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Subtropical Lawn Care For Green Incompetents

/ Adam / 2 Comments

In late 2009 we moved back to Brisbane, and in keeping with the low density suburban vibe that predominates in this city, acquired responsibility for a lawn. It takes up the remainder of a 400 m^2 block after a small worker’s cottage, a largish shed, and a few small gardens and trees are taken out.

I am not a huge lawn fan. We might convert some of it to garden, in the medium term, but even after that some sort of lawn seems inevitable. B floated the idea of letting it return to meadow, and sowing wildflowers. It’s a wonderfully romantic notion, but there are a few drawbacks. In Out of Control, Kevin Kelly describes a person who restores meadow environments in the US, and it is actually pretty hard work. In the same book, he quotes Freeman Dyson’s critique of Biosphere 2: that the great successes of a closed system like that will be weeds. (It was not exactly the original experiment parameters, but that’s just what happened). Rather more prosaically, typical scrub grass in South East Queensland grows to about a metre high. That’s taller than my son.

So rather than invest in tracking technology and snake wrestling lessons for the youngster, I resigned myself to participation in the ritual cleansing of the yard using a lawnmower.

I don’t really like lawnmowers either. Never have, they are coughing, loud, awkward things awash with fumes that always need filling up with petrol. Plus we have, with varying degrees of seriousness, been trying to go through what Alex Steffen describes somewhat derisorily as The Swap:

Many of these ideas are still being presented as support for the idea that we can conveniently retrofit North American 20th Century suburban life for the 21st Century. We still see hundreds of stories a day promoting the Swap — the idea that we can change the components of suburban, high-consumption, auto-dependent lives without have to change the nature of those lives — but that idea itself is non-reality-based.

To me the Swap is not sufficient but it’s a good start. And anyway, where does The Swap end and The Solution begin? So instead of another petrol lawnmower I bought a push mower off Ebay with $25 and an armful of enthusiasm. That’s push mower as in with your arms, not electric. It’s an old Flymo 5/40. Electric mowers have their place but require more financial commitment. And a really really long extension cord, or you take another big leap in expense.

We had a push mower when I was a kid so I was not entirely ignorant of its pros and cons. But here are some lessons learnt.

  • Consistency. These push mowers work best on short grass, so a philosophy of little and often works best. Once the grass grows a bit it will wrap around the internal axle, and also just stop the rotation of the blades. To make progress you then need to do many short sharp pushes on the same segment, rather than a relatively smooth walking pass. The effort increases in a brutally non-linear fashion relative to the length of the grass. When the grass got long, I ended up spending nearly a third of the mowing time on the most lush 5 metres square patch
  • Summer will beat you. We had record rainfall this summer as a long drought ended. Together with a few weeks away on business, bone idleness on my part, the wet ground and summer sun-fuelled grass vaulting ever skywards, I had to resort to borrowing a petrol mower a few times just to reset the playing field. Ok, what actually happened, even more humiliatingly, was my retired father just came and mowed it when I wasn’t home. Now we are on the edge of winter I am keeping up pretty easily. It’s still a net carbon win, but a bit frustrating to have to cheat in this manner. I suspect that without forking out for a lawnmower bike a few passes with the petrol mower will still be needed each Christmas though.
  • Grass types make a difference. For a lazy lawnmower like myself, broad short kikuyu grass is great. Shorter thinner grass like cooch or other even snobbier varieties used down south are dense pains in the neck (and back and shoulders).
  • Whipper snipper. It is harder to fudge edges with a push mower, as you can’t lift one wheel and push with that dangerous but widely used tilted petrol mower technique without losing almost all cutting power. Once I had established to myself that this push business wasn’t just a fad, by mowing for a month or two, I bought an electric whipper snipper. We recently switched to 100% green power at home so the carbon footprint is restricted to the manufacture and transport. Since I never did the edges properly before anyway, the place actually looks better now.
  • Profile. Our lawn is pretty flat and rectangular. Even so, there are a few dips and holes in it from trees removed long ago. They are a pain as well. We are trying to fill in the holes, but so far everything put into them has trickled down out of sight in a few weeks. They must have been big trees, possibly with roots in another plane.

I figure some people pay for the gym to get their exercise. I hate the gym, and this way we can still traverse our yard without a compass.

Two Letters and Twenty-Five Kinds of Awesome

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AE, the Canadian Science Fiction Review, is a larval stage SF magazine being launched through Kickstarter. I have the lucky, internet-mediated acquaintance of two-thirds of the staff. They are by turns witty, elliptically brilliant, and elegant vivisectionists of consensus reality. They also do words. Big words, small words, words jammed together into sentences, all varieties. Don’t believe me, go check their site out. Words all over the place, but none out of place.

The editorial team have embraced the web and Creative Commons, which is both appealling and the only approach that makes a damn bit of twenty first century sense, and they ultimately leave the final copyright choices up the the submitting authors. They are also planning to pay a decent rate – the SFWA rate, specifically. Their inspiration is, to paraphrase them slightly, more the many headed hydra of the Canadian cosmopolity than “Mounties In Space”.

Given the track record of these people’s superbity-ness, the very least I could do would be to point the rusty, lone search engine robot that reads this blog their way via the link above. So I’ve gone a tiny step further than that and pledged some money as well. Given the way Kickstarter works, this will come back to me in the form of delicious, perfect bound science fiction. Or if they don’t find enough backers this time, it will just come back to me, and the world will be a less speculative place. Which would be a shame. Because if there’s one policy this blog can follow, through thick and thin, it is being pro-awesome.

