and the baby came also

My niece, Zoe, drew this for me and wrote this about it.

"On the table was a pie and some green apple juice. And inside the tent was the big sister and the brother was outside on the sand. But anyway they wanted to camp at the beach. So they brought their hammock and they brought their tent and the baby came also."

50,000+ words per Dollar!

So was just reading about Amazon's new Concordance feature and had to check out one of my favorite books and see how it rated. What a bargain!

Though these are some pretty good word for your dollar here too.

Leef Dog

Yeah! I'm going to be changing jobs soon and moving over to Dogster.com to work with my friend John and crew. I'm very excited to be simplifying my life (read not commuting), working with cool people and pushing my tech skills in different directions. I'm really looking forward to it.

empty nest

empty nest
Originally uploaded by leef_smith.

The pigeon chick I've been watching for the last few weeks has disappeared. It was getting pretty big and full feathered, so I'm guessing it was just time to leave the nest, but haven't noticed it flapping around. So who know...

Pollan Attack!

Went and heard Michael Pollan speak at the City Arts & Lectures last night. What an amazing passionate and humorous speaker! He spoke primarily about his new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he goes explores four different modes by which food is produced in this country, industrial factory farming, industrial organic, "grass" farming or pasture based agriculture, and hunting and gathering food, and then has four different meals from the food each of these systems produces. The first part of the lecture was pretty depressing with lots on the marriage between capitalism and corn (particularly for animal feed), and the only consolation I had was my participation in the worst parts of factory farming is pretty minimal just by virtue of being a vegetarian. Though even with that, it was a good wake-up call to my own complicity in my food choices. Michael Pollan a much more forceful speaker then I expected, and far more radically anti-capitalist. He mentioned that Omnivore’s Dilemma was recently referred to as the Das Kapital of food.

Can't wait to read the book. Maybe we can choose it for our next book club book. In closing he suggested two sites www.eatwell.com and www.eatwild.com for further information and steps.

Rejected by El Dorado County DA

I just called the El Dorado DA's office and my case has been rejected. Whew! I knew it was going to be, but still a relief. Now I can put that whole DUI incident behind me. But I do wonder if I should pursue some action to try to help prevent the same thing happening to others like me?

softer world

Today's Softer World is a good one.

Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society

Very over the top, but looks like it was fun to put together.

Ira Flatow: Science Tuesday

I went to see Ira Flatow's City Arts & Lectures talk Tuesday night. It's always strange to see an accomplished interviewer interviewed, but he had some really good things to say about paying more attention to the politics and budgetary policies surrounding science in this country. I very much agree with him, that our current messianic administration and affiliated allies are really trying attack science and put unverifiable faith on equal footing with science. It's truly a sad state of affairs, but he also said some very encouraging things about science education and education in general being local issues and not federal and that it was up to local voters and communities to voice up in how they want their schools to be run. But too many otherwise liberal well-meaning people are pretty cheap when it comes to ponying up for even their own local schools.

He also said some interesting things about the unknown future of radio broadcasting. Apparently the Science Friday podcast has 6 million downloads, while all the other NPR podcasts have about 13 million downloads. Of course, most of the other popular NPR shows are being sold as downloads on audbile.com rather then podcasted, which is a whole other topic, the increasing commercialization of public broadcasting.

One Red Paperclip

I just discovered One Red Paperclip. From one red paperclip to a house all in trades. What a brilliant idea! I'm constantly amazed how someone with a good idea, some press and the Internet can truly do something pretty amazing.

James Jean Jams

One of my favorite artist recently is James Jean, who blogs at http://processrecess.com. He's truly doing some very lovely work of late. Though I must say, I'd love to see some sequential art from him at some point, rather then just cover images. Can't complain too much though.

More pigeon photos

I got a better view of the pigeon chick this morning. It's quite odd looking, especially the beak. It looks way to big for a bird that size. Maybe it'll grow into it. The yellow feather are also strange. I'd never have thought of pigeon chicks as yellow.

I remember we had this book Fly High, Fly Low in my 3rd grade classroom. It's all about a a couple of pigeon living in Union Square. Even at that point I thought it a bit odd to have a book about pigeons, but was fascinated by the idea of what real pigeon chicks looked like.

Lunar Power

My new book club has been reading Jared Diamond's latest Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. One of the things we've talking a lot about, obviously, is whether the our current globalized, capitalistic system is headed toward collapse, environmentally, economically or otherwise. I tend to think that human species can live in some pretty miserable screwed up living conditions, so we're likely to survive in some form or fashion. I can't help though but have some hope for ideas like Moonbeams to Power Earth

nesting

pigeon nest
Originally uploaded by leef_smith.

I was walking down the garage stairwell this morning and saw this pigeon nest right at eye-level. They used to nest in this awning right above my office entrance, but they put up that anti-pigeon netting forcing them out. I have to wonder how smart these pigeons are though. I mean a cat or anything could come right in there for a little snack.

Natl. Trich Awareness Week

For the last week or so I've been working on the website for All Join Hands 2006, the first National Trichotillomania Awareness Week, which is going to be in October. Like the site says, Trichotillomania is relatively common disorder affecting 2-4% of the population, including people from all backgrounds, myself included, which has both biological and behavioral aspects. The most common behavior aspect of it is pulling out one's hair, which was something I did until I had bald patches on my head. But in the last year or so, I've made great strides with my recovery and have been relatively "pull free" for the last year or so.

I'm pretty excited about the All Join Hands effort and here in San Francisco, we thinking about trying to do a local showing of the Bad Hair Life film as both an awareness raising event and fundraising event.