My upcoming appearance on Green Racine

I will be the featured guest on the Green Racine podcast on Monday 1 March at 1 PM CST. This show is hosted by Wayne Clingman from Racine, Wisconsin, and is focused on all things urban gardens, organic (food), and farmers markets.

My hour-long appearance will be focused on the Bay View Hide House Community Garden (BVHHCG), and possibly the Victory Garden Initiative.  VGI founder Gretchen Mead was a recent guest on Mr. Clingman’s show.

The Hide House Garden is a VGI-affiliated project.

Campagin season revs up at Milwaukee’s Drinking Liberally

The 2010 election season has begun at Milwaukee DL! We had a surprise visit from state Treasurer candidate Dan Bohrod, who became the first candidate to visit Milwaukee DL in 2010. He is a budget analyst for the city of Madison, and is challenging incumbent state Treasurer Dawn Marie Sass for the Democratic nomination.  As we can’t endorse a candidate, I invite Ms. Sass, and Republican candidate Jason Punzel, to also make appearances. Perhaps we can even arrange for a debate later this year. Debates plus beer — what could be better?

Welcome the garden, baby!

Bay View Hide House Community Garden — it’s gonna thrive!

Apple’s 10 billionth song download: one by Johnny Cash

Sweet.

I don’t know what the good Mr. Cash would think of this, but I think it’s pretty darn cool.

Terrence Wall stands alone with accusations of character against Feingold

Multi-millionaire landlord and strip mall builder Terrence Wall has sunk to a new low. The campaign season has hardly begun in the eyes of most, and Wall is seeking to slander Senator Feingold with baseless accusations. In an interview with the Wisconsin Voice of Christian Youth, Wall alleged that the two things that separate him most from Senator Feingold are “Honesty” and “Integrity.” As if to say, “Senator Feingold has none, but I’ve got it in droves. You can see it right here behind my attack ads!”

It gets better: in the same interview, Wall claimed that he’s “concerned about the value system” of Senator Feingold.  “I mean [he doesn’t] seem to have a fundamental foundation of values… [or] principles…”

Mr. Wall, you are alone in making that assertion. If anything, Senator Feingold was alone in standing up for the principles of constitutional freedom during the passage of the USA Patriot Act, which he cast the lone vote against in the U.S. Senate. He’s long stood for accountability and responsibility. I think Wall is trying to blow a dog whistle that only right-wing religious voters can here. It’s a known and accepted that Senator Feingold happens to be of Jewish descent. Don’t mean he doesn’t have values or principles. If anything, our good senator has them in plenty. That’s why he’s admired across the political spectrum.

The Green Bay Press Gazette Editorial Board, whom no one has ever accused of being an up-nort version of the Capital Times, last week stood against Wall’s early entry into the realm of negative campaigning. The same editorial also noted that the Associated Press described Wall’s ad “misleading.”

While it’s clear that Terry is trying to establish himself as the dominant candidate for the Republican primary, he’s doing it in a way that will either drive people away from the polls, or to his opponents, be they Dave Westlake or Senator Feingold. This may well cause Wall to stand alone as the loser in the primary. He may want to take up a gimmick like Westlake’s orange shirts. Perhaps he can be seen wearing a cheesehead wherever he goes. As we know, the cheese (and Terrence Wall) stands alone.

Seeing Milwaukee’s “food desert” up close

With all the recent talk of tea parties, it’s very easy to lose track of the fact that there are many millions of people who are actively suffering from starvation and malnutrition in America today. Most—but not all—live in America’s cities. They’re even in the suburban pockets of plenty that strive to cloak the unwellness within. And they’re in the wide swaths of rural America as well. Have you heard the term “food desert” before? Look closely at it. The second word is “desert.” It’s an appropriate term. Food deserts are areas where people do not have access to good food, though unhealthy fast food (and liquor) is easily available.

Tonight, I saw part of Milwaukee’s food desert. It happened on the occasion of the fifth time that my daughter and I have attended the Daddy/Daughter Dance—we drove from an event at the well-off Unitarian society, up Van Buren Avenue, across the Holton Street bridge, and into Milwaukee’s sprawling north side food desert. That topic is something I’ve previously addressed on this blog: see my posts about the brief dispute over placing yet another fried chicken joint on North Avenue. (The plans were later scuttled.)

What I noticed this time was the big empty patch of land on 11th Street between North Avenue and Meinecke Ave. A second one is located a block over just on the east side of 10th Street. (Use Satellite view mode in Google Maps to see them.) When I see big empty lots like these, my mind itches with visions of big, bountiful community gardens that they could be made into.

Will Allen is the Milwaukeean who’s achieved fame and fortune through his work at Growing Power. While I don’t know if he coined the term food desert, it’s a very fitting term for what I saw driving around the north side en route to and from the dance. I saw liquor stores, six different varieties of fast food, and a few very small and tattered “grocery” stores that sold lottery tickets, snacky crap, and booze. There were very few options for getting relatively healthy and unprocessed food.

