June 2013
87 posts
saw two people in Berkeley cycling with motorcycle helmets on.
why buy another helmet when you already have one, right?
China's Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities →
nytimes.com
Across China, bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties. Towers now sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides. New urban schools and hospitals offer modern services, but often at the expense of the torn-down temples and open-air theaters of the countryside.
“It’s a new world for us in the city,” said Tian Wei, 43, a former wheat farmer in the northern province of Hebei, who now works as a night watchman at a factory. “All my life I’ve worked with my hands in the fields; do I have the educational level to keep us with the city people?”
“For old people like us, there’s nothing to do anymore,” said He Shifang, 45, a farmer from the city of Ankang in Shaanxi Province who was relocated from her family’s farm in the mountains. “Up in the mountains we worked all the time. We had pigs and chickens. Here we just sit around and people play mah-jong.”
nytimes, 15.06.13.
this is so major. government buying up farmland, upending village life and pushing consumerism.. soon china will have super industrial “farming” like in the US. and then later grassroots groups will try to convert urban land back into pocket parks and gardens like what’s happening now in the US.
ughh I hate when drivers honk at me when I’m outside the bike lane for a brief moment. If you were a more observant driver, you’d see that I was trying to pass another cyclist.
The bike lane is too skinny for two bikes side-by-side, and on popular routes (like around lake merritt, where this incident occurred), wider bike lanes are needed so faster cyclists can overtake slower people safely without getting honked at.
And then that driver was waiting at a corner to make a right turn and I passed him. Yeah, like your honking got you anywhere faster.
anyway… Not as pissed off as I sound like.. happy weekend!
Fuck for Forest
wasn’t that good.
The beginning seemed to take a while to introduce the problem
and later they didn’t show that much about the land itself that the NGO was going to buy and protect in the Amazon.
the main guy / CEO kinda just seemed to want to ban nudity laws.
at least i saw the film, right.. add to my list of watched documentaries…
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however, I saw Public Sex, Private Lives @the roxie in SF on wednesday. a look into the lives of porn stars (featuring Lorelei Lee, Princess Donna, Isis Love). That was quite good. enjoyable with a few laughs. I recommend it. the trailer sucks, though. (thankfully i saw the trailer after the full film).
huh.. I didn’t know it was a kickstarter project.. glad it got funded and produced!
“I support the local economy by making tourists buy embroidered SF fleeces at Fisherman’s Wharf because they didn’t realize July is actually winter and all their t-shirts and flip fops aren’t helping them stay warm.”
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via sfweekly, 14.06.13.
