Great idea!

Until the cars stop running, we'll have to share most roads with them. Here's a very nice urban detail that will make that wait much nicer.

(h/t Progressive Review)

Lest we forget: The Klan in Oregon

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As part of the week-long Willamette University MLK Celebration 2010, Salem Public Library will host a screening of The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon 1920-1923. The newest release of local documentarian Thomas Coulter, the film details the meteoric rise of Klan activity in communities around Oregon in the 1920s.

7 p.m. Wednesday, January 20
Loucks Auditorium at Salem Public Library, 585 Liberty St. SE
Free and open to the public

Following the screening, Coulter will be joined by Willamette University Professor of English and Film Ken Nolley, local historian John Ritter and community member Willie Richardson for a panel discussion and question-and-answer session with the audience.

The evening is sponsored by the City of Salem Human Rights & Relations Advisory Commission, and the Willamette University‘s MLK Celebration 2010 Committee and the College of Law. More information about the event is available from the City of Salem’s Human Rights & Relations Office at 503-540-2371.

More information about all the activities planned from January 18-28 in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is available online at www.willamette.edu/go/mlk or from Willamette’s Office of Multicultural Affairs at 503-370-6265.

Another Capitol Idea: Madison, Wis. leads the way on reusing schools

Wow.

A project that will transform a vacant school building on Madison’s Southside into a state-of-the art urban agriculture and community center campus.

The exterior areas of the site will include the following components:

Community Gardens serving the local neighborhood

Education Gardens serving as an outdoor classroom for students from around Dane County

Edible Landscape including perennials such as nut and fruit trees and berries

Innovative Storm Water Management that views stormwater as a resource

Rain Gardens for infiltration of stormwater

Permeable Surfaces for parking and walkways to increase stormwater infiltration

Decent summary: Answering denialist nonsense

There are a lot of garbage, tin-foil-hat arguments out there purporting to prove that climate change is a fiction cobbled up by the left to provide a reason for establishing control over all aspects of the economy, outlawing freedom, hot dogs, and Chevrolets . . . . You only need to read the Statesman Journal regularly to see a regular parade of them (and not only in letters but also in insane columns by such icons of science as George Will).

Scientific American has a pretty good rundown on these and the responses from, you know, actual scientists.

Also, James Hansen of NASA has an excellent new book out that makes a compelling case for getting off coal ASAP: "Storms of My Grandchildren: The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity. It's not a page turner because of the writing (he's not the most compelling writer) but because of the urgency of his message: we are on a collision course with our own industrial wastes which are likely to force Earth's climate out of its stable, pleasant state and force it into a much more extreme state that we're not going to like very much at all.

Update: more restrictive stryofoam recycling rules?

A LOVESalem community correspondent kindly alerts us to a change in the recycling policy at the Fresh Start market, the only place in town that will accept styrofoam for recycling:

January 11, 2010 - The Fresh Start Market had signs posted on their styrofoam collection bins that they can no longer take anything but the block styrofoam. This must have just happened, I was there before Christmas.

Recall that there were already some restrictions:

Accepted: Only clean, dry block packaging foam, meat trays or egg cartons.
NOT Accepted:

• Packing peanuts (Call 503-588-5169 for reuse options. Most shipping stores will accept them for free if clean.)
• Packing foam with tape on it
• Construction foam
• Foam that bends in half without snapping

So it appears that we're now down to "Clean, dry block packaging" period. Still, having a convenient cheap way to recycle those infernal things is a real good thing.

Also, while you're at Fresh Start, don't forget to go inside and check out their offerings -- which include Salem's-own Willamette Valley Fruit Company pies and frozen berries at excellent prices! YUM!!

Something to watch for this year

Missed this last year -- will definitely be on the lookout for it this year: Friends of French Prairie's big bash.

One of those times when The Mustache is right

Living proof that you can fool some of the people all of the time. Image via Wikipedia

Thomas Friedman is a truly ugly, soul-dead person who will surely roast in eternity for having exulted over the prospect that innocent Iraqis would be slaughtered en masse by an invading US force determined to invade an Arab country -- and he didn't really care which one -- simply to say -- in his words -- "Suck. On. This." to Arabs. Not to mention his criminal writing.

