We recently ordered five cubic yards of one-inch red cinder. It’s a heapin’ pile o’ rock and it looks like this:

Good thing we have a big, wide concrete pad for it to sit on! You can see some staining on the gray concrete. I think we’ll get a trippy tie-dye effect of red swirls and smears left behind when the heap’s gone. That’s fine by me, the concrete could use a little color.

I shovel a dozen shovelfuls into the wheelbarrow and it gets about half-full at best. I reckon that’s about five-plus gallons of rock. I move a dozen wheelbarrow loads and then I quit for the day. And I only do it every few days, not every day. Hey, I’m a senior citizen! I shouldn’t be expected to work so hard.

It turns out that five cubic yards is 1010 gallons! (I learned this from Wolfram Alpha.) But that’s not exact. One fluid US gallon is defined as 231 cubic inches. A cubic yard is 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet (27 cubic feet) which, in inches, is 36 x 36 x 36 or 46,656 cubic inches. If you have five of those that’s 233,280 cubic inches. If you divide that number by 231 you get 1009.801298 . . . and a heapin’ mess o’ more digits.

So, rounding off to 1010 is the way to go. After all, who actually measured the five cubic yards? That’s got to be, as my old Chem 1A prof would say, “a quick-and-dirty number.” I suspect they really sell the stuff by weight, anyway.

But that’s not the point. Once I realized that I scooped about five-plus gallons or so into the wheelbarrow for each load, I knew it would only take about 200 loads to finish the job. I’ve already logged a few dozen, so this is a task even I can complete.

We like to xeriscape. That’s from a Greek word xeros which means dry. It was coined by a woman named Nancy Leavitt in 1981. Rocks grow just great around here! They need to have new buddies join them every decade or so, but are otherwise very low maintenance. I recommend you get your own heap real soon.

I don’t pay for TV so I only get channels that come off-the-air. One of those is Fox. They have Saturday baseball so I watched the Giants game this weekend.

After the opening sequence the camera panned onto the field and the home plate area. A graphic came on the screen advertising a gambling outfit and giving some odds for today’s events. I don’t remember if it was Bet365, FanDuel, DraftKings, or something else, but it was MLB-approved. I remember when MLB had “official” bat-makers, glove manufacturers, and whatnot. Now they support casinos!

Hypocrisy is nothing new in pro sports, so an anti-betting entity like Major League Baseball supporting betting isn’t a shocker, really. MLB likes money streams and people like to make bets so they are getting their piece of the action.

People are going to gamble. So making it illegal won’t work. So, we regulate gambling. We make it inconvenient. You have to go somewhere to place a bet. It takes effort and time, not just money.

But now we have the mobile phone and the apps that do everything for you. Enter the betting app. Now you can gamble whenever and wherever you want. You don’t even have to be an adult. All you need is the app.

I can’t see gambling-at-my-fingertips as a social good. A net positive. I can only think of the negatives. It makes me think of when the cellphone came to classrooms. Once the dam was breached there was no going back and the change was irrevocable.

Bets are blood money. Recreational betting (think Super Bowl pool) has never needed an app or anyone’s help. Prop bets in bars have been around as long as bars and betting. People who want to throw money down on elections or ballgames can do it all by themselves. Mostly, that stuff is harmless. But gambling is like drug addiction. Some folks can’t do it. They go down the tubes and take their loved ones along for the ride. Gambling is bad and EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THIS.

But MLB thinks it’s okay. I think they are fools. At some point the gambling money will be bigger than the prize money and the outcomes will be more important than just fans’ bragging rights. And that won’t be okay.

The economic engine we call capitalism depends on several things. One, a continuous stream of affordable energy. Two, a continuous stream of new raw materials. Three, continuous consumption.

The logical outcome is a continuous stream of waste! And that is what we see, of course. All these “growing markets” and all that consumption means we have to throw away the old stuff. And throw it away we do!

It’s hard to get people to care about their trash. Fortunately there’s a book about it:

I’m not going to tell you this is the best book in the world or anything like that. But it is well-written, thoughtful, and has a sense of urgency. Mostly, it’s the topic. I think garbage is a pretty damn important topic. We all know we live in a throwaway society. Sure we have recycling and food and clothing charities, but mostly we throw stuff away. And mostly that stuff ends up in giant dumps in poor countries.

