clearing out the old linkspam

[firecat]

Why I roll my eyes when individuals are exhorted to help California's drought by taking shorter showers.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/10/07/central-california-aquifers-contaminated-billions-gallons-fracking-wastewater
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LJ user xiphias notices some stunning political irony, which gives him the opportunity to quote the whole of Langston Hughes's 1938 poem "Let America Be America Again."
http://xiphias.livejournal.com/746269.html?style=mine#comments
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There's going to be a Sherlock Holmes exhibition at the Museum of London. The article is called "Sherlock Holmes: dispelling the myths. Most of the myths mentioned don't need to be dispelled as far as anyone interested in Holmes is concerned. The article is more interesting for its analysis of how Holmes and Watson almost immediately became larger than Conan Doyle's characters, which were actually rather sketchy and contradictory. Interesting bit:

It should be noted that Conan Doyle himself didn't sweat the details. Everything from the location of Watson's old war wound to his marital situation and the address of his consulting room was distinctly patchy. Characters' names are occasionally observed to change halfway through a story. Here, Holmes is a notorious practical joker; there, he is identified as having no sense of humour whatever. Here, we're told he's an early riser; there, a bastard for his lie-ins. The stories are hackwork of a very high order – which, oddly, makes them more rather than less fun to subject to the forensic scrutiny of the obsessive. Debates about their inconsistencies provide the space for elaborate and ingenious theories to blossom

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/11/sherlock-holmes-exhibition-museum-london-dispelling-myths
http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/london-wall/whats-on/exhibitions-displays/sherlock-holmes/
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Via Jae on DW, redefining the understanding of gentrification (no, it's not driven by young artists moving into poor neighborhoods and starting cafes), how it ties in with racism, and how many individuals feel they don't have much of a choice whether to participate in it.

Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/liberalism-and-gentrification/
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Subprime car loans are booming thanks to devices that allow the lender to brick the car if the buyer falls behind on their payments. The device also allows the lender to track where the car is.

In Austin, Tex., a large subprime lender used a device to track down and repossess the car of a woman who had fled to a shelter to escape her abusive husband, said her lawyer, Amy Clark Kleinpeter.
The move to the shelter violated a clause in her auto loan contract that restricted her from driving outside a four-county radius.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/
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Katherine Lampe writes about class privilege (specifically, the kind where people with enough money have no idea how people with less money live). http://theshadowsanctuary.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/class-privilege-perspective/
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Via AndrewDucker on DW, some genes are implicated in the coffee obsessions of certain people.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/addicted-to-coffee-your-genes-are-to-blame-new-study-claims-9783454.html

Comments

[flarenut]

Yep. In NYC we used to be told that people used 1200 gallons a day. Of which the typical person used maybe 50, with the rest being used on their behalf by once-through water-cooled heat exchangers for skyscraper air conditioning that wasn't even metered.

I'm not sure at all that the shower thing helps with engagement, because it pushes engagement with the wrong things. If you're not engaged with fracking and alfalfa...

Of course, I can say that while comfortably ensconced in a state with more water than we know what to do with.