Peace Nachos

Some Random cell-phone photos from the past week:

brick detail
 

Down and out in OTR:

playing with fire, at a party at the art gallery (Space Dock Gallery)[where: 18 E. Thirteenth Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202] above the Tucker's on 13th Street:
 

Checkered Room at said art gallery:

The start of the 5K Flying Pig, last Saturday:
 

Peace Nacho car 

Car Addiction and Oil Tragedy

Where is the outrage at the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?
Eleven men were killed, the water continues to be polluted, wildlife
is being killed, fisherman cannot fish, globules of congealed oil are
beginning to wash ashore, and most of us just shake our head say "what
a shame". And there is no outrage, because we know that the real
culprit is us. Our demand for oil, specifically cheap gasoline,
caused this tragedy.

Gasoline is subsidized and the price kept artificially low by
politicians that want to get the suburban and rural vote. Shortcuts
are taken on safety and oil companies are subsidized to keep oil
cheap. Lets be honest. If gasoline was priced to truly reflect the
external costs: the environmental damage caused by spills, the wars
waged to secure supplies, the human costs of the instability of
countries like Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq, the disease caused by
exhaust, the cost of the US Navy constantly patrolling the Persian
Gulf and guarding every tanker, and the surface excavation of
thousands of acres of pasture to procure tar-sand, and the smog, and
the carbon emissions, to the costs of local spills, local damage done
at refineries and gas stations etc etc...If all these costs were truly
figured into the cost, a gallon of gas would be totally unaffordable.
Yet, it is political suicide for a politician to call for even a
modest increase on the gasoline tax, even when the reason is that the
current tax doesn't even cover the costs of interstate road
construction and maintenance!

In the US, over the past half century, we have reconfigured our
patterns of settlement, our cities and our countryside, to a paradigm
that is fundamentally supported by one thing: cheap oil. And this
paradigm is so ingrained into us that we don't even see it anymore.
And there is no substitute, no affordable replacement to run our
254,000,000 cars. You cannot run hundreds of millions of
rubber-wheeled vehicles on used french fry oil or hydrogen or methane
or solar or whatever. Americans have a communal delusion that when
oil starts to get expensive, we will solve the problem with nuclear
powered cars of some sort that will allow us to continue driving
everywhere. But this is delusion. We have to wake up to the fact
that we made a mistake, a huge mistake in re-developing our country
around the automobile. It is time to kick the habit, time to live in
walkable places, and a modest start would include increasing the
gasoline tax.

Wanted: Suburban House in City

I happened upon an article in a Toronto newspaper in which the author, a mother of two, complained that she couldn't find a suburban type house in her urban neighborhood. I found it interesting, because I have met several downtown couples who feel a similar conundrum. In her words, she wants:

..an affordable, big, four-bedroom suburban house – in the city. That way, we non-car owners could live in spacious comfort and still be within easy walking distance of a decent health-food store, playing fields, the library, the boys’ public school, restaurants, our families and work. ..

...Our boys commute by streetcar to school every day, and they navigate the transit system with ease. They can’t ride their bikes home from school because they’d have to cross three major roads to do so. They play in their neighbourhood park, not their backyard. We make good use of Toronto’s ravines for weekend hikes...

I really don't have any solution for this mother, except to say you cannot have it all. You cannot have your urban lifestyle, and have a large backyard, ...at least on a budget and in a "safe" neighborhood. Yes, those houses do exist in Cincinnati, (for example in the gaslight area of Clifton) but for most middle-class families, you must choose. For my family, we chose to live in a poorer neighborhood, so that we could still afford the space, and yet we still don't have a private yard. We have a community garden, and we have the parks. I haven't run a lawnmower since I was a teenager, but neighbors step on vegetable plants in the community garden. The vegetables are not that important to me.

Understand your priorities, jump in, and don't look back.

Secular Humanist Graffiti