Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Of all the native species that like to grow here, I think I dislike black locust the most. This is because the young trees sprout everywhere, they grow fast, and they have vicious thorns. The stems are tough, so they’re hard to get rid of.
However, in the spring, the locust trees redeem themselves with dripping pods of flowers that have a really pleasant, springy scent.
I took my camera to the mill today when I went to buy chicken feed, hoping to get a portrait of one of the mill cats. The mill cats were not to be seen, but the spring chickens were still there. This was at the Monitor Roller Mill at Walnut Cove.
My local newspaper, the Stokes News
While big newspapers are foundering and shrinking, small local newspapers are holding their own, or even thriving. Is there a useful economic lesson in this for relocalization?
Oceans of ink have been spilled in attempts to analyze why larger newspapers are dying. It boils down to two things: both readers and advertising are leaving the larger newspapers at a fast rate.
Since local newspapers are holding on, then clearly local newspapers are holding on both to readers and advertisers. I understand that my local newspaper, the Stokes News, is doing well and making money. Let’s take a look at the Stokes News and see if we can make some guesses about why.
On the front of this week’s issue are profiles of the race for county sheriff. Each candidate gets about 20 column inches — a lot of space. There is a story on a new campaign to market Stokes County as a country-music destination. That story is 42 column inches long — huge. Inside is a lot of community news, including columnists from different communities who write about who is sick and who is visiting whom. The cooking column, “Cat’s Kitchen” by Cathy Long, is far more solid and enlightened than the quirky-trendy food writing I see in the larger Winston-Salem Journal. And besides those quirky trends are stale by the time they arrive in Winston-Salem. The Stokes News has a huge sports section, with detailed coverage of high school sports and lots of stuff on hunting, fishing, and golfing.
In short, the Stokes News contains hyper-local information that people want, and there isn’t anywhere else to get that information in one place.
Let’s take a look at the advertising. Inside the paper are ads for local merchants and services. For example, lawn mower ads from local hardware stores. Even small businesses like pet-grooming and handyman services can afford the small ads.
But I’m sure the real money-makers are the preprinted inserts. These include inserts from three grocery store chains: Lowe’s, Food Lion, and Ingles. There’s also an insert for CVS pharmacies, and Wal-Mart. Those are the stores that capture most of the routine weekly spending by people in Stokes County (though you have to go outside Stokes County to find a Wal-Mart).
People spend a big chunk of their money close to home, at places within driving distance. That, I believe, is the key to why small newspapers are doing well.
With a population of about 44,000 people and a per capita income of about $18,000, total Stokes County household income is something over $800 million a year. That’s a lot of money, enough to support a lot of businesses, and much of that money is spent close to home.
Corporations are capturing most of that money — grocery and drug store chains, Wal-Mart, etc. How long did it take corporations to figure out how to capture so much local income?
The number of family farms in the United States peaked in 1935. I think it’s safe to say that corporations didn’t get a big percentage of local income in 1935. But probably the year of the turning point was 1945, the end of World War II. That was when the trends began that turned the United States from an agrarian economy to what it is today — corporatized and suburbanized. In less than 65 years, corporations ultimately responsible to Wall Street have come to soak up most of the spending of people even in small, rural counties such as Stokes County.
Relocalization is about reversing that process. If more of that $800 million a year stayed in Stokes County, just think of the jobs it would produce. Many of those jobs, to be sure, would be agrarian jobs similar to what people here did in 1935. Do people still want to do those kinds of jobs? I don’t know. But one thing is clear, as local newspapers prove: There’s a lot of money in local economies, so much money that Wall Street wants it. Grocery stores get the biggest chunk of it.
Local folks who figure out how to reverse those postwar trends and sell (particularly food) into the local market will find that the money is there. And every dollar that stays inside the county makes the county better off.
Wikipedia
I hope the non-nerds will excuse another nerd post. But because of some of the email I get, I know that some of the readers here are nerds…
As we contemplate the fact that we are all energy hogs (you do contemplate that fact, don’t you?), I think it’s interesting to remind ourselves just how much can be accomplished with small amounts of energy. Let’s use an example from radio. To us modern digital folks, radio may seem like old stuff, antique almost. But all of our favorite toys depend on radio, from iPhones to WiFi.
Musicians are familiar with the concept of the octave. Octaves have to do with the doubling of a frequency. A piano keyboard, for example, covers seven octaves of sound. The human ear can hear about 10 octaves of sound. We can apply the concept of the octave to any phenomenon where wave forms and frequency are involved. This includes, of course, electromagnetic energy. If you go up about 40 octaves from the piano keyboard, you arrive at the frequency of light. The human eye can perceive less than an octave of light. Red light is the lowest frequency of light we can perceive; violet is the highest.
