Cocoposts

Worry Wine

San Francisco Chronicle reports Napa news:

The worst spring cold snap in more than 30 years is threatening to wreak havoc on the wine industry as three recent days of frost have killed grapevine buds up and down the crucial North Coast vineyard region. ...

The most damage to vines took place March 31 and last Saturday and Sunday, when temperatures dipped below the freezing point of 32 degrees to as low as 27 degrees....

The North Coast growing region is the premier wine land in America, anchored by Sonoma and Napa counties and stretching from Marin to Mendocino and Lake counties. Producing 450,000 tons of grapes every year, it is a $1 billion industry, so even a 10 percent loss would be huge in terms of dollars, growers said.

Crackberry Outages

San Francisco Chronicle:

The company that makes the ubiquitous, addictive BlackBerry smart phones said Tuesday it was still looking into what caused the second widespread service disruption in less than a year.  Research in Motion Ltd. said customers in the United States and Canada "experienced intermittent delays" for about three hours Monday...

During which time, RIM's 12 million users worldwide went ape sh*t.    

"Everyone's in crisis because they're all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing's happening," Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament, said during a caucus meeting. "It's almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that's quite phenomenal."

 Just like when they're working.

 

Another Coco Banner

Can't wait to use it on DCF so I won't.  Guess which is a cocorelative.  Hint: dark shirt.

Pig Kissing

Thanks  Joy!

Bad News for Coco

From MSNBC comes evidence of the sad state of the circus.

LONDON - Bad news for Coco and Blinko — children don't like clowns, and even older kids are scared of them. 

That's the finding of a poll of youngsters by researchers from the University of Sheffield who were examining how to improve the decor of hospital children's wards.

The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between 4 and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary.

Who doesn't?  I blame Stephen King.  Maybe Fellini.   

As metaphor for the political realm: the Roundhouse is the circus and the lobbyists are the clowns.  Disliking them won't make them go away - although I can take care of Blinko for a small fee. 

Surge in Off-Roading

Durango makes the New York Times series on federal lands.  This part called Wheels in the Wild.

DURANGO, Colo. In the San Juan National Forest here, an iron rod gate is the last barrier to the Weminuche Wilderness, a mountain redoubt above 10,000 feet where wheels are not allowed.

But the gate has been knocked down repeatedly, shot at and generally disregarded. Miles beyond it, a two-track trail has been punched into the wilderness by errant all-terrain-vehicle riders who have insisted on going their own way, on-trail or off.

There are so many of these machines,€ said Dave Petersen, a bow hunter who monitors public lands issues here in Durango for the environmental group Trout Unlimited,  it has€œ made our big public lands much smaller, for the wildlife and for us. (...)

T-shirt image from the The T-shirt guy.

And this sidebar from the Times story:

Groups Representing Motorized Users:

Blue Ribbon Coalition
Americans for Responsible Recreational Access
Advocates for Access to Public Lands
Ride With Respect
Utah Shared Access Alliance
Montanans for Multiple Use
Colorado Off-Highway Vehicle Coalition

Groups Seeking to Curb Off-Highway Vehicle Use on Public Lands:

Responsible Trails America
Trout Unlimited
Backcountry Hunters and Anglers
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
Rangers for Responsible Recreation

Notice some imbalance?  Vehicle manufacturers participate heavily in some of those motorized user groups.  And it doesn't include groups like the American Motorcyclist Association  or the Off-Road Business Association, where No Trails = No Sales!   The Times doesn't touch on these formidable business interests in the "debates" about ATV use.

Honda seems to over-stress the functional aspects of their vehicles.

(...)  On the farm, a tractor cost exponentially more to purchase and maintain, and an ATV uses 8 percent of the fuel necessary to feed a tractor.  Consequently utility usage exploded in the 1980s and ATVs became multi-purpose machines, serving both recreational and utility purposes. This multi-purpose usage grew from 30 percent of total usage in 1985 to approximately 80 percent of today's ATV market. (...)

By the time the '90s rolled in, the Honda FourTrax had become an essential part of the great American toolbox. You'd be hard pressed to find a Louisiana rice farm, Washington apple orchard or Montana cattle ranch that didn't have at least one. 

From copper mines to banana plantations, golf courses to pig farms, forest reclamation projects to shopping center maintenance, nothing on wheels had ever been as versatile, reliable, efficient and affordable, on the job or on the weekend, as the Honda ATV. 

Though sport models such as Honda's FourTrax 300EX and the new-for-'99 400EX are immensely popular with sport and recreational riders, industry observers estimate that 85 percent of ATV use in the '90s revolved around some sort of enterprise. Mr. Takeuchi's idea had grown up, gone to work and done a good job.

Now let' s go play!  But be careful.  Here's an interesting bit about the power of ATV manufacturers from Oregon Live. 

As the ATV industry's lobbyists fight to shape regulation in Washington, D.C., its lawyers have built a solid bulwark around their product in another arena: the courts. Injured riders once won huge verdicts, among them a landmark $5.7 million Oregon case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. But that was long ago.

Many lawyers these days are reluctant to sue ATV manufacturers because it's just too hard to prevail. The ATV companies spend heavily to defend cases and blame the riders for accidents. Victories for plaintiffs are rare. One big reason is the sway that government-sanctioned ATV safety warnings carry with jurors.