We export our waste. Even the waste we keep we take an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude and bury the stuff. There really should be no such thing as waste. All the stuff we throw away is just an under-utilized resource.

In the developing world, they use our waste. They pick out stuff that still has value. It’s ugly, dirty, dangerous work done by the world’s poorest people. We hear a lot about “American jobs, American industry, American workers” from the current regime. Here’s an industry we need—waste recovery. Instead of shoring up a nonsense racket like “crypto-currency” we should take a serious look at our recycling and waste management systems.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis’ book is a good place to start. The subtitle on the USA edition is the secret world of waste and the urgent search for a cleaner future and that unfortunately sounds like something a corporate green-washing committee would come up with!

I like the subtitle on the UK edition (pictured below): the dirty truth about what we throw away, where it goes, and why it matters. That’s much more direct. Regardless, read the book!

While there are a myriad of uses for both calcium metal and its various compounds, most people associate calcium with supplements.

Calcium is one of the most abundant substances in the crust of the earth and is well-known as an essential nutrient, especially for bone health.

The supplement industry knows this and they sell a hell of a lot of calcium. The 2024 global market was estimated to be just shy of six billion dollars and it is expected to grow by half in the next ten years.

The supplement business is a big one. Globally, vitamins and minerals and other such things generate about fifty billion dollars in annual revenue and that’s expected to double in ten years.

Most of these things are of dubious nutritional value and are even possibly harmful. The industry is mostly unregulated and the medical claims made by its salespeople are mostly nonsense. Nonetheless we love our supplements!

With that famous-named asshole now in charge of health for the entire country things are only going to get worse. There will be a lot more “alternative” medicine foisted upon us. Americans have a rich tradition of snake oil peddlers and we will be embracing more and more of that stuff as we drift further into medieval mumbo-jumbo.

There are plenty of things wrong with modern medicine. But that doesn’t mean you throw out good science and replace it with hippie bullshit. It’s just like recognizing the deep, systemic flaws with a capitalist economy. You don’t dump the whole shebang and go full commie, fer chrissakes. That’s NOT an alternative. You don’t go from a free market to a command-and-control economy because, like, uh, you couldn’t come up with anything else?

We have this tendency to see all problems as binary. You have a problem with modern medicine? OK, the smart move then is to get rid of the entire apparatus and replace it with sassafras tea, kombucha, and pilates. Good grief!

The problems that are worth solving never have simple solutions.

These days we have more knowledge about the body and nutrition than ever before. The problem is that we are buried in information. That’s not the same thing. Knowledge is hard-won. Information is easy. Anyone surfing the internet for nutritional advice will be quickly overwhelmed with masses of factoids, sales pitches, and contradictory materials. And increasingly, the same material reproduced at a dozen different sites! Actually learning—gaining knowledge—from all that shit is difficult at best.

Going back in history, the ancients knew they could heat limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO₃) to make lime (calcium oxide, CaO), also known as burnt lime or quicklime. Lime was used for mortar. Lime is still the most important ingredient in modern cement. You can imagine the scale of global concrete use and that will tell you about the huge demand for calcium! Good thing it can be found in large quantities all over the earth.

It wasn’t until 1808 that Humphry Davy isolated calcium metal from quicklime via electrolysis. Calcium metal is used in alloys and steel-making. Calcium compounds like calcium sulfate (CaSO₄, aka gypsum), used to make sheetrock or drywall, and calcium chloride (CaCl₂), commonly used to de-ice roads, are ubiquitous.

One of the most famous scenes in cinema is the one from Casablanca with Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac, the plane in the background, and fog enveloping the airport. She (Ingrid Bergman) has to leave but doesn’t want to. He (Humphrey Bogart) is in love with her but realizes he has to make her go. Ultimately she joins her husband and flies away. Woody Allen parodied the scene in Play It Again, Sam and probably made it more famous as a result.

Screenwriters Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard E. Koch had a pile of brilliant lines in Casablanca. But my favorite is when Rick tells Ilsa (and all of us of course):

. . . it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

I find this nugget of wisdom to be of great help in troubled times.