In between the frequencies of sound and light is radio, in a frequency range of 3,000 cycles per second (3 kilohertz, or 3 kHz) to 300 billion cycles per second (300 gigahertz, or 300 GHz). That’s a lot of octaves. What’s amazing about radio is that different frequencies travel around the earth in very different ways. For example, the frequency of radio waves emitted by your cell phone (around 1 GHz), can’t travel very far, because it can’t (usually) bend with the earth’s curvature or bounce back down to earth off the earth’s ionosphere. On the other hand, radio frequencies up to about 30 megahertz (30 mHz) can travel all the way around the earth under the right conditions, even with very little energy.
A candle is better at producing heat, actually, than light. A candle produces a meager 13 lumens of light and 40 watts of heat! That’s a huge amount of heat energy. And, by the way, the average human body runs on about 100 watts of energy, of which the brain consumes a fifth — 20 watts. The brain burns less energy than a candle. And though the energy used by the human body is a tiny fraction of the energy used by our cars, our bodies are not excellent examples of energy frugality.
Compare the energy richness of the sun with the energy frugality of the moon. The sun’s radiation produces about 342 watts per square meter on the earth’s surface, on average, during the course of a year. By comparison, the energy on the earth’s surface from the moon (per square meter) is only about a thousandth of a watt. To generate 1 watt of electricity from moonlight would require about 3,200 square meters of solar panels. But we can still see the moon perfectly well, can’t we?
As I proved to myself today, a signal can travel from North Carolina to Switzerland using substantially less energy than the energy produced by a candle. Beacons I transmitted today using less than 2 watts of power were heard in Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, Italy, and, of course, California. One of the reasons this is possible is because I used a digital, computer-generated mode of data communication that is extremely slow, efficient, and noise resistant. This mode is called “WSPR,” pronounced “whisper.” It takes almost 2 minutes to transmit this much text in the beacon: “K9WQ EM86wk 30.” The first four characters, K9WQ, are my FCC call sign. “EM96wk” is shorthand for my approximate location. The “30” is the amount of power I used, represented as decibels, and equals less than 2 watts.
That seems like magic to me.
I wanted to calculate how many watts of energy are in the sound of a human being shouting. I don’t quite know how to do that calculation, but I’m sure that plenty of people can shout louder than 2 watts. That’s one of the reasons I don’t watch television. I’d rather whisper on the radio.
Who I heard, and who heard me
The motherboard of a 12-year-old computer: somewhere you don’t want to go
What if your computer crashed today and couldn’t be restarted? What would you lose? There is no costless way to back up your computer. Probably the easiest and least expensive plan is to periodically burn CDs or data DVDs of files you don’t want to lose.
Back in the late 1990s, when I was working for the San Francisco Examiner (may it rest in peace), I sent my older sister a quite fine computer that was being retired by the Examiner — a Hewlett Packard Kayak XA. The PC had been in the office of a former publisher of the Examiner, Lee Guittar, so the computer was executive-suite squeaky clean. My sister used this computer until about three years ago, when the computer was damaged by an ugly power failure in which the power went on and off several times in quick succession. The computer went to the garage, and my sister got an iMac.
A week or so ago, my sister brought the computer to me. I had promised to see if I could revive it. When powered on, the computer would emit a series of beeps and then go silent. I have the technical documentation for the computer, and I knew that the beep codes probably indicated a problem with the BIOS on the system board. But my attempts to reflash the BIOS using the procedure in the technical manual failed. If there was any hope for reviving the computer, a new mother board would be needed.
What would we do without eBay. There was a mother board for sale with exactly the right part number, for $20 plus $15 shipping. I bought it. After I installed the new mother board, the old PC booted with almost no further drama.
My sister had kept things well organized. Everything of interest was pretty much in three folders — “Pictures,” “Pictures 2”, and “Recipes.”
I’m trying to decide what to do with my refurbished HP Kayak XA mini-tower computer. It’s pretty slow by today’s standards. But I’ll at least keep it as relic of the San Francisco Examiner days. The computer still has an Examiner property tag on it.
Here is a sampling of the photos which were almost lost.
San Francisco, looking across the bay from Point Bonita. My mother and sister used to make annual trips to San Francisco. Several of these photos were taken on those trips.
Mendocino County, California, along Highway 1. In Ireland those rocks would be called skelligs.
My sister’s deviled eggs, looking very Southern
Loaves of bread made by my sister
I believe this is some sort of apple pastry, made by my sister
A pie, made by my sister
The Hillsville Diner, Hillsville, Virginia. It’s about 40 miles northwest of here.
