Steve Hely's Blog, page 24

we’re all eating wood pulp

This piece in Bloomberg by Ken Parks about a wood pulp mill in Paraguay caught my attention. In trying to learn about “tons of cellulose” as a product and measurement I learned that they really mean like plant meal, which we then eat.

A 2014 NPR piece by Allison Aubrey sums it up with the headline: From McDonald’s to Organic Valley, You’re Probably Eating Wood Pulp

but don’t worry, the people doing that say it’s fine:

“A good way to think about it is to ask: Would our food be any better or worse if the cellulose used was sourced from another plant?” And Coupland says the answer is no. “Cellulose is just a molecule, and probably one we want more of in our diets.”

“Ah, yes, the ‘wood pulp in cheese’ stories,” Elizabeth Horton of Organic Valley responded to us when we asked her about the headlines.

Paraguay has had a rough go, something like half the country or more died in some meaningless war in the 1860s. The photos of it can look eerily like photos of our Civil War, happening at the same time.

polar bear cub with sunglasses

source.

pretty obvious how I found this (reading Mari Sandoz’s biography of Crazy Horse -> Mari Sandoz wikipedia page -> wikipedia page for “snow blindness”)

I’m all right on that one

And there used to be a politician in Nebraska, and if you asked him some really tough question like, you know, how do you stand on abortion, he would look you right in the eye and he’d say, “I’m all right on that one.” And then he’d move next.

very Warren Buffett joke from Warren Buffett.

You know, Tom Murphy, the first time I met him, said two things to me. He said, “You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.” Well, that was great advice then. And think of what great advice it is when you can sit down at a computer and screw your life up forever by telling somebody to go to hell, or something else, in 30 seconds. And you can’t erase it. …

And then the other general piece of advice, I’ve never known anybody that was basically kind that died without friends. And I’ve known plenty of people with money that have died without friends, including their family. But I’ve never known anybody, and you know, I’ve seen a few people, including Tom Murphy Sr. and maybe Jr., who’s here, (LAUGH) but certainly his dad, I never saw him, I watched him for 50 years, I never saw him do an unkind act.

on fun:

And we had as much fun out of deals that didn’t work in a certain sense as the ones that did work. I mean, if you knew you were going to play golf and you were going to hit a hole in one on every hole, you just hit the ball, and it went in the hole that was 300 yards away, or 400 yards away, nobody would play golf.

I mean, part of the fun of the game is the fact that you hit them to the woods. And sometimes you get them out, and sometimes you don’t.

So, we are in the perfect sort of game. And we both enjoy it. And we have a lot of fun together. And we don’t have to do anything we don’t really believe in doing.

On See’s:

And it has limited magic in sort of the adjacent West. It’s gravitational, almost. And then you get to the East. And incidentally, in the East, people prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate. In the West, people prefer milk chocolate to dark. In the East, you can sell miniatures, and dark — in the West —

I mean, there’s all kinds of crazy things in the world that consumers do. 

Talking about Netjets:

CHARLIE MUNGER: I used to come to the Berkshire annual meetings on coach from Los Angeles. And it was full of rich stockholders. And they would clap when I came into the coach section. I really liked that. (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE)

(he doesn’t fly that way anymore)

from this CNBC transcript of the afternoon session of the annual meeting. I couldn’t find a transcript of the morning session.

Oppenheimer

I watched the new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer movie. Can it top Cormac McCarthy in three pages in The Passenger?

Good luck!

Murals of the Zimmerman library, University of New Mexico

Here we see the Zimmerman Library on the main campus of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. The building was designed, like so many buildings in New Mexico, by John Gaw Meem.

Meem used architectural forms such as battered walls, vigas, and stepped parapets in combination with modern building techniques and materials to evoke the past without imitating it directly. He explained in a 1966 article that he used symbolic forms to “evoke a mood without attempting to produce an archaeological imitation.”

Meem’s finest works all found resonance with the soft, earthbound forms and materials that were part of the vernacular architecture of the Old Southwest.

Meem also headed the committee that wrote the 1957 Historical Zoning Ordinance for Santa Fe, which locked in the city’s distinctive style. I pilfer from Wikipedia a gallery of some of his works and restorations:

A personal favorite is La Quinta, at Los Poblanos Ranch and Inn.

