rocky-soiled Pennsylvania hilltop and fireflies flitting about in the dusk. I even had a picture of the driveway I wanted, made of the concrete I remembered from highways in the South instead of the gravel I'd grown up with or the asphalt that my friends had.
A big part of this fantasy concerned the people I expected to meet. Finally, after years of feeling deprived because everyone around me was white, I would get to know black people. When we visited the elementary school where I would be a sixth-grader, I was delighted to learn that three-quarters of the students were African-American. On the trips we took into Washington D.C. itself, I thrilled to see street scenes in which nobody looked like me. While I obviously knew that there were people of color in northern cities like Philadelphia and New York, I believed that there would be something different about black life in the South that could not be experienced elsewhere and I was eager to learn as much as possible about it.
As is now painfully obvious to me looking back on this period, I was absurdly naïve. Not once did it occur to me, as I looked forward to the move, that immersing myself in black culture and celebrating the legacy of the Confederacy might be mutually exclusive. Truly, it's hard to imagine being more clueless than I was about the realities of racial politics in the United States. Perhaps, if I had shared this fantasy with my mother, she would have tried to set me straight. Maybe doing so would even have led her to question her own contradictory beliefs. But she was busy and very stressed — my father had been required to move down to our new home in the middle of the school year and only came home some weekends — so I kept my excitement to myself.
Indeed, the only negative information that registered with me was something my father had said during our search for a home, when he passed a sign for the town where, as a government rocket scientist during the 1950s, he had gone by himself to a movie theater without a balcony and been reprimanded by an usher for sitting on the wrong side of the aisle, because, like most public spaces in that part of Maryland back then, it was segregated.
Strangely enough, he volunteered this story again the other night, without any prompting, as I sat with him eating the dinner I'd made for us. I hadn't mentioned working on this piece. And I'd never shared my fantasy of the South with him, except to the degree that I sometimes asked for money to buy items on vacation. But we had been talking about what transpired in Charlottesville beforehand, which gives a pretty good indication of how thoroughly recent events have pushed racial discrimination into the front of people's minds, even the sort who, like him, rarely bring up politics.
As you might expect, the reality of living in the Washington D.C. area differed sharply from my expectations. The air conditioning in our home broke within a month and my parents decided that they didn't want to spend the money to fix it, ensuring that the indoor "heat index" regularly approached triple digits over the next decade's worth of summers. I missed my friends. I missed the beauty that had surrounded us in the Pennsylvania countryside. And the neighborhood we ended up moving into was in a particularly "Southern" part of Prince George's County, Maryland, entirely white, overwhelmingly blue-collar, and full of kids my age who regarded me as an outsider not worthy of their time.
When I finally did make some acquaintances on our street, including the son of a local police officer, I was shocked by their lack of interest in the wider world and deeply troubled by their casual use of the "N-word." Because the school I had been slated to attend had been shut down for good over the summer, I was bussed, along with much of its predominantly African-American student body, to another elementary school that had previously been over 90% white. It was only then, in 1979, that the county was finally making substantive efforts to comply with a court order to desegregate. But the newcomers to this school were largely shunned by those children who had been attending it since kindergarten, both because they were new and because they were black, ensuring a kind of grassroots resegregation. Because I was also new, though, and would have attended the school that had been shut down, I was classified as a "black" white person. The other white kids in my class barely spoke to me. But I made friends with several African-American students in my class and spent my lunchtime and recess hours in their company.
My teacher, who had been transferred from the school that had been shut down, was also African-American. To her undying credit, rather than try to adapt herself wholly to the whiteness of her new surroundings, she insisted that all of her students, regardless of the color of their skin, would benefit from learning about black culture. We spent months learning about Africa. We studied slavery. We took field trips to places like the Frederick Douglas House in the District. And she did such a great job of making these lessons inclusive that even most of the white students who had initially grumbled about the curriculum ended up becoming interested in it.
In other words, I was very lucky. This teacher powerfully reinforced all the positive lessons about race that my mother had tried to impart and instilled in me a passion for social justice that demanded inclusiveness as a prerequisite. I often wonder what would have happened, though, if I had been placed in a different class, like that of the most feared sixth-grade teacher, a white woman who was an outright racist, fond of grabbing black children by the hair and dragging them to the principal's office. Or if my parents had been like the white boy in my class whose father ran the local "county" Little League team, which somehow managed not have a single black player.
When my parents learned that I was set to be bussed to a middle school far across the county, without any of my African-American friends, for seventh grade, they looked into a well-regarded private school ten minutes from my house. Although my mother was an adamant supporter of public schooling, I was still pretty depressed from the move and unlikely, given my penchant for becoming extremely car sick, to benefit from spending over two hours on a school bus each day. So they sent me to an open house at the private school. Walking in, I was taken aback by how white these prospective seventh-graders were. But I soon found two African-American boys to sit with and decided that it might not be that bad a place.
As it turned out, I was miserable for most of my six years there. Many of my white classmates had come from a private "feeder" elementary school and already knew each other. The two African-American boys, though pleasant with me, were closely bound to the community where they lived. They knew some of my sixth-grade friends and reported back to me on their activities, but we interacted less than I would have liked. While I eventually made new friends, I always had the sense that I remained an outsider relative to the private school's most prominent families, some of whom had eighteenth-century gravestones with their names on them in the graveyard of the neighboring Episcopal church.
There were a number of wonderful progressive teachers at this school, whom I think of fondly to this day. And the curriculum was generally rather progressive. But it did not come as a surprise when I learned that the school had originally been formed in the 1960s by people who were concerned about the direction public schools were heading. Like a lot of post-Civil Rights Movement institutions in the South, it had initially provided a place where white students could be "white without question," not officially segregated, but still insulated from the pressures of racialized interaction.
