Neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.
-- Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
When I heard that a week ago a man abducted a women in Renton, and drove her there to sexually assault her, I began to wonder why a rapist might consider Dearborn park a destination worth a half hour drive when so few local residents choose to walk there.
The
prominence of the play equipment and soccer field suggest that children
accompanied by adults are the primary intended users. When I ask my boy if he wants to go to the park, the answer is always a resounding yes, but Dearborn doesn't really count in his book. The park means open-ended play -- running from one interesting
diversion to another, mixing it up with other kids, navigating varied
terrain, excitement!
A funny thing I've found about standard children's park equipment -- the swing and Jungle Gym-style play set -- they have little interest in themselves. Kids know that they are for sliding and swinging and monkeying around, but they will use them only as enthusiastically as the surroundings merit. For lack of excitement, our play sessions at Dearborn are halting, and quick to end. If I don't guide each bit of the action, my son might actually request to go home -- something that has happened at no other park.
But enough of my kid, already -- what about me? The park has little to offer adult tag-alongs in the way of views or other areas where a person might pleasurably linger (unless you're the lurking sort, but more on that below). The walking path around the lower soccer field is only good for a five minute circuit and, as visually uninteresting as it is, only bears a single go round. There are no restrooms on site, which can also make lingering unattractive for families.
Thinking through the overall plan of Dearborn park, I came to the strange conclusion that privacy was the over-arching design consideration for this public facility. It's impossible to get a sense of who is there or what there is to do from the street entrance because the interior is blocked by a large mound. Walking through the park, the view into each successive area is partially or completely obscured by trees.
The path that runs down from the playground is completely secluded in the trees until it pops out into the lower field after some twenty-five yards. It continues on, encircling the play field (which I've only seen used in the fall for soccer) and leads back out to the entrance for a stretch, shaded by more trees. I was bemused when I saw "hiking trails" among the park's features on the city's web listing for Dearborn. I remember seeing what looked like a couple of overgrown deer paths and confirmed by a satellite view that there is a goodly splotch of woods. I never thought of the wooded area as even being part of the park!
Lonely, shaded, and secluded, Dearborn park is ideal for the kind of public activity that is best shielded from the general public view. Come at the right time and you'll see the evidence -- the condoms, the beer bottles, the gang graffiti. It's hard to imagine a better setting for lurking, hooking up, hiding, or indulging in your favorite controlled substance.
Wanting to get to the bottom of this "hiking trails" business, I dug a little deeper and found this enthusiastic review of the park, which declares it a "pleasant pocket of nature in the city." It further explains that the park "was developed by schoolchildren and staff from adjacent Dearborn Elementary School, and Seattle Parks and Recreation, the Trust for Public Land, EarthCorps and other groups."
The private setting that makes the park seem forlorn at best and menacing at worst during off hours, makes perfect sense if you consider it as an adjunct to Dearborn Park Elementary's grounds. Indeed, according to Dearborn Park Elementary's website, their teachers are "specially trained in Project Wild environmental curriculum to use the woods and wetlands as a classroom."
It is designed for school use, with all the built-in supervision and regimentation that implies. Of course there's no restroom -- there are plenty of them inside the school! Private grounds disconnected from the surrounding streets make city schools feel secure. But when the kids and staff go home, so does all the structure and supporting facilities and liveliness that make it a good place to be.
Without the school, the park is an empty shell and the neighborhood treats it accordingly, abandoning it to "users" like the one who made his way there from Renton last Sunday night.
In the spirit of the latest Manchurian Candidate to emerge from the bosom of the White House, the Hoole Intelligence Report will attempt here for the first time to say something nice about our president.
Gee Dub, you are cool so I'd like to dedicate a cool song to you!
Explaining that to be a gangster is about "living for the lord" and "feeding the poor and helping out with their bills," Bushwick Bill sets us straight about an often overlooked aspect of the gangster lifestyle and, I'd venture a guess, of the thrill of living in what Scott McClellan has called in recent days the "White House bubble."
