Typical

More Rain and Stolen Solar Incentives

"Someday a real rain will come..."

Once again, it is rainy season here in the VI and once again, the runoff from the nearly endless barrage of storms we've had these last couple weeks has washed untold amounts of silt, sand and soil into the harbors (not to mention dish soap, laundry detergent and raw sewage) - turning our deep blue Caribean water a lovely shade of "doodoo brown".

I guess I'm going to have to start going to Coral Bay Community Council meetings so I can gripe about this to someone. Why don't our culverts and storm drains cache water for St. Johnians to drink?! Oh right. because we live in a corrupt, Capitalist™ society, where any money set aside for such a project is immediately absconded-with by corrupt politicos and their corporate golfing buddies. How could I forget?!

Not that (to the best of my knowledge) there has ever been much of a push for cache-basins or water-towers in Coral Bay... I know that there is something similar in Cruz Bay - but of course, Cruz Bay is the corporate/economic hub of the island and as such - has the benefit of entitlement.

Meanwhile: the coral reefs will continue to die, the tourist dollars will continue to gradually dwindle, the charter boat and dive industry will continue to suffer and we will all - as a species - continue to shortsightedly crawl (lemming like) toward a completely dead, commodified, Blade Runner-esque world where everyone will sit on their thumbs and say: "Well, we tried"

No you didn't.

Example: The Economic Stimulus Package

As is almost always the case with such things in a Capitalist™ society, the stimulus package money has been completely misallocated and mispent. How did it happen? Lawyers like Ed McKenzie and corrupt local politicians colluded with eachother to create corporations that (ostensibly) created 'Green Jobs' (i.e. pay some poor kid $7-$8 an hour to assemble solar panels that are 'manufactured locally'). The jobs of course, are contingent on the demand for the product and there is no demend yet because the 'free solar water heaters' that they've been advertising (that is how to mis-spend stimulus money) aren't really free.

They could have been. The stimulus could have bought every home-owner on St. John a free solar water heater and a free solar-powered pumping unit. But that (of course) would not have allowed anyone to take their fee off the top. Of course, the operative phrase here is "home-owner", because god knows poor people who rent don't need any stimulus money.

At this point, they'll be lucky to get green jobs.

Where's the EPA when you need them?

Recently, I watched 4 EPA agents, driving 4 (count 'em: FOUR!) separate SUVs around our island, setting up air-quality testing-devices because (apparently) someone complained to them about the air-quality here on St. John.

I don't really know where to start bitching on this one...

At the SUVs?

At the fact that it took not one but FOUR (presumably well-paid) men to set up what looked like a small cymbal-stand to a drum kit?

How about the fact that from an environmental standpoint, air-quality is about the least of our worries here on St. John....

Let's start with WATER!

I looked down at Coral Bay the other day and noticed that the entire harbor looked like a toiled-bowl filled with chocolate milk. As any good St. Johnian knows, every time it rains here, there is enough runoff of silt and soil into the ocean to create serious problems for coral reefs and other ocean wildlife.



The image above (used without permission from Frank Barnako's Blog) is just one small example of the kind of runoff we're talking about here.

What gets me about this is that EVERYONE knows about it, talks about it openly, seems ACUTELY aware of it... but no one does a damn thing!

All that this island needs is few well-placed culverts, directed toward a few well-placed cache-basins and possibly a well-placed water-tower or two. Not only would this solve (or, at-least substantially mitigate) runoff problems but with the addition of a solar-powered treatment apparatus, it would supply so much fresh drinking water for the island that no resident on St. John would ever need to buy water again.

[For the uninitiated readers, drinking water is something you have to buy here on St. John. We have no public-infrastructure for things that people up in the states take for granted like running-water and sewage.]

Of course, between the millions of mis-allocated public funds, corrupt local government and all of those making a buck off of our badly-broken system, it's a wonder that we even have paved-roads here.

For the entrenched, the lack of a culvert in Coral Bay is likely to be considered a 'good' thing.

Which begs the question:

With all of the money on this tiny rock (good luck finding a house here for less the 1.2M or an apartment for less than $1500 a month), you'd think that this would have been addressed by now. If these people - who say that they care about the local wildlife and the natural beauty of St. John - who clearly have more money sense - actually DID harbor those ecological values, this problem would have been tackled back in the 1980's.