Thanks, in part, to the work of my sixth-grade teacher, this separateness made me uneasy. I missed the multicultural experiences that I'd had while in her class and wondered why very little of the content she had covered ever made its way into my college-preparatory curriculum. Every time I drove into Washington D.C. with my dad, passing the neighborhoods where my African-American friends had lived and then the increasingly impoverished ones that ran almost to Capitol Hill, I was reminded that there was something missing in my education. Sometimes, I'd try to redress the imbalance, like the summer day when I took a series of buses to visit the National Arboretum, which was located in a very rough part of town along the Anacostia River. For the most part, though, I just didn't have the time or resources to supplement the experiences I was getting in school.
It's almost time to get back to Donald Trump, reluctant as I am to do so. But there are two memories from my years at this private school that are worth recording in greater detail. The first concerns my sixth-grade teacher. The summer after seventh grade, my mother, who adored the woman, invited her — I think they had met up a few times in the interim — and her son, who was a year younger than me, to come over for lunch, along with my best friend from sixth grade, whom I was at that point still in touch with. After we ate — I remember a delicious salad with homemade mayonnaise and pickled watermelon rind — I went for a walk with the other two boys while the grown-ups talked. As we neared the end of our street, a man whose son had always been rather mean to me called out to us: "Do you have swimsuits? Because we have a pool you can use."
Not sure what to make of this unexpected friendly gesture, we walked back to my house to ask whether it would be possible to swim. My mother gave me detailed safety instructions and found something for the two boys to wear for swimming while I put on my own suit. Then we walked back to the house. The man seemed almost too eager to have us use his pool, but I figured it would be alright, since his wife and children were out of town on vacation and he was about to walk out the door. After telling us how to lock the gate when we done, he gave a wave and said, "Have as much fun as you like!"
And we did. But something about his fortuitous generosity didn't sit right with me afterwards. For one thing, I stopped seeing him around. So I eventually asked his son about him. "My parents are getting a divorce, so he doesn't live here anymore." I decided to tell him about the unexpected invitation to swim. The boy gave me a strange look. "Don't you get it? My dad can be a real dick. He was moving out. He only did that so my mother wouldn't feel comfortable using the pool."
The second memory is from my private school. Every student in my senior-year A.P. English class had to write a thesis of over twenty pages centered on one of the books that we had read. I decided on William Faulkner's Light in August, largely because I had spent the summer obsessively listening to the music of R.E.M. Despite all the disappointment and disillusion that I had experienced since moving to Maryland, some part of me still held on to my childhood fantasies about the South. Even if I was no longer able to romanticize the Confederacy, I hadn't yet abandoned the idea that white Southerners were in a special position to sort the good from the bad in their homeland and redeem the promise of agrarian living.
R.E.M.'s song "Little America", on their Reckoning LP, seemed to capture this notion, if in the slantwise fashion of all Michael Stipe's lyrics back then. I listened to it over and over, trying to make sense of each line. Some proved impossible to determine. But the ones I did finally pin down implied that the song was a critique of the New South. When Stipe sang "Another Greenville, another Magic Mart," I couldn't help but see the strip malls and subdivisions that were rapidly replacing whatever farmland remained outside of Atlanta and other major cities. And the refrain "Jefferson, I think we're lost" seemed to confirm this suspicion, invoking the Founding Father who had most forcefully warned Americans about the importance of preserving a rural lifestyle.
That's what I thought back then, at least. Years later, when someone explained to me that the "Jefferson" mentioned in the song was not Thomas, but the band's longtime tour manager Jefferson Holt, I had to laugh at how certain my teenage self had been of his interpretation. Looking back on this misunderstanding now, I'd hazard that my desire to redeem the South and contradictory figures like the United States' cosmopolitan third president was so strong that I was willing to believe that a band from Athens, Georgia would necessarily share in the project. And I certainly wasn't the only one, when R.E.M. was becoming famous, who felt that way.
Although I didn't refer to "Little America" in my thesis — my very proper, very Southern teacher hated me as it was — the passages from Light in August I focused on all concerned the agrarian lifestyle. It didn't hurt that, when I went to the University of Maryland bookstore to find research material, I came back with literary criticism from New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, who had themselves sought to exalt Southern rural living as a potential remedy for the ills of urbanized, internationalist modernity. Like Faulkner himself, they weren't particularly racist by the standards of Jim Crow. Yet the outsized influence they exerted over twentieth-century literary studies may have made them more damaging, ultimately, than less subtly prejudiced white Southerners. For it is through the tireless efforts of men and women like them that the romantic fantasy of the Lost Cause was gradually separated from the brutal reality of slavery and its aftermath.
In the case of many Americans, Gone With the Wind played a crucial role in encouraging identification with white Southerners. I know that my mother adored both Margaret Mitchell's novel and the wildly successful film starring Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable. But popular culture proves a lot more influential when its messages are reinforced by the educational system. The literature and history professors who perpetuated the fantasy of the Lost Cause — or were at least unwilling to repudiate it — not only influenced the students they taught directly, but also those who were taught by their former students, whether in classrooms or at home. They bear significant responsibility for refining the sort of argument that can separate the deeds of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee from the fact that they everything they did in the war was on behalf of the Confederacy.
I remember once, shortly after we first moved to Maryland, taking a lovely family vacation in the mountains of northern Virginia. My father was keen to pass all of our time looking at fall foliage in Shenandoah National Park. But I was a fan of the black basketball start Ralph Sampson at the University of Virginia and wanted to see Charlottesville. The compromise we worked out was to spend one day touring Thomas Jefferson's estate at Monticello and then turn our attention to nature. Although my mother and I loved seeing the former President's home and gardens, my father — a son of immigrants, who did not grow up learning American history at home — seemed less than enthusiastic. Maybe I should have asked him why. I was too busy, though, taking in all the information being imparted by the tour guides: how Jefferson experimented with exotic plants; how he used the Renaissance architect Palladio's buildings for inspiration; how he made a bed just the right size for someone of his height; and how he and the nation's second president, John Adams, both died on July 4th, 1826, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson had drafted and Adams had helped edit.
