Se solicitan trabajadores!!!

When I drive out to Cal State Channel Islands, the last 10 minutes of the drive passes through farmland, most of it planted with strawberries. Here and there along the straight lines of raised strawberry beds, groups of men and women stoop to pick the berries and place them carefully in boxes. Every so often, one of them stands up with a completed box, and walks quickly, or sometimes runs, over to the truck where the berry boxes rise in stacks.

Strawberries are one of the most labor intensive crops around. Unlike many fruits, they ripen unevenly, so you have to look at each berry to see if its ready to pick. The teams of laborers work from one end of a field to the other over the course of a few days, then they go back to the beginning and start over.

California is in the middle of the worst recession in my lifetime. The official state unemployment rate is over 10%, and I read today a prediction that it won't drop back below 10% until late in 2011. As I drive I often think of how incredibly fortunate I am to have work to go to that I like and that doesn't require me bend at the waist for hours at a time, starting in the chill of early morning and finishing with the sun hot overhead, day after day.

I'm told that nearly all the workers are Spanish-speaking, from Mexico and Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras.... I am sure some are American citizens and many have Green Cards, while others are "undocumented" or "illegal" or "unwelcome". This is not a political essay and I don't know what the right answer is; all I can say is that the people in these fields work hard everyday to support their families and to put strawberries on our tables, and I am in awe of the work they do.

"Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet"

I found this article very interesting - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/

My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again.

The Montrose Flood

The area where is live is laced with an extensive system of concrete culverts designed to channel rain water. Shown here is the Verdugo Wash. These culverts lead to the Los Angeles River, which is partially restored but mostly a concrete culvert as well, and then to the ocean.

Up above, at the base of the 5000 foot high steep wall of the San Gabriels sit huge boulder fields with concrete dams designed to trap the boulders that are washed down from the mountains in a heavy rain. Around our house the earth is a sandy loam with dozens of grey rocks of various sizes embedded in it. All of this is evidence of the thousands of years of periodic floods that were the harsh, natural environment of this area that lies in a valley just above the LA basin.


I was reminded of this history by an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times about the Great Montrose Flood of 1934. About a dozen people died when a wall of water, mud, and boulders came crashing down out of Pickens Canyon on New Year's Eve. It's hard to imagine the violence that such a flood would have represented. The San Gabriels are steep and rocky, and the kinetic energy represented by the flow of water and earth must have been staggering. Sometimes we sneer at our concrete "washes" in LA - they seem like such a crude substitute for the natural arroyos that existed before - but another way to look at them is as a triumph of civil engineering that lets human beings live safely in a harsh environment.

From Melting Pot to Pizza

One of the things I love about LA is the way cultures are mixed together in unexpected ways. Los Angeles is a city of mashups! This pizza spot I saw near downtown last night summarizes it rather well. Unlike a melting pot, where everything is merged into one undifferentiated goo, people come from all over the world and then maintain their identities. Of course that's true over most of the USA today, but it's in front of you constantly in Los Angeles.

Morning on the 405

This is pretty much how I've been spending my week...

I-95

IMG 1695
Originally uploaded by robotbrainz

I love songs that can evoke a place, whether it's a place I know or one that exists just in the mind of the songwriter. Two that come to mind immediately for me are Waterloo Sunset and Strawberry Fields.

One of the things I like so much about the band Fountains of Wayne is that their songs are specific - real people, real places. They have names like Julie and Stacey and Michael, and they live in places like Brooklyn and they shop at Costco and at... Fountains of Wayne, on Route 46 in Wayne, NJ.

Their latest album, Traffic and Weather, is really wonderful - and at the moment, my favorite song is "I-95":

They sell posters of girls washing cars
And unicorns and stars
And Guns N' Roses album covers
They've got most of the Barney DVDs
Coffee mugs and tees
That say Virginia Is For Lovers
But it's not
Round here it's just for truckers who forgot
To fill up on gasoline
Back up near Aberdeen

It's a nine hour drive
From me to you
South on 1-95
And I'll do it 'til the day that I die If I need to
Just to see you
Just to see you

I spent many years doing that drive 2 or 3 times a month, from New Brunswick, New Jersey to Durham, North Carolina (and a few years before, from Falls Church, Virginia to New Brunswick). The words and the sound of the song put me right back there on the highway, stopping for gas at the big truck stop in Aberdeen with the giant sign you can see two miles away as you rise and fall over the rolling hills of Maryland.

(Thanks to Robotbrainz for using a Creative Commons copyright for the photo above.)

The Differential Engine In Operation