sastyk | December 5, 2011Here's a charming example of corporate bullying - a major chain throwing its weight around so that we can't wear "Eat More Kale" t-shirts.:
Chick-fil-A sent Mr. Muller-Moore a warning once before, in 2006, but did not pursue that matter. Now, Mr. Muller-Moore and Mr. Richardson are awaiting a response from the company, and they plan to continue with their trademark application.
In a statement, Chick-fil-A said, "We must legally protect and defend our 'Eat mor chikin' trademarks in order to maintain rights to the slogan."
But Mr. Richardson does not think the company's argument would hold up…
sastyk | December 1, 2011I'm going to be buried under my book for the next few days as the Adapting-In-Place book finally goes to my editor, but I did want to respond to this email, or rather, get my readers to respond. Gwen writes:
"I just lost my job, and after a lot of late nights and panicked budget making, we think we can get along on just my husband's income, but it will be very tough and there will be no money at all for extras of any kind. We've always used our discretionary income to support things we care about - in the last few years this was local farmers and craftspeople, and making ethical choices…
sastyk | December 1, 2011Erica at Northwest Edible Life has a great post about her imperfections as a garden, and very relevant, because all of us have our Waterloos in the garden, and it is probably a bad idea to take them too seriously. But we do.
I've imbued my personal Golden Grass Fed Cow of urban homesteading with magical properties and strapped it to my identity one cheerful blog post at a time.
The Punk Gardening Angel of Reasonable Expectations pats me on my shoulder and consoles me: "It's really okay...Carrots are healthy and your kids like to eat them, and you do buy the bulk organic bag, after all, and…
sastyk | December 1, 2011
This video is making the rounds of the internet, and of course, is particularly meaningful to me. Like this young man, I'm the child of a lesbian family with a mother and step-mother. Like him, no one every looked at me and said "you can tell she was damaged by her upbringing in a gay family."
I wouldn't add much to his testimony, but because I'm 20 years older, I would add this. Not only are gay families just like everyone else, but gay and heterosexual households demonstrate this over and over again by the way gay marriages and straight marriages derive and build upon one another.
That…
sastyk | November 28, 2011So I've been offline a lot the last few weeks - as you know we had 10 kids in our house for a couple of days the week before Thanksgiving, and I was out of town until yesterday. While a few posts have gone up, I've spent absolutely no time on anything other than absolute necessities online.
So it was something of a shock to me to find in my comments thread a bunch of accusations that I'd been removing comments.due to my disagreement with them. This frankly pissed me off, since I absolutely do not censor or remove comments routinely - or generally at all. Despite a general tendency of…
sastyk | November 28, 2011In an interesting intersection of my interests in food and foster parenting, there's an emergent tendency to view extreme childhood obesity as a problem of medical neglect. Medical neglect can be grounds for removing children from their home and placing them in foster care, as seen in this recent case in Ohio:
An Ohio third-grader who weighs more than 200 pounds has been taken from his family and placed into foster care after county social workers said his mother wasn't doing enough to control his weight.
The Plain Dealer reports that the Cleveland 8-year-old is considered severely obese and…
sastyk | November 28, 2011Sadly, he's not alone, which is why this is worth debunking. Gingrich's sense that oil fields can be brought rapidly online, and his "we beat the Nazis and went to the moon so we can do this" statements reflect the general cultural misunderstandings about how oil is extracted that are endemic in our culture. While his claim that we could "open up enough oil fields in the next year that the price of oil worldwide would collapse. Now, that's what we would do if we were a serious country." is a bit of idiocy, it probably isn't atypical idiocy in a country that knows nothing about the basic…
sastyk | November 27, 2011For the last few weeks and over the next month, attention to hunger will be at its annual peak. People will donate turkeys, time and checks, canned goods and garden produce to food pantries. Many of us will find ourselves thinking of those in need in this season. We'll dish out cranberry sauce and decorate cookies, volunteer at the food pantry or in the shelter kitchen, and focus on making sure that the season of lights and joy is also one where people aren't forgotten. This is a very good thing.
It is also important to remember that most of the regularly hungry or food insecure people in…
sastyk | November 27, 2011I grew up with handy parents, and I learned some things from them - cooking, chopping wood, making do, but there were still things I missed out on. Even though my step-mother is a talented woodworker, I never learned. Even though she does plumbing repair, I didn't pay attention when I could have. My father hunted, but I wasn't interested when he might have taken me and taught me to be a better shot than I am. My grandmother and aunt were remarkably talented at knitting, sewing and crocheting - I've had to painfully learn those skills over myself without them. Can I just say how badly I'd like…
sastyk | November 21, 2011My mother in law ate a roasted turnip at my house the other day. It was unfamiliar enough to her in that form (she'd had mashed turnips before) that she had to ask me what it was, and it was a reminder of the fact that this time of year truly is the only time that many Americans come in contact with the lesser-known root vegetables. While carrots, potatoes and onions are part of our daily lives, and sweet potatoes and beets are at least intermittenly familiar (if commonly hated), few Americans know celeriac, turnips, parsnips, taro, rutabagas, yams, jerusalem artichokes or many others well…
sastyk | November 21, 2011I'm going to guess that not many of my readers would have imagined that your blogiste would be planning to be out at the stores at 5am on Friday. She never has done anything of the sort before. While not really much of an advocate of "Buy Nothing Day" (I'm more for "buy little year"), generally speaking I'd rather rip my own eyeballs out than go shopping anyway, and the idea doing it among the crowds on black Friday would be even less appealing. And yet, that's precisely what I'm planning on doing.