Let's show the world what a little common-sense and cooperation can do for a community instead of sitting around on our thumbs waiting for a completely dysfunctional bureaucracy to do it for us. If we act now there might be a piece of coral left for the 'turisats' to look at.

As an incentive, whoever ponies-up to the task at hand gets to be hailed publicly as an altruistic hero of the people - giving free drinking water away to each and every resident and saving our local environment in the process.

Guess that would just upset too many apple-carts.

Lights Accross the Caribbean

Here's an idea for the territories:

Using high-powered lasers and optical-grade prisms, beam a laser from a hilltop in Puerto-Rico, to a hilltop in Vieques, to a hilltop in St. Thomas, and so-on, in a daisy-chain that reaches all the way down to Trinidad. If you did it right, it would be visible from space.



What's the point?

Something about demonstrating the interconnectedness of all people and all nations. Also, a demonstration of what is possible when people work together. Also: stimulating tourist dollars, getting great publicity and letting the world know that we are a smart, creative, forward-thinking territory. 

Additional Benefits:

Although this would be a decorative apparatus, a public-sculpture if you will, scientist could actually use the laser to measure territorial air-quality. Airline pilots and ships at-sea could use it to navigate by at night.

Some Challenges:

Political will, funding, various technical-challenges and optics-hurdles that are likely to be associated with beaming a single beam of light over hundreds and hundreds of miles.

If the dots were connected the right way, a giant fish-shape might even be possible.

Toasty!

Found one of THE COOLEST design sites recently at Toast Concept:

http://www.toastconcept.com/




This is quite possibly one of the coolest websites that I have ever seen and I worship the servers that these guys (and gals?) host on.
I implore you to explore this site.
Caress it.
Love it.

Toast Concept is... It's like the best-tasting, most middle-of-the-road, fast-food/comfort food you've ever tasted.

But visual.

It's like eating at Popeye's Fried Chicken... it's that tasty and generic!



if Mac opened their architecture, switched Unix Kernel for Linux Kernel (why not? Sun Microsystems already let's a 3rd-party - Canonical - handle much of it's OS needs via 'Ubuntu' and 'Ubuntu Server' Linux-distros), and then let Toast Concept handle their web-presence, print-presence and animation on their TV ads... Mac would effing take-over the home computer market!

Well... Okay, their market-share would break certain boudaries, let me just say that with reasonabe certainty.
They would need to develop a really good FPS (first person shooter) game available EXCLUSIVELY on the Mac in-order to seal the deal, but they could do it.

Something rivaling an X-box style console game.



Then they could have U2 (green) and the White Strips (red, white & black) team up with Wyclef Jean (Yellow) in a LEGO-inspired fashion-dancer splash of neo-rastafarian 3D CGI graphics made by Toast, preaching the virtues of 'One Love' in a Bob Marley cover of groundbreaking rockin-reagae proportions. It would sound like Iggy and the Stooges meets Bad Brains and the Clash in an alley and instead of knife-fighting, they all join together in a song of racial and cultural harmony under the big shiny Apple logo. In fact, that could be the video! They could CGI old film footage of Joe Strummer (the Clash) into the scene like they did in the Buddy Holly video (Weezer) and then...

Guess I better buy stock in Apple before I send them my proposal >;D

Remember... you read it here first.

Here's Looking at You, Syd

Syd Barrett in 1967. By Adrian Boot/Retna UK.

Great article on on Roger 'Syd' Barret from the November `07 edition of Vanity Fair. Apparently, in addition to founding Pink Floyd and inspiring such epics as rock-opera 'The Wall', he also helped inspire a play about Communist Czechoslovakia.

Weird:

"How did one of pop music's epic breakdowns—that of Pink Floyd's dashing, mentally ill, drug-addled front man, Syd Barrett—find a place in a drama about Communist Czechoslovakia? The author recalls the genesis of his most recent play, Rock 'n' Roll, a London hit which reaches Broadway this month."

Read the article on Vanity Fair's website.

Java

Espresso Machine with Computer Monitor or... "Java" for short.

~St. John