July 13, 2020

2020.07.13
When I was about 11, my father was listening to NPR in the car and I was the captive audience in the back seat with no choice but to listen. It was some gardening and/or food themed show and the host was talking about how carrots grown in the winter produce more sugar. This is an evolutionary tactic on the carrot's part to survive harsh conditions. And that was when this man dropped the most banger line I've ever heard. "When you bite into a carrot and it tastes sweet, that's the carrot saying 'I don't want to die.'" I was floored, changed as a person forever. This line haunts me. The poetry. The emotion. NPR made me the sappy garden idiot I am today, romanticizing senescence and over analyzing the science behind vegetables.
moggiepillar
(admittedly this could be mis-spun as a somewhat anti-vegan concept...)
Elsewhere, workers labor daily to extract gold that lies more than two miles underground [...] If you think that such depths are startling, consider the sheer number of holes humans dig. One estimate suggests that for every person alive, there may exist 21 feet of borehole hollowed out in pursuit of geothermal energy, and natural gas, oil, and other hydrocarbons. Even as human toil compiles new kinds of useful metals and crystals aboveground, it creates airy space where raw resources were once bestrewn below.
A long while ago I thought about the Paul Simon line "Too many people on the bus from the airport / Too many holes in the crust of the earth", and while I'm wary of analysis that says "it's too many people!" and not more about how shared resources are being exploited and used, it seems a foresightful line- that was way I heard about fracking causing earthquakes in otherwise stable areas and putting drinking water at risk.
Power, power, power! Up here where the world was like a toy beneath me. Where I held the stick like my cock in my hand and there was no one...to say me no!
via Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution". I thought of this when Tom posted an image from an anti-mask rally with the comment "They’re doing a no-mask protest in Colorado Springs today. This is the level of sophistication. The woman has “No” crossed out."