And these are troubled times. A demented fascist and his brain-dead minions are destroying our country. The engines of our wealth and prosperity are cooking us. Literally. And the most important of all human endeavors turns out to be advertising. It’s not what you do that counts. It’s how you spin it. Our citizenry has been taken over by this mind-set. If it looks OK on TV it must be OK.

The Information Age has unfortunately turned our minds into plows that can run for a mile but only cut an inch deep. It’s all surface. We touch plastic keypads and see dancing liquid crystals and think we are doing something. But we forget everything after we step away because it’s mostly just noise. The signal was re-packaged so long ago we don’t remember if we wanted it in the first place.

The Chinese used paper two thousand years ago. The Egyptians used pen-and-ink. The walls at Monte Alban are not only centuries older than the Berlin Wall—they are still standing. Some things are robust and some are not.

Greek bards knew the whole of the Odyssey in their heads. Religious scholars have committed to memory entire sets of scriptures: the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud all have centuries-long oral traditions. Will e-readers last that long? Or websites?

Anything with the enormous energy appetite of our computer-enhanced existence is bound to be vulnerable. Fragile. Unable to withstand shocks to the system. Fortunately we have backups. Our books. Our languages. Our music. Our art. Our minds. All the people we know. All the people we love. All the things we’ve built. All the stuff we’ve learned. Civilizations thrived long before digital connectivity.

Lest you think me a Luddite, I assure you I’m not. Advancements in technology are crucial. But wholesale surrender to our Silicon Valley Tech Bro Overlords is not advancement. Most of what they have to sell us is shit we don’t need. And in fact, it’s shit that’s mostly bad for us.

This brings me back to the “hill of beans.” The actions of individuals get absorbed into the morass of humanity and we lose our sense of identity and purpose. We feel nameless and hopeless and without agency in the world. But then we get up and keep going. Rick and Ilsa kept going! We will, too.

A few months ago I started a little project called EUMENTICS™. It was a bit of a parody of the self-help crowd. But it was a bit serious, too. I actually follow my own suggestions! I finally came up with the last one.

Lesson Eight: divest thyself of social media.

Personally, I’m quitting Facebook. Or ZuckLand, as I like to call it. He (Zuckerberg) is a piece-of-shit human being. And his clownish “vision” of the future is a mercantilist dystopia. Fuck him. I realize I’m just a “hill of beans” in their trillion-dollar universe, but it’s MY hill of beans.

I feel better already!

p.s. I will stop cross-posting HCN to ZuckLand. You can stay in touch with my writing by bookmarking this site (https://markcoconnor.com/) on your web browser. Or enter your email address in the box on the upper right of the web page. You can also email me directly (mcoc13@gmail.com) and I will add you to the notification list.

There are some things on the periodic table that are hardly there at all. The heaviest of all the column 1 elements—the so-called alkali* metals—is also the rarest. Its most abundant isotope (Fr-223) has a half-life of only 22 minutes! There is so little of the stuff (certainly much less than a kilogram) in the earth’s crust at any one time that many of Francium’s physical properties (density, melting point, etc.) are only inferred.

Francium was discovered by Marguerite Perey. She had been a student of Marie Curie’s and at the time of her breakthrough was working with the Curie’s daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie. She was the first woman elected to the French Academy of sciences (1962). Her famous mentors were denied that honor: Marie died in 1935 and Irene in 1956. All three women suffered from radiation exposure due to the risky nature of their work. All three died of complications due to those exposures.

Perey didn’t get a Nobel Prize for isolating what turned out to be the last of the “natural” elements. In fact interest in her work faded quickly despite its significance. Here’s a picture of the crew from the Radium Institute in Paris in 1930. Perey is seated on the far left:

Many other women made fundamental contributions to nuclear science: Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Lise Meitner come to mind immediately. And certainly other women have had their work neglected like Perey, with Rosalind Franklin being the most obvious, I suppose. Ultimately one has to work for one’s own satisfaction as counting on the respect and recognition of others is a fool’s game.

*Lithium, Sodium, Potassium, Rubidium, and Cesium

Titanium is groovy stuff. Stronger than steel, but less dense. Denser than aluminum, but stronger. It resists corrosion, like aluminum, because it reacts with oxygen to form a thin layer of oxide on its surface. This property also means that titanium metal is not found in nature—only its compounds. It’s the ninth-most abundant element in the earth’s crust.

