Fire and Knowledge

Here is a great story about a family who got rid of their car and replaced it with bikes and public transportation. I’ve wanted to do this for a couple years now, but just haven’t had the courage.

We have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us.

–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), p. 83

I have found many readers more interested in what I wear than what I think, more avid to know how I do it than in what I do.

–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), p. 31

“The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

–Doc in John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945), p. 131

Do you want to live on $12,000 a year? Here are some tips on how to pull it off.

I finally got around to reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan a few days ago. I’m about half way through and it’s excellent. Pollan says we have a “national eating disorder” and highlights the irony that our stereotyped unhealthy country is so obsessed with “health food” and diets. He walks through his personal journey with industrial agriculture, organic agriculture, and hunting/gathering. The first 1/3 of the book is devoted to corn, because we eat more corn than anything else, though we don’t know it. It’s in everything, quite literally.

This is a great book to read if you’re interested in the food you eat, which I suppose should be everyone. Actually, if you’re not interested in the food you eat, this might be exactly what you need to read. You’ll never look at industrial (or industrial organic) food quite the same way again.

There are many interesting quotes I’ve marked, which are sure to find their way onto the site in the next few months.

We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information—all in short (and loud) doses of “easy listening.”….

We are a profoundly nonintellectual culture, but we are not committed to this attitude; in fact, we are scarcely committed to anything. We may be the most labile culture in all of history, capable of rapid and massive shifts of prevailing opinions, all imposed from above by concerted media effort. Passivity and nonintellectual judgment are the greater spurs to such lability. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity—the most precious trait of any adequate analysis—is erased. He wins who looks best or shouts loudest. We are so fearful of making judgments about ourselves that we must wait until the TV commentators have spoken before deciding whether Bush or Dukakis won the debate.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Dinosaur Rip-off” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 100-101

I really hate ads — I use an ad-blocker for the web and refuse to buy from any company I get spam from. So of course this caught my eye:

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.

It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist’s dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.

São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising