CleverBlogName

From GraphJam.

And we did that by normalizing infection […] Men wrote in and said, ‘I have H.I.V. and I am perfectly healthy. How dare you imply that I am not?’

The article’s mostly scary about drug use; but the picture it paints of moving from supporting people who are unwell to enabling dangerous behavior is pretty disturbing—because it’s something I can see in any number of other places.

Yesterday marked the 50 year anniversary of the first lighting ordinance ever enacted, which restricted searchlight advertisements from sweeping the night skies above Flagstaff, Arizona, USA. Flagstaff now enjoys the status of being the first International Dark Sky City, and maintains a lighting code that limits lights from polluting this majestic nighttime view.

Spectacular.

Previously lush hills are now barren of plantlife; soil is turning to dust; streams have dried up and farms are dying.

The new deserts of China and Europe.

And lest my local audience feel too smug about this, consider:

“Grass on golf courses or surrounding villas is sometimes labeled a ‘crop,’” we read in the New York Times, “making owners eligible for water that would not be allocated to keep leisure space green. Foreign investors plant a few trees and call their vacation homes ‘farms’ so they are eligible for irrigation water.”

Ask yourself how viable the massive, river draining irrigation of Canterbury farms, or the suburbs of the Kapiti coast are looking now, and have a think about what they’re going to look like in a couple of decades.

Ada has hit the size limit for travelling in the car with her seat reclined and her head facing the front of the car; it’s generally the safest way to travel, but it’s not so when you’re too big for the seat to go that way. It’s also uncomfortable when your feet start felling crammed up.

Oh, and it’s boring. How boring? Well, on Sunday I shifted the seat into an upright, forward facing position. Then I showed Maire. Then I showed Ada. “New seat,” says I. I took the family out for a quick 10 minute spin.

Ada was enchanted. “New seat.” “Daddy broom, broom.” “Mama seat.” “New seat.” And then, in a fit of excitemnet, “new car!”

Since then, every journey by car has been accompanied by the insistence, as we come to the door, that she be placed in the “new seat” or the “new car.” Because it’s that much better.