What I didn't hear on that tour was anything about what it was like to be a slave on the plantation of such an enlightened gentleman or about the mixed-race descendants who bear Jefferson's name, like George and Louise Jefferson and their son Lionel. Indeed, aside from a brief mention of the slave quarters, the tour guide's only reference to the people who were compelled to serve Jefferson concerned his "ingenious" invention of a dumbwaiter that allowed them to convey food and drink to him without having to be seen. Whether for imperatives of aesthetics or conscience, the man who famously declared that "all men are created equal" sought to conceal the evidence that powerful men like George Washington, James Madison and himself benefited from artificially maintained inequality of the worst kind.
In suggesting that taking down the statues of Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee, as the city of Charlottesville was proposing, could eventually lead to a movement to dismantle the monuments to slaveholding Founding Fathers as well, the President was trying to provoke the outrage of today's Archie Bunkers by invoking the specter of an American equivalent to the Cultural Revolution. For all of the condemnations Trump received for these comments, they were actually quite savvy. Nothing terrifies people who live in a nation born of revolution more than the possibility that the same logic that justified its break with the past will be redeployed to destroy it. In the case of the United States, the Declaration of Independence's assertion that "all men are created equal" is always threatening to undermine institutions that depend on denying its implications.
Reflecting on the influences that led my mother and, under her tutelage, me to exalt Confederate leaders despite our commitment to fighting racism, I am convinced that it wasn't simply the carefully cultivated romance of the Lost Cause that bore responsibility, but also a broader effort to single out great men — and, much too infrequently, women — who are, to borrow George Orwell's famous formulation from Animal Farm, "more equal than others." Until World War II, most history books took this approach. And it persisted until well after then in the ones that children are likely to read. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, school libraries were still full of these de facto saint's lives, even if newer materials, like the Jackdaw folders of primary-source documents that I studied obsessively as a teenager or the displays at museums like the Smithsonian, were doing their best to promote a different approach.
It was largely through engagement with this kind of historical thinking, not revisionary so much as divisionary, that the foundation was laid for me to understand later how much my early education had been lacking. But the legacy of that traditional historical thinking continued to make itself felt subliminally long after I had begun to question it. For example, if I'd had access to the Jackdaw series in elementary school or, more pertinently, if my mother had been given the opportunity to see history that way at any point in her education, I might not have misinterpreted that R.E.M. lyric.
And even now, as I contemplate the tearing down of statues across the land, some part of me feels not only anxiety that this project may be proceeding too rapidly, but actual sadness that the "great men" they depict are being brought down to size. Andrew Jackson was a vicious man, totally lacking in the qualities that made redeeming figures like Robert E. Lee a little easier. Yet when I remember sitting in Jackson Square in New Orleans as an eight-year-old, looking up at the pigeons perched on the General and his rearing horse, or when I remember sitting in the same place on my honeymoon, trying to fight a surreal hangover with a muffuletta sandwich, I become stupidly sentimental.
By itself, the approach to history that left us a legacy of bronze and marble men wasn't just overly simplistic, but deceptive and, at times, downright dangerous. I'm not convinced, though, that trying to erase evidence of its wrong-headedness will have the effect its proponents desire. If a white, male, cis, middle-aged man like me, who has had the privilege of being taught how to turn this privilege against itself, at least to a degree; if someone like me, who has literally spent his entire conscious life being reminded that all forms of discrimination are bad and that discrimination against black people is one of the United States' "original sins"; if someone like me, who has also had the privilege of interacting with and learning from some of the nation's brightest scholars of color; if someone like me, who has never once, since being admonished by his mother for saying "Jap", even used an ethnic slur; if I can feel just a little bit spoken to by the President's controversial statements, then it is extremely likely that people who haven't had all these advantages will feel called to action in ways that should make us all apprehensive.
Like all things, even this essay — and I'm using this word in Montaigne's original sense, to signal an attempt that was bound to fall short of its mark — must come to an end. I'm not sure that the world needed me to write it. But I know that I did. Because the minute I forget, in rushing to condemn others for their misdeeds and prejudices, that I am myself composed of contradictory beliefs and impulses, the value of what I do provide will be cheapened. If we are truly serious about making progress towards a nation where people are measured by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin or the pattern on their head scarf, then we must acknowledge that this content can never be reduced to a common denominator. Even the President, despicable as he may seem, deserves to be seen this way. As my daughter says, "Anyone who acts like he does must have suffered terrible abuse as a child."
What I would propose, as we try to move on from Charlottesville — aside from not prematurely forgetting what happened there and how people responded to it, as the pace of the present-day news cycle inclines us to — is that we think long and hard about the ways in which different constituencies may be spoken to and try even harder to speak to them with care and respect about what matters to us most. By the time All in the Family ended its run on television, Archie Bunker had changed into a more decent, open-minded man. That may have been the result of wishful thinking on the part of Norman Lear and Carrol O'Connor, but it is far better to think wishfully than to succumb to political reflexes without thinking much at all.
Thomas Jefferson failed spectacularly to live up to the spectacular potential of his own words. Most of us do. It's just that we haven't been born into situations that make it possible for us to do as much good and bad as he did for the nation and the world or, for that matter, as Donald Trump is doing. Our challenge, going forward, is to open up those parts of ourselves and others that are spoken to by that potential, while becoming as aware as we possibly can of the our potential to be hailed in less salutary ways. Like Jefferson, we are bound to get lost along the way. But we might just find ourselves becoming better people in the process.
Featured image and all others courtesy of the author, including those documenting the white and black boards from his courses, except for the memes, which are all of indeterminable provenance, as memes will be.
A Mother's Loss in the Coalition's Battle for Raqqa
The Anti-Americans
Reconsidering Trump's Fourth of July


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A Shocking 80 Percent of Americans Can't Access Rooftop Solar. Here's Why.
