‘you never know
what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.’
-Cormac McCarthy
Happy St. Patrick’s Day !
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source credit: gary larson, the far side
Mar17
Mar16
in the streets.
A world built for cars has made life much harder for grown-ups, Stephanie H. Murray wrote in 2024. https://theatln.tc/XVjVdlji
In 2009, two mothers in Bristol, England, experimented with closing part of a neighborhood road to traffic for two hours after school. “The experiment also produced some unexpected results,” Murray writes. “As children poured into the street, some ran into classmates, only just then realizing that they were neighbors … That session, and the many more it prompted, also became the means by which adult residents got to know one another.” As the experiment has expanded, “neighborhoods across the country have discovered that allowing kids to play out in the open has helped residents reclaim something they didn’t know they were missing: the ability to connect with the people living closest to them.”
Roads were once areas of community and play. “Only when cars hit the streets in larger numbers did things begin to change,” Murray writes, as “deliberate efforts within the auto industry shifted the blame for traffic deaths to children and their parents.” Streets became a place for children to cross only when cars were absent, and speed limits subsequently rose.
Play streets can now be found sporadically in urban centers. Play streets help bind communities, because adults must work together to enact the logistics of shutting the roads down. But it could also have something to do with the way children’s play alters the feel of the street, giving adults permission to engage in the sort of socializing “we’ve otherwise policed out,” one expert told Murray; kids function, he pointed out, as a sort of “connective tissue for adults.”
“Children’s tendency to violate social boundaries—to stare a little too long, ask someone an overly forward question, or wander into someone else’s yard—can nudge adults to reach across those boundaries too,” Murray continues at the link in our bio. “It probably isn’t a coincidence that playgrounds are one of the few places in America where striking up a conversation with a stranger is considered socially acceptable … By siloing play there, we may have inadvertently undercut children’s capacity to bind us to one another.”
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:Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Giuseppe Ramos / Getty
Mar15
food gatherers.
working with a group of like-minded helpers
we sorted through 1200+ pounds of apples
fresh from a local farm
getting them ready
to donate to our community
‘act as if what you do makes a difference. it does.’
-william james
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Food Gatherers is the largest anti-hunger program in Washtenaw County, Michigan. We partner with a network of hunger-relief partners that includes agencies and programs providing direct food assistance through schools, clinics, low-income housing complexes, shelters, counseling programs, and faith-based organizations, as well as programs serving seniors, the disabled or those with mental illness, and substance abuse recovery programs. By providing free or very low-cost food to our partners, they can serve their communities and direct their own funds toward the vital human services they provide.
Food Gatherers’ mission is to alleviate hunger and eliminate its causes in our community. As the food bank and food rescue program serving Washtenaw County, we do this by connecting valuable food resources to programs that serve those in need. In fiscal year 2025, Food Gatherers distributed 10.3 million pounds of food — the equivalent of 8.5 million meals. This is only possible thanks to the support of many volunteers, community partners, and donors.
More ways to give
- By phone: Please call Food Gatherers at 734-761-2796. Our hours are Monday-Friday, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
- Start a monthly donation: Join our Full Plate Partner program and provide even more nutritious food to our neighbors. Click here to start your monthly gift.
- Donate food: Visit our Give Food page for details on our most needed food items and donation guidelines.
- Host a food and fund drive: Want to engage your community in the fight against hunger? Click here for details on how to host an event to benefit Food Gatherers.
Food Gatherers is effective and efficient — 95% of donations go directly to hunger-relief activities in our community. Food Gatherers does not share donor names publicly without permission.
Mar14
cottage.
i would love to live in a colorful cottage like this
tiny, imperfect, and a bit uneven
if it were not made of paper
—
‘i would sooner live in a cottage and wonder at everything
than live in a castle and wonder at nothing.’
-joan winmill brown, british actress and writer
—
image credit: albert’s constructions
Mar13
widdershins.
Mar12
familiar.
for some reason in the last few days
I’ve had a series of people coming up to me
asking if I was the person they saw somewhere
or mistaking me for someone else who they knew.
are people following me,
am I wearing powerful magnets,
does my face look extremely generically familiar?
—
here are my series of events:
1. a man who I’d met once was in a large group meeting with me and stopped me to ask if I had been with a small group, maybe family, at dinner a few nights ago at a restaurant in town. it turns out I had been but he hadn’t said hi because we barely knew each other and he couldn’t remember my name. I was only there because the guest of honor requested that restaurant but it wasn’t a place where I usually go. the man who asked me the question had first met me when he came to a smaller meeting I was in, sat down and realized that he had come to the wrong meeting by accident but ended up staying for the whole meeting anyway. we now are working together in the big group.
2. later that same day, I met up with a different small group of people in a tiny cafe to begin organizing a community project. a woman who I had never met was at the cafe and asked me if I had been to a grocery store prior to the meeting, because she thought she had seen me there. I said, yes I had met my daughter there earlier before coming to the cafe meeting. We introduced ourselves and will now be working on this project together.
3. the next day, I walked downtown to a small market and was browsing in the cheese section, where a woman was also looking at the cheeses nearby. She began to talk to me and I thought she was just being friendly or asking me a question, so I turned to her and she apologized, saying she thought I was her friend who looks very much like me and lives nearby and she just assumed that I was her until I looked puzzled. we are not going to be working on a project together, at least as far as I am aware of at this point.
4. the next day after that, yesterday, I was walking in the mall due to bad weather, with my friend, when a woman came up to me to say something and when she got close she said that I looked exactly like her friend but realized at the last minute that I wasn’t her. so we all laughed and she went on her way. I explained to my friend that for some reason……
—
‘people always think they know me from somewhere.
that shall be my epitaph:
‘he hath a face familiar to many, known to few and now hidden forever.’
-stewart stafford
Mar11
i hope.
-tanner olson
Mar10
craveable?
nothing about this really appeals to me
but to each their own
maybe pizza soup in a bag
will be the next big thing
i’m just not getting it
maybe i should be drawn
to the dripping greasy stuff
it says it’s
proper good
and a
craveable creation
so –
—
‘part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like
and let the food fight it out inside.’
~ mark twain
Mar9
pay to play.
there was a lottery that gave you immunity from being arrested
Get-out-of-jail-free cards aren’t exclusive to Monopoly.
When Queen Elizabeth I found herself in need of funds to pay off the debts incurred by her father Henry VIII’s reign, she began organizing England’s first national lottery in 1567. One of the prizes was arguably worth more than money: immunity from being arrested.
Elizabeth had been reluctant to raise taxes on her subjects despite her plans of expanding England’s naval forces and overseas expeditions, so she turned to a lottery instead. She wrote in a letter to Sir John Spencer in 1567, “It is expedient to have somme persons appointed of good trust to receave suche particular sommes as our subjects shall of their owne free disposition be ready to deliver upon the said lotterie.”
For the price of 10 shillings (about 120 pounds today, high enough to be cost-prohibitive for many citizens in Elizabethan England), entrants were eligible for a top prize of 5,000 pounds (around 1.1 million pounds today). The top 11 winners received cash prizes, and anyone who entered received temporary immunity from arrest for all crimes other than felonies, piracy, and treason — though this protection was not always enforced. The winners of that first lottery have alas been lost to history, but one imagines they enjoyed their low-stakes crime spree as much as, if not more than, their cash prize.
—
source credits:history facts.com, parker brothers, monopoly
Mar8
yet another daylight saving time day/night.
‘they always say time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself.’
-andy warhol
—
here we go again.
—
art credit: Alexandra Rozenman,’ Playing With Light,’ Oil Painting
I didn't have my glasses on.... 