SAMOAN TSUNAMI SURVIVORS, THE FIRST CLOWN IN SPACE AND HOUSES MADE OF STRAW

Photo by Randy L. Rasmussen – The Portland Oregonian

Lydia Doleman at work constructing one of her straw houses in Portland, Oregon

Hi again and yep, from the ramparts of the Bastion on the Puget Sound, it’s been another interesting week. Our hearts certainly go out to the survivors of the tsunami which struck the Samoan Islands on Tuesday. Apparently caused by a big undersea earthquake (8.0), it struck so fast there was virtually no warning and all the coastal and lowland areas were literally wiped out by the big waves. As of this writing, the death toll stands at 99. The Samoan Islands have a population of 277,000, about a quarter of it in the American portion. President Obama has declared it a disaster area and Australia and New Zealand have already dispatched aid and assistance.

We note with personal sadness the passing of Mary Travers, of the American folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. During the Sixties and Seventies, hers was a voice which gave so many of us a reason to carry on. Though best remembered for songs like Leavin’ on a Jet Plane and Puff the Magic Dragon, the one for which I am most grateful to her for is a ballad of Irish rebellion entitled “The Risin’ of the Moon.” So thank you for that one too, Mary, and yes, Lass, your grandchildren are carrying on.

Well, the existence of water on the moon has now been confirmed, thanks to NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper and the Indian rocket and launch system which got it there. Results of the mission suggest that a sustainable manned moon colony could be a reality within the next two decades. It’ll be kind of interesting taking a romantic evening walk in 2029, gazing up at a beautiful full moon and realizing that there are other couples up there, strolling among the hydroponics and gazing at a beautiful full earth. For more on a very successful international space venture, please go here and here.

Well, the first clown to ever leave earth is currently enroute to the International Space Station aboard a Russia Soyuz to entertain the troops as it were. I’m hoping this Merry Andrew is good because if he’s not, he could also be an international embarrassment for Canada. But wealth has its privileges and this billionaire reportedly paid $34-million for the chance to audition. A long shot, perhaps, but our money’s riding with him because his name is Guy Laliberte and he’s the founder of Cirque du Soleil.

Well, for this next one, there has to be a totally new category somewhere between “Jeez, Ya Think?” and “Why am I not incredibly surprised?” Apparently spanking children reduces their IQ points, according to a study released by the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma in San Diego last month. The findings contend that physical abuse causes post traumatic stress in children and that this is linked to decreased intelligence. I’m just surprised it took scientific research to prove that hitting a kid isn’t good for that kid. So now we can add that to a list of reasons why a compassionate and rational creature does not cause injury or ham to those smaller and weaker than itself. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t hit kids because it’s not cool. I don’t need any other reason than that.

For this week’s critter story, we go to the bottom of the world. Yep, Oz is in the news again. An early morning surfer spotted a young orca trapped in a shark net off a Gold Coast beach, which is in Queensland, on Australia’s east coast, south of Brisbane. The surfer, who also happened to be captain of the Miami Beach (Queensland, Australia) Surf Life Saving Club, contacted the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, whose rescue team arrived on the scene 40 minutes later. Before a crowd of 250 concerned, spectators, rescue was affected without injury to the juvenile orca. The entire operation took just a little under four hours. For more information and a video on this splendid animal rescue, please go here.

In the midst of all this debate on national health care, I found it interesting that in a recent study released by the not-for-profit research and performance evaluation Conference Board of Canada ranked the Maple Leaf tenth on a list of 16 countries for health care and the U.S., last. The study measured:

Life expectancy
Mortality due to diabetes
Self-reported health status
Mortality due to musculoskeletal system diseases
Premature mortality
Mortality due to mental disorders
Mortality due to cancer
Infant mortality
Mortality due to circulatory diseases
Mortality due to medical misadventures
Mortality due to respiratory diseases

I found this study absolutely fascinating. It offers comparisons in all categories, is well illustrated and communicates in language amazingly free from political bias and industry rhetoric. Here’s how the 16 nations ranked and the grade the Conference Board game them.

Japan, Switzerland, Italy and Norway received As. Canada, Sweden, France, Finland, Germany and Australia got Bs and the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland, Cs. Denmark and the United Kingdom joined the U.S. at the bottom of the dumpster with a grade of D. For more information, please go here.