Hunting and Habitat

A Denver Post's story noted a November National Geographic article about the decline in hunting and the implications for habitat protection.

"The great irony is that many species would not survive at all were it not for the hunters trying to kill them," wrote author Robert M. Poole.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service statistics reveal just 12.5 million hunters in 2006, more than 1.5 million fewer than in 1991. Overall, the number of hunters and anglers declined from 37.8 million in 2001 to 33.9 million in 2006. The Rocky Mountain region experienced one of the most dramatic declines.

Hunting seems irrelevant to many people.  Others are fine with it in the abstract.  As if killing animals was a very distant thing and OK for someone else but not for them - like extreme skiing.  Others carry a stereotypic view of hunters involving drunken red-necked guns blasting away in the woods (not terribly different from the stereotypic view of the back-slapping Iowa farmer - only wearing bright orange.)

The author in the National Geographic piece attempts to capture the diversity of the hunting experience and describes his own in this excellent bit:

As a bird hunter who occasionally shoots a deer for the freezer, I have never shared the big-game hunter’s appreciation for horns, antlers, and trophies, which convey an elevated status upon those who keep track of such things. They carry pictures of trophy elk and whitetails in their wallets and speak knowingly about Boone and Crockett Club scores for antler points, rack spreads, and other measurements. It may be that trophy fever is rooted in the aesthetic that prompts me to save a few grouse or woodcock feathers each year—which are beautiful on their own merits and evoke a particular day in the field, when a bird twittered up through the alders, folded in mid-flight, and was brought to hand by Bart, an old Brittany spaniel who still knows his job and does it with style.

Bart and I pile into the car with the first cool days of autumn, heading north, as we’ve been doing for more than a decade. Even at age 13, he still quivers like a puppy; he knows what’s in store, the very thing for which he was bred as a pointing dog. Year after year, we tromp the same moldering orchards, endure the same slashing hawthorn thickets, hear the same old stories from friends in New Brunswick and Maine, and flop in the same seedy hotels along the way. We mourn the dogs that have died since last year and meet the puppies that will replace them. This routine is a reminder that the seasons dance to a cadence as old and reassuring as Ecclesiastes—even older.

Each bird I take from Bart is accepted with a mingling of thanks, a twinge of regret, and a smoothing of earth-colored feathers. When we have enough for a meal, it is cause for ceremony, accompanied by good wine and extravagant praise for Bart, who can no longer hear a word I say but pretends to, knowing this will earn him a nice piece of woodcock or grouse at the end of the show. Such gestures are important in a world where hunting seems increasingly irrelevant and misunderstood.

 

 

Hands Over the Christmas Vacation

Among the seasonal traditions at the cocobode is the annual movie gorging, beginning with the ceremonial replaying of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.  It's not Christmas without viewing Clark Griswold's Grand Illumination of 25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights.  When he gets them lit, a nuke plant is rev's up and the Hallelujah chorus sings.  Remember Aunt Bethany brings her cat wrapped up as a gift?  And the cat gets fried chewing the tree lights?  Bethany was played by Mae Questel, a vaudevillian era actress and famous cartoon voice, in her last film appearance.   

Writer John Hughes wrote this, along with another on my favorite movie list - Ferris Bueller.  Says something, about taste and maturity, I know.   

Christmas presents included Hands Over the City for my growing collection of planning movies.  This is Francesco Rosi's 1963 story of Naples's real estate speculation and corruption.   The lead character is a developer and politician who votes on plan changes to benefit his housing construction business. 

Francesco Rosi, in a disc two interview, describes how one square meter - bought while in the countryside becomes worth a great deal if serviced with electricity and water- paid for by the state or the city.

All you had to do was change a color to change the purpose of at site and therefore its value would multiply enormously;  The "legislative plan of 39" was continually messed with and undermined.

The theme seems to resonate.      

 

 

Keys and Locks

Yesterday's debilitating deja vu moment involved unlabeled keys and a slightly mystical quest to match them with locks. 

Then I had a vivid dream last night about finding a key to an office drawer full of unpaid and overdue tax bills.

The keys seem to breed in the basket where I put them - making ever more orphan baby keys.    I’m thinking about making a key wind chime.  Hung up that way, the clatter and  jingle might be like a homing call to the locks.  Then they could find each other and doors, boxes or minds would be opened.   

 

Cougar Hot Tub

From the Denver Post via AP:

DEADWOOD, S.D.—A relaxing soak in a hot tub came to an abrupt end when Marlene Todd came eye to eye with a mountain lion in her backyard. "I was kind of hidden, sitting with my back up against the side of the tub, and I heard a little rustling sound in the needles right beside me," she said.

Todd said she thought it might have been her house cat until she saw "this big, tan, hairy body" just 4 inches away.    "I didn't realize what it was until it took a leap and jumped up on the side of my hot tub," Todd said.    ..."We locked eyes, and it kicked off of the hot tub and ran away.

... "Now I know what a goldfish feels like when the cat is staring in its bowl," Todd said.

A hot tub soak on a Thursday morning?  Must be nice - living in Deadwood.  "Shouldn't you be working?" the big cat asked.  "And where did this house come from?"