You'll also hear the reason gangsters never run away from their problems (read the Middle East) -- Hint: it's because they're not strong runners!
Now, I can't be totally sure who raps on the last verse of the song, but the Geto Boys are from Texas and it does start out with the introduction "And now a word from the president."
I know that some who read this post (Karl, Dana, Scooter, I'm just messing around, really) and think "That's not the Hoole Intelligence Report" we knew, or "Why didn't he declare his fondness for Gee Dub years ago?" Sticks and stones, friends. Ultimately, this blog has to be about intelligence from whatever perspective -- right, left, or center.So voters of the world keep supporting me
And I promise to take you very far.
Other leaders better not upset me
Or I'll send a million troops to die at war.
So all you 'publicans that helped me win
I'd sincerely like to thank you,
Cause now I got the world swinging from my nuts
Damn it feels good to be a gangster!
Much has been made in this election cycle of the company the presidential candidates have kept. The connection of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to great American rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky has been touted in the media as a potential liability that may yet taint the candidates. Ever the maneuverer, Hillary Clinton, who some forty years ago wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky's work, used her husband's presidential authority to block access to the document. In the mid Eighties, Obama cut his teeth in street-level politics as a community organizer trained in Alinsky's methods.
Alinsky is a bogeyman in some quarters because he had the audacity to encourage the poor to dirty their
hands in the process of accumulating power in the same way everybody expects
politicians and business to. His sin was viewing the poor as capable of solving their own problems and challenging them to actually confront those in power who have influence over the issues they face (read a fine interview with the man here).
Alinsky's maxim "No one can negotiate without the power
to compel negotiation" wouldn't sound strange coming from some hard hitting executive like say, Jack Welch. But when Alinsky actually expected the poor residents of Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood to "compel negotiation" -- well, that's a different story.
His stated aim of "rubbing raw the sores of discontent" sounds like that great American taboo, "class warfare." We vote, we pray, we humbly accept charity, we may even complain, but we do not confront and we do not demand, especially in groups. It's unreasonable. It upsets our sense of order. It sounds like some commie shit.
In American politics these days, change is on the agenda. The question is who is capable of delivering the change Americans desire. The Hoole Intelligence Report contends that it ain't a new president and, with a little help from Hillary, Barack, and Saul, will explain why.
The Work of Other (Better) PeopleThe other day, I was talking to a friend about philanthropy. His friends tell him that they admire the volunteer work that he does and the contributions he makes but that they themselves aren't the type of people who have the time or disposable income to do likewise. What they are saying is that he has reached that privileged station in life that affords him the wisdom and leisure to give back to the community, but they themselves, lacking his success, are excused from virtue.
They don't realize that he considers himself to be by far the greatest beneficiary of his "charity." He doesn't give because he's a Warren Buffet, he gets to be a little bit the Warren Buffet because he gives. Many people stand up this prerequisite of angelic purity to excuse themselves from stepping outside their immediate circle and contributing to the greater good in their community or the world.In his book, "Rules for Radicals," Alinsky offers this striking observation about peoples' motivations -- "it is not man's 'better nature' but his self interest that demands that he be his brother's keeper." He continues:
To eat and sleep in safety man must do the right thing, if seemingly for the wrong reasons, and be in practice his brother's keeper... This is the low road to morality. There is no other.
Self Interest and Self Help -- Self, Self, Selfity, Self
Alinsky would have pointed out that this is a false distinction arising from the shame associated with selfishness. In "Rules for Radicals," he writes in a chapter on the politics of language that "it appears shameful to admit that we operate on the basis of naked self-interest, so we desperately try to reconcile every shift of circumstances that is to our self-interest in terms of a broad moral justification or rationalization."
The problem with dreams and ideals and values that we feel don't advance our own interests is that we are unlikely to do much about them ourselves -- they tend to be the broad, fantastical things we feel are outside our sphere of influence which leads us to cede responsibility for them to God or to... a president!
