Chandra Clarke

Offering Light and Laughter Wherever I Can

Five Interesting Things – June 2022

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It’s time for the June 2022 edition of 5 Interesting Things. It’s a short round up of things I’ve found that are: potentially actionable, inspiring, thought-provoking.

Green Wave – Looking for a complete career change? Consider ocean farming. That’s right, ocean. Green Wave is a regenerative farming project that does kelp and fish farming, and now they want to teach you how to do it. Read about the project here, and then if you’re intrigued sign up for courses.

Droning on – Do you have a drone? Are you looking for reasons to get one? This blog has a neat list of things you can do with one.

Algae lamps? – A French scientist has been working on a way to generate light using bioluminescent algae. The bonus is that algae are really good at chomping CO2.

Self-driving tractors – We’ve been a long, long way from horse drawn plows for some time, with farmers able to till and plant in the comfort of air conditioned cabs and stereo sound systems. John Deere kicks it up a notch with the release of an autonomous tractor. One of the biggest issues in farming is that the window of opportunity to get stuff into and out of the ground can be quite limited – you don’t want to try to take heavy machinery into a sodden field, or you won’t be getting it out anytime soon. Farmer Bob needs to sleep and eat, but his tractor? A self-driving one can stay in the field 24/7 until the job is done.

Achoo! – The research is really really preliminary, but scientists have made an interesting discovery with regards to allergies and autoimmune diseases. They have learned that neuritin, a protein, suppresses formation of rogue plasma cells which are the cells that produce harmful antibodies. Or in other words, it acts like an antihistamine. Incidentally, a great accessible book on the immune system is, well, Immune by Phillip Detmer. (That last is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, which supports indie bookstores).

Full Steam Ahead

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Earlier this morning, I was reading an article about irons. It said that if I really wanted to splurge, I could buy a Miele Rotary Iron, for $3295. So naturally, my first question was: what’s an iron?

I am, you see, somewhat ‘clothing care challenged.’ When the soap commercial comes on TV and asks, ‘What is your biggest laundry problem?’ my family does not say ‘ring around the collar.’ They say: ‘Chandra.’

Let’s start with laundry collection. It was only later in my adult life that I managed to acquire anything as fancy as a ‘sock drawer.’ My old dresser only had two drawers; since I could never decide whether to file socks under ‘unmentionables’ or ‘mentionables,’ I usually just tossed them at the nearest piece of chair-like furniture. As the dresser was also quite small, many other stray bits also had to be, um, filed, the same way.

These days, of course, since I have children, One Must Set an Example. So I don’t have my laundry all over the floor in my room anymore. I shove it under the bed.

But I digress. Once I have gathered enough laundry to make up a load, I’ll take it to the washing machine, throw in some soap and … promptly forget about it. Indeed, laundry is one of the reasons why I got a PhD. This is so that a) I can really be an absent-minded professor and Eccentric rather than merely Lazy and b) so that I can study the strange, bluish life forms that appear on wet clothes after about a week.

After a second, and sometimes third wash (depending on how forgetful I am), I will actually manage to get the load into the dryer, where it will sit for another week. The advantage is that I never have to use fabric softener: after a half dozen consecutive washes and sitting for several days in a crush of heavy clothes, my unmentionables are as soft as can be.

It should be no surprise then, to realize that ironing is just not in my vocabulary. My approach to wrinkle management varies depending on the day:

  • Working in the home office: wrinkles, schminkles.
  • Going out in public: Set six timers to remind myself to grab the clothes when they get out of the dryer and hope there’s enough random things to make up an outfit.

This way, I use far less energy with the dryer than I would with an iron, which I would forget and leave on for a week. (By which point, it would have burned its way through two floors to the basement.)

Which brings me to my second question about the $3,295 iron. Who the heck pays that kind of money for an appliance that you still have to operate manually? Plus, if you look at what a ‘rotary iron’ is, it looks like an exceptionally efficient device for catching and squashing hands. I had enough of that back in the bad old days when I had to run an ancient printing press for my job.

No, if I am going to spend that sort of money on anything to do with laundry, it’ll be for a robot. And it will be one that picks up my clothes, washes, dries, irons and puts them away.

And meanwhile, I could get on with… less pressing concerns.

Regional Government

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We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are.
— Max De Pree

In the last post in my series on the environment and what you can do to help, we talked about the need to push for change at the municipal level. Today, we’ll kick it up a notch and focus on regional government.

Depending on where you live, that could be your state, your province, your county, your canton, prefecture, etc. For the sake of simplicity, let’s consider this any level of government between municipal and national/federal.

These governments aren’t quite as monolithic and hard to budge as the national governments can be, yet they quite often have really big budgets and mandates to deal with environmental issues.

