October 2007 Archives
5:35 p.m.
Move over, ya big lunk -- there's a new kid in town!
China's Yuan Rises Most Since End of Dollar Link on Bank Signal
"China Life Insurance Co. has surpassed AT&T Inc. in market value, giving China more of the world's 10 largest companies than the U.S. for the first time. Five of the 10 biggest companies by market capitalization are now Chinese, compared with three that are located in America, after China's benchmark stock index almost tripled this year."
Maybe all that Top Ramen I ate while in college (and for several years afterward) will help prepare me for my new overlords . . .
5:46 p.m.
You know how women joke that beauty is pain and fashion is suffering? Yeah, well, get a load of these photographs of models' feet during a runway show for Stella McCartney's Spring 2008 line:
"My previous gig was for prison fashion in Russia!"
11:59 a.m.
Absolutely beautiful outside -- delightfully sunny, nicely breezy and only just slightly chilly with all the excess humidity of the past summer months completely vanished. I had no idea Dallas weather could be so spot-on perfect. After hiding away in the condo throughout July, August and September, I can actually walk around outside and enjoy my surroundings without feeling like I'm going to die from heat prostration.
I have no idea how long this type of weather lasts here, but I'm going to enjoy it to its fullest while I can. Everyone else in the neighborhood seems to have the same idea -- there are groups of people chatting away outside the coffee shop, individuals strolling with their dogs, children playing in the development's small park area, shoppers walking in and out of the nearby stores. During the summer months, it was highly unusual to see even one other person on the sidewalks.
The BF is in Oklahoma today for one of his last fittings for his new Ossur Proprio Foot. See the video below for an introduction to the beginnings of real bionic technology for the masses.
He said he might be bringing it home today for testing, and I'm excited to see how it operates and the difference it will make in the way he walks and moves in his daily life. There's so much discomfort and awkwardness of movement he endures with the prosthesis he presently wears -- here's hoping that technology has finally caught up to prosthetics in a meaningful way.
6:40 p.m.
I ran across this story today and was amazed that I'd never heard of this before:
Giant garbage patch floating in Pacific
"An enormous island of trash twice the size of Texas is floating in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii . . . The trash stew is 80 percent plastic and weighs more than 3.5 million tons."
Twice the size of Texas? I mean, we could dump some dirt on the thing and call it an island nation -- and it's only supposed to get bigger as time goes on. The article states that this debris patch has been accumulating since the 1950's . . . did no one think, through the passage of over five decades, that perhaps we might want to take some action regarding our oceanic trash pit before we hit the point of no return?
And why does all that trash accumulate in this particular spot in the first place? There's a 10-million-square-mile oval in the Pacific that's known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an area that's almost unnaturally calm because of the lingering mountain of high pressure air that renders the waters near motionless.
In 1997, a sailor named Charles Moore decided to take his boat through the gyre, and didn't like what he saw:
"It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap . . . Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents."
Ugh. Thank god there's only place like this in the ocean, right? Right?
"There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. "That corresponds to a quarter of the earth's surface," Moore says. "So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes."
I'm not remotely close to being considered an environmentalist, yet this information makes even me shudder.
I suppose there isn't any chance that we could just load the whole mess onto some rockets and blast it off into orbit?
"As of June 21, 2000, the (U.S. Space Command) counted 8,927 man-made objects in the great above and beyond; some are there more or less permanently. Of the total, 2,671 are satellites (working or not), 90 are space probes that have been launched out of Earth orbit, and 6096 are mere chunks of debris zooming around the third planet from the Sun."
Oh, yeah . . . we're already a little crowded up there as it is. So, when exactly are we leaving for Mars? I'm not so sure how much time we've got left on this big unflushed toilet we call home.
2:32 p.m.
I like Doris Lessing -- or, technically speaking, I like her writing. I've never personally met Ms. Lessing, but after seeing this video clip, I rather wish that I had:
What a perfect response.
The first book I read of hers was Briefing For a Descent Into Hell. I was in my mid-twenties and only shortly out of college with a (quite useless) degree in literature, and I was absolutely blown away by the depth and breadth of ideas sprawled across the pages. I had not been introduced to Doris Lessing when I was in school, so I quickly set about to rectify that terrible misfortune.
I dove into the rest of her science fiction works (The five piece Canopus in Argos series), tried (and failed) several times to get through The Golden Notebook, and the last novel of hers I read was Love, Again, a very frank yet tender account of falling in love when you're supposedly past the age where falling in love is expected or even entirely welcome.
I've always admired her intelligence, if not her actual work (again, The Golden Notebook -- god knows I tried!), and hearing that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature made me just a little bit happy, all quietly and privately at my kitchen table as I gulped the morning's necessary and first cup of coffee.
8:25 p.m.
Just returned from a week long trip to Chicago, which was nice -- it was great to get out of Dallas for a little bit, but the cool, refreshing weather of a normal Chicago October was absent due to a heat wave that even screwed with their annual Chicago Marathon:
Scorching Chicago Marathon Leaves 1 Dead
"At least 49 runners were taken to hospitals and another 250 were treated at the site. The 88-degree heat and sweltering humidity were so draining that organizers shut down the second half of the course four hours after the start . . . Race director Carey Pinkowski said organizers were concerned that emergency medical personnel wouldn't be able to keep up with heat-related injuries. "We were seeing a high rate of people that were struggling," Pinkowski said. "If you were out there at 1 o'clock, it was a hot sun. It was like a summer day. It was just a brutally hot day."
And it really was hot in Chicago. The BF and I cut a number of afternoon treks short due to the glaring sun and the heat. I mean, we left Dallas to get away from the heat, but it looks like we took it with us . . . and it also looks like I brought back back some kind of virus in return, though I most likely picked that up from the airplane.
The plane on which we returned to Dallas was one of the filthiest airplanes I've ever had the misfortune to board. American Airlines has a reputation for dirty airplanes and bad customer service, but this was ridiculous -- the seat backs were ripped and coming apart, the overhead bins were covered with what looked like years of grime and human grease, the seats, armrests and carpeting were stained and caked with food, ink and god knows what else. I spent the entire flight trying to keep my head from leaning back on the seat, I was that disgusted.
I can't for the life of me figure out how airlines find this acceptable -- their planes aren't running 24/7. There's actual downtime when these vehicles can be cleaned, so why aren't they?
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