I really want to read a Mounties In Space story now. But stylish. Like Mountiepunk.

Captain Beefheart, John Sundman, and Richard Prince

/ Adam / 2 Comments

John Sundman writes ripping fictional yarns free of the help and hindrance of the established publishing industry. He has an eye for the technoparanoid flavoured with notes from Christian mythos.  Others have raved about his thriller Acts of the Apostles which is indeed a fun book; personally I like the experimental loops and hilarity of Cheap Complex Devices. It also helps that the tech sounds right, and no doubt his background as a tech writer (as well as fireman and peace corps volunteer) enriches the work.

Like most writers who are not also eccentric industrialists or aristocrats, and especially those without a current advance, Sundman is looking at ways to get paid to write, and his latest project got enough backers at kickstarter to get the go-ahead.

Which brings us to Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet. Captain Beefheart created a series of critically acclaimed and cultishly adored art-rock-wtf records in the sixties and seventies. If you need a more recent reference point – I did – he is Matt Groening’s favourite musician. I have a copy of Trout Mask Replica only because of a review written by Groening. It is a corker of a record but it sounds like a blues band being mugged by schizoaffective rabbits on the first listen.

Don, unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, could not make a living out of being a brilliant avant-garde rock musician, but he does make a living as an avant-garde painter. How does this work economically? The number of people buying fine art is if anything far smaller than that buying music, even avant-garde rock music. I suspect it is because Beefheart was in a no-mans land of niche popularity in a mass medium. An LP, CD or MP3 is cheap, with high production costs and low marginal costs. Each copy is also effectively identical, so supply is pretty expandable on demand. The result is low unit costs but also the need either move a lot of units, or make money another way (like gigs).

So Captain Beefheart took a similar career trajectory to Richard Prince – he moved from easily reproducible art to painting, which is the complete opposite of the cost scale. In the fine art world each piece is unique or in a strictly limited set (eg prints). The marginal cost of producing another self-portrait by Rembrandt is effectively infinite. The fine art world is therefore dominated by firstly a certain amount of zero-sum status pissing contest, and secondly and most relevantly a culture of collecting and patronage. It was more financially viable to find a few wealthy patrons than tens of thousands of casual followers.

If you look at Creation Science on kickstarter, it’s an attempt to tap both types of market. Contributions can range from a busker tip to full blown patronage, and according to Sundman the patron-style packages were not just wishful thinking. Personally I stumped up for the paperback, and here’s a toast to the success of Captain Johnny and his Magic Price Point.

Would You Like Subsidiarity With That?

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As it happens, the question of whether politics is a service industry once came up at the family dinner table, a number of years ago. I remember it because, on airing, my wife immediately quipped “Isn’t it a disservice industry?” and there the topic rested.

Tempting as it is to leave it there once more, given the time invested in the discussion leading to this question, let’s continue. John is after all brave and intelligent man, who like many economists struggles every day with Compulsive Quantification Disorder. He suggests here that Members of Parliament are best viewed as a kind of outsourced policy unit, a way to deal with our busy, everyday lives.

In a closing example it is asked Why do we hold an MP, who has power over our lives, to a higher ethical standard than say, a heart surgeon, who also has power over our lives?

Well, the question itself is wrong – we do hold heart surgeons to an extraordinary ethical standard, where we expect them to use their professional skills to their upmost to save their patients’ lives. And this is because saving lives and fixing dodgy hearts is at the focus of their professional role. If a heart surgeon fiddles with expenses, we are irritated because we paid more than necessary, and we feel certain general levels of professionalism have been breached, but it doesn’t compromise our mended heart. It’s also worth noting that a heart surgeon mostly has responsibilities to single patients; for our purposes she is mostly a hub, with spoke relationships emanating out to her patients.

What does an MP do? One of the roles they play is as a low tech vote proxy service for their constituents on particular votes before the Commons (or parliament of choice). John’s example is probably closer to say a mutual fund manager, making investment decisions on our behalf according to broad published guidelines, in this case a party manifesto, plus any individual pledges. On top of that, if they are in the cabinet, they also execute policy. Due to the way the Westminster system works, where the government can change without an election, this also goes for the shadow cabinet. That would be the part of government that can declare war, put you in prison for not paying your taxes, and so on. Any of these roles require good judgement and good character, and allowing people to be corrupt as a backbencher, but then reform as a minister seems an implausible reading of human nature.

Even this characterization is inadequate, however. Each and every member of parliament is responsible for the maintenance of the rule of law, to their constituents and to the common weal, whether society chooses them or not. To do that job requires respecting the law in the spirit and in the letter, its conventions and moral basis. It’s as fundamental as a heart surgeon being skilled at stitching up hearts. When you fail to respect the law – worse, the reason the law exists – then you prove yourself inadequate at an MP’s job.

Do people inevitably fall shy of this high moral standard, from time to time? Well, yes; and I’m actually pretty willing to overlook misdemeanors like claiming four pounds on dog food. I do find it indicative that one of the most centralising, box-ticking parliaments of recent times has fallen so broadly awry of exactly these sorts of pettifogging rules: it was lousy law and now we’re seeing why. Perhaps that has also fuelled some of the outrage and resentment behind this expenses scandal.

The state is larger than human at times, monstrous and casually cruel; this mortal God, Hobbes called it. To direct it, or mold this mortal god is yes, a sacred trust of sorts. It is sad when, from time to time, it chews politicians up and spits them out, the way lions, from time to time, chew up antelopes. It is sad but not unexpected.