Head in the Sink:We are What We Sweep

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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.

Food Environment Maps: The USDA says, "Let's Eat!"

Food and Mapping make a healthy diet and the USDA's Food Environment Atlas - the barely year-old online tool, which measures a community’s food-choice landscape has just been supersized. The update was launch in February and increases its food environment factors like availability and type of restaurants and food stores, food prices, socioeconomic characteristics, and health outcomes from 90 to 168. The data is downloadable as Excel files, and are arranged alphabetically, first by state and then by county. State and county FIPS codes are provided. The county list is from the 2000 census.

These data are a trove generating nearly limitless question-posing and question-answering possibilities about community and environmental health, economic development, land and city planning, business placement, and education outreach.

Components measure change over time, and several indicators that will make the Atlas more useful in gauging residents’ food accessibility in rural communities - regions more likely than urban to suffer from obesity - nicely complementing First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign against childhood obesity.

This Counts as Spring: The Great Backyard Bird Count

Map by Me

Choropleth-o-Rama! Wow What a Map!!

Those smarties at the Centers for Disease Control present (and really this is just one example of their knock-home-the-message communication skills) a jaw-dropping example of a choropleth map - this one shows the prevalence of obesity from 1985 through 2009. Half movie (it's a drama, not a comedy), half public service announcement - this technique presents what must be gobs of data in compelling, and (interestingly) palatable bites.
Man, what a map.http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html#State

I would be interesting to compare access to healthy food in urban, periurban, and rural regions and obesity - a health issue associated with food deserts. In the US, rural counties have the highest level of diabetes/obesity. Why no gardens?

Base2Stay: A Little Swank in London

Base2Stay is a series of hotels: London, Liverpool. We stayed a Saturday night at one, I've forgotten why, on a sketchy edge of Kensington - the potted palms were chained to the pretty marble porch. Sketchy, maybe, but Base2Stay knows what swank is: gorgeous bedding, gleaming bath, equally gleaming European desk attendants, but it's neearly affordable (95 pounds a night - double it to translate to dollars; 65 pounds in Liverpool) because it knows exactly how much swank it is going to dollop on you. Exactly. How much.

As a result, the room was the size of the bed, and climbing over, the view was of the bins and the road, although the road was Kensington-quiet: a fruit shop and the chemist's on the corner, a Mini whizzing by or a Bentley prowling.

In the morning, galumphing in hiking boots and glasses past the impeccable, freshly spritzed, multi-lingual desk attendants. We went for good Italian coffee around the corner in Earl's Court. On the way, there was half a young man lying on the sidewalk, half through someone's garden gate, the bottom edge of his jacket, a plaid shirt, his legs, and pretty good shoes in the path. They were strange to approach. He was lying on his hip - the way you do - so his legs looked like they were walking toward us in a world on a perpendicular plane.

Brian hopped them, which was both delightful and appalling. Delightful, really.

It had been raining lightly, but the sidewalk under him was dry. He was gone when we walked back, but the legs walking were still there.