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If you’re like Pickerhead, the daily Obama drama is getting tiring. So how about an edition that ignores the current DC mess? We start with John Tierney’s famous NY Times Magazine article on recycling. Then a Mark Steyn send-off for Dominick Dunne, late of Vanity Fair. Next we learn the good news that scallops are making a comeback in Long Island’s Peconic Bay. Dilbert and Dave Barry close things out in the humor section.
Thirteen years ago this June, John Tierney set a NY Times record for irate reader’s letters with a piece he wrote suggesting recycling was a waste. Now that is something to aspire to when contemplating what might be on your tombstone.
…We’re a wicked throwaway society. Plastic packaging and fast-food containers may seem wasteful, but they actually save resources and reduce trash. The typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American household, but it produces one-third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale. Those apples in Dittersdorf’s slide, protected by plastic wrap and foam, are less likely to spoil. The lightweight plastic packaging requires much less energy to manufacture and transport than traditional alternatives like cardboard or paper. Food companies have switched to plastic packaging because they make money by using resources efficiently. A typical McDonald’s discards less than two ounces of garbage for each customer served — less than what’s generated by a typical meal at home.
Plastic packaging is routinely criticized because it doesn’t decay in landfills, but neither does most other packaging, as William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, has discovered from his excavations of landfills. Rathje found that paper, cardboard and other organic materials — while technically biodegradable — tend to remain intact in the airless confines of a landfill. These mummified materials actually use much more landfill space than plastic packaging, which has steadily been getting smaller as manufacturers develop stronger, thinner materials. Juice cartons take up half the landfill space occupied by the glass bottles they replaced; 12 plastic grocery bags fit in the space occupied by one paper bag. …
…”I don’t understand why anyone thinks New York City has a garbage crisis because it can’t handle all its own waste,” says James DeLong, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. “With that kind of logic, you’d have to conclude that New York City has a food crisis because it can’t grow all the vegetables its people need within the city limits, so it should turn Central Park into a farm and ration New Yorkers’ consumption of vegetables to what they can grow there.” Some politicians in other states have threatened to stop the importing of New York’s garbage — it’s an easy way to appeal to some voters’ chauvinism — but in the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would only be depriving their own constituents of jobs and tax revenue.
We’re cursing future generations with our waste. Dittersdorf’s slide showing New Yorkers’ annual garbage output — 15 square blocks, 20 stories high — looked frightening because the trash was sitting, uncompressed, in the middle of the city. But consider a different perspective — a national, long-term perspective. A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side. …
…Are reusable cups and plates better than disposables? A ceramic mug may seem a more virtuous choice than a cup made of polystyrene, the foam banned by ecologically conscious local governments. But it takes much more energy to manufacture the mug, and then each washing consumes more energy (not to mention water). According to calculations by Martin Hocking, a chemist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, you would have to use the mug 1,000 times before its energy-consumption-per-use is equal to the cup. (If the mug breaks after your 900th coffee, you would have been better off using 900 polystyrene cups.) A more immediate environmental impact has been demonstrated by studies in restaurants: the average number of bacterial organisms on reusable cups, plates and flatware is 200 times greater than on disposable ones. …
Mark Steyn writes about the life, and coincidental events, of the late Dominick Dunne.
…In 1991 the diminutive scribbler in the owlish glasses and the baggy suit was in Palm Beach covering the rape trial of Ted’s nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Had he not been there, he would never have heard the tantalizing tidbit that young William had been in the Skakel house in Connecticut on the night in 1975 when Martha Moxley was murdered. Had he not picked up that unfounded bit of gossip, his curiosity might not have been awakened and he might never have written a fictionalized account of the case, A Season In Purgatory, a roman à clef compressing three generations of Kennedy gossip into one book. Had his novel not reactivated interest in the murder, he might not have had leaked to him a copy of a private investigator’s report on Michael Skakel. Had he not been in court in Los Angeles in 1995 when O.J.’s dream team played the “race card” crudely but effectively against Mark Fuhrman, he might not have felt so sorry for the LAPD detective that he struck up a friendship and forwarded the Skakel investigator’s leaked report. Had Fuhrman not used the Skakel report to write a damning book on the Moxley case, the state of Connecticut might never have reopened it and put Michael Skakel on trial. It was a very slender thread that led to a rare Kennedy conviction. “It is a fact of my life that coincidences happen to me,” says the narrator in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. For Dunne, the greatest coincidence was as stark as a gravestone: Martha Moxley was killed on the same date—Oct. 30—as his own daughter. …
…Dunne was a stage manager on The Howdy Doody Show and a producer of C-list movies before a chance encounter with Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown led to his reinvention as a writer. The preoccupations of the last half of his adult life are summed up in the title of another book, An Inconvenient Woman, a thinly disguised fictionalization of Alfred Bloomingdale’s murdered mistress Vicki Morgan. In both his crime reporting and his novels, there’s usually a powerful man and an “inconvenient woman”—sure, she’s hot, she’s fun, she’s cute, but there comes a point when she’s an inconvenience. And then you lawyer up and make the inconvenience go away. That’s what Kennedys do, with both the passing fancies—the waitresses, the campaign cuties, the gal next door—and with their routinely “annulled” first marriages. That’s what Ted did with Joan, the wife he drove to alcoholism. That’s what he did with Mary Jo, swimming up from the depths of that Chappaquiddick pond and leaving her down there pressed up against a shrinking air pocket waiting for the rescue team he never called. Nice girl, but inconvenient. So he got back to the hotel, worked the phones, called in the family fixers, squared the local authorities, started the speechwriters working on the statement.
