Tag Archives: culture

Marriage Equality: Way To Go Washington State!

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You know, I haven’t been very pleased with the government here in Washington State lately. (Just one example.)

But, this morning I woke to some good news for a change.

Via The Seattle Times:

Historic Senate vote clears way for gay marriage in state

The state Senate passed legislation Wednesday night that would legalize gay marriage. The bill now goes to the House, where it’s expected to pass easily.

It’s always puzzled me that in a country where heterosexual marriages end in divorce 50% of the time, heterosexuals somehow still think that only heterosexuals should be allowed to marry.

Happily, Washington is poised to become the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriage, and I only hope that that number will continue to grow.

Likes and Follows and Blogging, Oh My!

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To paraphrase Dorothy Parker:

I love writing, love having written, but getting read, well, that’s a little more complicated.

I started my first blog the same year that Facebook was born. Zuckerberg and associates went on to achieve fame and fortune, and I still work a 40-hour/week day job and make no money whatsoever from this part-time pastime called blogging.

But, I’m not bitter. Really. I’m not.

Seriously, Fish & Bicycles is the product of many precious stolen moments, painstakingly extracted from the crazy busyness of work, homeownership, husbanding, parenting, and other assorted pursuits and distractions. Consequently, I barely have enough time to hammer out the entries that I do post, and I could do so much more if only I had more time.

Of course, if it were as simple as that I wouldn’t be writing what you are reading right now. Instead, this funny thing happens when you publish your work out in public for all to see for so long: It just might happen that people might read what you’ve published — I know, crazy right? — some of those people might even like what you’ve published, and some might keep coming back for more.

And, however much you tell yourself that it doesn’t matter, that you adhere to the advice of a writing mentor of yours who said you should write as if no one will ever read it, it feels really, REALLY good when people ARE reading your writing and even better when they tell you that they liked what you wrote.

So, there were always comments to manage, but the vast majority of part-time, non-professional bloggers like me don’t get more comments than they can handle.

But now, thanks to Like and Follow buttons, readers are provided with a wider variety of ways to show their appreciation for your work, and bloggers are told in articles all over the web that the best way to build traffic early on is to engage with folks who take the time to read and appreciate your work, to respond to their comments, thank them for the Likes and Follows, and visit their blogs to reciprocate.

Well, if you’re a social creature like me, that all comes quite naturally. I enjoy the social networking element of blogging immensely, I love meeting new people and discovering great blogs, especially given that these great people and blogs are from all over the world!

And yet, remember that bit about stolen moments extracted from crazy busyness?

If Fish & Bicycles was my day job, if I was getting paid to blog all day, this would be a non-issue and I’d have plenty of time to write and engage with the blogosphere.

Sadly, finally arriving at the regrettable point of this long, rambling note, I’m having to make the painful decision to cut WAY back on my responses to Likes and Follows.

I hope to continue replying to comments left at Fish & Bicycles, and I hope to stop by the blogs that I follow from time to time, but I’m no longer going to be able to reciprocate every time someone Likes one of my posts or chooses to Follow Fish & Bicycles.

There, I said it.

Heavy sigh.

I hope you all will understand, and please know that I’m deeply honored and touched when anyone appreciates what I do here.

TED Talks: Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun

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I’m continually surprised by how many times I’ve recommended TED Talks — those incredibly thought-provoking, inspiring, often moving products of the various TED conferences held around the world — to people who have never heard of them, for I find them so thoroughly accessible, with each talk lasting no more than 18-20 minutes.

I mean, we can all find time for a few of these a day, or more scattered throughout the week. Right?

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted a TED Talks video, and today I’ve got a juicy one for you.

This was a challenging video for me, as I suspect it would be for most of my fellow peaceniks. The assertion made by Peter van Uhm, Chief of Defense for The Netherlands, that guns and armies are necessary tools for peace, rubs me the wrong way. And yet, having been raised Jewish, I carry the inherited trauma of the Holocaust, and I’ve struggled my whole life with the question of whether or not violent military action is justifiable in order to save people from oppression or genocide.

Now, I don’t agree with everything that Mr. van Uhm says, but I admire the TED organization for inviting him to speak and present his case, and he does so eloquently, with great sensitivity, and with great respect for his fellow TED presenters and attendees, who are trying to make the world a better, more peaceful place via a variety of other means.

First There Was Greenwashing. Now There’s Brownwashing?!

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Anyone REALLY paying attention to issues of environmental protection and sustainability knows about the nefarious practice of Greenwashing, whereby companies and their PR firms make questionable claims that their products are eco-friendly, exaggerate just how eco-friendly they are, or worse, make no claims at all, but by adding green color and graphics of green leaves and trees and such to the packaging, they try to pass off a product that has no special eco-friendly attributes as one that does.

I heard a snippet of a piece on the public radio show Marketplace this morning, that appears to have been taken from an article in the Wall Street Journal, about how brown is the new green:

When consumers see brown they think green, say companies that sell products like paper towels, napkins and diapers.

Dunkin’ Brands Inc. and Target Corp.’s in-store cafes among other chains have made the switch from white to brown napkins. Next week, Cascades Tissue Group is trying what marketers long considered the unthinkable: brown toilet paper. It is pitching beige rolls, dubbing the product “Moka.”

Brown paper products are becoming an obvious way for consumers to show that they care about the environment. They assume the products are made with recycled materials or didn’t involve whitening chemicals.