As I heard remarked earlier today, the high school where the dance took place was in an “unfortunate area.” Yes, that’s true. But things like that happen for a reason. In Milwaukee, there’s been the deliberate segregation of African-Americans in the mid-twentieth century, white flight in the 1950s onward to the 1990s, and deindustrialization from the 1970s to the 1990s. Some of those were deliberate, others symptoms of greater changes. While it’s useful to know the root causes of the current situation, one needs simply to survey Milwaukee’s north side via Google Maps satellite mode, or even more effectively, to drive through it. It’s a real-life food desert. Many things—the waking nightmare of many of Milwaukee’s schools, deep poverty, and accompanying crime—are directly related to it.

Making community gardens out of some of the vacant land in the city won’t solve all of these problems. But it can help.

For the sake of our city, and our larger community, We have to.

New Barrett for Wisconsin web site debuts

The new Tom Barrett for Governor web site is up. It looks good! The web team did well at it. (And they are from Wisconsin, right? Not that Barrett’s Milwaukee-area opponent can brag about having a web site that was made in the state.)

Word has it that more interactive content will become part of it. They have one such part up there now, called Ask Tom, where you can ask him a question or submit an idea. It’s not linked from the main page of the site, but you can still get there via this Ask Tom link.

MJS: “Wall’s tax breaks become campaign fodder”

“Oh, what a place to be, in the service, of the bourgeoisie,” as Iggy Pop once sang.

It’s a nice place to be. Gets you out of annoying things like paying taxes.

Diana Marrero of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a lengthy story today called Wall’s tax breaks become campaign fodder.

Enjoy!

Gov. Doyle signs the “Pickle Bill”

My friends in the urban ag scene are very happy that Wisconsin Assembly Bill 229, known as the “Pickle Bill” or the “Pickle Law” (link to PDF) has been signed into law. This allows a person to make limited sale (less than $5,000 per year) of home-canned food such as pickles at farmer’s markets, church sales, and other small venues without need for a food processing plant license.  Comply with requirements concerning notice and labeling, and you’re all good.

Rep. Gary Sherman (D-Port Wing) authored the legislation.

This is a good law of the sort we don’t see much of nowadays. (Did we ever before? Not really.)

Steve Jobs caught Microsoft flat-footed, not once, but twice.

This is pleasing to me, in that way that seeing one huge company beat another, even huger company is pleasing. It helps that one is Apple, Inc., the company that I’ve been mildly obsessed with since an early age. The other, Microsoft, seemed to have Apple beat after the release of Windows 95. At the time, Apple wasn’t too hard to beat. The company was churning out endless variations of the Performa line of computers, which were best known for middling performance and crap-tastic consumer appeal.

All this was also before Steve Jobs returned, and we started seeing products like the Blue & White Power Mac G3, the iMac, or the ill-fated Power Mac G4 Cube. (Part of me still wants one…)

The iPod and the iTunes Store, it turns out, caught Microsoft totally off-guard. It seems that Steve Jobs’ legendary demands for secrecy paid huge dividends. According to MacRumors.com, “e-mails sent by Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Jim Allchin to other members of the Microsoft executive team revealing that the company had been taken by surprise by Apple’s launch of the iTunes Music Store in April 2003. The e-mails were made public as part of an antitrust suit brought against Microsoft in late 2006 for which Groklaw has been documenting the exhibits provided as evidence.”

MacRumors story.

Groklaw story.

And later the iPhone caught Gates & Co.  flat-footed—again.

This is very telling to me, having begun reading Leander Kahney’s Inside Steve’s Brain. Leander was an industry buddy of mine back in the day, reporting on our travails at LinuxPPC, so I figured I’d get his book in lieu of the JesusPad coming out. It’s been a very good read, a good glimpse inside what some observers can see of Steve Jobs’ thinking. It’s also a good historical contrast with Frank Rose’s 1990 book West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer. That book detailed the rise of Apple, the development and release of the Macintosh, and Steve Jobs’ exile from the company. All that I remember of it at this point is at the very end, when Rose described Jobs working on the NeXT computer. There was a Macintosh in his office, with the six-colored Apple logo gouged off the front.

There’s been a remarkable progression since then, and even starting well before then. Remember that Mac OS X has UNIX at its core. The first version of UNIX was developed in 1969. It went through many iterations and off-shoots, including BSD,which was created around 1978. BSD later branched into FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and also into NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, which powered the beautiful and expensive NeXT computers. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996, bringing Jobs back in an advisory capacity, but what would happen with OPENSTEP remained up in the air. At the time, Apple was working on their next-gen OS, Copland which never saw the light of day. Perhaps out of desperation, Apple’s top brass looked around for a third-party system they could meld the proprietary Mac OS onto. Somehow, OPENSTEP was chosen to be the basis for the new system, then known as Rhapsody, which grew into Mac OS X. Thus, the work done at Bell Labs in 1969 found its way into millions of Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone computers. (To say nothing of the thousands of earlier Macs that ran LinuxPPC, our version of Linux, which in turn was modeled after POSIX.)

Got all that? There will be a quiz later. Good night!