Alinsky's Iron Rule of Organizing illustrates the difference between Obama’s presidential hopes and dreams and the necessity for grassroots political participation:
Never do for people what they can do for themselves.
The equation is simple -- if your values, hopes, and dreams, are important enough for you to personally do something about them, you will. If they are not, you won't.
In Alinsky's words, "Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services."
People who take on an issue themselves are likely to act with a vigor proportionate to the issue's effect on their lives. If you yourself identify an issue and define the action that will get the result you want, you have motivation to see it through and, for better or worse, own the results. This is what people mean when they talk about "sustainability."
For her part, Hillary Clinton has alternately hidden her connection to Alinsky, damned his work with faint praise, and dismissed his methods. In her 1993 book "Living History," she writes,"He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't.”
In fact, Alinsky explicitly stated that people who want to affect change must work inside the system* -- the thing they really disagree on is the purpose of working inside the system. The Clintons have worked inside the system for a solid three decades building a sweeping national political juggernaut. Alinsky-style community organizing starts "inside the system" for the
simple reason that, in order to bring about "concrete, specific, achievable" improvements in their lives, normal people need to depart from a familiar place.
Ultimately, it's the scale of Clinton's and Obama's
ambition that led them away from Alinsky's principles of civic participation.
Their hustle, however noble, is to make the case that giving them your vote is the best way to see your political hopes and dreams realized.
Shop N' Vote '08!
Confronted with the attacks of 9/11 and the specter of environmental disaster,
there are just two forms of civic participation Americans have come together
around -- shopping and voting. Shopping for that hybrid sedan, picking up those compact florescent bulbs, or in GW's less discriminate formulation, "your continued participation and confidence in the the American economy."
We attempt to buy our way out of an impending environmental disaster
not because that is the correct response or the one that will succeed, but
because it is the response that will cause no disruption in our politics, our
economy, or our lifestyle. The fruit of our virtue is trifling.
* "There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families -- more than seventy million people -- whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971 dollars]. (Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals,"xix.")
The clusters of beer cans and the vehicles housing sleeping bodies I would see in the parking lot each morning were the tangible products of whatever mysterious activity went on inside. On the nights I walked by the building I discretely peered through the windows into the dim interior and tried to make out what was going on. There were never more than three or four people inside -- hardly enough patrons to support a bar. I grew suspicious that something illicit was happening at the Dos Amigos and, between my wife and I, trying to guess what that might be became a kind of parlor game.
She walked out, motioned that we should move back, and rigged a velvet rope across the front entrance. From the other side, she politely but firmly informed us that there would be a $14 cover charge.
Our reaction was decidedly of the "gee whiz" variety. We stammered and half-protested that there were only four people inside the bar -- surely they would welcome the idea of doubling their paying customers? There was no entertainment (that we could see anyway) -- how could there be a cover charge? Were we so naive because none of us had a memory of being turned away just for being the wrong sort of person?
For the denizens of the Dos, we were nothing but a close call -- I'm sure they had a good laugh when the coast was clear. Maybe one of them even thought back to a better time when the whole neighborhood met up at the Dos Amigos Tavern. Ah, the promise and the good intentions and the grand ambitions of a new venture! Maybe, after knocking back a shot or doing another of whatever it was they used to do in the Dos Amigos, one of them sighed that it had all come down to this.
A Slow, Sad Winding Down
Too often,
it’s court records that tell the story of the ends of things, and so it is with the
last gasps of the business at 5319
Martin Luther King Junior Way South. It seems that the long-time owners of the Dos Amigos are a married couple who have physical disabilities that have in recent years made it difficult to see after their business. In late 2001, their ongoing inability to pay property taxes (around $10,000) came to a head and the property went into tax foreclosure. One day before it was set to be auctioned off, a man they'd never met before showed up at their doorstep and said he could help.
