It was a little bittersweet hearing NPR’s story about the half-gallon challenge this morning. When Appalachian Trail thru-hikers reach the trail’s halfway point, in Pennsylvania’s Pine Grove Furnace State Park, many stop at the camp store to buy and consume a symbolic half-gallon of ice cream. In the weeks beforehand, there’s much discussion about how …
Category Archives: General
Manufacturing to make a return in Southside?
In a New York Times article about the increased cost of shipping (a 40-foot container now costs $8,000 to move from China to the U.S., compared to $3,000 just a few years ago) comes a bit of good news for manufacturing in our region: Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship …
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It’s time to tap into our vast offshore energy reserves.
Virginia is really, really ripe for wind farms, nowhere as effectively as in the Chespeake. There are some spots suitable along the spine of the Blue Ridge, but in the whole of the Chesapeake and in the whole of the continental shelf, there is just a stunning amount of wind energy waiting to be harvested. …
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My Virginia belt.
Lady Bird ate my belt just a few weeks after she came to live with us. By “my belt,” I mean my one and only belt. I wore it every day since I don’t know when. Certainly since eighth grade. It was just a strip of brown leather with a silver nickel buckle—simplicity itself. Years …
On Amtrak.
Ben Jervey writes in Good Magazine (motto: “For people who give a damn”) about his Amtrak trip across the nation. I enjoy taking Amtrak, but only because flying is so bad. Jervey’s experiences are about the same: the train is chronically late, the food is terrible, and the services are sparse. I’ve been thinking about …
Christopher Cerf’s “The World’s Largest Cheese.”
Today I discovered in my mailbox Christopher Cerf‘s “The World’s Largest Cheese,” a bizarre and occasionally brilliant book (Jorn Barger called it “a wonderful bit of fluff”) that I ordered used for a few bucks recently. Far and away the best portion of the book is the “See The Merinos” series of illustrations, which I’m …
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Birthday pile in a sadness bowl.
Joanne McNeil at The Tomorrow Museum writes about the social awkwardness of grown-up birthdays, particularly in the era of Facebook, and how that’s emblematic of a devaluation of social interconnectedness and, indeed, friendship itself: Were there a Getting Things Done-style book for keeping up with friends, well articulated methods how not to alienate ourselves from …
Clever new milk packaging.
Call me a huge dork, but I’m really excited about this new milk jug design taken up by Wal-Mart and Costco. They’re rectangular, allowing them to be packed far more tightly in shipment, use less packaging, and have a greatly reduced overall environmental impact. This is precisely the sort of small manufacturing modification that big …
Dominion won’t help you kick the habit.
Dominion has gotten the OK from the State Corporation Commission to raise electrical rates by 18%, effective immediately. The SCC agreed with Dominion’s assertion that they were simply trying to cover the increased costs of fuel, and I don’t know of any reason to doubt that’s so. (Dominion had to ask permission because they’re regulated …
£10k purse for proving homeopathy’s effectiveness.
A doctor and a physicist have put up a £10,000 for anybody who can demonstrate that homeopathic medicine works better than a placebo. Homeopathy is at best a placebo, at worst it’s something closer to medicalized superstition. “Homeopaths,” writes New Scientist dryly, “seem in no hurry to take up the offer.” Somebody will win that …
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