We poked our heads into the Zimmerman library to see Kenneth Adams’ WPA-era murals, Three Peoples. However, the librarian informed us these are now covered, because, as she put it, some people find them offensive.

(lifted from here).

Kind of get it. These murals loom over big rooms at the library of the school, whose undergrads are 46.4% Hispanic. You can arrange to see the murals apparently, but checking them out online was good enough for us.

Strangely there’s another mural, the history of which I don’t know, which remains uncovered:

Another good mural in New Mexico:

The rattlesnake game

One day a man walked in the saloon carrying a big glass jar with a live rattlesnake in it. He wanted to sell it. Frank says: “Hell, no, they see snakes soon enough.”

But the man kept arguing with him. He says: “It’s big money for you if you’ll buy it. Now I’ll bet the drinks for the house there ain’t a man here that can hold his finger on that glass and keep it there when the snake strikes.”

To show you what a bonehead I was, I took him up. It was thick glass and I knew damn well the snake couldn’t bite me, so I put my finger on it. The snake struck, and away come my finger. Igot mad and made up my mind I would hold my finger on that glass or bust. It cost me seventeen dollars before I quit, but since then I’ve never bucked the other fellow’s game and it has saved me a lot of money.

Frank bought the snake and he sure made money on it. It was lots of fun to get some sucker that thought he was long on nerve to go against it; no one ever could. But one night a bunch of cowboys came in and I knew some of them. They all tried the snake and failed, and one of them got mad and busted the glass with his sixshooter, and the snake got out and they had to kill it.

that from an excerpt from We Pointed Them North by E. C. Abbott, “Teddy Blue.” In his In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas Larry McMurtry says:

Anticipating a road trip to the northern plains I’ve been reading up. I’m good as long as I have a coming road trip to think about.

The Rattlesnake game

One day a man walked in the saloon carrying a big glass jar with a live rattlesnake in it. He wanted to sell it. Frank says: “Hell, no, they see snakes soon enough.”

But the man kept arguing with him. He says: “It’s big money for you if you’ll buy it. Now I’ll bet the drinks for the house there ain’t a man here that can hold his finger on that glass and keep it there when the snake strikes.”

To show you what a bonehead I was, I took him up. It was thick glass and I knew damn well the snake couldn’t bite me, so I put my finger on it. The snake struck, and away come my finger. Igot mad and made up my mind I would hold my finger on that glass or bust. It cost me seventeen dollars before I quit, but since then I’ve never bucked the other fellow’s game and it has saved me a lot of money.

Frank bought the snake and he sure made money on it. It was lots of fun to get some sucker that thought he was long on nerve to go against it; no one ever could. But one night a bunch of cowboys came in and I knew some of them. They all tried the snake and failed, and one of them got mad and busted the glass with his sixshooter, and the snake got out and they had to kill it.

that from an excerpt from We Pointed Them North by E. C. Abbott, “Teddy Blue.” In his In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas Larry McMurtry says:

Anticipating a road trip to the northern plains I’ve been reading up. I’m good as long as I have a coming road trip to think about.

Coachella

125,000 some people expected each day – would that make the concert and arts and unofficial fashion festival California’s 49th biggest city, somewhere ahead of Clovis and behind Pasadena? For two weekends.

An “ARTIST A PASS” ticket costs $9,495 through a secondhand retailer.

Is it interesting that of the biggest acts at Coachella in 2023, several perform in a blended English/X language? Spanish for Bad Bunny, Korean for Blackpink? Are we evolving a new global pidgin of pop?

The one I would’ve most liked to have attended, even more than Beyoncé, might be AC/DC. When they played their first note the ground was said to shake in the farthest parking lot. A feeling more body than sound. Felt in the bones.

Derbyshire peaks

huh, I don’t see it. will have to investigate in person some day. That from

and the photo is from Wikipedia, by Vincent.

wrongos

surprised to find the word “wrongos” passed New Yorker copyedit. That from Margaret Talbot’s review of the new J. Edgar Hoover bio by Beverly Gage.