I'm just not sure what to think.

The New Yorker is right up there as one of my favorite publications. I've been reading it since I was a little kid. Okay, at least I've been reading the cartoons since I was a little kid. Many years ago my mother started a game of trying to guess the title of the cover each week. Jerzy and I do it to this day. That said, I don't know what to think about the cover of the next issue. I guess even one's favorite thing can let them down from time to time. I just don't know what to think.

Animated Cartoons a la New Yorker. Who knew?

Got too much time on your hands? No dirty dishes to wash; cats to feed; kids to drive; dog to walk; bills to pay; work to do; papers to write; books to read; laundry to wash? (I was going to say laundry to fold but realized folded laundry is a low priority, luxury. I'd be happy with washed and dried.) Great. You're in for a treat, a time-consuming treat -- The New Yorker on-line. As if I don't already have unread New Yorkers piling up in print form, Chris has directed me to the on-line version. You know how when the magazine arrives the first thing you do is read the cartoons? (Even smart people read the cartoons first, I've been told. Do you suppose that includes the likes of Madeleine Albright?) Well, now you can go to the New Yorker and watch animated cartoons (I suggest you start with "Surprise Party") first before finding far too many interesting, well-written, informative articles to read -- add them to your favorites file; copy and paste them into the Save for Later Reading folder. Best of luck. I never made it past the cartoons.

Gloves, Cans and Farts

Avery and I walked to work yesterday, her work that is. It's only a few miles but along the way we always see lots of gloves on the ground so I generally bring my camera with me to take their pictures. I'd forgotten my camera so no new glove photos although I've got some great pictures of them in my mind's eye. That's the thing about photographs. If I take the picture I can usually put the image aside, secure in the knowledge that it's locked away in the camera. If I fail to take a picture of interest it hovers about in my brain. I see a red work glove, and a black biking glove and a green gardening glove and . . . So no gloves, but I was fortunate to find two lovely cans to add to my collection. I've been known to frame rusty cans. I promised to give Avery the shiny one for Christmas.

Avery has a cough, a bad cough that's lingered for a while and apparently when walking, the act of coughing causes her to spontaneously fart. There. I said it. Fart. Farting is not something I was raised to talk about. It just wasn't done. I suspect Avery would be happier if I outed her as a lesbian than a farter. My friends and I never intentionally farted in front of one another when I was a kid, and although the boys were rumored to have tried to set their farts on fire with matches, we were not quite sure if there was any truth to it.

If anyone ever farted when all five of us kids were packed in the station wagon with my parents my mother would say, Josh!, as if he was the only one of us who could have done something so offensive. We all caught on to the trick after a while. Fart. Josh!

My boyfriend when I was 19 told me he didn't fart. You never fart? Nope. I believed him. I made sure I never farted around him either. Is it any wonder the relationship was doomed? I mean, we weren’t the most committed couple you’ll ever meet - our relatively crummy relationship probably lasted less than a year. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for certain is, we never, not once, farted in front of one another, at least not perceptively. Not living together near Washington Square Park. Not living on 89th Street between West End and Riverside. Not traveling across the country in our old van with Indian-print curtains and retreads that were always itching to explode, and an engine that could only be started by opening the big metal cover and connecting some wire to the solenoid by hand.

You might wonder (I certainly do) why I'd write about such a sophomoric, adolescent subject as gas, against the better judgement of even my otherwise often known-for-bad-judgement kids. I blame it on The New Yorker, David Sedaris and Steven Levitt, co-author of the widely popular Freakonomics.

The New Yorker showed up in the mail a few months ago (December 17, 2007, Reflections, Journey Into Night, to be exact) and, as usual, I read the comics and looked to see if David Sedaris had written anything. Aha. He had and, as would be expected, his article was laugh-out-loud hysterical. David Sedaris often writes about his family life as a kid. In this particular article there's the dinner table scene. It may not pack the wallop that it does in context but, here's an excerpt:

I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying he could stand, but group laughter was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.

The problem was that there was so much to laugh at, particularly during the years that our Greek grandmother lived with us. Had we been older, it might have been different. “The poor thing has gas,” we might have said. For children, though, nothing beats a flatulent old lady. What made it all the crazier was that she wasn’t embarrassed by it—no more than our collie, Dutchess, was. Here it sounded like she was testing out a chainsaw, yet her face remained inexpressive and unchanging.
“Something funny?” our father would ask us, as if he hadn’t heard, as if his chair, too, had not vibrated in the aftershock. “You think something’s funny, do you?”
If keeping a straight face was difficult, saying “No” was so exacting that it caused pain.
“So you were laughing at nothing?”
“Yes,” we would say. “At nothing.”
Then would come another mighty rip, and what was once difficult would now be impossible. My father kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and I can’t remember how many times he brought it down on my head.
“You still think there’s something to laugh about?”
Strange that being walloped with a heavy spoon made everything seem funnier, but there you have it. My sisters and I would be helpless, doubled over, milk spraying out of our mouths and noses, the force all the stronger for having been bottled up. There were nights when the spoon got blood on it—nights when hairs would stick to the blood—but still our grandmother farted, and still we laughed until the walls shook."

And then there's Freakonomics, that fabulous book that dazzled me with seemingly unrelated facts and amazing and improbable notions, most of them so heady that I forgot them by the next day. But for the study of gas, Freakonomics might never have been written. You see, the father of Steven Levitt is one Dr. Levitt, national expert on flatulence. Dr. Levitt contends that it is gas that is partly responsible for putting his three children through study at some very expensive universities.

Steven Levitt, in the NY Times, January 02, 2008, quotes his father, "I know a lot about gas" and links to the December 28, 2007 article in The Canadian Press "Flatulence expert defines 'normal' output rate."

Levitt is a veritable gas guru, a leading expert on the under appreciated field of flatus -- intestinal gas that escapes via the southern route. He admits his unusual expertise has put his three kids (one of whom is economist and "Freakonomics" co-author Steven Levitt) through expensive universities.

Levitt has gone to extraordinary lengths to plumb the mysteries of flatulence. He's captured farts in specially made Mylar pantaloons, measured the cocktail of gases they contain, even conducted a study devised to get to the bottom of what may be the most contentious question in the field: Which gender emits the smelliest farts?

So what have he and others learned about the fine art of flatulating?

It's a pretty common occurrence. Studies in which volunteers tracked their gas passage suggest people fart 10 to 20 times a day, with some hitting the 30, 40, even 50 mark, says Levitt, who is with the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minn.

Kids today fart like crazy. With abandon. They laugh and fart and laugh and fart again. When Julia was a theater student she told me that the fart is the universal chuckle-getter. It transcends language and culture, she said, and is always good for a laugh.

Kristara throws herself across my bed and farts on purpose. I laugh and she reminds me how humorless I was when she first moved in with us and she'd fart, with attitude, in front of me. I do have some memory of that old me but I’m liberated now. I not only can fart and laugh out loud (At my age what choice do I have?), I can write about farting for anyone to read. But the truth is, with every click of the keys, when I type the "f-word", I cringe just a little bit. I’m not gonna lie.

Corn.

gawilli (Back in the Day) commented on my April 6 post about the growing demise of songbirds:

"Thanks for this post, and the links. The article also says that natural habitats are being ploughed under for corn to be used in production of ethanol/bio-fuel. The balance of nature is very delicate. What a mess we are making of things."

I try not to think about corn. I mean, I like it, on the cob, popped and with butter, straight out of the can. And of course I like to make cast glass corn, to add to my collection of glass strawberries, pears, pretzels, waffles, and anything else I can get to sit still long enough. But I don't like corn to be in the stomachs of cows where it doesn't belong, nor do I like it, subsidized or not, causing the ruination of family farms and the stripping of the farmland as it proliferates across America, with its chemical fertilizers and pesticides that find their way into the Gulf of Mexico in an ever-growing algae bloom. And now we have Ethanol. It's pros and cons abound.

Paul Krugman wrote in the April 7, 2008 NY Times Op Ed piece "Grains Gone Wild",

Where the effects of bad policy are clearest, however, is in the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels.

The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.” This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.

And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.

In the Business Week, March 19, 2007 article, by Moira Herbst, "Ethanol's Growing List of Enemies"

As demand for the alternative fuel drives corn prices up, an unlikely assortment of groups are uniting with the hopes of cutting government support - The ethanol movement is sprouting a vocal crop of critics. While politicians including President George W. Bush and farmers across the Midwest hope that the U.S. can win its energy independence by turning corn into fuel, Hitch and an unlikely assortment of allies are raising their voices in opposition. The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies, solar-power idealists and free-market pragmatists (see BW Online, 02/2/07, " Ethanol: Too Much Hype—and Corn").

They have different reasons for opposing ethanol. But their common contentions are that the focus on corn-based ethanol has been too hasty, and the government's active involvement—through subsidies for ethanol refiners and high tariffs to keep out alternatives like ethanol made from sugar—is likely to lead to chaos in other sectors of the economy.

"The government thinks it can pick a winner, but they should allow consumers to pick their own," says Demian Moore, senior analyst for the nonprofit Taxpayers for Common Sense. "Corn ethanol has failed to prove itself as a reliable alternative that can exist without huge subsidies.". . . snip . . .

If the government is going to play a role in energy markets, there are other players who would like more attention. Supporters of solar and wind energy make the case that if the government is going to hand out subsidies and mandate use, in the name of energy independence, they should get the same kind of treatment as ethanol.

"Why are we supporting ethanol with a mandate, but not wind and solar?" says Randy Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Assn. "There's a lack of consistency in policy."

Then one can consult Michaels Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (sometimes known as Judy's bible) by way of a fabulous (duh) article in the March 15, 2006 New Yorker, Paradise Sold: What are you buying when you buy organic? by Steven Shapin - -

"Pollan's first meal is fast food, and he follows a burger back to vast monocultural industrial blocs of Iowan corn, planted by G.P.S.-guided tractors and dosed with tons of synthetic fertilizer, whose massive runoff into the Mississippi River--as much as 1.5 million tons of nitrogen a year--winds up feeding algal blooms and depleting the oxygen needed by other forms of life in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollan then follows the corn to enormous feedlots in Kansas, where a heifer that he bought in South Dakota is speed-fattened--fourteen pounds of corn for each pound of edible beef--for which its naturally grass-processing rumen was not designed, requiring it to be dosed with antibiotics, which breed resistant strains of bacteria. Pollan would have liked to follow his heifer through the industrial slaughterhouse, but the giant beef-packing company was too canny to let him in, and so we are spared the stomach-churning details, which, in any case, were minutely related a few years ago in Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation." Pollan also follows the American mountains of industrial corn into factories, where the wonders of food technology transform it into the now ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which sweetens the soda that, consumed in super-sized quantities across the nation, contributes to the current epidemic of type 2 diabetes. All very bad things."

So here is the only good news in this as I see it - if corn is used for Ethanol then there will be less to put in the stomachs of cows.

Phew. Corn. It is yummy. If only it were just corn.