But he's been quite good on energy in the last few years, leaving aside his weird "World is Flat" delusions and recognizing the urgent need for a stiff, rising price on carbon and investments in carbon-free energy. This is one of his better pieces.

How to have less crime and less punishment

A must-read for times of state budgetary crisis -- which is Oregon's permanent, structural condition. The link above is to a NYT magazine article on the ideas covered in the book (click cover image for more on the book itself).

Every one read this!

Image by tomswift46 via Flickr

What a great, humane act of kindness here, by William Zinnser, whose books on writing should be required reading for anyone who goes anywhere near the task of teaching kids anything:

I have four principles of writing good English. They are Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity.

First, Clarity. If it’s not clear you might as well not write it. You might as well stay in bed.

Two: Simplicity. Simple is good. Most students from other countries don’t know that. When I read them a sentence that I admire, a simple sentence with short words, they think I’m joking. “Oh, Mr. Zinsser, you’re so funny,” a bright young woman from Nigeria told me. “If I wrote sentences like that, people would think I’m stupid.” Stupid like Thoreau, I want to say. Or stupid like E. B. White. Or like the King James Bible. Listen to this passage from the book of Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all. [Look at all those wonderful plain nouns: race, battle, bread, riches, favor, time, chance.]

Or stupid like Abraham Lincoln, whom I consider our greatest American writer. Here’s Lincoln addressing the nation in his Second Inaugural Address as president, in 1865, at the end of the long, terrible, exhausting Civil War:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right [eleven straight one-syllable words], let us strive on [active verb] to finish the work we are in, to bind up [active verb] the nation’s wounds, to care [active verb] for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan [specific nouns],—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Here’s another American President, Barack Obama, also a wonderful writer, who modeled his own style on Lincoln’s. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father. a beautifully written book, Obama recalls how, as a boy,

At night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known.

They were of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month. . . . A pair of college students . . . placing their orders at a lunch counter teetering on the edge of riot. . . . A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.

Such images became a form of prayer for me [beautiful phrase], bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me [active verb] . . . that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities . . . had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens [specific detail]. They expanded or contracted [active verbs] with the dreams of men. . . . In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs [specific detail], I saw [active verb] the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised [simple nouns: place, house]. . . . Because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed [active verb] that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.

So remember: Simple is good. Writing is not something you have to embroider with fancy stitches to make yourself look smart.

Principle number 3. Brevity. Short is always better than long. Short sentences are better than long sentences. Short words are better than long words. Don’t say currently if you can say now. Don’t say assistance if you can say help. Don’t say numerous if you can say many. Don’t say facilitate if you can say ease. Don’t call someone an individual [five syllables!]; that’s a person, or a man or a woman. Don’t implement or prioritize. Don’t say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation. Writing is talking to someone else on paper or on a screen.

Which brings me to my fourth principle: Humanity. Be yourself. Never try in your writing to be someone you’re not. Your product, finally, is you. Don’t lose that person by putting on airs, trying to sound superior. . . .

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away

Some arrogant outfit called "Clear" -- some sort of wireless internet scam -- sends junk mail to LOVESalem HQ, despite our energetic efforts to get on every "Do Not Call" and "Do Not Mail" list in existence and our total lack of interest in supporting any business that is converting forests to landfill material by sending junk mail to unwelcoming non-customers.

But to top it off, they reveal themselves to be deceptive liars to boot.

In clean, normal-size print in the body of the letter you see this:

CLEAR is simple
Just plug and surf. No appointment, no installation visit and no annual contract required.

But lo! Down at the bottom, in the middle of a dense paragraph SIX-POINT GREY-ON-WHITE-BACKGROUND type, you can, with a magnifying glass and strong lighting, barely make out

Requires $35 activation fee with a one-year agreement.

So just remember: CLEAR -- a firm you clearly don't want to support.