Being the only option available, they made the deal. By some stroke of luck or cunning the new owner of the Dos Amigos got the house off of the foreclosure list without paying the outstanding taxes. After "purchasing" the property and "paying" the taxes, the audacious "entrepreneur" got about the business of strong arming the former owners into buying the it back on terms that were for him to say the least, extremely advantageous.
The original owners ended up prevailing in court against him, and county records confirm that they still own the property, but judging from slow, sad decline I've witnessed in the five years I've lived next door, their fortunes haven't changed. Unnameable illicit activity continued at the tavern for a couple of years, but gradually petered out until the building was abandoned sometime in 2005.
A half mile west of Seattle's Columbia City business district, the Dos Amigos is a reminder of the urban blight that now-bustling urban village rose up from almost a decade ago. Progress has encircled the Dos Amigos Tavern, squeezing the island of neglect into an ever-smaller corner.
As part of the light rail project, which runs down the center of the four lane road in front of the tavern, the City of Seattle has replaced the parking lot with a triangular mulch bed dotted with plantings and bordered by a new sidewalk. Where people had to walk three blocks in either direction to cross the street legally, crosswalks now cut across the road directly in front of the tavern.
Since I moved into the neighborhood, the Dos Amigos Tavern has tempted me with its strange possibilities and today I want to say publicly that I have succumbed. In my mind's eye, I've renovated it a dozen different ways -- it's been a bookstore, a night club, a cafe and a neighborhood tavern. These days it's plain to see that the wood frame building, with its broken windows, shedding roof, and peeling siding is palpably ready to get on with the business of collapsing, and I aim to help.
Mark me, dear Hoole Intelligence Report reader -- I will see the Dos Amigos Tavern turned into a lovely neighborhood gathering place which will go by the name of Dos Amigos Park. How long will this take? Why does my neighborhood need a park? What kind of park? How will I pull it off? Is it even possible? Stay tuned for Dos Amigos Park, Pt.2.
This edition of the Hoole Intelligence Report will bring to your attention the existence of a fake, but immensely popular Bible verse which somebody (nobody knows who) invented to prove a silly point about masturbation (which nobody can agree on). That the holy scriptures offer succor and guidance to untold millions across the globe goes without saying. It is my hope that the tale of the Ghost Verse will make it clear that fake scripture can be a profound source of inspiration in its own right.
It was during a week night session of
church some time in the Eighties that I first heard it told. The dude who sat down in the metal folding chair next to mine was a singular fellow, who I'd
never met before. A son of one of the church regulars back from
somewhere (prison? some low-rent art school?) outfitted in a late-Seventies
style typical of a certain kind of twenty-something loaner. His name
would have been something like Dan or Jimmy.
His hair, parted in the middle and carefully combed over the ears, framed glasses that made him look more square than studious. He had on a black t-shirt, and in his back pocket was tucked the inevitable comb. I'd seen the costume before and even then, it suggested something definite -- the insistence on an obviously dated style was the outward sign of a simmering refusal to get on with the business of adulthood.
The pastor must have mentioned something that related to masturbation from the podium (itself a strange circumstance), which prompted Jimmy to turn, look me in the eye, and declare with monotone intensity:
The Bible says "It is better to cast thy seed in the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground."
His intention was obvious - to suggest that the Bible was much more complex than the preacherman was letting on, that he was a special authority on the ambiguities of scripture, and that he was personally very much in the belly-of-a-whore camp.
Being a surly misfit myself, I'm sure I nodded my head at the fellow or grunted and returned to the tedious business of sitting through church. I was staggered, nonetheless. It had the ring of authentic scripture, but the theology seemed contradictory to what I'd read myself in the Bible. Paraphrasing it, one hears God as a Marine Corps burn-out father -- "You gotta get yourself laid son, wanking it's for wimps."
