So today’s Earth Day. What did you do to save the planet?
I took the bus.
OK, I’m just bragging. Being a stay-at-home/work-at-home dad I don’t normally go anywhere, so taking the bus actually increased my carbon footprint/energy usage/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Oops.
I woke up with a sore throat yesterday morning (on the most beautiful day of the year) and ended up going to bed early. A fitful sleep resulted in bizarre, weird dreams. Or rather, mundane dreams. At one point I was dreaming about nailing planks on to the backyard fence we’ve talked about but haven’t started building yet (currently we have a chicken wire concoction that’s holding up surprisingly well—I’m tempted to leave it, but always feel self-conscious when neighbors walk by).
In the dream I was planning exactly how to build the fence: how many nails to use, how to space the planks (two pencil widths), how far off the ground they should be, etc. And it was then I literally dreamed the thought, “Seriously, I’m dreaming this? My dream is building a fence? My dream sucks.”
Food riots are still on my mind. Turns out I didn’t have to look to broader news outlets for that breaking story, I could have just caught up on the 1,000+ unread items in my Google Reader. If I did, I would have come across this slap in the face from Shaun Groves:
“If the government cannot lower the cost of living it simply has to leave,” said protester Renand Alexandre. “If the police and U.N. troops want to shoot at us, that’s OK, because in the end if we are not killed by bullets we’ll die of hunger.”
In other news, rumor is Apple’s releasing a 32GB iPhone in May for only $599!
Ouch. But he’s right.
With our upcoming adoption we’ve been paying more and more attention to Ethiopia. So it’s been a bit discouraging to read about two bombings earlier this week and another one last month. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s not a big surprise to see Ethiopia included in the countries facing civil unrest over food prices. They’re also facing drought. It kind of starts to pile up. We really have no idea how incredibly lucky and wealthy we are here in the U.S. (“While many are worrying about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs.” -World Bank Chairman Robert B. Zoellick).
But amidst all the worrisome news, I also came across Lauren’s blog. She spent about six months teaching in Ethiopia and gives a great glimpse into real life in Addis Ababa. That is until she survived a horrific car accident that broke a vertebrae in her back and had to be airlifted to an Israeli hospital. She’s now recovering in Duluth. She also used to attend my church (It’s somewhat morbidly ironic, but another young woman from my church with aspirations of working in Africa recently survived a horrific car accident and broke a vertebrae in her back). Despite her traumatic experience, Lauren’s stories of life in Ethiopia are captivating.
Then there’s Shaun Groves’ story of child sponsorship in Ethiopia. I’ve been unsure about child sponsorship, but it’s hard to argue with a story like that.
It’s just another example of adoption and Ethiopia connections coming out of the woodwork.
I’m always harping on the idea that businesses don’t have to grow. The U.S. economy doesn’t have to be growing by leaps and bounds to be healthy. Sometimes things shrink. It might be painful, but it’s not the end of the world. I think they call it pruning. That constant growth everyone seems to expect isn’t sustainable. Some people even call it greed.
That’s what Semco CEO Ricardo Semler says in his book Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace:
A few years ago, I struggled with an opportunity to acquire a company with five plants and 2,000 employees. “Why do we want to grow more?” I asked myself. Are we going to be better for it?”…
It’s all about persistence, isn’t it? But where does persistence end and obsession begin? How high is too high? How big is too big? Of course, some growth is necessary for any business to keep up with competitors and provide new opportunities for its people. But so often it is power and greed and plain stubbornness that make bigger automatically seem better…
Semco has learned that to want to grow big just to be big is a catch … Much about growth is really about ego and greed, not business strategy. (excerpted by 37signals)
If Semler sounds familiar, I quoted him saying something similar a while back (also found via 37signals). That’s two references to the guy—maybe it’s time to read his book.
This story from a woman who spent time at an orphanage for HIV positive children in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is amazing:
Once they started getting the ARVs that were needed and at a fair price, children stopped dying. And so money that they used to save to pay for children’s coffins is now being used for growth and development, empowering the organization to grow and help so many more people.
It reminds me of the stories of Ethiopian orphans in There Is No Me Without You.
Talk about getting a double spoonful of crap in life: orphaned and HIV positive. While these tragedies may not be able to be rectified, they can be redeemed. That’s what the church is supposed to be about (not just teachin’ and singin’).
Did you know there were deadly food riots in Haiti last week? And in several other countries around the world. The U.S. closed the embassy in Haiti, banned official travel, is discouraging civilian travel and encouraging U.S. citizens already in Haiti to get out. The soaring cost of food sparked the violent protests—around the world food prices have risen 45% in the past nine months and have doubled in the last three years. The Chairman of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick, said three dozen countries face potential social unrest because of rising food and fuel prices.
I didn’t hear about it until Sunday morning when our rector announced that our upcoming missions trip to Haiti (we have a nearly 20-year partnership with a congregation in Haiti) was up in the air. Apparently I’ve been reading the wrong news outlets (curse you CNN!). The U.S. has pledged $200 million for emergency food aid, so I guess it’s good that at least something is being done. Update: Though experts say this isn’t a short term problem.
In this wired world where a not-so-healthy debate is only a click a way, we could all use some help in how to disagree. Which is why I find this disagreement hierarchy kind of interesting. It helps to analyze a discussion a bit and figure out if what you’re arguing about is even worth arguing about.
More often than not, two people arguing passionately about something are actually arguing about two different things. Sometimes they even agree with one another, but are so caught up in their squabble they don’t realize it.
I think that happens a lot. More than we care to admit (because then we couldn’t argue, dammit!). So often I think the argument is over completely separate points. We argue over how it should happen, not realizing that we both want different outcomes, which would explain why we both think it should happen differently. But instead of realizing that and cutting to the chase, we keep going at each other over something irrelevant.
The Library of Congress has released loads of photos on Flickr. My favorite is this set of color photos from the 1930s and 1940s. I’ve seen very little if any color photography from that era. It all looks like it was shot 20 years later than it was.
It’s curious to me how film quality affects our perception of time periods. I always pictured the pre-1960 world as black and white, then a sort of off-kilter Technicolor world before film started to look more “normal” in the 1980s. Oddly enough, I always pictured the pre-photographic world as the random illustrations and paintings that appeared in textbooks.
It’s also interesting seeing all the horses and wagons. For whatever reason I always imagined the automobile being ubiquitous after 1920 or so.
Today I received another one of the questionable forwards. The story in a nutshell is that a court ruling had prohibited prayer at a graduation ceremony. When one of the speakers approached the podium, the entire graduating class simultaneously sneezed. Then the speaker simply said, “God bless you, each and every one,” and the crowd erupted with applause. A heart-warming ‘screw you’ to those anti-Christian courts.
The first clue that it’s not entirely true might be the mass simultaneous sneeze. The fact that it’s talking about prayer in school should at least make you wary about potential bias. The fact that it has to conclude with “This is a true story; it happened at the University of Maryland,” should also be a hint that’s something not right—how often does the newspaper have to assure you something is a true story? I also couldn’t help but wonder why the University of Maryland had a principal.
I looked this story up on Snopes.com, the go to site for questionable e-mail forwards, and found that the story is in fact true. With some notable exceptions.
Continue reading Truthiness of E-mail Forwards; Or, Pray to My God or I’ll Heckle You