The saturday mess

I was going to call this post, "The Saturday Gestalt", but then I looked the word up and found that gestalt means: "A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic entities that creates a unified concept, configuration or pattern which is greater than the sum of its parts, " from Wiktionary, and its hard to see what unified concept I can make out of this particular Saturday. In addition, why use a complicated word like "gestalt", when "mess" comes a lot closer?

Maybe this is what happens when a crowd of blog ideas meets a multi-tasking Saturday. The hardest thing to fit into the whole mess was my central project this afternoon: the creation of Potato and Cabbage Bundles, for my Irish-themed dinner group which meets this evening. Since my dinner group members do not read my blog, I can confess that this must have been the most complicated cabbage dish anyone could possibly envision, that is, for a normal culinary human being. It involved steaming the cabbage, mashing potatoes with a whole host of yummy ingredients, burning the oil on the stove and filling the entire house with smoke while I searched for new radio goodies to listen to on the internet, cutting up parchment paper... and on and on, more steps than is necessary or sustainable--to stay connected to one of my central themes.

Anyway, the cabbage bundles are assembled and ready to bake, and I thought it might be interesting, to me at least, to list the other ideas, worries and funny things crowding into my brain on this particular Saturday. My last blog entry was on the theme of conversation, and the book, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, arrived and is beckoning to me right now. Author Stephen Miller provides a fascinating introduction to the role of conversation in ancient times, whetting my interest with this description of Socrates by the politician Alcibiades: "Whenever anyone hears you [Socrates] speak or hears your words reported by someone else...whoever we are--woman, man or boy--we're overwhelmed and spellbound." Socrates was reportedly an excellent listener, and treated his fellow conversationalists with respect, urging them to examine their assumptions. If I were to meet such a conversationalist, would I be capable of examining my own worldviews, or am I totally bound up in my current positions?

I love to consider a range of ideas around a theme, so I particularly enjoyed Stewart Staniford's entry, "Innovation in Hard Times", posted on The Oil Drum, one of my favorite blogs. Staniford ponders how humans will respond to the coming challenges of peak oil, the melt-down in the housing market, and the damage caused by the Iraq war, to name the major crises de jour, by examining the number of patents granted each year, and analyzing the perspectives of the gloom and doomers like Jim Kunstler(author of the Long Emergency, which argues that peak oil will destroy life as we know it) to the optimists like futurist Ray Kurzweil, a computer visionary who foresees a future time when artificial intelligence will create technological innovations far beyond our current level of knowledge or imagination. This got me to thinking about whether I am fundamentally a pessimist or an optimist. I think I must fall on the side of the pessimists, mostly because of the ability of a small number of people--disaffected and angry--to make life extremely difficult for the peace-loving majority. So if the number of people whose lives go into crisis mode increases, it could trouble the comfort of many. And it certainly does seem as though a number of crises could come together and start to have spiraling impacts in ways that we cannot now foresee.

The melt-down in the housing market is beginning to receive more attention. Mainstream economic observers, such as Merrill Lynch, are now saying that housing troubles could cause a recession in 2007, and economic bears like Noureil Roubini say that we will have an economic hard-landing making waves throughout the world economy. After reading some of these assessments, I went for a walk through the new subdivision adjacent to my neighborhood. I saw that 4 McMansions, built on speculation by area builders, still remained unsold. At least two of these have been for sale for at least 2 years. This kind of information is not being reported in our local media, which usually rely on local Realtors for the predictable sound byte: "we are having a market correction but the turn-around is right around the corner." When you realize the level of inertia that supports mainstream economic optimism, you begin to worry about how people will cope when the difficult times do come.

As an antidote to all this pessimism, you might want to listen to Radio Canada International's audio feed on the topic: "Laughter is the Best Medicine," featuring about 6 minutes of hilarity with Surjit Lalli from Vancouver. It got me laughing.

The other recent humor source came from a paper sent to me by a group called Sustainable Belmont (SB), from Belmont, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It described efforts of SB to persuade community residents to cut down the amount of time spent in idling cars. SB received a grant that allowed them to obtain anti-idling signage, handouts and stickers, the Board of Selectman granted permission to hang the signs, the police agreed to issue complaints, and city staff was enlisted to distribute some of the signs. They must not have believed in the whole idea, though, because staff were observed idling their vehicles while hanging anti-idling signs. Somehow, this just hit my funny bone, especially since I also am involved in an all volunteer local sustainability group that has faced this kind of bureaucratic intransigence. I need to look further into the problem of car idling. I did find at least one case study that started to suggest some aspects of the problem.

So that's the Saturday Mess.