Solstice was founded on the idea that every American should have access to affordable solar energy. Building solar is now almost universally cheaper than fossil fuel plants, and industry experts say that solar costs will continue to fall. But a shocking 80 percent of Americans are locked out of the rooftop solar.
How Many Americans Can't Install Rooftop Solar?
How Many U.S. Rooftops Work For Solar Panels?
Many Americans Can't Install Rooftop Solar Due To Credit Requirements
Solstice Is Bringing Solar to Every American.
Getting rooftop solar is generally only realistic if you own your home, have a relatively high FICO score (over 680), and live in a state with policies that require utilities to compensate you for the energy you produce. Under these requirements, a 2015 report from independent clean energy research organization GTM Research puts the percentage of Americans left out of the rooftop solar industry at 77 percent, or approximately 90 million American households.
GTM breaks down the reasons that US households can't install rooftop solar in their 2015 Solar Market Outlook. The biggest factor is that the third of Americans who rent their homes generally cannot install rooftop solar, while other important elements include policy, access to credit, and physical barriers.
This is a useful, big-picture look at the US solar market, but it's not everything we need to know. To really understand what's happening with solar access in the US, we need to dig deeper into the numbers that make up this graph.
Infographic: How to Bring Solar to Every American.
Access the Infographic
A 2015 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) states that 81 percent of residential buildings have suitable space for at least 1.5 kilowatts of solar on their rooftops. This number reflects factors like rooftop area, shading, and rooftop orientation.
In an attempt to put a more realistic number on the households who can actually install panels on their roof, the researchers then chose to exclude the 37 percent of households who rent their homes or who live in buildings too tall to easily install solar. According to these criteria, 49 percent of American households can install at least 1.5 kilowatts of rooftop solar.
This number gives an idea of how many households are entirely excluded from rooftop solar due to shading, rooftop orientation, building size, and homeownership status, but when it comes to solar, size matters. Only 20 percent of rooftop solar arrays installed today are less than 1.5 kilowatts in size. The average array size is 5 kilowatts, and you'd need slightly more than that to power the average family home. The same NREL study indicates that only 39 percent of small buildings could host an array 4.5 kilowatts or larger, regardless of factors like homeownership.
Since few Americans can afford the upfront cost of rooftop solar ($15-40k on average), a full analysis of solar access needs to include access to credit. Rooftop solar financing typically requires a credit score of 650 or more–a requirement which less than half of the American population fulfills (32 percent of Americans have a credit score lower than 650, while one in five has no credit score at all).
Given that so many Americans don't have the credit ratings required by solar financiers, the number of people left out of the solar market is likely significantly higher than NREL estimates. Community solar has the potential to remedy this problem.
Solar will only go mainstream when access to it is democratized, and today, nearly four in five Americans can't install rooftop solar. Some of the obstacles confronting these households have to do with the laws in their states, but the majority of them are issues that community solar is well adapted to address. These communities are the reason we come to work in the morning, and we'll only be truly satisfied when they have full and equal access to their own solar energy.
We're making solar work for you.
Category: InclusionBy Forrest Watkins August 8, 2017
Tags: energy democracyenergy equitysolar accesssolar energysolar for renters
Author: Forrest Watkins
Forrest worked in the marketing team at Solstice prior to his current role as a Program Manager. Previously, over a yearlong Princeton in Asia Fellowship and a two-year world bicycle tour, he developed 360 By Bike, an independent journalism project aimed at understanding and documenting the global impacts of climate change and the energy transition. In his years on the road, he saw first-hand the inequality inherent in our current energy systems, and resolved to use his skills to help democratize ownership and control of the next generation of energy resources. He graduated from Whitman College in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology (BBMB) and Spanish.
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"I am 3/4ths Canadian, and one 4th New Englander - I had ancestors on both sides in the Revolutionary war." - Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop's Letters to Aunt Grace: Part 14 "These new drugs"
Bishop's letter of 5 July 1956 contains an addendum dated 16 July. The first part got "mislaid" and she went to Rio for several days. The letter turned up again in her studio at Samambaia and Bishop finished and mailed it, with a cheque for $15, for the maple syrup Grace was commissioned to obtain and send (an amount which Bishop hoped would cover the postage — these days, that amount wouldn't even cover a fraction of the postage!)
In the initial part of the letter, Bishop had updated Grace about her boils, giving her aunt an account of how they came to manifest. She had "an infected gum, first," which infection decided to move to her knee, where erupted enough boils that walking was not possible. As always, Lota's "tender care" kicked in and that with the help of "Antiphlogistine" and vitamin B, she began to feel better quickly, even though the boils persisted: "God knows what it is." She noted that she would see a doctor in Rio about this situation, "as soon as I can."
That consultation happened while she was visiting Rio in the days between 5 and 16 July, so Bishop was able to provide a second update in the same letter. As it turned out, the boils were "a bad reaction to penicillen" [sic] which she had taken for the gum infection (three shots of it). "Fortunately," she noted, "I take metacorten [sic] all the time anyway, for asthma, and that's just what I should have taken." Once the penicillin was out of her system, the boils turned to red lumps, then to bruises.
chemical formula for penicillin
"When someone is allergic like me, you never know what may happen, apparently," she wrote to Grace, who understood well enough these causations. Just like the "ghastly" plane crashes she wrote about, Bishop observed what we all know (and even more so today, with even more reason), "These new drugs are fearful & wonderful, aren't they."
To further reassure Grace, Bishop noted that she had a good allergy doctor, "the best in Rio, a young man, a friend of a friend, and he won't take a cent." Even as Bishop argued with him about this generosity, he would not relent, so she told Grace that she'd now have to figure out some sort of present to give him. Stay tuned. Her next letter reveals what gift she chose, and I will let you know when we get there.
Fast forward over four decades: On 2 February 1998, I gave a talk to members of the History of Medicine Society in Halifax, Nova Scotia: "'In the Waiting Room': Elizabeth Bishop's History of Medicine." Like finances/money, health/medicine were foundational forces in Bishop's life, affecting every aspect of it. In Grace, she had a correspondent who not only cared about her health issues, but also understood them deeply, having spent most of her early adult life tending to the sick and injured. Doctors and hospitals were present in Bishop's life from the beginning and they played important roles in shaping her world view. And her letters to her aunt contain many references to all things medical (one of their main subjects).
