Through fracture, healing and beauty
Posted on | October 14, 2012 | 1 Comment
Piece by Piece, an arts program of the Skid Row Housing Trust in downtown Los Angeles, put a stunning collection of mosaics up for sale this weekend. To see a sample of the work, click here. For more about Piece by Piece, or to support Angelenos helping themselves out of homelessness through making and selling art, click here.
Warmest January to September on record
Posted on | October 10, 2012 | No Comments
“The January-September period was the warmest first nine months of any year on record for the contiguous United States,” reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its latest State of the Climate update. “The national temperature of 59.8°F was 3.8°F above the 20th century average, and 1.2°F above the previous record warm January-September of 2006. During the nine-month period, 46 states had temperatures among their ten warmest, with 25 states being record warm. Only Washington had statewide temperatures near average for the period.” Click on the graphic to be taken to NOAA for the full update.
This one’s for Suleiman
Posted on | October 4, 2012 | 1 Comment
Quince paste is drying in a slow oven. It’s taken 18 months to get to this point and the entire venture started as an accident. The recipe used to make it is problematic and the result is proving stubbornly sticky to the touch. Yet it’s so damn delicious that I’d proudly serve it to Suleiman the Great.
When the bare root sapling that provided the quinces was planted as part of a fruit tree allee in the winter of 2010, the plant tag read “Santa Rosa plum.” When the plant that subsequently flowered, leafed out and fruited looked like a Dr. Seuss cartoon of an apple tree, it was clear that this was no plum. The Seuss fruit was a quince.
Raw, quinces are odd and unappealing. The form is bulbous, the skin fuzzy, the body disarmingly hard and light, and the flesh a dry maze of what seems like tough cellulose. It takes cooking to tease out a quince’s pear-like aromatics, suppleness and rich store of pectin. So, as small crop of quinces ripened this autumn, for a paste recipe, I turned to the 2002 book Chez Panisse Fruit, by Alice Waters.
Click here to keep reading about cooking for Suleiman in the LA Weekly, and here for a report by Felicia Friesema on quinces appearing in local farmers markets.
High good, low bad: Mead in September 2012
Posted on | October 1, 2012 | No Comments
Photo: James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control / Wikipedia. Click on the image of Culex genus mosquito larvae to be taken to a Los Angeles County Vector Control District guide to local mosquito species.
Lake Mead’s closing elevation last night at 1,115.13 feet, or at approximately half-full, prompted New Mexico-based science writer John Fleck to wonder what Arizona, Nevada and California did with all the water sent down the Colorado River by northern states? “Waste it on hookers and blow?”
Did we? Why didn’t I get any? Here in Southern California, at the tail end of a far drier than usual local rain year, roughly half of the million or so acre feet of Colorado River water delivered to urban users from Ventura to San Diego most likely went to car washing, in pools and on lawn. Given the imprecision of hoses and lawn sprinklers, as much as a quarter of that water probably spilled into gutters. As this overflow puddled in storm drains, it created ideal conditions for mosquitoes and a bumper West Nile virus season. So Fleck is almost certainly right to suspect we wasted our manna from the north. It can even be said that we got a buzz on. Only it was the wrong kind.
Update: In a follow-up to his hookers and blow post, John Fleck desalinates his language for anyone so delicate as to have taken offense. Look at the entitlements versus delivery obligations for the Lower Basin states on the Colorado River, he writes, and without surpluses “the Lower Basin is inevitably going to drain Lake Mead.”
Tags: chance of rain > John Fleck > Lake Mead > Water Year 2011/12
Cadiz campaign donations likely impacted San Bernardino County groundwater ordinance
Posted on | October 1, 2012 | No Comments
Click to enlarge this sample from the campaign donation filings for San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt.
UPDATED 10/3/2012: Monday October 1st, gathering in special session, San Bernardino County Supervisors voted 4-1 to in effect waive the county’s groundwater ordinance in favor of allowing private water speculator Cadiz, Inc to self-monitor massive water exports from the Mojave.
Why would San Bernardino County, in the words of Cadiz opponent and former assistant county administrator John Goss, “bind itself to the terms of the memorandum of understanding without approving the very management plan it is then bound to adopt and implement”?
In a word, money. After the jump are excerpts from 16 years of newspaper reports on how Cadiz has paid to play, a tactic that in one of its wilder moments landed Cadiz chief executive officer Keith Brackpool and former California governor Gray Davis in the Middle East with the (now deposed) Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
For those following Monday’s vote, click here to be taken to San Bernardino County records of supervisor 460 forms. While surfing, do note that the declarations of Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, recipient of almost $50,000 in donations, have been prepared not in San Bernardino County, but in Orange County, by Betty Presley & Associates in Rancho Santa Margarita, where the local water district is acting as a quasi-municpal front for the Cadiz bid to export San Bernardino County’s groundwater to Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Looking at what the Riverside Press-Enterprise gives as the total of the stated donations to supervisors, $107,000 since 2007, you have to hand it to British-born Cadiz CEO Keith Brackpool. The scion of London’s “gin-and-jag” belt has made one of the best deals since Manhattan was supposedly traded for beads. Not that the Mojave groundwater doesn’t more than earn its keep left in the desert aquifer, but the market value of the supply targeted by Cadiz over the next 50 years is estimated in excess of $1.8bn. San Bernardino County supervisors have sold out the health and prosperity of the land around the Mojave National Preserve for an amount that might not even cover a down payment on a doublewide. Click here to keep reading
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
