Plastic product placement on ABC
Product placement: A "brain surgeon" with her almost constant companion, a plastic single use water bottle, in ABC's Private Practice. Source: ABC
There are various ways to advertise on network television, but only product placement inoculates the message against the fast forward button. In the case of ABC’s Private Practice, a medical drama set in Santa Monica, California, a sales pitch for bottled water was even written into the script recently. A character who we are to accept as an Ivy League-trained brain surgeon was given a speil about how ready access to bottled water untroubled by guilt about the bottle’s persistence in the environment for 1,000 years was what she loved about the show’s ocean-side clinic. With this insouciance for hire, ABC managed the ultimate perversion. No, not asking us …
The Dry Garden: Hesperaloe
Mushy leaves of South African aloe can't do this. The fibers of the Chihuahuan Desert native Hesperaloe are used in cordage.
Four years ago, I learned that a lady up the street whom I had for six years referred to as Chloe was named Cheryl. In much the same fashion, I only recently learned that a plant in my parkway that for five years I have called nolina is in fact Hesperaloe parviflora.
I learned this while singing the plant’s praises to a gardening class that had dropped by to see my rain catchment system. If there is comfort in this, it’s that hesperaloe is one heck of a plant by any name.
A member of the agave family and native to the Chihuahuan Desert, hesperaloe’s tolerance for cold (to 12 degrees) and heat (100-plus degrees) means that the plant can cope easily with what our Mediterranean climate can …
High good, low bad: Lake Mead in October 2010
“The advice given to boaters here these days – ‘If you haven’t been to Lake Mead lately, you haven’t been to Lake Mead’ – sounds like a marketing slogan dreamed up to lure return business,” writes Shaun McKinnon in the Arizona Republic. “Except in this case the advice is true. The drought on the Colorado River has reshaped the huge reservoir so dramatically in the past 11 years that it bears little resemblance to the lake captured in snapshots just a few years ago. Water levels have dropped 133 feet. Islands have emerged and grown. Rocky outcroppings push through the surface, creating watery obstacle courses whose paths shift almost daily.”
Click here to keep reading or here for hourly elevation reports from the US Bureau of Reclamation. Lake Mead closed October at 1,082.35, less than 10 feet of the point where shortages will be announced for Arizona and …
The Dry Garden: She’s back
I met Dryden Helgoe six years ago when she was part of team behind a new landscape at Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena. Shortly afterward, I worked with her on a playground plan for a school garden. During both encounters, she was inscrutable: gracious, spookily competent and distractingly beautiful as a Botticelli angel. Then, by the end of 2005, she was gone — off to start a family.
During the intervening years, I wondered more than once if the choice of stay-at-home motherhood would retire Helgoe. When I met her, she was a rising star. The University of Oregon landscape architecture graduate had a year at the Olin Studio in Philadelphia and five with Nancy Goslee Power & Associates in Santa Monica. Helgoe’s disappearance from the scene left a void.
Click here to keep reading about Dryden Helgoe’s return to landscaping in The Dry Garden column of the Los Angeles …
America’s best idea on “uncertain path”
The “national park idea as we know it, a veritable covenant between national park managers and the American public, is collapsing and will need to be redrawn,” says William C Tweed in his new book “Uncertain Path.”
While other historians might not refer to their writing as a “walking meditation,” other historians probably didn’t spend three decades as a ranger. Tweed only retired as Chief Park Naturalist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in 2006.
On Thursday November 11th Tweed will be discussing the future of America’s best idea at the Solvang Public Library, 1745 Mission Drive, Solvang, California. Time: 7.30pm. Sponsor: The Santa Ynez Natural History Society.…
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