Terra Preta angle for Alex…

Okay, Alex, here’s my take:

1.  Combine the clear implications summarized in this article.

2.  The fact that the City of Irving landfill has trash brush and treefall taking up twenty acres, twenty feet deep.

While City of Irving gives away as much of this in the form of mulch as they can, turning this stuff into char for the gardeners and landscapers would turn a costly trash product into something that could serve to:

  • cut carbon out of the local air (this is an issue b/c TX is, unfortunately, largely dependent on coal-fired power)
  • increase the general fertility and water-retention of the area due to increased soil fertility
  • improve the Las Colinas Tufa that is both (relatively) infertile, and ridiculously instable, by increasing the amount of humus in the soil.

What I need to do is to get with the City’s folks at the landfill (and hopefully avoid having to make a City Council presentation in the process), and potentially pull a grant working on the “global warming plus TXU pollution plus landfill issue” angle.  But my labor in that process would inevitably be relatively small unless sufficient grants were available to turn that into salary:  and even then, I’m hard-committed to teach six, and possibly seven, courses this semester.

Input welcome.

Europe is Screwed. Is it worth it?

Two quick meditations on the EU. This is a long one, because the EU is simultaneously a horrific problem, and an incredible promise. I’m going to put the “read more?” extenders on this one, because it’s going to be long enough to monopolize the entire blog page.

The Problem

We went shopping over the Christmas holiday with my father-in-law, on our yearly “let’s take a perfectly good day and get up at 4:45 a.m. so that we can sit in a car for five and a half hours driving way too slowly in the fog so that we can watch Daddy shop.”

Daddy-Shopping is cute, because he’s simply overjoyed that all these nice things are there to be produced and enjoyed by humble Mom’n'Pop restaurant owners like himself. And he’s perfectly justified in feeling this way: his dad was a Calvinist Parson, aka, a class enemy, and treated as such, by the Hungarian Communists. Nothing like having everything you own taken away from you, avoiding being thrown into a concentration camp only because of the determination and boldness of your wife, and then having nowhere to get your toddler out from under the rain except staying with some gypsies in a barn. Daddy was that toddler, and has perfectly good reasons to enjoy getting out there and engaging in a little “retail therapy.”

(more…)

Safe and Sound in Texas

Where, having screwed up my New Years’ Day schedule (apparently misheard somebody and thought an evening party was a late-afternoon party), I shall endeavor to make amends with BunnyMade(tm) steak tartare…

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