Daily Archives: November 7, 2010

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, GeekWorld, Humanities, Politics, Retirement

Gadget Obsessed? Moi?

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Samhain                                                          New (Thanksgiving) Moon

To call me gadget obsessed might take reality a tad too far, but not much.  I saved up some money and bought a TIVO.  It took me this afternoon to get it set up and working, putting the cables in the right places, getting the codes right, creating a few channels on Pandora, wondering at the limited Netflix options when the full menu is available on my new Play Station 3, (OK, maybe it’s not quite far enough.) and deciding whether or not to ditch the cable tv subscription from Comcast, my least favorite company of the week.

In spite of myself it looks like keeping the cable subscription is still the best way to get the most out of the TV.  I’m gonna keep checking though since new ways to watch movies and broadcast shows keep popping up.  Most of what’s on tv is low culture, but often compelling anyhow and even the stuff I like that’s not compelling entertains me. With streaming movies the content available at home on demand has increased a hundred fold.

As a general rule, I don’t watch tv to get educated and I’m rarely disappointed.

Even with the increased quality and options though, nothing on the tube–that phrase dates me like saying icebox–compares to the live music, open studios and visiting with friends at Art Attack last night.  Remember Alvin Toffler?  The futurist from a long time ago.  He talked about high tech, high touch and I’ve found him right on that score.  I use the internet, the facility of cable tv combined with the internet and software like WordPress and Microsoft Word to make me much more productive in the work I choose to do, but going in to the MIA and seeing my docent friends or over to Paul’s house for a Woolly meeting, a Sierra Club meeting on Franklin Avenue are equally important to me.  Without them I would be a hermit.

A lot in the hermit’s solitude appeals to me, so I’m happy Kate and I have created a place here where we can be alone and creative, just the two of us, but I need face to face time with others, too.

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Good Pharma

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Samhain                                             New (Thanksgiving) Moon

When I walked into the Northrup King building last night, I had to pause a moment to let another time in my life, also spent there, sink in, too.

The period was not unlike the current one with high unemployment and plant closings dominating the news.  This was the mid 1970’s, the era when the contraction of the American automobile industry began in earnest and my hometown went from Smalltown, USA to Shutteredtown, USA.  No longer at home, I had lived in Minnesota for five years at the time, involved in anti-war work and organizing for labor unions and local neighborhoods.

In 1975 ripples went out through the activist community in Minneapolis that Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant, had plans to purchase the Northrup-King seed plant and close it down.  Many of us rallied to the workers there and began a campaign to stop the plant closing and save the jobs.  As our research proceeded, we learned an important and, to me at least, sobering truth: pharmaceutical companies were buying up seed companies; Northrup-King was far from the only one.  Why?  Because the pharmaceutical companies had the perspective and vision to see the imminent emergence of biotechnology.

They realized that future profit streams could require as many patents as possible on genetic material; germplasm would be the new precious metals, the oil fields of tomorrow.  And they wanted to control as much of it as they could.  Seed companies like Northrup-King already had patents on many of the cultivars of wheat, corn and soybeans, foodstuffs necessary to humanity’s most basic survival needs, add to them patents on specific chemical combinations and plant-based medicines already held by Big Pharma and the potential for mischief, if not downright evil seemed self-evident.  This was before the big push to patent parts of the human genome, now well underway.

We fought hard, working regulatory, legislative and union channels, organizing street protests and trying to raise the visibility of these issues, but we lost.  As did most plant closing campaigns.

After this sifted through my memory banks and into present experience, I walked up the iron steps onto a former loading dock, walking into a studio filled with brightly painted flowers and novel re-uses of older technology.  Art Attack! was a good anti-dote, good pharma.