What should you press for at the regional level? Here are some suggestions:

  • The preservation of, the expansion of, and/or the creation of conservation areas, parks, or “green belts” (areas not made into parks but that are theoretically off limits to development).
  • Subsidies for the development and installation of green economy infrastructure. This could include incentives to buy cars that aren’t powered by internal combustion engines, setting up charger networks, or providing incentives to homeowners for conservation and power generation.
  • How is power generated in your region? Is it green or something like coal? What are the regulations regarding ‘going off the grid?’ Is it possible to sell power generated at home? Each one of these could be it’s own grassroots campaign.
  • How do your waterways look? Are they clean? Which authority is responsible for them? Is there a plan to fix problems like phosphorus runoff from farms, or pollution from factories and municipalities? Who’s tapping into the water supply and are they paying a fair price to do so? (All that bottled water we drink? It’s purchased off municipal or state water systems for pennies and sold to us for dollars – and encased in plastic to boot!)
  • How well do your public transportation networks link up? Is it possible to travel everywhere in your region through public transit? If not, could it be possible?

As with municipal-level issues, pick one to advocate for. You’re more likely to run into issues with multiple governing bodies here, so take the time to research who is responsible for what before you start taking action.

How to Take Action

There are three ways you can take action at the regional government level.

  1. Find out who else might be making noise about your preferred issue already. Chances are, given that you’re looking at the regional level, that there’s some sort of advocacy group or non-governmental organization (NGO) already involved. Then join it, and commit some volunteer hours to making it succeed.
  2. It might be the case that there isn’t an organization already, or no local chapter. Guess who could start one? You!
  3. You can make your views known to your regional representative. A phone call might be more effective here, as regional reps get a lot of email. You could even go old school and send a paper letter by post.
  4. Don’t forget the option of running for office here too. Obviously, this is going to take more money and effort than it would at the municipal level, so it might not be an option for you. But you could also consider…
  5. Joining a regional-level political party. Candidates and elected officials don’t come up with policy on their own; they’re just the public face of the party in their area. You can be one of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ people, pushing for policies at the party level between elections, keeping party members organized, helping to select candidates or delegates within the party that align with your issues, and helping to get your preferred candidate elected when the time comes. We talk a lot about how much money goes into political campaigns, but tens of thousands of hours of volunteer labour is also required. What could you contribute?

What issue would you tackle at the regional level? Comment below.

Be Your Own Man

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A long time ago, British researcher Gerald Lincoln announced that he suspected that men might be subject to a medical condition known as ‘irritable male syndrome.’

I suspect we haven’t heard much about this since because I’m betting Lincoln was buried in a pile of 23,576,654 emails from women around the world that said: ‘No kidding, Sherlock.’

Another 14,357,542 emails probably politely suggested that Lincoln rename the condition to ‘irritating male syndrome,’ as that would be more accurate.

Lincoln based his theory on his studies of animals, including Indian elephants, reindeer, red deer, and mouflon (sheep). He found that as their testosterone levels fell, male animals became moody and withdrawn, striking out irrationally.

Now, to be fair, it could be that these creatures were irritable because some bloke in a lab coat kept running in to check their testosterone level. Because this is a family publication, I won’t discuss how Lincoln measured testosterone, but let’s just say it might explain why he studied sheep more often than large, easily enraged elephants.

However, let’s assume Lincoln was on to something. Are there similarities between irritable men and irritable rams? We’ll compare:

Rams: When angry, will do something irrational like run headfirst into a tree.

Men: When angry, will do something irrational like punch a wall.

Rams: Will signal their displeasure by bleating angrily.

Men: Will signal their displeasure by calling the referee on TV nasty names.

Ram: When in a bad mood, will go sulk in a corner of the pasture. When a ewe comes over to ask what’s wrong, he’ll avoid eye contact and say nothing.

Men: When in a bad mood, will retreat to the garage. When his wife comes out to ask what’s wrong, he’ll avoid eye contact and say: ‘Nothing.’

Rams: Wooly all over.

Men: Hairy all over.

So, it appears that Lincoln’s theory stands up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. I’m curious as to why we haven’t heard very much about this potential issue.

Actually, no, I’m not curious. I know why it hasn’t gotten a lot of press: Because what this implies is, men can be governed by their hormones.

Men have tried to claim this about women this for centuries, probably as far back as the cave days:

MRS. UGH: Argle! You have left your underfur all over the cave again. How many times I got to clean it up? You drive me crazy!

MR. UGH: Oh oh. You angry. Must be dat time of month again huh?

MRS. UGH: No! I’m just sick and tired of …

MR. UGH: There, there [patting her head]. Look, I just go over to visit Bargle. Be back in, um… few days.

Things had not improved much by the 20th century:

MAN 1: Give women the vote? Good lord, what a horrible idea. Women are far too emotional to make any sort of decisions. And can you imagine what sort of dither they’d be in if an election happened to land on their special day?’

MAN 2: Indeed. Next thing you know, they’ll want to run for public office.

MAN 1: [Shudder]. Perish the thought. We’d have prime ministers going around bombing other countries just because they were in a bad mood or something.

The ultimate irony here is that Lincoln’s theory about hormones has come full circle to bite men in their wooly regions. If both men and women are supposedly hormonal, at least women can claim to be predictably so, whereas a man can be irrational and crabby at any time, without warning. This is why lots of women wear t-shirts that say: ‘Sometimes I wake up grumpy, and sometimes I let him sleep in.’

Of course, we could do something radical like take mental health issues for both men and women seriously and devote some serious time and money into investigating and treating them. In fact, I’d say this is our second biggest issue of the 21st century, right behind climate change.

Why do I think that, you ask?

I mean, have you seen the comments on social media lately?

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