Monthly Archives: April 2006

Andy Goldsworthy

This entry was posted in art on by (updated 6790 days ago)

A couple years ago we first saw a documentary called Rivers and Tides about Andy Goldsworthy a British artist. He is primarily a sculptor and photographer. All of his work is created with natural materials from the area where the pieces are created. Many of his pieces are temporary by their nature, although some are permanent. Right now there is an exhibit of some his work at the Frederik Meijer Garden and Sculpture park in Grand Rapids. The show was put on in conjunction with a new permanent installation of an archgrand rapids arch created by Goldsworthy. The show runs through May 7, 2006 and if you have time to drive to Grand Rapids it is definitely worth going to see the Goldsworthy show. If you can’t get to Meijer Gardens definitely rent the movie and see it. Even if you can’t to Meijer Gardens before this show ends it is still worth visiting any time. Among other things they have the 24 foot highDaVinci horse. davinci horseThe sculpture is one of two castings made from molds based on the original design by Leonardo DaVinci 500 years ago.

Jules, Max and I went to Grand Rapids for a couple of days earlier this week while Sofia was on her trip to England. the Meijer Garden also has a tropical butterfly exhibit in one of the tropical conservatory. They have thousands of butterflies during the months of March and April. While we were there we also went to the VanAndel Museum downtown to see the Treasures of Ancient Egypt:The Quest of Immortality which also runs through May 7. This exhibit has artifacts dating back to the Old Kingdom in 2300 BCE. Among other things their is an eight foot high red granite head of Ramses II and full reproduction of a burial chamber from Thutmose III’s tomb.

Munk Interview

This entry was posted in music podcasting on by (updated 6785 days ago)

Last week on Accident Hash, C.C Chapman did a very interesting interview with Munk. Munk had some very interesting things to say about the music industry. Basically, he is making a good living as a full time musician, with no big label record deal, and no real physical distribution. He said that he may well never release another physical CD. He records all his music at home with a laptop computer, simple mixer, his guitars, bass and keyboards. He also has someone play drums sometimes. Take a listen to Munk’s music, you can hear it at emusic. It sounds as good as anything ever recorded in a big studio. The big music companies sign bands then take them into an expensive studio to record. Once the CD is released the costs of recording, promotion and distribution get deducted from the band’s royalties. The dirty secret of the music industry is that the vast majority of bands with recording contracts with labels never actually make a dime from record sales and often end up owing the label money. If they make any money at all it is from ticket and merchandise sales. Today with digital recording and downloads of music, a musician or band can record their own stuff and then distribute it on-line for a tiny fraction of the cost of actually pressing cds and getting them into stores, where many of them may sit unsold. There is also the issue of payola (money that record labels pay to radio stations for airplay). Munk

Munk has bypassed this system completely. He sells his music directly through sites like emusic, itunes, and cdbaby. He has also had his music played on commercials and TV shows like The Sopranos. His songs have gotten lots of play on podcasts, and he doesn’t have to pay podcasters to play them. Go listen to the interview and you can hear what he has to say and also hear some of his music.

Slacking

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I’ve been slacking on writing this week. I did replace my theme last week. I had been messing around with trying to modify, old theme to make the main body variable width, with the sidebars fixed width. This way the various items in the side bar don’t get cutoff but the page fills the page regardless of what screen resolution you use and the size of your browser window. My old theme was all fixed width and the style sheet was kind of funky. I finally found a clean looking layout and after tweaking the sidebars I rolled it out. The old theme was also throwing up errors when rendering the about and contact pages. This stuff all works now. I have more stuff I wan’t to write about and will be putting up a bunch of posts in the coming days.

Real Estate Signs

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So this morning YpsiDixit had a a post about the apparently squishy housing market in Ypsilanti. Then this afternoon the Ann Arbor News had an article about the rapidly increasing number of listings combined with stagnant sales, and actually falling prices. While most economists would blame this on rising interest rates as I did until recently, I think the real reason may be something different. Have you noticed anything new about many of the for sale signs in the last couple of years? Why is it necessary for real estate agents to stick a big photo of their mug on the for sale sign? I am not buying the agent, I am buying a house. What I want on the sign is the words “For Sale” and the phone number in big bold type so I can easily read it. I don’t want to see the face of some schmuck trying to sell houses all over town. Ann Arbor until just a few years ago used to prohibit for sale signs from realtors, only owners were allowed to put for sale signs on their houses. I used to think this was ridiculous. Now after seeing all the signs with agents pictures I think it is time bring back the sign ban.

Labor shortage? 3

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Yesterday in the AA News business section Mike Ramsey wrote a really ridiculous article about an impending shortage of skilled labor in this country.

“There’s a lot of baby boomers in the population and the first ones turned 60 not too long ago, and by 2010 a lot of them will be leaving the work force in droves,” said Sean McAlinden, chief economist for the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research. “Quite frankly, by 2010, presuming we still have any auto plants at all, they will all be hiring.”

The problem with that statement is that presumption of having any auto plants in 2010. Here is a copy of the letter I sent to the News this morning.