Thus, it seemed logical to talk to a room full of doctors about Bishop's close relationship with the medical world. After all, at one point, Bishop almost gave up poetry to become a doctor.
I don't remember giving the talk, alas, at least not any particulars. But I do remember the q&a was lively and the doctors were surprised and impressed by Bishop's knowledge of drugs and medical procedures. (If anyone is interested in this talk, I can send a pdf — just make a comment to the blog with your email address.)
Nova Scotia Hospital (N.S. Archives)
I puzzled for awhile over an appropriate image for this post (how does one show "these new drugs." But then I thought of the above image of perhaps the most important hospital in Bishop's life: The Nova Scotia Hospital (a.k.a. Mount Hope), in Dartmouth, N.S., where her mother Gertrude spent 18 years of her life. If you start looking for hospitals, nurses, doctors and other medical elements in Bishop's poetry and prose, you find quite a population of them, and no surprise. Medical and health issues were not just daily things that happened to Bishop, she pulled them into her art, too, and looked at them from all angles, transformed them into symbols, metaphors, emblems, which resonate for us all.
St. Elizabeth's Hospital
The image above is of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. One of Bishop's official duties when she was Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress in 1949–1950 was to visit Ezra Pound, incarcerated there. Out of those experiences came "Visits to St. Elizabeths," a somewhat controversial poem. What is fascinating and little known is that the woman responsible for establishing St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Dorothea Dix, also played an instrumental role in the creation of the Nova Scotia Hospital. I have written in detail about this connection in my book Lifting Yesterday. Bishop was quite aware of Dix's involvement with both hospitals and said to her friend Dorothee Bowie that the only biography she ever wanted to write was about Dix because she had helped the mentally "insane."
The next post will be the last for the 5 July 1956 letter and return to poor Aunt Florence and other matters.
Click here to see Part 13.
Posted by Sandra Barry at 8:03 AM 0 comments
Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia AGM, 18 June 2016
About thirty members and friends gathered at the "In the Village" Cafe in Great Village, N.S., on Saturday afternoon 18 June 2016 for the EBSNS Annual General Meeting. Our guest speaker, Halifax artist Emma FitzGerald, gave a lively talk about her artist residency in Rio de Janeiro, where she worked on a project inspired by Elizabeth Bishop's poems. Here are some images of that day, taken by EBSNS member Susan Kerslake.
(The business part of the day.)
(l to r) (Life member Lois Bray, our new
Vice President Judith van Duren,
and long-time member Barbara Bell.)
(Emma FitzGerald weaving her tales of Brazil)
(Tea, treats and talk)
Thanks to all who came out to help us celebrate Elizabeth Bishop "In the Village." Go to the EBSNS website to read the minutes of the meeting and the President's Report.
Posted by Sandra Barry at 12:16 PM 0 comments
Elizabeth Bishop's Letters to Aunt Grace Part 13: Getting down to business
Even Elizabeth Bishop knew she was "no business-woman." Her relationship with money was complex and fraught. She was a fortunate writer in some ways because she had inheritance from her father, mother and paternal grandfather. This inheritance provided at least some income for a good part of her adult life. But she had little interest in managing her finances, perhaps because she professed to have little ability to do so. Indeed, from her earliest childhood, until she came of age, her inheritance was managed by her mother, then her grandfather and then her paternal uncle.
Even with money in hand, and increasing success as a writer (being published, receiving awards, fellowships and other prizes), Bishop always seemed to worry about money, about having enough to live on. Her life-long health issues and their attendant costs were certainly enough to keep her at least concerned about finances. Though, as she admits in her Depression era memoir "The U.S.A. School of Writing," she didn't really have to work in a conventional way, until much later life.
Bishop disliked teaching, but in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, she taught because she needed the money. She did readings, an activity she disliked even more than teaching, for the money. She sold the Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore letters in her possession in the 1970s because she needed the money. She was always very direct about this motivation. In her letters to Grace in the early 1970s, worry about money is a regular theme, especially as she approached retirement.
Money is even a subject in her poems and stories. Perhaps her first awareness about money as a force in daily life came in Great Village during her early childhood. Her memoir "In the Village" contains several fascinating references to money.
For example, it refers to a five-cent piece Bishop receives as a gift, with the image of King George V on it. The above image is not of a nickel, but this gives you the idea. This coin dates 1916, the year of "In the Village."
And much later in her life, one thinks of "Poem" where art and money are directly linked, the little painting having never earned any money in its life, even though it is the size of an old-style dollar bill.
The "old-style dollar bill" painting by Bishop's Great-uncle George W. Hutchinson.
In her own letters to friends and colleagues, money is a not infrequent subject. As much as artists want and need to be outside the crass realm of business and commercialism, unless they are independently wealthy, artists are often, reluctantly, obsessed with money, or the lack of it.
I have always thought a book, or at least an essay, about Bishop and money would be well worth the effort and quite revealing. It is a subject that directly touched every aspect of her life from birth to death; but it is a subject that seems to be somewhat taboo: too private? too uncomfortable? too crude?
In her letters to Grace, Bishop wrote about her finances and business transactions, especially in the 1960s, when Brazil was going through serious economic upheaval. Such subjects were not central in their dialogue, but they were present in ways that demonstrates how these issues mattered to Bishop.
In the 5 July 1956 letter to Grace, Bishop tells her aunt that she is "investing some money here." She had borrowed from her bank in the US (I don't know if anyone has ever figured out what bank(s) Bishop dealt with — perhaps not much of an issue, but it would be interesting to know) and invested it in Brazil. The nature of this investment is not revealed in the letter, but Bishop tells Grace that "interests are fantastically high." Bishop had help in this endeavour from "a friend of mine who's supposed to be a great money-maker." The idea was to make "enough to live on here" and "send some more $$$ back to the U.S." Bishop seemed quite sure this plan would work, even though she had "never thought of doing anything like that before." She declared that it must be "the 'Bishop side,' as Aunt F would say, — the grandpa B side!"
"Grandpa B": John Wilson Bishop
The Bishop side of her family was decidedly all business. Her paternal grandfather, John W. Bishop, was a self-made man who had created a solid construction company in New England, building landmark buildings such as the Boston Public Library. Grace herself knew the Bishops well enough and understood their inclination. In her letter, Bishop declared, "Anything artistic I feel positive couldn't come from there, even if my father did do well in high-school." Bishop's father, William, might very well have been the most "artistic" of this family, a well-read, gentle and thoughtful man, who clearly cared about more than just making one buck and then another.
Perhaps Bishop's aversion to dealing with money and finances came from seeing these forces dominate her paternal side. But even as she lacked a business acumen, she did have to deal with her "living" at every stage of her life, and especially so as she aged. I do not know if Bishop's investment paid off as well as she hoped.
The next post will deal with more health and medical matters.
Elizabeth Bishop's Letters to Aunt Grace Part 12: The Fear of Flying
The next extant letter for 1956 is dated 5 July, the promised full response that Bishop mentioned in her postcard. This letter contains a number of ongoing and new subjects, and the next couple of posts will focus on them in turn.
Bishop's dislike of flying was something she mentioned on more than one occasion to Grace. One of my previous posts introduced the subject of air travel.
Grace's view of this mode of transportation is unknown, but it might have been similar to her niece's because Bishop mentions a recent news event that clearly unsettled her, something she thought would interest Grace: "Weren't those airplane accidents ghastly." So upsetting were they that Bishop observed she would not have gone to Diamantina (a trip she took in April) "after them."
Of course, I wondered what plane crash had happened, and thanks to Google and the internet, I learned about a tragic mid-air collision of two aircraft over the Grand Canyon, on 30 June 1956, only a few days before Bishop's letter, so indeed a very current event. It was the first airplane crash in aviation history causing over 100 deaths. 128 people perished.
Images of the types of airplanes
that crashed over the Grand Canyon.
Commercial transcontinental, transatlantic/pacific flight was still in its early years, though expanding rapidly. This terrible accident clearly shocked the world. Bishop noted, trying to lighten what for her was a dark subject, told her aunt about a painter friend of theirs who had recently flown to Europe. When, upon arriving, he was asked how he liked the flight, his said, "It was the longest fright I ever had."
Bishop is, of course referring specifically to the Colorado tragedy in her letter, though it is interesting that she writes "airplane accidents" (plural). As I searched online, I found a site that lists plane crashes that have occurred in each year, planecrashinfo.com, and discovered that there were over 50 plane crashes in the world in 1956, including one on 15 May, when a Canadian air force plane crashed into a populated area in Orleans, Ontario, and killed over two dozen people on the ground.
I myself am afraid of flying. Like Bishop, I have flown in spite of it; but never comfortably. We are told that flying is safer than driving in a car; but for some reason, it doesn't feel like that. Well, humans are quite irrational on many levels. I wonder how many of these 50+ crashes Elizabeth and Grace heard about in 1956, multiple accidents each month, most not of the magnitude of the one in Colorado, but they all added up to a deadly year in aviation.
I am not sure when Bishop's first flight occurred. From birth, she was a frequenter of ships and trains, which continued when she began to travel on her own in the 1920s and 1930s. Her first vivid description of flight that I have found appears in a journal she kept in August 1951, when she made a trip to Nova Scotia and Sable Island. For some reason, Bishop chose to fly, from New York to Boston and then on to Nova Scotia.
The trip journal begins with a description of this flight, which seemed to fascinate more than frighten her. On the New York to Boston leg, she wrote that they saw only one other plane, miles off, and commented in a way that invokes her poem "Manners": "It seemed wrong not to hail it, for the 2 planes not to approach each other & talk over the strangeness of being there at all – It didn't seem possible." The plane landed at an airport in Dartmouth, "a clearing in the fir woods," and she took a little ferry across the harbour to Halifax. For the Nova Scotia to Sable Island leg, she boarded the HMCS Cornwallis (a Coast Guard resupply ship) to make the journey. She approached Sable Island by sea.
In May 2008, I had the great privilege of going to Sable Island, thanks to a kind invitation from Zoe Lucas. Along with writer Janet Barkhouse, we went by air and I felt quite reassured because our pilot was a woman, Debbie, and very experienced. A regular trip for her. It might have been the least nerve-wracking flight I've ever taken. I wished Bishop had seen Sable Island from the sky. She would have appreciated its striking appearance way out there in the vast ocean.
Sable Island by air, May 2008. Photo by Janet Barkhouse
Janet Barkhouse (centre), Sandra (right) and
Sable Island Station Manager Gerry on the South Beach
In her 1951 journal, she was fascinated by the geography beneath her (the plane flew only 11,000 feet up): "N.S. looked lovely from the air — fresh dark greens, red outline, glittering lines of rivers — more animated than Maine had looked — & that amazing cleanness that strikes me every time." By 1956, flight was more common, but the skies were becoming more dangerous, too. The adventure was turning into an anxiety, at least for Bishop.
The next post will look at a subject for which Bishop had little acumen: business.
Posted by Sandra Barry at 2:28 PM 0 comments
TODAY'S VIDEOS -- JANUARY 1, 2021
TODAY IN BISHOP -- JANUARY 1, 2021
Brazil, January 1, 1502
… embroidered nature… tapestried landscape.
– Landscape into Art, by Sir Kenneth Clark
Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs:
every square inch filling in with foliage—
big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a satin under leaf turned over;
monster ferns
in silver-gray relief,
and flowers, too, like giant water lilies
up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves—
purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,
rust red and greenish white;
solid but airy; fresh as if just finished
and taken off the frame.