The story of Onan, the Bible's famed masturbator, seems to be the inspiration for the verse. It's laid out in Genesis 38 like this -- a guy named Judah sets his son up with a wife, Tamar. God turns on the son and ends up killing him (standard operating procedure in the Old Testament, it turns out). It then falls by tradition to our man Onan to knock up his brother's widow, so that the offspring can carry on their dead father's line. A close reading reveals that though Onan was only too happy to "get down" with Tamar, he wasn't trying to father any kids that weren't his, which led him to withdraw at the vital moment and famously "spill his seed on the ground."
The popular gloss on the story is that Onan settled for "shaking hands with the unemployed" instead of hooking up with Tamar. And thus he was fingered as a wanker by posterity and "Onanism" became a synonym for masturbation. Worse still, poor Onan didn't get a chance to enjoy his new found fame as God killed him shortly afterward.
This misreading of the story is a big semantic leap toward the Ghost Verse, because it presumes that Onan chose masturbation over the chance to sleep with an actual woman (an opportunity sanctioned by God himself, no less). You won't have to ask too many teenage boys to find out why that's absolutely nuts. Nuts enough in fact to rise to the level of Sin. And this is the thrust, if you will, of the Ghost Verse -- male masturbation should be a source of guilt because it is a distraction from the totally awesome business of getting laid.
The beauty of the Ghost Verse is that it has survived and flourished. Search for it on the internet, and you'll find that its status as authentic scripture is refuted time and time again, but such protests only seem to increase its popularity. People continue to quote it because they like it, even if it's not "real."
For some, it confirms Christian hypocrisy and the flawed, anachronistic nature of scripture. For others, like Malachy McCourt (Frank's bro), its presumed Biblical origin is a source of comfort, explaining adolescent sexual anguish as fealty to a strange and cruel god. As for Jimmy, my first and greatest tutor in fake theology, wherever he ended up, I'm sure he continues to do God's work to this day.
Twitter. Flickr. Facebook. THE GPHONE! As everybody well knows, the current pile-up of web 2.0 services promising to revolutionize personal communication will settle into a virtual junk yard we'll laugh about years from now, if we even remember the names (Alas, poor Kozmo). Among the very few web 2.0 services used by the Hoole Intelligence Report, the awkwardly named del.icio.us is a jewel you really should consider trying.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service which allows you to store, organize, cross-reference, and share all the interesting stuff you find on the web. When you find a blog entry, magazine article, or site you like, you click the "post to del.icio.us" link on your bookmarks toolbar, which brings you to the del.icio.us site, where you can add a description to the bookmark and tags.
I tag my del.icio.us links with the key words that identify the content. I further organize my links by grouping them into "bundles" of related tags. In the main bookmark navigation pane, tags are grouped by bundle and appear in darker, bolder, larger type depending on how frequently they are used. In the capture on the right, you can see that "mobilebanking," a tag I frequently use, is a whopper, whereas "demography" is teeny and in a lighter font.
If you regularly use a particular tag like "puppies" to label bookmarks, you can click through that tag's link and see what other del.icio.us users who have an abiding interest in puppies have bookmarked. If you find a user who frequently bookmarks interesting content, you can set up del.icio.us to show you what they've added when you visit the site. I have the RSS feeds for a couple of people's del.icio.us selections hooked up to my Google Reader where any additions show up as headlines.
del.icio.us is loaded with subtle features that will aid avid web surfers and bloggers in their dorky pursuits. If you have a large collection of browser bookmarks, you can get started with the service by uploading them to del.icio.us, which will assign them tags based on your bookmark folder names. Firefox users (superior beasts, in case you were wondering) can download a slick del.icio.us toolbar, making the service that much easier to use. There are widgets available for Facebook and major blogging apps that display your latest del.icio.us links. For those with a couple of web surfing minutes to burn, you could do far worse than clicking the "popular" link at the upper right hand side of the main page, which represents the cream of the web at any given moment.