Now, however, white paper can be made from 100% recycled fibers and whitened without the chemical chlorine, traditionally the primary complaint against it. Still, Cascades says dropping the extra step of bleaching reduces the environmental impact of Moka toilet paper by about 25% compared to their white recycled paper because of energy savings and other benefits…

So far so good. Nothing particularly bad here, right?

Well, this here is where the danger lies:

Even so, Dunkin’ Donuts decided to use recycled brown napkins about three years ago, in part because of what the color “symbolized,” says Scott Murphy, vice president of strategic manufacturing and supply for Dunkin’ Brands. Tests in a handful of restaurants showed the brown napkins made customers “feel like they were doing something good for the environment,” and matched the décor, he says.

Now, Dunkin’ Donuts still made a good decision. It’s great that they are using 100% recycled, non-bleached napkins! But the potentially exploitable thing is knowing what the brown in the brown napkins has come to “symbolize” and that it has the power to make customers “feel” a certain way.

The irony of all ironies in this story comes in the next paragraph:

At least one company adds brown pigments to non-chlorine bleached diapers to drive home the environmental message. The diapers need “visual differentiation,” says Louis Chapdelaine, product director of fibers at Seventh Generation Inc., a Burlington, Vt.- based company that specializes in eco-friendly household cleaning products and paper. It’s important “not so much that it’s brown, it’s that it’s not white,” he says. All diapers, if left undyed, would be the color of raw plastic or semi-translucent, he says.

What?!

Listen, it’s awesome that they aren’t using chlorine bleach to whiten their diapers. But these diapers stink, whether soiled or not, for their obvious attempt at Brownwashing. They could dye these diapers any color at all, so why brown? In fact, considering the unpleasant brown stuff that these diapers typically capture from the babies wearing them, you’d think that beige or brown would be the absolutely last color that Seventh Generation would choose, and this claim by their product director that this is simply a matter of providing “visual differentiation” really rings hollow. They even have a whole webpage dedicated to defending their brown-dyed diapers, though it, too, reads as nothing more than an elaborate rationalization.

Meanwhile, the folks at Babyworks.com and the Mothering Magazine online forum are none too pleased, and I have to say that I’m deeply disappointed in Seventh Generation, a company that has been an originator and a leader in the recycled and eco-friendly product marketplace. It could be that their products are still as eco-friendly as they always have been, but this brown dye thing and the excuses they make for it really has me questioning their integrity for the first time.

Sure, there are worse fish to fry, companies that have made no efforts to offer more renewable/sustainable products, and they won’t be earning a nod from me in my Celebrating Eco-Progress series anytime soon.

Let’s just hope that they don’t take after Seventh Generation and jump on the Brownwashing bandwagon too.

The Question of Celebrity Obligation

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The Argument is legendary amongst a circle of friends I’ve been lucky enough to know since grade school. We’re all from New Jersey, where arguing is a pastime rather than a friendship-threatening conflict, we’re all very passionate about music, the arts in general, politically several shades of liberal, from far-left to center-left, and The Argument has resurfaced many times over nearly 30 years.

But the instance of The Argument that I remember most vividly took place sometime in the late 1980s, in our favorite pizzeria, Taverna Della Pizzeria in Spotswood, NJ, and it started when someone asserted the opinion that Bob Dylan, over the course of his long, illustrious career, should have leveraged his celebrity more to support important social causes; that he abandoned his activist roots and the legacy of his hero Woody Guthrie to be just another vain rock star celebrity.

This position was strenuously attacked by another from the group, who argued that it is actually oppressive to musicians, actors, dancers, painters, etc., to demand that they have any obligation to anything other than the pursuit of their art; that once you impose any “shoulds” on them you are interfering with the free flow of their creative expression.

Over the years, The Argument expanded beyond Dylan, to include pretty much every other form of celebrity, but when I read this morning that Dylan has authorized the use of his music for a just-released 4-CD set of covers, by 80 artists of 75 of his songs, with proceeds going to Amnesty International, memories of The Argument came rushing back, and I found myself jumping to Bob’s defense.

While it certainly is true that Dylan abruptly abandoned his activism roughly around the time he abandoned purist folk music in the mid 1960s, it is not at all accurate to argue that he abandoned it entirely or forever.

After his famed 1966 motorcycle accident, which I wrote about back in November, and which seemed to wake him up from an intoxicating celebrity binge, the first live appearance he made in twenty months was for a Woody Guthrie memorial concert, clear proof that he still valued the protest tradition. The photo I include here is from three years later, at the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh, later that year he recorded a song mourning the death of Black Panther George Jackson, and four years later he recorded the song Hurricane, a passionate defense of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whom he felt was wrongly imprisoned on murder charges.

In the years since, Dylan has appeared at other benefit concerts, lent his songs to benefit albums, and now we have the Amnesty International collection, which will raise thousands and thousands of badly needed dollars for an essential civil rights advocacy organization.

As for the broader topic, whether or not celebrities have an obligation to use their fame for good, I’m inclined to see valid points from both sides of The Argument. The idea that they need to “give something back” is overly simplistic, and it really doesn’t work, as they’ve already given of themselves via the production of their work. Personally, I treasure the work of artists, much of which has meant so much to me over the years that I can’t imagine a world without it. These are true gifts, regardless of the financial rewards earned by their creators.

Additionally, I do believe that it’s important for creative freedom and development to not put artists into confining boxes, demanding specifics from them, but I do admire artists who do add their voices to worthy causes.