The most-hated man in Toronto
Igor Kenk, owner of The Bicycle Clinic, was arrested for bike theft and was eventually found to have 2,396 stolen bicycles. Kenk had stashed the bikes in 10 garages he rented around town, and in his house. The police also found cocaine, crack cocaine and about 15 pounds of marijuana.
There are different theories about what Kenk planned to do with the bikes. Some say he was hoarding bikes to prepare for a severe oil shortage. Kenk had a scrap metal dealer's license, so he may have been waiting for another spike in metals prices before melting down the bikes.
Kenk lived in a rented house in Yorkville, a nice suburb of Toronto, with his partner Jeanie Chung, a concert pianist. Chung faces charges for possession of stolen goods and drugs, and turned herself in after returning from performances in Banff.
You see, my dear wife complains sometimes about all the bikes I have been collecting (I am up to 3, but one of them is in a different country), and now she is afraid I will end up like this. I said, If I'm going to end up like that you'd better start practicing, it's a long way to Banff.
Labels: bikes, CGS
Dissipation
Noun
dissipation (plural
dissipations)
1. The act of dissipating or dispersing; a state of dispersion or separation; dispersion; waste.
2. A dissolute course of life, in which health, money, etc., are squandered in pursuit of pleasure; profuseness in vicious indulgence, as late hours, riotous living, etc.; dissoluteness.
3. A trifle which wastes time or distracts attention.
4. (physics) A loss of energy as heat from a dynamic system
Labels: CGS
Back to the land
I keep daydreaming about how I would build the farm if I was a pioneer like my great grandad Peter Johanson. I'd be way ahead of my time:
-I'd put a well in the basement. The water from the well would be 38 degrees, year-round. A windmill would pump this water over a galvanized steel box we'd use as a refrigerator.
-We'd be the only farm in the county with an indoor flush toilet, septic tank and drainage field.
-We'd need good insulation just about a row of straw-bales wide. The siding could be lifted off the house to replace the straw every few years.
-I'd plant windbreaks (OK, Peter did this too) around the farmyard and barn, and around the garden plot. Open to the south to admit sunlight. The windbreaks would be multilevel-- high cottonwoods, medium ash, low level cedars. Also an orchard with apple, pear, plum and cherry trees.
-Sheep would keep the lawn cut and we'd have fresh eggs from the chickens.
-I would make heavy duty leather boots with felt linings and turn them into frontier Sorels by dipping them in molten beeswax.
Labels: CGS, energy
Letter
Somebody asked what I thought of
Kim Stanley Robinson's
Forty Signs of Rain. My reply:
The funny story about that book is that I thought it would be cool to get an Emerson quote every day, and so I typed my email address into a website that promised this. What happened next is that that address started to receive enormous quantities of spam, like 100 per day. So much that I was forced to give it up. Somebody thought they would have fun sticking it to the left wingers.I can tell you that the series doesn't get better than that first book. In the second two he rewrites the scenes and characters from the first and nothing much happens. I had hoped for much more. I didn't learn anything about the climate and it was a long slog. But anyway better than Chrichton's State of Fear.I am home with the flu today, chills, lethargy, constant urge to cough. Made a great soup for lunch-- diced onion, green beans, diced carrot, chicken bullion, olive oil, ginger sliced thin, crushed garlic, some pepper and cumin. It cleaned out my bronchii & also passages above the windpipe. It was refreshing to not go to work today and find that the world did not end-- students and colleagues can actually manage without me. This thought has helped relieve the congestion in my chest.Seen this?
81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on the Wrong Track
Labels: CGS
Time travel
The following is from
a New York Times article 'What Created This Monster?' that details how decades of deregulation have brought us back to 1929:
For example, in the old system, savers had federally insured deposits in tightly regulated savings banks, and banks used that money to make home loans. Over time, however, this was partly replaced by a system in which savers put their money in funds that bought asset-backed commercial paper from special investment vehicles that bought collateralized debt obligations created from securitized mortgages — with nary a regulator in sight.Labels: CGS
The Chemistry of the CGS
The Primate Brow has linked seven stages of grief and the
CGS. Quoting The Brow:
Here are the seven stages and how they relate to the coming global shitstorm:1. Shock and Disbelief. Most of us visit this stage daily. For instance, I have trouble believing that we are in a decades-long war to secure oil resources, that the comfort all of us enjoy today will soon be attainable only by the super-rich, that the earth’s environment is irrecoverably ruined. The reality in front of our faces can cause frontal lobe lock if taken in large doses...2. Denial. This is a deeply entrenched and powerful response. Most Americans spend most of their time enjoying this stage right now. Everyone is an armchair climate expert who somehow knows more than the scientists who have spent their careers studying the issue. There is a big gap between the information we have in front of us and the way we behave. Denial can cause behavior that seems to be opposite of the most logical response. Taking part in ecstatic displays of resource consumption can be comforting. This explains NASCAR. “The American Way of Life is a blessed One!”
I heard a speaker today who said that the 21st century is going to be the century of chemistry. He predicted that there will be a defining moment at mid-century when we will start paying back energy to the ecosystem. (Right now we are running an energy deficit, burning through coal, oil, gas and soil, and harvesting every possible ecosystem from the ocean to the rainforest to the amber waves.) This guy is a Professor from
the top Chemistry Department in the U.S. and firmly believes that chemistry, 'Low Energy Science' as opposed to High Energy Physics, will discover a way to convert sea water and carbon dioxide into synthesis stock to feed the petrochemical octopus* using only sunlight. My friend the professor said that Bill Clinton had told him once that the 21st century was going to be the century of biology and he said,
No Bill, you're wrong, it's going to be the century of chemistry. Give me a decade and I'll show you. He was optimistic because the current crisis in energy and environment is waking up politicians to chemical issues. BASF, said to be the largest company in Europe, has a new slogan: '
BASF, The Chemical Company'. Could it be that we have turned a corner and chemistry is no longer a dirty word?
*
Petrochemical octopus coined in an otherwise ho-hum 2002 article in the South Atlantic Quarterly;
'... the petrochemical octopus that feeds and clothes us.'Labels: CGS