A blue-white sky, a simple web,
backing for feathery detail:
brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel,
a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;
and perching there in profile, beaks agape,
the big symbolic birds keep quiet,
each showing only half his puffed and padded,
pure-coloured or spotted breast.
Still in the foreground there is Sin:
five sooty dragons near some massy rocks.
The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts
splattered and overlapping,
threatened from underneath by moss
in lovely hell-green flames,
attacked above
by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and neat,
"one leaf yes and on leaf no" (in Portuguese).
The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes
are on the smaller, female one, back-to,
her wicked tail straight up and over,
red as red-hot wire.
Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting,
in creaking armor, came and found it all,
not unfamiliar:
no lovers' walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no lute music,
but corresponding, nevertheless,
to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of style when they left home—
wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
L' Homme arme or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself—
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.
| ABOUT EB 100
| BIBLIOGRAPHY
| FIRST ENCOUNTERS
| LARGE VERSION
| LIFTING YESTERDAY
| NOVA SCOTIA CONNECTIONS
| WONDER QUESTIONS
| "TWO ARTS"
"Crusoe in England"
ELIZABETH BISHOP NEWS LINKS
November 28, 2019: Lynn Curwin reviews A Pocket of Time for the Truro Daily News.
August 2, 2019: EB's Key West Home for sale. The asking price? 1.2M US$...
July 11, 2019: Liza Wieland lists EB's top eleven poems for The Millions.
August 3, 2018: Poetry for Robots by Robots. Episode 31: Elizabeth Bishop.
July 26, 2018: In Praise of Elizabeth Hardwick.
July 23, 2018: Bishop, Lowell, and Summer Babka.
July 23, 2018: "One of Them, Too:" Poetry and Democracy.
July 18, 2018: Malcolm Willison's EB Project.
July 18, 2018: Sylvan Esso and "Filling Station."
July 18, 2018: "A Mirror on which to Dwell" to be performed in Marlboro, Vermont.
July 12, 2018: Miriam Sagan Visits EB House and Great Village.
July 10, 2018: EB is #5 on the list of 12 poets you haven't thought about since the Leaving Cert... (first published on 26 April 2018).
July 6, 2018: The University of British Columbia's Players Club (established in 1915) will present a production of the play "Dear Elizabeth" this September.
July 6, 2018: Summer camp, Elizabeth Bishop, and the poetry of youth.
July 5, 2018: "The best of Ordinary Corrupt Human Love suggests Elizabeth Bishop."
July 5, 2018: Riffing on "The Map."
July 5, 2018: EB (a trifle tardily, let it be noted) considered for editor of Best American Poetry... miracles for breakfast, one assumes, will never cease...
July 5, 2018: EB and antiques -- Great Village a "Mecca"!
July 2, 2018: An Ode to Poetry at the Capitol.
June 29, 2018: Friend of the EB100 Blog Joelle Biele's new book of poems Tramp reviewed by Harvard Review.
June 25, 2018: If "One Art" were a limerick...
June 10, 2018: Barbara Hammer's 2015 EB documentary "Welcome to this House" is now available for purchase.
June 8, 2018: EB House dedicated as a Municipal Heritage Property -- The Truro Daily News.
May 24, 2018: Elizabeth Bishop Calls the Poetry Crisis Line.
April 26, 2018: Tito Genova Valiente on "Writing about the art of travel" for BusinessMirror.
March 30, 2018: Angelo Caserta at Bird Life International marks EB's A Cold Spring.
March 24, 2018: Peggi Medeiros in South Coast Today on missing EB three times.
March 13, 2018: Elizabeth Bishop and macular degeneration.
February 22, 2018: Harry Sullivan of the Truro Daily News reports on EB House preparations to welcome guests.
February 6, 2018: The University of Arkansas stages "Dear Elizabeth."
January 31, 2018: Vanity Fair Visits Brazil.
January 18, 2018: The New Yorker compares Joan Murray with EB.
January 9, 2018: The New York Times reviews Daniel Swift's new book about Ezra Pound's confinement at Saint Elizabeth's.
January 5, 2018: John Banville reviews Elizabeth Hardwick's Collected Essays for The Guardian.
January 3, 2018: Auction of a first edition signed copy of EB's North & South.
December 18, 2017: GQ claims EB was wrong in "One Art" -- David Levesley on the Art of the Orgy.
November 30, 2017: The Truro Daily News reports on the Gift of the Elizabeth Bishop House to the St. James Church of Great Village Preservation Society.
November 27, 2017: "Garden, Temple, Tea, River, Miracle, Sun": Megan Marshall on Kyoto and Elizabeth Bishop."
October 13, 2017: Saskia Hamilton at work on a book about the correspondence between EB and Marianne Moore.
October 6, 2017: Seminar to examine EB's "Crusoe in England."
October 6, 2017: "Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots:" Carmen Maria Machado's Earnest Vision.
October 4, 2017: Upcoming premiere of Lady Macbeth and Her Lover, (in part based upon EB's life).
September 25, 2017: John Harbison's settings of North & South.
September 21, 2017: Review of Hammer's "Welcome to this House."
September 18, 2017: EB inspires a new fashion collection.
September 16, 2017: Cape Bretoner Sarah Faber's new novel set in Brazil.
September 16, 2017: The Spectator reviews the Marshall EB biography.
July 19, 2017: Barbara Hammer's EB film, "Welcome to This House" is now available for purchase.
June 12, 2017: The Truro Daily on the Elizabeth Bishop Exhibit in Great Village.
June 12-30, 2017: NEH Seminar: "Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive" at Vassar College.
June 9, 2017: "The Powerful Reticence of Elizabeth Bishop."
John Barnstead
Sandra Barry
Suzie LeBlanc
I retired in 2014 after forty years of teaching Russian language and literature. I'm a past president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.
I am a poet, independent scholar, freelance editor, and secretary of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.