Titanium alloys have such a range of applications, from aerospace to agriculture, that it’s hard to imagine the modern world without it. Titanium is bio-compatible and is used for medical implants. You probably know someone with a titanium knee or hip. Interestingly, the metal is not magnetic and is a poor conductor of heat and electricity.

Titanium dioxide (TiO₂), also called titania, is well-known to everyone as a bright white pigment. Sunscreens and paints use TiO₂, for example. World production of titania is in the millions of tonnes.

Titanium cladding was used by Frank Gehry in the design of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum (in Spain). Check it out:

Click on the image to embiggen.

I was a 70s kid so the version of Elvis that I remember is the pudgy guy in the white suit with the big collar and lots of rhinestones. It was like a comic book version of a performer—you couldn’t take him seriously.

Elvis, in reality, was a brilliant talent and a true original. Sadly, he’s the poster boy for how fame destroys a person. Getting rich and famous is every American’s dream. For Elvis it was a nightmare.

When you go back and listen to the early Elvis or watch his movies you see what the phenomenon was all about. He could sing anything. Blues and gospel were as natural to him as hillbilly and folk. He could rock up-tempo numbers, croon love ballads, re-interpret standards, you-name-it. You can see the joy he took in his signing and music-making. It’s sad to think what made him great was also what destroyed him.

And then there’s the dancing. The guy had moves. The raw sexuality of his wriggling and twisting shocked audiences in middle America. Juke joints and barrelhouses had, for decades, featured performers who did much more explicit things, but those were on the fringes of polite society. Elvis was on TV in the goddamn heartland!

Eventually, like all outliers and oddballs, Elvis became mainstream. His dancing was no longer subversive, but cool and clever.

I’ve have no rhythm, can’t sing for shit, and am about as musical as hailstones on my car’s roof. But I love to dance. I think dancing is the most wonderful thing in the world and that everyone should dance as often as possible.

You know what? You don’t even need music. Just dance to the music in your head! That’s what Elvis did. He just moved to the feeling inside of him. It was so natural and pure and singular. The guy was already dancing in his head before anyone struck a note. The song just opened the floodgate and let it all flow.

One dangerous assumption we make about artists is that they don’t think about what they do. That it’s all intuitive and requires little or no intellectual effort. Well, that’s nonsense. Elvis could create dance moves on the spot, but there’s no doubt he worked on those moves and improved his technique. Like all performers he was self-conscious—he knew what he looked like and he honed that look. He sharpened the edges and smoothed the rough spots. Singers train their voices. They practice. They experiment. So do dancers, of course. That’s how an artist creates a signature style. It takes a lot of thought and effort.

But we aren’t professionals. We are just folks trying to get by. So we don’t have to worry about what we look like. We don’t have to rehearse and tighten up our act. We can just “let it all hang out.”

And that brings me back to EUMENTICS™, my revolutionary new system for mental health and well-being. There are only a handful of lessons in EUMENTICS™, and you don’t even have to remember them because I already wrote them down.

This is our penultimate EUMENTICS™ lesson. Only one more after this!

Lesson seven: dance to the music in your head.

There was this crackpot writer named William S. Burroughs who was not only a trust fund baby (yes, that Burroughs* family) but a junkie as well. He could occasionally turn a phrase. He coined “the algebra of need” when discussing his heroin addiction. Elaborating, Burroughs says:

Well, by the “algebra of need” I simply meant that, given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need — any form of need — you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible. The same is true of anyone in a state of absolute hunger, absolute fear, etc. The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.

Our country is currently in the grip of something absolute. And that is the absolutism of our TechBro Overlords.

Assholes like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the rest of the billionaire class are diseased men. They are possessed by the Algebra of Greed. They have more money than they could ever spend or disperse, they have the power and influence that comes with that money, they have fame, notoriety, and celebrity status, they have absurd vanity projects like rocket ships, and, most importantly, they get to sit at the Right Hand of Their King. They are the Princes of MAGAt-land.

But it’s not enough.

They want more. They want to be admired. Respected. Loved. I know, it makes one retch.

