Sometimes I read so much depressing news — about global warming, the war in Iraq, genocide in Darfur, the religious right’s reign of terror in this country — that I have to crawl into bed with a trashy book to recover. And then occasionally an article arrives via one of my dozens of Google alerts that makes me think there’s hope after all.
LA Times School Me blog: Some tenacious people managed to turn several acres of asphalt at 24th Street Elementary, a public school in a rundown section of Los Angeles, into a teaching garden like Alice Waters did for a school here. Teachers now show kids how to dye clothes with beets from the garden, and demonstrate “everything from the math of growth rates to the science of photosynthesis there amid the corn and sage.” Pushing through the entrenched bureaucracy sounds hellish –”They’ll poke their eyes out with those hoes!” — but man, what a cool thing: several generations of poor kids who will know that food comes from dirt, not McDonald’s.
Other stuff we read today:
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: An inventor has created a sticker that shows when fruit is ripe. Man of La Muncha wonders if previous generations had the ability to tell fruit ripeness, and if we have lost that ability. This isn’t much of an issue with locally sourced fruits: if they smell good, they’re ripe.
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Humor:
