localish change

That penny was mashed and given me by this woman at a hand cranked machine in Golden Gate Park during Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (HSB). She was explaining to people one at a time why Warren Hellman was sponsoring the event. It went something like "Wells Fargo was just about going out of business. Warren Hellman's grandfather set up a table outside the bank and gave people gold coins if they would take them into the bank and deposit them in new accounts. It saved the bank." I put my favorite moment of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass on facebook as:

> At Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Steve Earle was introduced as 'Warren Hellman's Secretary of Insurrection.'
> In case you're wondering, he did sing "The Revolution Starts Now." One time during singing it I could
> swear he sang "the revolution starts here." That was just the icing on a great day of music.

Since then I've remembered that maybe Steve Earle was introduced as "Warren Hellman's Secretary of Defiance." For sure, before he sang the song he said something like "the whole country is looking to San Francisco to change things. In the '60s the electrifying force was a series of events that happened in this park at this time of year, just like this moment we are sharing now." I came away from the event liking what I'd heard.

That slogan was printed on the bag they gave me as I left the registration table for the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce festive fall mixer type event at the Santa Clara Convention Center. That coin was the only quarter in my pocket when I got home. The art could have been any of the many different images they have nowadays. The other object is a small piece of the thing I got from one of the tables. It reminds me of the guy that told me "the most efficient watering is hand watering by people that don't want to put any more time into it then they have to." I live that by bringing my tomatoes a large cup of water when they need it. Anyhow, it was a loud and interesting event. I came home well fed and slightly drunk.

I remember reading in a book about Indiana history that "the american dream is a shared national vision that makes practical sense at the local level." I thought about that for years before I figured out that calling the American Dream "a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot" was nothing but pandering to the car, building, and poultry industries. Obviously for George Carlin the "AMERICAN DREAM" (as they put it above) involved getting folding green applause for pulling the rug out from under people's preconceptions. I don't know what the american dream looks like to you, but I really hope that whatever it is, the carbon footprint is small. I've noticed that sustainable answers are usually the most energy efficient ones.

I was surprised to find out that the Lucky on El Camino near Americana sells 14 oz. bags of ground cumin from India for about what Safeway sells these 2 oz. jars of the stuff. The Safeway jar is unlabeled as to country of origin, which almost certainly means it was domestic. That coin was a one year old green festival token that I never got around to cashing in when I took the picture. I had it in my pocket for the next green festival, but they stopped using that system so I still have it.