(But if they can’t have love or admiration they’ll settle for fear.)

It’s the Algebra of Greed. More plus more equals even more. More times more, more raised to the power of more, More for the Sake of More.

We’ll dress these characters up with gushing stories about their brilliance, their entrepreneurial vision, their technological savvy, and their boldness and risk-taking.

We’ll leave out their law-breaking, moral vacuousness, and monumental vanity.

The truth is these guys are sociopaths. They aren’t our heroes and certainly should not be our leaders. How in the world can a free, democratic nation turn over its government’s management and accountability to un-elected private operators? Why do Elon and his minions get to look at our personal data and then decide who or what gets axed? This is nothing short of a coup.

The dumbshit in the White House has turned the country over to pirates. He’s letting them loot the treasury and tear up, disrupt, and destroy anything that they don’t like. And they don’t like much. And they certainly don’t like you. They don’t want the government to help you. They want you to be entirely dependent on them.

They want to turn the USA into a company store. I mean the kind of company store that Merle Travis immortalized in his song “Sixteen Tons“:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

It’s not easy for ordinary citizens to get out from under the grip of the Greed Brigade. And it is nearly impossible to do it as consumers. And being a consumer is more important than being a citizen—at least as far as these guys are concerned.

The best thing we can probably do is stop buying their shit. As much as we can, anyway. And stop buying into their “vision” of the future. It’s great for them and crap for us.

My next post will be more positive, I swear! I shall wrap up my EUMENTICS™ lessons.

*Burroughs Corp. merged with Sperry to form UNISYS in 1986

I bought some “organic” asparagus at Raley’s last week.

The bunch had a tag on it from Gourmet Trading Company. They source their asparagus from Peru and it is available year-round.

As you can see from the chart asparagus is a spring crop here in the Pacific Northwest. I bought my bunch in the middle of winter!

It takes about two weeks to ship a container from Lima or Callao in Peru to coastal ports like Los Angeles or Savannah. Obviously produce has to be refrigerated, but even carefully packaged and stored vegetables lose much of their nutritional value a few days after harvest. These folks say asparagus has a shelf-life of 5-7 days in your fridge. But what if it hasn’t gotten to my fridge yet?

To be fair, the asparagus from Raley’s was crisp and delicious. Obviously I cannot evaluate the nutritional content. And I’m not sure I would be able to distinguish the off-season Peruvian asparagus from local, seasonal asparagus. Perhaps in a side-by-side comparison I might be able to pick out the “fresher” alternative, but I don’t think so.

There is this idea that we should reduce our “food miles.” The energy/carbon footprint of global trade is massive. (Most foodstuffs, at least, are shipped and not flown.) At the same time, people in poorer countries and communities depend on the income from farm exports. Americans have the luxury of food surplus. We get to choose what we eat, when we eat, and how much we eat. Even in a small, nowheresville-town like Yreka I can get an astonishing variety of food from all over the world.

Economists want everything to be about efficiency and comparative advantage. Economists are analytical types and they like stuff to fit neatly into their definitions and equations. Most of them don’t “think outside the box” of their discipline. Agriculture is not an entirely economic activity! Farming is not just a business, it is much more fundamental to our existence and a deep and enduring part of our cultural inheritance. It’s not just about dollars-and-cents, but about how we live and our relationship to our planet.

Being a “locavore” may not always be practical. I like coffee, for example. And everyone I know (except me) likes bananas! But exceptions don’t undermine the big idea. The big idea is that we should have robust and healthy local agriculture to support robust and healthy communities. That’s a no-brainer.

What does it take to have robust and healthy communities? For one thing, don’t vote for assholes like the current one in White House. People like that care only about themselves, about getting richer, and about “getting one over” on their perceived opponents and enemies. The world doesn’t get better when people like that usurp and wield power.

I want a world where people work way less and have way more time to be with their families and take care of each other. I want a world where everyone has access to quality food and fresh water. Where no one is un-housed. Where people are free from tyranny and abuse. I don’t know how to make this world any more than you do. But we won’t get anywhere if we don’t make these our goals.

Think big. Think about the whole world. It’s not just a bunch of asparagus! It’s a chain of connections stretching across the globe and we are all part of it.