And finally, I really got a kick out of this one. Remember that fairytale we heard as kids about the three little pigs and the big bad wolf? I think the morals of that one were build with bricks and don’t antagonize something that already wants to make a sandwich out of you. Well, in Oregon, they’re making houses out of straw and nobody’s huffing and puffing them down.

Contractor Lydia Doleman, owner of Flying Hammer Productions, admits that the technology isn’t new but in fact originated in Nebraska, where trees are at a premium. She built her first such home in Colorado, at the age of 20. Now, she’s making them work in the soggy Northwest, where she has the endorsement of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance and the support of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. For more about this extraordinary woman and the impact her straw houses are having on the Northwest, please go here.

Well, that’s it for this week. Thanks again for the ear. Take care, stay well and God Bless.

Rusty

NORTHSTAR RECOMMENDS

To Your Health
If you’d like to know whether your eating habits are either adding years to your life or taking them off, take this RealAge quiz. It will not only score your real age against your health age but give you a program for improvement. I’ve been working this one for about a month now and yep, I feel a lot better.

Want to know how to live to be 100? Try this one.

Ever had trouble getting behind eating a lot of fruits and vegetables despite how good they are for you? Ever had trouble selling that one to your kids and grandkids? Ever been totally sold on the idea then gone to the market and been totally tasered by the price of good health in some places? If your answer is yes to any or all of the above, you really need to check this site out. Fruits and veggies: more matters.

Online People Finders

Free People Search – This is an American online White Pages that I found really simple, quick and user friendly. I looked for myself under the several versions of my name and it found them all. It’s also free and doesn’t involve anything to download.

Know Thy Elected Officials - Just type in your zip code and this site will supply you with the names and contact information for your legislators from the state level up. This is a two click site with a host of other relevant features.

Media
BBC – Best source for international news

Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean – Live from the smallest record store in North America. Canadian humor, entertainment and commentary at its maple leaf best. Popular on National Public Radio in the States.

Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool) – The “United Press International/Reuters of the American West/ Updated and informative news shorts with links to the source. Its editors draw from a coverage area which includes Alaska, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Update and informative collected news shorts from those sources. They also put out an excellent weekly environmental edition.

U Got Style is a monthly ezine dedicated to independent films. Fully illustrated, it features hard news, interviews, reviews and a wide variety of other information. It’s also fun to read.

The Vancouver Sun, outstanding source for Canadian and world news.

TALENT FOR HIRE
Rusty Miller, Freelance Photojournalist – Whether it’s a one time press release, book or product review, difficult business correspondence, resume or classified ad composition you need, take a look at the services offered menu on my writer-for-hire homepage and we’ll get together on it.

Are you a travel editor looking for color shots of Seattle? Are you an art dealer looking for new work to carry on consignment? Check out galleries of my work here and here.

A KANGAROO, YOGI & BOO BOO (TWO BROWN BEARS) AND THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE

Hubble Telescope, before she was released from orbit to roam the universe

Well, as a profound patron of the weird (It finds me anyway so I now subscribe), I have come to cherish the Australians. They make a national hero out of a man who wrestles alligators and idolize those who swim with sharks (In my opinion the indisputably DUMBEST thing I’ve ever heard of). And now another “Digger” has made the news Downunder. Yep, you’re gonna love this.

Neil McCallum and his son were vacationing on the Gold Coast of Australia and beach walking one morning when a kangaroo bounded by them and bounced off into the surf, apparently not at all concerned about the total absence of other mammalian life forms in waters where two hammerhead sharks had been spotted earlier in the week.

Neil and his boy, who hail from Queensland, (Australia) decided to keep their eyes on the ‘roo (I did not make that up. That’s what they call them there. ‘Roos’). And when this roo got caught in a riptide and was being slowly but implacably carried out to sea and probably into the devilish maws of a rapacious Devonian, Neil abandoned all thoughts of family, community and country, stripped down for action and dove into the surf.

In a feat of extra-human strength which will be talked about in that part of the world for hundreds of years to come, Neil McCallum, of the Queensland McCallums, effectively rescued a young marsupial from certain death. The entire nation of Australia is on its feet, cheering this one, He Who Swims With Roos, and this from a nation which has also given us Mel Gibson and Crocodile Dundee.

