Apartment life

Living in NYC means you probably aren't in a house or have a yard, or a lot of room in general.  And being from California means you gotta suffer all this claustrophobia without your meds, at least not the premium shit.  And its relatively expensive.  Anyways have no fear cuz the internet is here, and I raked it out a bit.  Depending on what your situation is, you might find yourself wanting to do a little ganja farming, and for that here's the break down. 

If you do, you gotta keep it green and do it organically.  "Cannabis growers should feel an obligation to use a healthy, living soil to produce truly medicinal and connoisseur-quality pot" says Danny Danko of High Times. He further explains that, "pouring salts and chemicals onto a dead medium and then down the drain does unnecessary damage to your local environment, polluting rivers, lakes and oceans. One look at some of the results of chemical agribusiness runoff, such as the Salton Sea in Southern California, and you’ll see why nonorganic nutrients are never advisable: Rotting fish carcasses float on the salty foam of a dead sea, and the whole area reeks with a foul stench that’s clearly man-made." And if that's not reason enough to go green with it, Danko adds,"I've smoked plenty of decent chemically grown pot (and grown it in the past), but the same strains, grown organically, always win out in the final analysis."  

That being said, I found out that apparently this organic soil recipe by Subcool is dope and the correct one to use.  

An inconvenient truth

Jane M. Gaines in her article Political Mimesis brings up a very serious question. Do documentaries actually lead to social change? To be specific in her own words; “I am concerned with the question of what it might be that moves viewers to want to act” (89).  This question is problematic, which she addresses, such as what constitutes action? What is counted as change? How are these measured? And how do we measure the films impact, in relation to the political conditions of the audience?  It is interesting because there are so many documentaries about different social issues, environmental issues, political issues, health related issues, whatever else Micheal Moore thinks is wrong, and yet there are still a lot of problems.   

Gaines goes on to say that documentaries, or the form of film, is more effective because films often make their appeal through the senses to the senses, circumventing the intellect” (92).  Through sight and sound, the “realism works to align the viewer with a struggle that continues beyond the frame and into his or her real historical present” (93).  Sounds believable enough and she does cite Einstein.  Film documentarians then are able to frame an issue with the purpose of generating, or eliciting, a strong emotional response, which will potentially lead to activism.  There is a shock value to it, and then an empathetic response, which may then turn into either a sympathetic or apathetic retaliation.  

I think most documentaries now a days are not very successful in terms of communicating objectives.  It is easy to communicate that the oceans are beautiful and that littering is wrong, all you have to do is take a few shots with that expensive Nikon you got for your high-school graduation.  I watch a number of documentaries on Netflix, and I notice that most of these are usually less funded than blockbuster films have really good shots and are well produced.  I'm no film student, but Food, Inc. (2008) for example has beautiful shots, and they are well edited, and some even have animations that explain in detail, but with fun, the entire problematic process of the issue.  Food Inc, for example shows how farmers grow their corn, then the corn goes to the livestock farmers, to the chickens, to the cows, to the porks, and then these animals go to the slaughter house, and then through some process and it comes out as a hot dog.  Now see that was a long description, imagine watching it, and then an hour and a half more of it.  That is a bit exaggerated, as the whole thing is actually 93 minutes long.  Don’t get me wrong, Food Inc was a dope documentary and I learned a lot, but it hasn’t turned me organic or made me actively seek out locally grown food.  The problem I am getting at, is the documentary is too long, it is very thorough, and intriguing, and clear, but damn I get it. I think that in order for a documentary to be successful in generating social activism, it has to be short and almost pure shock, with very clear objectives, with bullet points of what has to be done and when.  I think a good example of an effective documentary, was the Kony 2012 one.  It generated a huge amount of publicity and a lot of people felt for the cause and even donated money….until they looked deeper into what was happening with the money, and the Hollywood scandal which lead to the movements quick...finish.  Regardless though, it was popular and raised awareness pretty well.  I even saw some posters up around the city, that red Kony 2012 one.   I give credit to how it was able really frame the issue to really create an emotional response, as well as being really well produced, and short enough for everyone to watch it fully (less than 30 min), keeping people’s attention and intrigue with various shock points.   I also believe that short youtube clips, with content that may or may not have been planned, may even act better than fully produced documentaries in creating a buzz for social change because they have the ability to go viral or gorilla.  What does that mean? Idk, but its controversial.  I point to the video of the when the Police pepper sprayed those OWS-ers over at UC Davis. It was shocking, and lead everybody to the same conclusion that what they were seeing was 1) real and 2) fucked.  That video pissed a lot of people off but that seems to be what was needed to start some action.  

It's been a while since I dug for bugs

Yo imma have to add this to my bug collection.  Asian Long-horned beetle is the name, killing trees is it's game.  Not really, its just laying its larvae that happen to burrow deep within the tree, either way its annoying and these things are invasive and causing a lot of forestation damage.   And if the forests go, where will people go camping.  Plus I bet they would look cool underneath a glass frame.   There's a whole website about these little insect terrorists asking: if you see something, say something. http://beetlebusters.info/where-is-it/new-york/  

Hey you vegetarians....I'm looking at you

I recently watched a Ted talk given by Stefano Mancuso titled "The Roots of Plant Intelligence" in which he makes the argument that plants are living creatures similar to insects and animals.  In his presentation he seeks to raise critical question about the mainstream notion that plants don't have intelligence.  He does so by providing evidence he collected such as comparative behavior when exposed to light as opposed to the absence of light, the way in which a plants roots grow and transmit signals to the rest of the plant- and how these observations seem similar to what is seen in animal behavior and animal brains.

This got me thinking about the idea of soil fertilization.  I wonder if the plants absorb or incorporate into their structure the neurons and axons that are in the soil from of all the dead species of animals, insects, fish, birds, dinosaurs, whatever, that have ever lived.  I then wonder if that is why certain plants contain chemicals that create a neurological change when ingested by humans or even other animals.  I then wonder if this then shapes our human evolutionary course seeing as they are a large part of our diet.  Anyways I think its pretty interesting, here check it out: