Fairfax County Gov media folks

Link Between Creativity and Eccentricity...I Told You.

Schumann, they say, believed Beethoven, long-dead, was channeling music to him. Ai Wei Wei insisted on stating the dangerous - long after it became obvious that things would get ugly.

Ah...creative minds - so rarely tidy...Psych Central talks here about research showing tangible, physiological links between "creativity" and a reduced ability to filter the noise and irrelevance around us - seeing relevance everywhere. Some one wrote a (long) comment to the article asking who's really crazy, the person who throws herself into her thankless art, or the person who hates his job. Hmmm.

The Link Between Creativity and Eccentricity

If Beethoven were sending you music, what would you do? Would you have the nerve to play it, write it, paint it, build it, expose it, suggest it, eat it, perform it, set fire to it, sing it? Maybe he is. Can you hear?

Lomography: Shooting from the Really Hip

Confessions Of An Editor - Nights Out from Lomography on Vimeo.

Imagine the surprise of the LOMO Russian Arms and Optical Factory when it invented the LOMO Kompact camera with such superior optics that the heartbreakingly clear shots of dams, train stations, and missile silos caused agents to find each other in gloomy naves, sunny parks, and busy cafes, dropping small packets into baby carriages, sliding them under their Figaro's, and dropping them into raincoat pockets of the man facing west on the Dneiper Bridge murmuring code like, "Lo-fi grain," "Beautiful light leak," and "Contrast and saturation, comrade, contrast and saturation."

Some say it was the warmth of this little camera that melted the Cold War, that put shooting from the hip in a better light.

Use your power for good at Lomography http://www.lomography.com/about/lomographs.

Fish and Spatial Scales

The American Institute of Biological Sciences' Public Policy Report today lists this whale of an achievement: the USGS has released at last its interactive choropleth map displaying "Risk of Current Habitat Degradation for stream and coastal fish
habitat."http://www.nbii.gov/far/nfhap/ They provide links to USGS-NBII-hosted public WMS map services and downloadable data and metadata.

A mammoth undertaking and immensely powerful tool for natural resources and fisheries biologists, water conservation scientists and engineers, this map, using vast datasets covering spatial levels from Ecosystem Drainage level (think Chesapeake Bay watershed) to the Reston-sized water catchments, was compiled by the National Fish Habitat Board. Their report, called affably “Through a Fish’s Eye: The Status of Fish Habitats in the United States 2010" brought news that more than a quarter of all streams in the U.S. are at high or very high risk of habitat degradation.

Poor land and water management practices
nation-wide include intensive row crops, fertilizer use, channelization,
water withdrawals, loss of perennial vegetation, and invasive species.

The map scores specialized-ecoregion and volunteer/community efforts called Fish Habitat Partnership Boundaries - like the intriguing Desert Fish Habitat represented by the Mexican Stone Roller in cold rivers like the Chiricahua and its high montane conifer forests increasing parched by years-long drought; and "Driftless Area" whose 24,000 square-miles covering parts of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois full of spring-fed coldwater streams and a resulting diversity of plants, animals, and habitats are being impacted by field agriculture and habitat fragmentation.

Eastern Brook Trout Habitat Partnership (http://easternbrooktrout.org/) web-based interactive data management system with GIS capabilities has also been developed.

Jenny O: That's What Girls Are Made Of

Female artists who couldn't catch a break, catch fire at SXSW Austin this week,
and Jenny O is smolderin': ember-warm, cheeky, elemental. Likely to get loose. (some word-play about "fan" goes here)

"Well, OK Honey" http://www.myspace.com/jennyo and its 1966 girl-band groove - You'll like it. And what's not to like? in its pony bounce.

But its freshness is its "secret-life-of-girls" frankness that seems to divulge that that's how girls really dance, and they do it in the woods and in neighborhood streets: smelly kittens in mocassins, parkas, and uncombed hair with fat bottoms and red knee socks.

"Well, OK Honey"'s the track chosen for mass consumption - others songs are smokier, plain, about love, home, food, bravery, and confusion - that's also how we dance.

Brian McNight said of Jenny O: "A night of unadulterated, gluten-free sexual healing." Steve Martin (I don't know why) It's like we're listening to Willie Nelson making love to a Staples singer."...I don't know why...

Head in the Sink:We are What We Sweep

2847

A kitchen midden that hasn't been flung out the door. Appalling and charming the detritus and sloughings of our lives we scuff through duning up. Ours is mostly hair, I'm afraid, most of it mine, I'm really afraid, and the cat's - all we have of her, but I'm sure I didn't get it all, if that's a comfort, Gravelly bits - although we take off our shoes on the porch - the nibs of tulip poplar seeds that ballast them to spear into loam, And color: pink confetti of onion skin, orange rind, sunny yellow Yogi De-tox tea bag labels, a Mediterranean theme on my floor: cilantro, parsley, pine needs, honey.

Seeds Feed Us: PakistanSeedDrive is Grassroots Aid

The best solutions are the simple solutions. In Pakistan, earthquakes, cross-border fighting, and then a flood, swelling the Indus river and its tributaries the length of the country 100 miles across 900 miles to the Arabian Sea. When the water receded in August last year, 2,000 lives had been lost, livestock drowned, farmhouses, storehouses and infrastructure wrecked. Nothing to eat. Not only that: saved seed was lost, and no money and no place to buy this year's seed. Although devastated soil structure - fields are actually buried under alluvial silt that hardens to goo then brick, can only be overcome with time and sweat - is an immense and limiting factor, PakistanSeedDrive went to the root of one of Pakistan's agricultural problems by collecting and sending seeds. Give a man a fist - full of bean seeds.