The Power of Each Pair of Hands

At a cleanup at North Carolina's Jordan Lake (near my house) a few weeks ago, about 50 volunteers picked up trash over a period of 4.5 hours. (Previous post title: So Glad I Did)

The results: 110 old tires and roughly 250 large bags of trash.

The bold move: getting out there when you might think lots of people are going and two more hands won't make all that much difference.

The pictures are from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which organized the effort and grilled hotdogs afterwards.





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Ode

Just ran across a magazine "for intelligent optimists" that is both predictably upbeat and appealingly unpredictable. Ode Magazine started in Rotterdam in 1995 and has been publishing out of San Francisco since 2004.

The current April issue includes a piece by William Stimson, a proponent of "radical simplicity," titled "How to Move a Tree: Why Attempting the Impossible Is Always the Right Thing to Do."

And, in the surprising category, is a story: "Tax the Beautiful: Ugly People Should Be Compensated for their Obvious Disadvantage in Society, argues Gonzalo Otaloro." (by Marco Fisher)

Taxing the beautiful is the most outrageous idea I've heard since a few days ago when a Republican candidate for statewide office in NC was reported as favoring merger of the U.S. and Canada.

I can't say that I support either of those, but I love the wide-ranging thinking they show.



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