Inside the Hillsville diner
That’s me serving pinto beans from the wood cookstove. The stove is in a house that my sister and mother and I stayed in on a visit to Mendocino County. During the 1970s and 1980s, two of the old houses I lived in had wood cookstoves in them. I’m very skilled at cooking on a wood stove. Notice the gas stove behind me. We had ’em both going.
That’s me, doing a very unprofessional job of cracking oysters in Inverness, California. The oysters came (of course) from the Hog Island Oyster Company on Tomales Bay. As for the oysters, we fried ’em in batter.
A couple of times when my mother and sister came to San Francisco, we stayed at the Chicken Ranch cottage at Inverness, California, right beside Tomales Bay. In spite of its humble name, the Chicken Ranch cottage was at the time an outpost of Manka’s Lodge. This photo is taken from the backyard of the Chicken Ranch cottage.
This is my sister and I, before the premiere of a Sharon Stone film in San Francisco. My boss at the San Francisco Examiner, Phil Bronstein, was married to Sharon Stone during that epoch, and so I got invitations like that. What an era: the thrill of the dot-com boom, grief for the end of the Examiner, and some Hollywood glamour thrown in.
Sorry for the blur. That happens easily with my camera when the light is low.
Solution below. Don’t peek.
The groundhogs love to eat my clover. Until a few months ago, I had a family of groundhogs living within 25 feet of my upper porch. That was a little too close for comfort. I was afraid they’d borrow around the foundation of the house. I harrassed them whenever I saw them by making noises, throwing things, and emptying cat litter down their holes. After a few weeks of harassment, they moved back just inside the woods.
For now, I’m content with where they are. Though groundhogs can be garden pests, I think they’re one of the smaller nuisances. Unlike deer, groundhogs can’t wipe out an entire garden in one night. They’re welcome to the clover. I like the idea of providing habitat for the critters, as long as they don’t bite me or get into my food.
I’ve decided to try straw bale gardening this year. Though my raised beds, filled with compost, have been pretty productive for the past couple of seasons, straw bale gardening seems even less expensive and less hassle. The idea is, you first prepare the bales for 10 or 12 days by keeping them soaked with water and adding fertilizer. Then you slip baby plants (not seeds) into the bales.
Though someday I’d love to have a thriving all-organic garden, that will be easier after I’ve had some years to work on the soil. The bales, as they decay into the soil, can’t help but help.
If you Google for straw bale gardening, I think you’ll find that the process has been university tested and is university blessed. Here’s a good starting article. Don’t be tempted to buy instructions. There are plenty of free sources of instructions on the web.
Ammonium nitrate, which is what you’ll find in 34-0-0 or 32-0-0 fertilizer, is powerful stuff. It may be a little harder to find than ordinary 10-10-10 fertilizer.
Whole wheat sourdough bread from homemade starter
I am a novice at sourdough bread, but I do think I’ve learned that sourdough requires experience. Experience not only for the baker, but also for the sourdough starter. My sourdough starter, which I made from scratch, is now a month old. I first made bread with it when it was seven days old. The first loaf rose, and it was decent bread, but each subsequent loaf has gotten better. I think this is because I’m learning how to handle sourdough and because the starter is getting more mature. At first, the starter had more of a neutral, fruity smell. Now it’s getting more and more sour and smells more and more like sauerkraut.
Yesterday’s bread took six hours to rise. I suppose that’s normal, but I’m still learning.
Here’s a link to my previous post on sourdough.
In the fall of 2008, I planted 10 young apple trees and a pear tree. The trees came from Century Farm Orchards. They’re all old Southern varieties of apple trees. Each tree was about 3 feet tall when I planted them.
I don’t expect apples for three years or more, but I did have my first blooms this week. Two of the trees had small, single blooms. So far so good.
I finally have a whole-house surge protector, something I’ve wanted for a long time. It’s possible to buy these things and have an electrician install it, but my electric company offers them for $9.95 a month, with installation, and a warranty, included.
The surge protector installs under the meter. It took the technician only a couple of minutes to install it. The warranty will pay for the repair or replacement of anything damaged by lightning (or any kind of power surge) that gets through this surge protector. The warranty covers each damaged device for up to $5,000, or a total of up to $50,000 per incident. One of the advantages of a whole-house surge protector is that it can protect the big stuff such as the heat pump, refrigerator, washing machine, etc. It’s a good idea to keep the small surge protector installed at computers, etc., to give them double protection.
I hope this makes me feel a little more secure during the summer lightning storms. I know how much damage lightning can do…