Saturday, February 26, 2011

Food and Justice


Writing this post from the campus of Northeastern University in Boston. I'm at a conference of food activists, attending workshops and the like.

This post is going to be a bit diffuse and broad-brush, a summary of all the cool things I learned this morning. A lot of these issues require much more in-depth research and discussion. So I'll come back to many of them in future postings. For now the smorgasbord:

State-Owned Banks
This is an issue I had not thought or heard about before today. North Dakota is an example of a place with a state-owned bank. The advantage is that the bank can respond to regional issues in a way that multinational corporations like Bank of America or Chase simply cannot do. For example: a hail-storm wipes out all the crops in North Dakota. BoA has no sympathy. A state=owned bank, with closer ties to the farmers, can forgive that year's payments because it understands the local issues. In other words, local economies require local financing and a fundamental overhaul of the American monetary/banking system. Oregon and Maryland have state-owned banks in the works.

/Nutritional mythology and misleading terminology
Is sugar really just an empty calorie? A more accurate term might be anti-nutrient, since sugar impairs the body's ability to absorb b vitamins and minerals.
Is childhood obesity an epidemic? Or is it just a symptom of declining childhood health, which actually contributes to a host of diseases such as asthma, eczema, diabetes, and cancer.


More later...

Friday, February 18, 2011

Welcome to the art show.

This post is a series of drawings I made based on this painting. Matisse's image infected my mind, and this is what came out the other side. The first four images are sharpie, and the final one, the combination between Dali and Matisse, is sharpie and pastel.



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Friday, February 4, 2011

"El Story Numero Dos": The Pogo Stick Complex




This is a story that was written exquisite corpse style with some of my friends. Without further ado, here it is:

Every now and again, she just needed to hang upside down. It made her think of how things used to be, before people started walking around on their hands, or with pogo sticks attached to their heads in some unusual cases. Very unusual cases, indeed. There is no sadder sight than a newborn child with a teeny-tiny pogo stick already developing. The disease had, at that time, become highly contagious. Every young boy quickly realizes the importance of comparing the size of his pogo stick with those of his friends. His mother wept for days, anticipating the torment and and eventual pogo stick complex the boy would one day develop. Which is why a very skilled hypnotist quickly entered into his life. Every thursday at 3:00 PM he would be lead through hypnotic exercises with the purpose of elongation. Until, one day, he became Stretch Armstrong and could do anything he wished.