What’s become of me?  There once was a time when I’d have been all over something like this.

A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama told Men’s Health magazine last fall that such a tax is “an idea that we should be exploring. There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda.”

But with all the junk food and U.F.O.’s (unidentifiable food-like objects) out there, why soda? Why a tax? And, most important, would it work?

But before we all jump on the Captain Obvious-sponsored “Soda Isn’t All That Good for You” bandwagon, perhaps we should recognize this solution for what it really is: LAME.

The problem here isn’t the sugary drink itself, but the much wider prevailance of cheap, sweet calories.  Soda is NOT the new tobacco, as the New York Times wondered yesterday, because soda is just one of many forms that cheap calories take. Tobacco, on the other hand, is clearly tobacco, for better or worse.  Period.

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For all you middle-agers out there, those most infuriating of DM comments might actually do your grey matter good.  From the New York Times…

The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

…Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

So click on those comments and jiggle those synapses.  Jiggle ‘em!

Looking back on it, few should be surprised that preservation efforts, both historic and environmental, were so aggressive prior to 2008.  The construction industry, which single-handedly does more to alter the natural and urban landscape than any other entity, was building at an artificially fast pace, boosted by demand that really wasn’t there.

So it should also be no surprise that in a post-boom era, conservation groups are making up for lost time, buying up land for a fraction of the price it once demanded.

From the New York Times…

The victories [for conservation groups] reveal a green lining of sorts in a credit crisis that has depressed real estate prices, spawned foreclosures and derailed development projects across the nation.

The purchases by conservationists and state and local governments assure that thousands of acres will be put aside in perpetuity for parks, watershed protection or simply preservation of open space.

“We are getting a second bite at properties that never should have been developed in the first place,” said Will Rogers, president of the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit group that buys land for preservation. “We are working on dozens of these deals across the country, and I know other land trusts are as well.”

Since late last year, I’ve been half-looking, half-hoping to come across some statistics I could spout out at cocktail parties regarding how much of the world’s carbon emissions is attributable to food production, storage and delivery.  This morning’s NY Times article about Sweden’s initiative to put CO2 info on food labels is an absolute treasure trove of data.  The big number…

An estimated 25 percent of the emissions produced by people in industrialized nations can be traced to the food they eat, according to recent research here.

And don’t miss this handy graph that shows, among other things, the extreme difference that can be made by choosing chicken over beef.

Ken Edelstein asked me to post this weeks ago.

This weekend, before or after you head down to Oakhurst for the Arts & Music Festival, take MARTA down to Candler Park for some more festival action!

According to the Fest’s website, you’ll be able to dye your hair green, play dress up, see Kingsized perform on Sunday night (and Baton Bob on Saturday), and even invade people’s homes (what some folks call a “tour of homes”)!

But what I really wanna know is, why on earth is the New York Times a sponsor of a Candler Park festival?

This morning’s NY Times struggles with a seeming paradox.  The nation is in a recession and the national crime rate is down.

How is this possible?  Turns out no one can really explain it.  Lord knows there are a lot of proposed causes for upticks or decreases in crime rates.  Prison rates, active policing, low-profile immigrants,  improved public housing policy, better medicine, expanded gun ownership,  abortion, poverty levels, illegal drugs.

Sure everyone has their hunches.  Problem is, according to the article, no one has ever really effectively argued any of these supposed correlations into the realm of causation.

In complement to the previous post, this morning’s NY Times used the closing of a Chappaqua, NY bookstore to examine what’s putting indie bookstores out of business.

And while I don’t think the article’s conclusions would be considered earth-shattering (surprise!  It’s Amazon and big-boxes!), I thought this quote resonated…

There’s so much noise in American life that we tend to hear only the loudest: Obama-mania! A.I.G. Mania! March Madness!

Way down on the decibel scale is a buy-local movement struggling to be heard. On the Internet, in small business groups, even from groups focused on local bookstores (www.indiebound.org) its message is that if people want local stores, a downtown that’s vital, they should shop there, even if they can get the Tylenol cheaper at Target and the John Grisham book cheaper at Amazon.

Nothing is forever, certainly not an independent bookstore. A lot of things killed our bookstore, including the terrible economy and the incessant information overload that makes reading a book like a quaint rite from the past. But if we lost it out of indifference, or to save a buck or two on Amazon, we lost a lot more than we saved.

Buy local.

The New York Times has created “The Local“, which features two blogs; one that covers a couple Brooklyn neighborhoods and the other that documents a few towns in NJ.

Descriptions on the two sites (description 1 and description 2) make them sound like they’re aiming to be very similar to sites like DM.   A little FAQ created by the Brooklyn blogger asks the perennial question “How on earth does the Times expect to make money off this?”  Here’s his response…

We’re not sure yet. This is very much an experiment. As this venture grows, we’re hoping that a business model will emerge from it. If you’re a fledgling Internet entrepreneur and you have an idea – well, you can contribute to The Local, too.

Hmm.  Doesn’t sound too like they found the magic formula just yet…but I think just jumping in is the best way to figure it out.  A big part of the problem thus far has been that news folk everywhere have been attempting to find a business model that can be applied to every community.  Just the act of attempting that shows they’ve already missed the point of local blogs.  The best ones are molded to their individual communities.  That includes how it would possibily make revenue.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, good for them!  I’m obviously in full agreement that local blogs are of great value, and I think they’re on the right track by having bloggers blog their own neighborhoods.  In terms of being self-sustaining…that’s something everyone is still working on.

For someone who will see his little blog pass a half -million page views today, you’d think that a post entitled “The End of Newsprint” would be a ego-stroking report on the death of newspapers and the unstoppable emergence of the much mythologized “citizen journalism”.

But its not.

Reading Michael Hirschorn’s “End Times” article in Jan/Feb’s Atlantic yesterday, which chronicles the building death-knell of the hard-copy edition of The New York Times didn’t send me out into the night, twirling and laughing at my good fortune.  Actually, it just left me feeling very unsettled.

Hirschorn’s article documents the well-known descent of the newspaper industry and talks about how the NYT must make drastic changes over the next 5 months or it could default on $400 million in debt.  His analysis concludes that the death of newsprint is inevitable…and he’s probably right.

But my own foray into “citizen journalism” hasn’t done much to placate my fears that something substantial isn’t lost when print media goes entirely online.  Yes, newspapers have had this coming to them for an awfully long time.  In its own attempts of survive, our own AJC still claims that it covers the entire metro-Atlanta area, lulling people into a false sense of security that if news happens in their suburb, the AJC will be there to cover it.  But as we’ve seen here in Decatur, cutbacks have made it nearly impossible for our hometown paper to tell even half of the relevant stories the community should know about (Was there a peep out of the AJC regarding the Fellini’s robbery?).  The success of THIS site would not be possible without the cut backs at the AJC.  My questionably-humorous anecdotes about Decatur politics wouldn’t be able to compete with a paid staff of dedicated full-timers.

If this is where the future is heading, this site is definitely on the right side of the trend.  However, I still have a couple real concerns. Read the rest of this entry »