As I read Mike Ramsey’s article about a looming labor shortage, the only thing I could think was “What planet is this guy living on?” Has Mr. Ramsey actually tried to find a job in Michigan recently. There is not a shortage a labor here now or in the near future. What there is, is a shortage of skilled laborers willing or able to work for Wal-Mart wages. There are thousands of skilled workers who are being laid off by automakers and suppliers now and in the next few years. Skilled (and unskilled) laborers from Delphi have been asked to take a 60% pay cut. Even people who are not losing their jobs are seeing there wages stagnate or worse. According to census data median household income fell 3.8% from 1999-2004 while prices continued to climb and even productivity increased over that same period. Of course this wage stagnation has not been applied to executives whose compensation has continued to climb. As manufacturing jobs continue to get shipped to low cost labor markets, the only way people can get jobs here is to accept lower wages. Soon there will be no market in the United States for all the cheap products because no one here will be employed. As I was graduating with my engineering degree 15 years ago, there was a lot of talk of a shortage of 750,000 engineers by now. Well that never materialized either. If anything is a surplus of engineers now.

As the workforce ages there will also still be plenty of people available to work. Without decent paying jobs we won’t have a younger workforce paying into social security and with pension plans going belly up, the people who expected to retire will have to stay in the workforce. And since only people who already have plenty of money seem to be benefiting from the tax cuts of recent years, the vast majority of us will just have to keep working or at least trying to. Also the tax policies of the republican legislature and the previous republican governor have done nothing but eviscerate revenue for the state and local governments so they can’t do anything to help either.
Next time Mr. Ramsey might want to talk to someone besides the corporate managers who are obsessed with off-shoring every job they can before writing such a ridiculous article.

LeFurge Woods Nature Preserve

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On Saturday Max and I went out to the LeFurge Woods nature Preserve in Superior Township. I have been driving past it a couple of times a day for years on my commute to work. I have only ever stopped along the roadside to take some pictures of birds. Recently I read a post on YpsiDixit’s blog
 about exploring the preserve. Prior to that I was not aware that there were actually trails through the area and that people could go walking through it. Since Saturday was such a nice day, Max and I went for a walk and wandered around for about 1 1/2 hours. Thanks to the rain in the preceding days, the wetland was particularly wet and we came out with very muddy shoes.
Tree Swallow
I took a whole bunch of pictures and a selection of them can be found here. Fortunately with digital photography I have the freedom to just shoot and shoot and edit later without having to pay for photofinishing. I took about 160 photos, something that would have been completely impractical for me in the film era that I grew up in.

This preserve is a wonderful little piece of nature not very far from where we live. If you are in the area it is definitely worth a visit.

Wal-mart employees still underpaid

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I was reading news on Newsvine today and I saw this link to an editorial in The Nation. The newsvine headline read Op-Ed: $13,700 An Hour. The editorial discusses stagnant pay among most working Americans and the pay of corporate executives and the headline refers specifically to the CEO of ExxonMobil who earned $13,700/hour in 2005. The CEO of Haliburton earned $8,300/hour, and as usual a Wal-mart employee brings up the rear. The CEO of Wal-Mart earned a paltry $3,500/hour. Even the CEO of my employer made over $3800/hour last year. According to census data median household income fell 3.8% from 1999 to 2004. I can confirm this, because my own real income has fallen steadily for the last 5 years. My raises have been less than half the official inflation rate, and that doesn’t even fully factor in the real cost increases in energy and health care. A full-time employee making the minimum wage only makes $10,500/year. No executive is worth that kind of money no matter how much profit a company makes. For executives to earn 80-100 times or more what the average employee is making is absolutely obscene. The salaries and bonuses paid to corporate executives in the United States is completely out of control. Costco for example pays their CEO 12 times the average of all employees. They also pay their employees 40% more than Sam’s Club and 90% of their employees have health care coverage. Costco also has five times less turnover than Wal-mart and in spite of all this Costco is very profitable with over $1 billion profit in their last fiscal year. You don’t have to over pay your executives to make good profits.

SAE Congress

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Yesterday I attended the 2006 SAE World Congress in Detroit. SAE is the Society of Automotive Engineers of which I have been a member for 17 years. The congress is basically the annual convention of the organization. The gathering includes dozens of technical sessions on all kinds of automotive engineering related topics. There is also an expo for car makers, suppliers, tool providers and other vendors. The big theme this year definitely seemed to be hybrids. There were hybrid vehicles and power-trains on display at many of the car-maker booths and hybrid components and systems on display at various supplier booths. GM had their hybrid power-train that is coming next year on their full size SUVs. Honda had their new Civic hybrid. Ford had the Escape hybrid. Toyota of course had the Prius and the new GS450H hybrid. Aisin showed a new automatic transmission with 2 motors built in that is designed for rear wheel drive applications.

Probably the most interesting thing I saw was from a company called Ovonic. Ovonic started in the early 90s developing advanced batteries for all-electric cars. They made the batteries for the GM EV1 electric car. Unfortunately for GM and Ovonic they didn’t really make much real progress in improving the energy storage capacity of batteries. Chemical batteries in general continue to be a very poor means of storing energy. In terms of energy storage capacity per volume and and weight batteries remain at the bottom of the list by a long distance. Just try picking up the battery in your car and see how heavy that is and all it can do start your engine. Compare that to a gallon of gas which depending on your vehicle can move it anywhere from 10-50 miles.