Mark me, dear Hoole Intelligence Report reader - all the brilliant, provocative scraps you come by on the web today will be displaced by equally interesting jibber jabber tomorrow. For me, del.icio.us is the tool that forms the web into an ongoing reference and a source of learning instead of a pleasant waste of time.
Use your cell phone to call a friend's cell phone. Hang up after the first ring. Your telephone number is now registered at the top of your friend's call history log as a missed call and you pay nothing for airtime. Prank call or mere annoyance? In Africa and parts of south Asia, this practice, variously called "beeping," "flashing," or "bipage," is a vital low- or no-cost communication tool.
The key to the beeping phenomenon is the recognition that buried in the features of every standard mobile phone is a free pager. The recipient of a "beep" responds in a predetermined way, usually by calling the "beeper," but the message could just as well mean "I've arrived at the market" or "I'm done, please pick me up." The subtext of a beep is often that the "beepee" is better off (or at least has more airtime to burn) than the "beeper."
African mobile networks are likely the most advanced and well-developed infrastructure on the continent, but the average person doesn't always have the disposable income to be a full-fledged user. Beeping is a way to access the benefits of mobile communication at a lower price point many poorer African consumers can afford. Other favorite strategies for reducing cost are buying only a SIM card and using somebody else's handset to make calls or sharing one phone among many people.
According to Jonathan Donner, a researcher for Microsoft who has documented the beeping phenomenon, as many as a third of all calls that come across mobile networks in Africa are missed calls. In response, some African service providers have attempted to limit or monetize beeping by adding value to the paging function.
Orange Senegal lets customers send a "Call me back" message when their airtime credit drops below ten cents. A Kenyan provider does the same, but limits users to five messages per day. Vodocom DR Congo charges a penny for its service. Presumably, some consumers will choose these services over beeping because they don't have the ambiguity of a simple missed call.
Back in like Ninety-One, paging technology was the cutting edge. Many people (myself included) paid the same monthly airtime bill for a pager that we do now for a PDA equipped with a QWERTY keypad, camera, internet connectivity, and who knows what else. Leave it to the world's most cash-strapped consumers to ferret out the free underlying features of a technology we take for granted.
So the other day I'm finishing up the book when I came across this astonishing claim:
The price premium in fair trade products is a form of charitable transfer, and there is evidently no harm in that. But the problem with it, as compared with just giving people the aid in other ways, is that it encourages recipients to stay doing what they are doing--producing coffee.
Happy fair trade month, Whole Foods shoppers!
I commend Collier for taking aim at any number of sacred cows, but fair trade? Must every virtuous and kind thing I do have awful unintended consequences? Yes! Collier continues:
Raising prices (albeit infinitesimally, since fair trade is such a small component of demand) makes it harder for people to move into other activities. They get charity as long as they stay producing the crops that have locked them into poverty.
I divine three indictments against fair trade here -- a) it isn't "normal" commerce, but charity, b) it's ineffective charity, and c) what small impact it has keeps poor people doing the things that make them poor. Each of these arguments, while clever, is wrong.
Pondering my relationship as a consumer to distant producers, my mind reels back twenty or so years to the nights my family would lounge around watching prime time television. In particular, the Keebler cookie commercials, which featured Ernie the Keebler elf captured my imagination. Keebler cookies are made by cheery, diligent elves inside of a tree. Assuring the viewer that their cookies are sweatshop free, the last line of Keebler's original jingle runs "They're baked in magic ovens, and there's no factory. Hey!"
There can be no doubt that since the elf campaign launched in 1968, many Keebler cookies have been bought because they were made by elves in magic ovens and hence, are "uncommonly good." Consumers pay a premium for cookies made by make-believe creatures when plenty of lower cost alternatives that taste just as good are at hand.
Is this a charitable transfer to elves? Worse, have we cookie consumers inadvertantly locked the elves into a retrograde tree-based production system? Obviously not. Collier assumes that given equal quality, the lower priced product will always win out, which may be true of a cattle auction, but not of branded consumer products.
