But a big change is coming. With little fanfare, a grassroots "farm-to-cafeteria" movement has been spreading from school to school. More than 400 school districts and 200 university cafeterias are now building their menus (and, in many places, their educational curricula) around fresh, local ingredients, much of which is organic. In nearly every case, the change has come because some parent, farmer, nutritionist, or other individual rose up to ask, "What the hell is going on here?"
Vanessa Ruddy was one of them. In 2002, her son, Grant, enrolled at Lincoln Elementary School in Olympia, Wash., and when she took a look at the lunch menu, she did not like what she saw. While this school had long shown an interest in good food (it had an organic garden, a children's activity kitchen, and a harvest festival in the fall), the lunch program at Lincoln was definitely old school.
At the bottom of the menu was the name of Paul Flock, the school district's child-nutrition supervisor, and Ruddy decided to call him. She put it off for a month, however, assuming he'd be a typical bureaucrat, and she dreaded having to make a big fuss and wrestle with the bureaucracy. Lo and behold, though, Flock welcomed her call and was open to improving the menu.
Ruddy enlisted other parents to join her for a meeting in Flock's office, and he asked what she wanted. "Organic Food" was her response. Thus began an organizing process to get teachers, cafeteria staff, the kids, farmers and other relevant parties involved and working together. Sure enough, in October 2002, Lincoln Elementary opened its "Organic Choices" salad bar, with a colorful and flavorful array of fresh, organic, locally produced fruits and veggies. Ruddy said that the school's cook told her, "You would have thought it was Christmas! You should have seen the kids' eyes light up."
Entertaining and astute, Ducky's tales of sex-gone-wrong and sex-gone-right flow into narratives of how women really orgasm, perverse octopuses, beer goggles, balls, female ejaculation, weird things found in people's butts, the truth about butt-gasms, outlawed sex toys, banned books and fear of sex education in America. Combine all that and you get a hilarious and thought-provoking look at today's twisted libido.
TICKETS: $5 to $15 sliding scale
(This event is sponsored by For Your Pleasure.)
I hit Seattle Friday morning from NYC and the Colbert Report. I didn't get any sleep that night as I replayed every question Colbert asked and came up with 10 better answers I should've used. Kind of like traumatic job interview. I also hadn't slept the night before Colbert from nerves and the fear that I wouldn't wake up and I'd miss my 6 a.m. flight.
So I was running on fumes. I was picked up 19-year-old Andrew, who runs the Pacific NW Portal, and we got lunch. Jerome was hanging with David of Horse's Ass (who broke the "Brownie is a horse lawyer" story). With a little food in me, I seemed to perk up. We headed over to Redmond to speak at Microsoft. Tamara at MSFT put on a great event, and I got to meet famed tech blogger Robert Scoble. I even got to sign a book for one of George Bush's former national press secretaries. (Jerome's inscription: "Not next time".)
After Microsoft, I was really starting to feel exhausted. We headed over to Seattle's Labor Temple, where SEIU and Drinking Liberally's Seattle chapter hosted a great talk. Elliot Bay Book Co was on hand to sell books and reportedly did brisk business. We had close to 200 people show up, the event was blogged, and I was so pumped from meeting so many great people that a bunch of us headed out to a bar afterwards for a drink. I was suddenly not so tired. That night I slept great at the swanky W courtesy of MSFT.
The next afternoon we had a picnic in torrential rain, but people still showed up, including Dave Neiwert, Preemptive Karma, and Auntie Neo Kawn.
We then headed to Olympia, where a great crowd met us at Orca Books and wiped out their entire inventory of CTG. The General tried to disrupt the event, but his mission was not accomplished. (And how cool was that? I was quite the groupy.)
JA also put up a post about their soggy sortie to the NW.
Submitted by Rob Richards on Mon, 04/10/2006 - 10:12am.
By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer
April 10, 2006
BAGRAM, Afghanistan — No more than 200 yards from the main gate of the sprawling U.S. base here, stolen computer drives containing classified military assessments of enemy targets, names of corrupt Afghan officials and descriptions of American defenses are on sale in the local bazaar.
Shop owners at the bazaar say Afghan cleaners, garbage collectors and other workers from the base arrive each day offering purloined goods, including knives, watches, refrigerators, packets of Viagra and flash memory drives taken from military laptops. The drives, smaller than a pack of chewing gum, are sold as used equipment.
The thefts of computer drives have the potential to expose military secrets as well as Social Security numbers and other identifying information of military personnel.
A reporter recently obtained several drives at the bazaar that contained documents marked "Secret." The contents included documents that were potentially embarrassing to Pakistan, a U.S. ally, presentations that named suspected militants targeted for "kill or capture" and discussions of U.S. efforts to "remove" or "marginalize" Afghan government officials whom the military considered "problem makers."
Postal union members in Sioux City are worried that a proposed consolidation will leave residents with lesser postal services than people from bigger cities.
To show their disapproval of the plans, which would close a post office distribution plant in Sioux City and move its activities 90 miles away to Sioux Falls, S.D., union members picketed in front of a downtown post office in Sioux City last week.
Currently, Sioux City's distribution center offers the same speed of service available to residents in much larger cities. But some fear those services will suffer if the distribution center leaves town.
Protests in Sioux City mirrored similar displays in other cities, such as Olympia, Wash., and Philadelphia, said Tom Maier, a national business agent with the American Postal Workers Union.
Maier said that he doesn't believe all postal consolidations are bad, but that he thinks some of them could leave people with lesser service. Federal law requires the postal service to provide universal service to the public, he said.
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