I am a professional singer who recently has become a great admirer of Elizabeth Bishop's writing. I am also fond of walking and nature. I became involved with the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary because I wanted to have her poems set to music so that I could sing them.
Links to Elizabeth Bishop Resources
Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia
Facebook: Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia
Voices and Visions: Elizabeth Bishop (1988) - Annenberg CPB Project
Elizabeth Bishop's Nova Scotia Family at Acadia University
An extended interview with Elizabeth Bishop from 1977
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: Books by Elizabeth Bishop
A selection of Bishop's poems and a short biography
A cento of commentaries on various Bishop poems, provided by the University of Illinois English Department
Elizabeth Bishop's Letters to Aunt Grace: Part 14 ...
Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia AGM, 18 Ju...
Elizabeth Bishop's Letters to Aunt Grace Part 13: ...


other automotive forums i am a member on have rules where a new member cannot post in the marketplace until they have at least lets say 100 posts, 780 should implement a system like this to keep the market place spam free or new users who have no forum experience make a mess of things.
Agreed. And maybe implement a trader rating system so people know who's legit and who's gonna rip you off.


There has been a recent popularity regarding time windows and it is one I completely agree with! There are certain structural changes that happen throughout the 24 hour session and as a trader it is important to take note of these when designing a system or strategy (or just placing trades). For example, how is my strategy's performance when Asia closes? How about when the US opens?
There are also some blatant market anomalies that still exist regarding time windows. The most obvious one, and often popularized by Eric Hunsader of Nanex (and others), is the S&P500 futures performance from 2am to 3am. This little one hour window looks like quite the edge – and has been persistent despite being publicly known for quite some time.
There are plenty of ways to use the time of the day to your advantage. For instance, only find trades/patterns that exist during a window of time where you might be at your desk. Another simple approach is to filter out unfavorable periods of the day to improve your performance (obviously proper testing methods important here).
My main point is… if you start paying attention to time windows you may be surprised as to what simple edges you'll discover. It has certainly been a staple in my research for quite a while and knows many other successful traders who put a lot of emphasis on this.
I've recently upgraded Build Alpha to allow for intraday strategy creation and time window filtering (among other things). Inside BA you can now select (and create your own) time windows to use as input in the strategy creation engine. There is also a time of day test which allows you to select certain windows to see if it improves strategy performance.
Below is a simple strategy that shorts EURUSD (I used the futures contract) at 5:00 am EST every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning. This idea simply holds the short trade for 3 hours.
These might not be standalone strategies, but can certainly give you a head start for continued research, act as a filter for other strategies or be paired with other ideas to create fully operational strategies.
Trading is extremely competitive. Looking at price alone is may be too naïve in today's market; there is simply too much computing power looking at it. If you're struggling to find quantified edges then maybe it is time (pun intended) to start pairing price action with time filters.
As always, thanks for reading. And please stay safe with all these hurricanes!
Totally agree. Some cross asset signals also work on particular time windows.


Perhaps it's not food that's medicine, as Hippocrates suggested, but the soil the food is grown in that's medicine.
At least that's the idea behind soil scientists' investigation into healthy farm soil as a key to healthy bodies. In this essay Dr. Daphne Miller summarizes some of the research investigating the health benefits of certain types of soil.
Studies suggest that ecological farming produces "a greater microbial biomass" than conventional farming, and it also involves more systems that share "holistic tenets" (including protecting topsoil, conserving water, limiting the use of chemicals, and recycling animal and vegetable race back to the land) that benefit both the land and the people who live on it.
In other areas of research, European immunologists and allergists are exploring why children raised on ecological farms experience fewer allergies than other children raised on industrial farms.
Part of these health benefits come from a process known as "genetic swaps" between the human microbiome and the outside world, such as where we grow our food.
In her own practice, Miller now informs patients that produce grown in "well-treated soil" may offer a distinct advantage in terms of nutrients and immune support when compared to more conventional produce. Certification processes make it difficult to identify exactly how foods have been raised, however, with some organic farms not qualifying as 'ecological" and other farms, while not technically labeled "organic" are producing food in an ecological manner.
One easy test is to ask about the places our food comes from is: "does the farmer live on the farm?" If so, it's likely that the farmer cares for his or her soil "as if it were another family member." CSAs and farmers markets may be other ways to find this nutrient-rich produce, and to be able to ask questions of the farmers who produce it. Home growing produce is another option.


The cake part is a bit dry. Usethis cake recipe instead.
The Dutchess bake shop in Edmonton is very popular for their pastries and cake. This cake called " The Duke Cake" is adapted from their cookbook.
The recipe has been modified to fit a 9-inch cake pan. The conversion I found on the internet worked really well. (radius) want to use divide it by recipe pan (ex. (4.5 x 4.5) ÷ (4 x 4) = 20.25/16 = 1.2656 use this number to multiply your ingredients. Make sure you have a scale to make this cake.
Lots of steps to make this cake. I've only made it once.
Heat sugar in pan until golden brown do not stir, heat whipping cream in microwave until scalding, then pour cream into sugar in increments with stirring. Sugar may crystalized out, so you can strain it if needed. Remove from heat, mix in butter, flour and salt. Let it cool and refrigerate until set. Good for two weeks in fridge.
Combine (3) in mixer bowl, add the melted chocolate (1) then add the dry ingredients (2) in increments, do not overmix.
7) 238 g unsalted butter, cubbed, room temp.
Pour mixture into the mixer bowl and cool to room temperature.
Once cooled whip in the butter until fully incorporated.
Cut cake in half, spread a layer of salted caramel onto the bottom half and top with frosting then cake. Frost the entire cake all around and freeze it. Save some frosting for piping at room temperature.
Had too much waste. Maybe make half the recipe below.
Combine (9) in saucepan and heat until scalding, then add into chocolate (8) in 3 portions.
Pour mixture onto the cake, cover entirely with glace. Use reserved frosting to decorate.