It's a basic tenant of marketing that with any strong brand there's a constellation of associations and values bound up in the product being hawked that compel people to buy. In the case of Keebler, a certain number of kids are persuaded that the idea of a snack of magical origin adds value to the cookie experience. The only way to explain the 40% price premium on Polo tee-shirts is the waspy glamor the Ralph Lauren brand confers on the wearer. Such ideas, while immaterial, figure as key product benefits for consumers.
The growth in the market for Fair Trade certified products represents the broadening of the consumer-driven definition of product benefits to include social values. When somebody plunks down $3 more for a pound of Fair Trade coffee, they aren't looking to eradicate world poverty, they are paying for the right kind of coffee -- the kind that's harvested in an environmentally sound fashion by people who have been treated fairly. To observe that fair trade is ineffective charity is to misunderstand the inherently modest virtue of this bargain. Next the economists will tell us that buying a Harley Davidson motorcycle doesn't help the Hell's Angels.
Does Fair Trade hurt poor people in the developing world? Dig if you will the picture of Juan Valdez, a coffee bean picker in Colombia who gets either $1 a day for regular coffee or $1.25 for Fair Trade certified coffee. Ask Juan whether or not he'd prefer to make 20% more for the same work. But first, do the responsible thing and explain to him that by accepting more pay, he is dodging the truly abject poverty that might eventually drive him to find more lucrative work elsewhere.
Juan's choice, and the choice of a consumer calculating the social value of a fair trade purchase, couldn't be more obvious. Leave it to an economist to suggest that the best way to help the poor is to make sure their suffering is as awful as possible.
I've finally rescued my puffy coat from its lonely spot in the back seat of my car, which means there's no denying it's Autumn. Most people (and I am no exception) decide at this time of year that the only reasonable way to combat the cold and drear is to considerably increase their wine consumption. To this end, I'll be traveling to Eastern Washington this next weekend to celebrate the grape harvest at the Lake Chelan Crush Festival.
Which brings me back to participatory retail and transparent supply chains, topics I posted on a couple of weeks ago. A new online business called Crushpad elegantly combines both ideas, allowing any old joe or jill off the street to make a barrel of their own ultra-premium wine.
With the online MyCrushpad interface, you guide every parameter of the wine making process, choosing grape variety, wine style, vinyard, harvest time, sorting and pressing method, aging time, and bottling and packaging. Since you're producing a whole barrel of wine (about 300 bottles), it costs between $4,500 and $9,000 to play, which translates to about $15 per bottle at the lower end.
To defray the cost or make the 6-24 month process a community experience, Crushpad encourages families, friends, or colleagues to pitch in on a barrel. The idea of a work group making a barrel of wine as an alternative to say a softball team, or a company bestowing a Crushpad barrel to a favored client seem like intruiging possibilities.
With Crushpad, intensive consumer participation makes supply chain transparency a natural part of the experience. With at least a couple of featured vinyards that practice organic viticulture, users have some control over the environmental impact of their wine. Crushpad could add some value to the experience by including labor practices (grapes are harvested by a migrant workforce) among the choices users can make.
All that said, the Hoole Intelligence Report hails Crushpad's radical experiment in participatory retail. Now I've got my puffy coat on and I'm off to fetch a glass -- where my wine at?
He hit me and I knew he loved me.
If he didn't care for me,
I could have never made him mad,
But he hit me and I was glad.
Who can say what strange flight of fancy led the great husband and wife songwriting team, Gerry Goffin and Carole King down this particular rabbit trail? Hearing the song for the first time, like discovering a sonnet by Shakespeare devoted to lighting farts, the dissonance between form and content is mind-bogglingly absurd. According to the CD's liner notes, the song was "withdrawn by Spector before it reached the top 100 because he felt the lyrics were too sensitive for pop radio." It took some thirty-five years and a courageous young woman named Britney Spears to overcome this prejudice with her debut single "Hit Me Baby One More Time."