Let's back up to last Wednesday, however. Last Wednesday Eric and I accepted an emergency…
sastyk | November 14, 2011As you may remember, after waiting for a long time for a sibling placement, Eric and I took what was supposed to be a weekend placement of a little boy, M. back in October. We picked him up on a Thursday afternoon, anticipating he'd go to his father on Monday, but for various reasons, that didn't work out. They had already done an extensive search of extended family, and we were told that M. might be with us for the long haul, until his Mother was able to take him again - and for various reasons, it wasn't clear whether Mom would be able to take him back.
Now the first rule of foster…
sastyk | November 10, 2011Here is the single biggest question to consider about the economic, energy and environmental unwinding we are facing - what will the economy look as we go? I get more questions about this than about anything else - what should people do for work, what should they do with savings, how should they begin to prepare themselves for a lower energy world. What I find, however, is that among both the prepared and the unprepared, there's a whole lot of people kidding themselves. There are those who imagine that there is no economy outside the world of the stock market and formal jobs - that a crash…
sastyk | November 9, 2011Robert Rapier was one of the great pleasures of ASPO-USA's recent conference - his presentation was one of the best and as a long-time admirer of his work, it was a pleasure to finally meet him personally. I also like his current piece on the most common misconceptions about peak oil. Like him, I don't like the term peak oil at all - because I think it fixates us on precisely the wrong things - the downslope matters more than the peak. I particularly like this point:
Misconception 2: Peak Oil Beliefs are Homogeneous
The beliefs among people who are concerned about resource depletion cover…
sastyk | November 8, 2011A superb article by Benjamin Dueholm in Washington Monthly about Foster Parenting and its connection to politics and a whole host of other things. Well worth a read:
In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration navigated every day by low-income parents who struggle to raise children with the critical help of government programs. That same week, the office of the bone specialist who had treated Sophia's broken leg at the hospital tried to get out of scheduling her for an urgent follow-up appointment. Like many…
sastyk | November 8, 2011Someone once observed that attending an ASPO-USA conference is like trying to drink from a firehose - there's just so much information, so many amazing people, so many sessions, so much to do that it can be overwhelming as well as stimulating, engaging and delightful.
Helping to RUN an ASPO-USA conference is a little like drinking from two Firehoses at once, only vastly more enjoyable. Still, the only time I remember getting that little sleep was with my newborns. The combination of absorbing all the amazing information and also acting as host to more than 300 guests, working with…
sastyk | October 30, 2011Between now and 4:30 Tuesday morning, I have to get 1 extraordinarily cute lion, three vikings and a clown ready for Halloween (the Vikings are going to pillage a neighboring town with two of their best friends, the other two are just trick or treating), do a few dozen errands, shovel out the snow, vaccinate 32 goats, take said lion, vikings and clown to demand sugar as fealty from various people, pack and try and have enough of my book draft done so that my editor doesn't kick my ass from here to British Columbia when she sees me. So I'm guessing I won't be posting much.
I'll try and do…
sastyk | October 27, 2011From The Onion:
Admitting they had "absolutely no idea what the fuck [they were] doing," millions of Americans immediately ceased trying to manage the country's large-scale, ongoing disasters and pleaded with U.S. scientists, economists, educators, philosophers, and inventors to intervene and make things better again.
"You are good at doing things, and we are bad, okay? We admit it," said Cincinnati-area executive Robert Everhart, who belongs to the growing consortium of citizens desperately asking America's qualified people to take it from here. "So we're begging you, please grab hold of the…
sastyk | October 27, 2011In _Depletion and Abundance_ I spend a lot of time talking about the ways that the informal economy is actually more robust in some ways than the formal economy, and the ways that informal economy activity can strengthen our home economies. I argue that in the Developed world, the informal economy is hidden or "housewifized" out of existance - we think of it as a small portion of our life, and not significant, but in fact, the informal economy is enormous and critical.
If you haven't read Robert Neuwirth's _Stealth of Nations_, you should, for a much more in-depth analysis of the role of…
sastyk | October 25, 2011The phone rang about 2 on Thursday afternoon, just as I was about to settle down with my book draft for a long, dull afternoon of revisions. If I was implicitly fantasizing about something to get our adrenaline pumping, I got it. Our social worker called and asked if we would consider taking a 17 month old boy with severe speech delays and special needs. Oh, we'd need to come pick him up downtown before 4:30.
Yikes. My first inclination was to say "no" since we've wanted to take a sibling group, but there was something about this that just felt right to both Eric and I. We had planned to…