Blogging Brande

Update

It's Valentines Day. And J and I enjoyed taking Izzy for a ride on the Carousel at the mall.


Jeff's new book with my research contributions and reflective essay is now available from SUNY Press. It was enjoyable to reread the project in print. And it's a handsome looking book, I think. It has probably been the highpoint of my doctoral work to be able to donate a copy to our library.

The dissertation has been drafted for a while now, but the revisions I need to do are daunting. Chapter 5 especially feels in need of much work--in part, because it needs to close out the project better, and in particular, because I thought chapter 4's examination of Dorothea Brande's fascism and freewriting worked so well.



Using Schell's book has improved my game writing course greatly!


I must admit Facebook has become a worthwhile investement of my time. Some excellent reconnections on there. Will I want to return to blogging?

Can't say just yet.

Back next year?

My blogging has slowed, so I'm taking a break from it. Actually, it's not like I work very hard to maintain this blog. It's mostly just for fun in thinking things out. But I'm making progress through some difficult parts of the dissertation, and I don't want anything to distract because I have the nagging feeling that I should be working on a blog post. As I tell J, I just can't multitask as well as most people. No, I'm going to read the world through my research for awhile.

Bad Accounting makes Me Green

This post is not a criticism of Wegmans in general, even if they are the particular example. Goodness knows I'm finding their cafe area with free internet access the perfect sabbatical concentration place for actually making progress on the diss (a solid 1/3 drafted after a year with only a dozen pages). The concern is how policies on damaged items are promoting bad recycling and economics.

I find myself spending a lot of time at Wegmans. Logically, I bought a nice coffee cup to avoid the paper waste. But I didn't want to purchase their plastic no.5 as seen on the left. It may be low on its leaching into your coffee, but it's just not well recycled.

So I opted for the deep red, stainless steel mug (online pic not available) which should last till J says it has to be thrown out because it's now 20 years old. Both have pop on compared to threaded tops, which I'm not thrilled about--maybe I'll only get 10 years out of it. However, I didn't look closely enough at the mug I bought; people waiting in line behind you are only going to be so patient. And I bought a mug with a sizable dent in it. OK, so I go to customer service and ask if I can get a damage discount. The answer they gave is the one I expected, but bad policy for any company looking to be green. They will exchange the mug for me for a new one or my money back and then throw out the damaged one. When I worked at Sears almost twenty years ago, us warehouse workers spent around a 1/2 hour a week smashing up perfectly usable returns because people didn't want them with some imperfection. I do understand not wanting damaged goods, but the problem is there is no incentive for most stores to put perfectly usable goods into the market. Before they are dropped in the dumpster, they are crushed or made unusable, this prevents dumpster divers from profiting, even if dumpster divers are more green than the business claiming greenship. The companies have contracts with the manufacturers to get money back on the goods. Some items carry insurance such as for spilled milk in a grocery store. Or they use the IRS to file a yearly loss within one's own company--making damaged goods not resold as tax deductible. Resale would lose them money. The accounting is in place to make sure most damaged goods are compensated for without selling them. Uhhg!

It's still simply more profitable to junk things. And so I told customer service thanks for the exchange offer but I couldn't let the mug I bought for the primary reason of being green go to a landfill. I guess this is all to say if you see some guy at Wegmans with a dented coffee mug, don't assume he's careless. Consider that it may be a badge of pride in not having let bad policy throw out a perfectly usable coffee mug.

Thinking about Portland

Elmo Gone Bad

We've been watching a lot of Sesame Street this year. But even Iz recognizes the following prank calls as fake.

Ok, so the truth is we didn't let her watch these. However, we now see Elmo in an entirely new light.

Bud Run for Maureens Hope

Remember if you don't stop your nike plus at the end of a race, it makes for bad running times. Sigh...

Well, I suppose timing how fast I can grap a post-race banana is worth charting.

BSG Sustainability--"It is not enough just to survive, one has to be worthy of survival"

I found the following time line through the green filter. It's interesting for me because when I think about sustainability I usually think about conservation or technological development that might allow for maintainable ecologies. I don't think much about how the planet would progress without us. After we look at this time line, we might consider for a moment how the earth might be better off without our survival.



While watching BSG, Adama returns throughout the series to the following theme: "It is not enough just to survive, one has to be worthy of survival ... and that they never asked themselves why they deserve to survive." When looking at the longterm effects of the human race on the Earth, this unconsidered is worth asking. The blending of survival, meaning, and ethics is a move that provides longterm trajectories to the critical statements about local rhetorics. For it combines the needs of the global as a local-cultural issue: what makes us worthy today of using Earth and its resources?

I can't remember if I blogged this before, but the mid-season ending of BSG was brilliant. Of course, they find Earth. And of course, it's been destroyed from a nuclear devastation. Mankind is still looking to implement a worthy ethics for its survival.

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