Ovonic has a new subsidiary that has been developing hydrogen storage systems. Hydrogen is great for use as a fuel because the only combustion byproduct is water vapor. One of the problems with hydrogen besides producing it is storage. Hydrogen gas needs to be stored at extremely high pressures. Ovonic and other companies have been working on methods of storing hydrogen in solid form, which is much safer. They showed a Prius that had been modified to run on hydrogen and used their metal hydride storage system. The hydrogen powered Prius gets the same mileage as the gas powered version and has a range of about 200 miles. Thats more than 3 times the range of the EV1 ( which went about 60 miles under ideal conditions). The fueling system they have developed can fill up the car in about 8 minutes right now. So Ovonic has pretty reasonable hydrogen powered car that unlike the EV1 is actually a practical mid-sized car that can carry four people in comfort and get decent range and doesn’t need to be plugged in when it’s not being used.

Now we just need a hydrogen fuel infrastructure. Hydrogen cars aren’t much use if you have nowhere it fuel it up. We need to develop a cost effective means of producing hydrogen and distributing it. In the coming days and weeks I plan to write some more stuff on hybrids. Hybrid vehicles as we know them now have some very good points but they really are not all they could be.

Coverville

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Brian Ibbott was one of the earliest music podcasters back in the fall in 2004. Brian had a distinct twist to his show though. His show is called Coverville and he plays covers exclusively. He found a way to legally play licensed music by playing the ASCAP/BMI fees because the songs are all cover versions. He does his show three times a week and typically plays 5-6 songs per show. Some shows have a special theme and he also does “cover story” shows where he plays covers of songs originally done by one artist. Some recent cover story shows included one where he played covers of Nick Lowe songs and another of covers of Johnny Cash songs. Brian manages to find some incredibly obscure covers of well known songs. A lot of the songs are really good, but some of them are really atrocious. Some of the more interesting songs I have heard on the show include Don Ho doing his rendition of the Peter Gabriel hit Shock the Monkey and Phyllis Diller covering (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

Brian’s two most recent shows were truly good for a laugh. Last Saturday on April 1, he released his first episode of Originalville which includes a marvelous rendition of the Men without Hats classic Safety Dance. You really need to listen to this one all the way through to get the full impact. Check it out, it’s worth it. Then yesterday Brian did an interview with Richard Cheese. Richard does lounge renditions of hit songs, including a peppy mambo version of Sunday, Bloody Sunday by U2. Richard is a very funny guy. Go over to Coverville and peruse the archives. I’m sure you’ll find some fun surprises in there.

Mexican food in Ypsi

This entry was posted in food Ypsilanti on by (updated 6806 days ago)

Ypsilanti, has a real plethora of great Mexican food, and none of it comes from a chain or franchise restaurant. The old stalwart is of course La Fiesta Mexicana on W. Cross St. Michelle Roman and Guillermo Aleman (Memo) have been running their little establishment across from the EMU campus since 1990. On most evenings it is quite busy and they are also open for lunch. Jules and I and the kids have been going there for many years and always love the food. They specialize in traditional Mexican dishes primarily from central Mexico. The enchiladas verde covered in a tomatillo salsa have always been one of my favorites along with the tamales which are available with several different fillings. The fresh tortillas especially the corn are also extremely tasty. I could just sit and eat the corn tortillas for a meal. The carne dishes are fabulous too and the pollo con molle is a special treat as a are the Fajitas. Make sure you get some guacamole and a carafe of the limonada to drink. You won’t be sorry. Now Michelle and Memo have opened an offshoot called Taqueria La Fiesta on Packard at Carpenter Rd next to the Hollywood Video store. We’ve been there a couple of times now and it is great. The Taqueria is different, mostly takeout with a few tables. The menu is also very different from the original restaurant, with tacos, gorditas and Mexican sandwiches, none of which are available at the original. The lengue tacos are particularly good and a new favorite of Max. This place is definitely worth checking out if you are looking for some quick food on the go.

Another recent addition is Taqueria LaLoma on W. Michigan Ave. The location has been home to several different establishments in the last few years but it looks like La Loma is going to stick around for a while. The food is great, and the service is really fast. The chimichangas are very tasty and the various tacos and burritos are great too. They also make great Mexican sandwiches. Depending on what you are looking for each of these restaurants has great choices to offer, with their own unique menus.

On the other hand any “Mexican” restaurant that doesn’t know what cilantro is must be avoided at all costs. In that vein make sure you stay away from Tios. This place started in downtown Ann Arbor and has had a second location in Ypsilanti for a few years now. The appeal completely escapes me. We’ve tried it a couple of times and been completely underwhelmed each time. Throwing some jalapenos and hot sauce on your dishes does not make Mexican food. The hot sauces seem to be the sole appeal of Tios, and if you take those away the food is bland and uninspired, reminiscent of Taco Bell.