MIA since January.

Maria Benet? Absent… the alchemist has been gone for a month or so. In other Alembic news:

High impedance pickups have limited bandwidth. My father designed our pickups to be low impedance to increase the bandwidth. This also made the pickups low output and so he had to design an active onboard preamp to boost the signal. They were, in fact, the first active electric guitar electronics ever.

- Mica Wickersham

Consulting engineers sat at the table and several dozen townspeople sat in the audience facing them.  After a brief introduction and an explanation of technical matters such as storm water run-off and mitigation, flood control and parks and open spaces there came the time for questions.  Mostly people didn’t have questions.  They had things to share with the engineers.  They had things to say about their wetlands restoration projects, about calcareous fens, about their concerns that the pavement would increase run-off and thus the risk of flooding in the existing neighborhood.  They told the engineers about the difference between agricultural pollution and urban oils and chemicals and fertilizers and poisonous waste that would ruin Swan Creek and the Nine Springs area forever, seeping into the marsh and destroying the spawning ground for the northern pike, ruining a thriving sports fishery and further damaging an already weakened aquatic system.  They told the engineers about how the calcareous fens depend on calcium rich ground water for survival and how the urban wells would draw down that ground water and despoil the fens forever.

There were a few questions though…  who was paying them:  the city.  Had they considered that if they recommended against the development there wouldn’t be an open space issue, no need to translate fields and woods into lawns and ballparks?

Who was taking minutes of this public meeting?  No one.  Why were we there then?

At the cassandra pages I read about a sea of trillium…

As I walked along the lake this morning, three fat large-mouth bass swam in the clear water just off shore. The sun was so bright, shining toward me from the east, that it made the body of the smallest fish translucent. One fish then turned and lazily swam toward me so that I could see both eyes at once, glinting orange. I waved my arms but the glare on the water favored me; the fish turned again and swam off, unperturbed. This scene — the shoreline and myself, looking into the water — are a recurrent dream, and today I felt myself shifting between partially-remembered dream sequences and the real interplay of lake-life and observer. These dreams are sometimes disturbing, and always strange — I’m quite sure the water represents my unconscious mind — and I’ve never fully understood them. I left the shore after a while and walked across the road to the woods, and followed a deer trail through the undergrowth to the edge where the woods give way to a farmer’s meadow. The deer had been there last night, from the looks of the fresh scat and scuffled earth under a copse of thorn apples. I backtracked, looking for hepaticas, and found their leaves and some spent blossoms under a tree where they’ve always grown. I sat down then, with my back against the the tree, and gazed across a sea of white trillium. I was there a pretty long time, long enough for the woods to settle once again into my eyes and heart, creating a strong memory of the white blossoms; the scent of the warming earth under its cover of leaves; the pair of warblers overhead in the budded branches of a hickory, singing the spring.

Writing in Ad Age, Steve Rubel shares the following trope… (thanks to my favorite ads-keteer for the link):

Galaxies: centers of gravity pulling together like-minded individuals, such as YouTube, Digg, Flickr and Second Life.

Stars: online celebs, such as Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, Flickr fiend Thomas Hawk and YouTube addict Nornna.

Planets: individuals who follow the stars, influential in their own right.

Shooting stars: insta-celebs that create neat videos and then fade away.

Comets: recurring themes, such as transparency, veracity and entitlement.

Asteroids: desolate, lifeless places with negative energy — think spam blogs.

(Yes, Rubel’s column has an RSS feed.)

“We must teach the children that taking care of the land and learning to feed yourself are just as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic. For the most part, our families and institutions are not doing this. Therefore, I believe that it’s up to the public education system to teach our kids these important values. There should be gardens in every school, and school lunch programs that serve the things the children grow themselves, supplemented by local, organically grown products. This could transform both education and agriculture.”

- Alice Waters, “A Delicious Revolution”

The Kansas City Pitch’s “Kansas City Strip” column is written with an unfortunate narrative conceit: the perspective comes from Kansas City cuts of beef. This week’s subject matter creates a terrible carnivorous resonance. When is “dog bites man” news?

Cars squealed around him. As soon as he hit the pavement, the dogs were on him. One bit his right wrist; another ripped into his left ankle, pinning him.

Most terrifying was the silence. No growls, no snarls. The beasts weren’t angry, just hungry. They tore at Dixon’s loose-fitting clothes, working methodically like puppies trying to open a bag of food. Dixon lost track of one dog and looked over his left shoulder to find it; it snapped toward his face, ripping a hunk of flesh from his upper cheek and temple. He watched as the animal gulped it down.

“I was amazed at how wide he could open his mouth,” Dixon says.