Dominick Dunne couldn’t go along with the “dream teams” and the rest of the flim-flam, not after the murderer of his 22-year- old daughter got a three-year sentence. So he was there for the “inconvenient women,” all the way to his last big trial, when Phil Spector became the latest big shot to date a gal to death. Poor Lana Clarkson wasn’t a “legend” or a “troubled genius,” like Phil, just a one-time B-movie queen who wound up in a B-movie ending. …
…An assistant of mine loved his fiction. “This is the way airport novels should be,” she said. Which is a good way of putting it. Any competent hack can do the brand names and the restaurants and the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous stuff, but Dunne understood the subtler currents coursing just below the surface. He liked the parties and the gossip and the name-dropping; the movie stars and the dispossessed Euro-princelings and the Kennedy cousins. He was of them, but not one of them, not entirely. And so, notwithstanding who got top billing, there was a kind of symmetry in his and Ted Kennedy’s all but simultaneous expiry: a man who disposed of inconvenient women, and a man who ensured they weren’t forgotten. …
In the NY Times, Dindya Bhanoo reports on the scallop restoration effort and the mysterious brown tide that had decimated the bivalve population.
…The recovery resulted partly from dedicated efforts by scientists to rebuild the scallop population, said Stephen Tettelbach, a professor of biology at Long Island University.
Dr. Tettelbach is in the fifth year of a five-year, $2.3 million bay scallop restoration project, financed by Suffolk County, that has released nearly five million scallops into Peconic Bay waters. Working with researchers from Cornell Cooperative Extension — a university outreach group — and the State University at Stony Brook, Dr. Tettelbach has helped create densely packed scallop sanctuaries, primarily in Orient Harbor, Hallock Bay and Flanders Bay. …
…In a separate effort, the Nature Conservancy in New York has released hundreds of thousands of baby scallops into the Peconic Bay since 2002.
Yet, considerable mystery still surrounds the onset and the waning of brown tide, said Christopher J. Gobler, a professor at Stony Brook who studies toxic algae.
Scientists know that the toxins in brown tide, which tints the water a coffee brown, slow the rhythmic movements of scallop gills and prevent feeding. Brown tide also blocks sunlight from reaching the bay’s bottom, where eelgrass beds grow and scallops nest.
…“We know if a water body is more likely to get brown tide,” Dr. Gobler said. “But it can also break suddenly, and we have no idea why.” …
Dilbert’s Scott Adams has a hilarious story. Here’s the warm-up.
Now that I’m married, one of the questions I fear the most is “Can you look in the X and see if you can find the Y?” Oh, I try. But my wife refuses to learn that I will never succeed.
X and Y might represent, for example, the special cheese hiding in the fridge, or the “good pillow” hiding in the bedroom, or the yellow folder hiding in the kitchen. There are a variety of reasons I will not succeed in finding the desired item. About 25% of the time the item is not in the room, or pile, or container where it should be. Another 25% of the time the item is inadequately described, as in “the light brown socks in the drawer with the other brown socks, but not camel colored or reddish brown, and not the old ones.”
But the biggest reason for my seek-and-find failures can be attributed to Transdimensional Materialization Phenomena (TMP). This involves items not being where they belong when I look for them, but tunneling through a wormhole and materializing right where they belong when my wife looks in the same place two minutes later. Apparently this phenomenon is triggered by just the right coupling of exasperation and sarcasm. …
Parents of young children, in particular, will appreciate stories of theme birthday parties gone wild. Dave Barry tells an amusing tale.
Things are tense in our house. Our daughter is about to turn 4, which means we have to hold a birthday party, which means my wife is, at the moment, insane.
Like many moms, my wife believes that a child’s birthday party requires as much planning as a lunar landing — more, actually, because you have to hire a clown. Serious moms plan birthday parties months in advance, choosing a theme …and relentlessly incorporate this theme in every element of the party, including invitations, decorations, music, games, craft projects, snacks, cake, entertainment, favors, little gift bags for the favors, ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, name tags for the ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, and on and on until the mom has lost all touch with human reality. If you want proof, go to one of the Internet sites devoted to birthday planning, such as birthdaypartyideas.com, where moms report, in detail, the deranged lengths to which they have gone to stage birthday parties for small children. They sound like this:
“Our theme for Meghan’s third birthday was `The Enchanted Fairy Forest.’ To create a `forest’ in the family room, I made full-size `trees’ out of fiberglass, which I painted brown and festooned with 17,000 `leaves’ I cut by hand from green felt, accented with live squirrels that I caught using a galvanized-steel trap baited with Peter Pan creamy peanut butter. For the `forest floor,’ I brought in four tons of mulch with a Lawn Boy yard tractor. For the `sky,’ I used the actual sky, which was visible because I removed the ceiling and roof with a chainsaw, which is when my husband, Ed, left me, but the overall effect was well worth it.”
You think I’m exaggerating, but that’s only because you haven’t browsed “birthdaypartyideas.com.”
It would be different if dads planned birthday parties. First off, the party would be about a month after the child’s actual birthday, which is when Dad would remember it. Dad’s party theme would be “delivery pizza,” which would also serve as the cake, the craft project and the party favor. The entertainment would be pulling Dad’s finger. The kids would have just as much fun. …