I think that’s pretty cool. However, I wonder how those glorious headlines would have read if Downunder’s new Everyman had ended up on the menu at Chez Shark. Do you think his widow and children would have been compensated for their loss? Did his life insurance policy cover getting eaten by a shark while attempting to rescue a drowning kangaroo? (I checked and mine doesn’t.)

And if Australia’s tabloids get ahold of it, will there be speculation on what really drove McCallum to such a potentially extreme measure of human sacrifice? Were they actually strangers, these two, or was there some prior relationship? Marsupials have pouches. Will the press wonder what was in that pouch which might have motivated McCallum? Will breathless readers really want to know?

That’s why I don’t court celebrity, immediate or posthumous. It makes life way too complicated. I do, however, love watching folks like Neil McCallum. Even when it’s not a slow news day in Seattle, they’re invariably still the best show in town.

And for those who have been asking about the brown bear who’s been scoping out our Seattle suburbs, he’s still at large and now apparently has company. One has been spotted north of downtown, in Ballard and Shoreline, which are right on the Puget Sound. Another has been seen roaming South Seattle near a big golf course.

State, county and city animal control authorities are working with local emergency services personnel and with residents of the neighborhoods “impacted”. It is fully anticipated that the bears will either find their way back to the deeper woods or will eventually get a friendly assist via a tranquilizer dart and a taxpayer paid ride home.

Yep, everybody’s being cool. Yogi and Boo Boo are just having an adventure and we’re treating them pretty much like any other tourists. (Chamber of Commerce is going to love that one. Sigh) And also quietly respecting that they were here first. The bears. Yogi and Boo Boo. Never mind. I digress.

Our thanks to a reader in Victoria, British Columbia who tipped us off to a possible academic American brain drain which seems due, at least in part, to the present economic climate. As Americans find themselves with less money for education and as American universities themselves are forced to increase tuition to offset the loss of funding from government and alumni sources, American students are going north of the border.

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports that McGill University has seen a 22 percent increase in American enrollment in the last five years. Other academic institutions across Canada cite similar growth statistics. The trend predates the current recession by well over ten years but enrollment figures have increased dramatically in the last year or so.

It’s not clear yet if Americans who graduate from Canadian colleges and universities then seek employment and settle in Canada or whether they return to the United States. It is apparent, however, that dollars which could be going into the American educational system are, instead, going north with those students.

I’m glad that even in times like these, some of us can still afford to give our kids a good education. If American universities cannot compete with the Canadians in that regard, as far as I’m concerned, that’s just another reason to look both inward and abroad for a better way to do things here at home.

And if you love good news as much as I do and figure that if they can do it anywhere, “by gum, by gosh, and by golly, we can do it here,” you’re also going to enjoy reading that even in the worst of economic times, dislocated workers start companies which succeed and, in some cases, become profound landmarks on the entrepreneurial landscape. Hewlett Packard, for instance, was born at the end of the Great Depression; the Hyatt Corporation, in the Recession of 1957 and Fed-Ex during the fuel crisis of 1973.

In Oregon, they’re showing that it can be done now, in the Pacific Northwest. Business licenses in Portland are actually UP since the start of this last downturn and that may very well be due in part to the efforts of the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, a nonprofit organization which provides tools and training for new business owners. In a recent interview with Oregon Live, Tom Embree, a partner in a Tigard investment company, explained it this way.

"Down markets are great times to start a company. When people get laid off or choose to take buyouts, both startup founders and employees are created." He said that when venture capital is scarce and "it's difficult to raise money, you learn to do more with less.”

The State of Washington has endorsed this idea of the citizen entrepreneur by providing the unemployed here with the opportunity to learn how to start their own businesses while still being allowed to collect benefits and without needing to also look for work at the same time. Olympia seems to feel the state’s workforce is itself capable of retooling and history seems to bear this out as well.

And finally, here’s to the Space Shuttle Atlantis and to the venerable Hubble telescope. Unless NASA changes its mind, the space shuttles are being retired. Hubble is already enroute to the stars and beyond.

She’ll be sending us those incredible photographs for as long as she can. It’s a vast universe and she’s built to last. I wish her good luck and Godspeed. I’m going to miss her.

Until next time, then, take care, stay well and thanks for the ear.

Rusty