I'm a grandmother!

She arrived a week or so ahead of schedule on August 23, leaving her parents unprepared with a name. So for now she's Baby Girl Palmer. Of course, her daddy was Bay Boy Palmer for a couple of weeks, so it's a family tradition.















And here are the proud and very photogenic parents.

Today's fresh catch

I went out to the garden to get a tomato for a tomato and cheese sandwich. Came back with a mini-harvest of
4 tomatoes
3 potatoes
1 pepper
38 tomatillos
3 onions
5 beets
41 green beans

The 38 tomatillos mean there will be some salsa verde in the near future.

My kitchen is fragrant with another bumper crop of white nectarines. One of the small blessings of global-warming-induced spring drought.

If you have a garden, be sure to get out there once a day and get your hands dirty. Pull some weeds, search for potatoes, or just sift through the soil. Soil microbes have been shown to stimulate production of serotonin, the body's natural anti-depressant. All you have to do is get them on your skin, and they do the rest.

Why can't we be a little more like Denmark?

I don't usually agree with Thomas "Flat Earth" Friedman, but he's right on with this description of how Denmark used energy taxes to create wealth and energy independence.

Denmark, by the way, is one of the most economically successful states in the world.

Op-Ed Columnist - Flush With Energy - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.

And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy: “No.” It just forced them to innovate more — like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)

There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had “a positive impact on job creation,” added Hedegaard. “For example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.

“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”

Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.

“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”

Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.

Why should you care?

“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”

Of issues and arugula

From Andrew Sullivan, that notorious former conservative:

Here you have the current message of the McCain campaign from no less an authority than Rick Davis:

"Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand ‘MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew—Black Forest Berry Honest Tea’ and worry about the price of arugula."

They really played the arugula card? For all McCain's personal qualities, we're learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions - how do we get out of Iraq with the least damage? how do we get past carbon-based energy? how do we tackle al Qaeda's new base in Pakistan and within the nuclear-armed Pakistani government? how will we reduce the massive debt bequeathed us by the Bush-Rove GOP? how do we restore the Geneva Conventions? - we are debating people's cultural insecurities and food choices.

The slow collapse of conservatism as a coherent governing philosophy is not unrelated to this. If you never want to fight campaigns on policy, why bother crafting any?

I'm walking again

The salient characteristic of all canes: they fall on the floor. Repeatedly.

Steve can tell where I am in the house at any given time by the clatter of the cane, falling yet again. Fortunately, my injuries are such that I have no trouble bending down and picking up the cane.

The cane belongs to my mother, who has several. It is decorated with exotic symbols such as a compass rose, Mayan calendar and various flags and banners. I've seen it in my mother's hands many times, and I feel a special bond with my mother when I'm using it.

My mother sent me flowers, with the note, "I know you are trying to save the atmosphere by riding a bike, but first take care of my little girl till she is well. Can I help? Love, Mama."

(Said "little girl" being 61 years old.)

Yes, Mama, you can lend me one of your canes.

For the first few days after the accident, I could walk okay. Then it got harder and harder. Since my last post about it, I've had more X-rays and found that I have a broken collarbone and a small fracture in my pelvis. I suspect a couple more cracks in areas that were not X-rayed: my upper left arm and right thigh.

Five days after the accident, I could not walk at all. That's when I started getting around the house on my office chair, propelled--backwards--by my one good limb. Here I am, getting a cup of coffee. Fortunately, I could stand up with no trouble, because reaching above mid-chest height with either hand was a chore I could not manage.

But I'm getting better. I've gradually added skills: getting in and out of bed without excruciating pain, taking a shower by myself and then drying myself off, cleaning out the cat box, doing laundry, washing dishes, watering the garden. All these chores had devolved to my dear Steve, with some help from my daughter.

A week ago I started driving again.

Yesterday I overdid it. We went to some garage sales and the farmers market and picked up various heavy things, with which I put more strain than I should have on my collarbone. I did too much walking. Today I will pay the price. Thank goodness that ibuprofen now covers the pain, so I'm out from under the befuddling narcotics.

I'll need to get lots of rest today, because tomorrow I'm off to Sacramento to lobby for publicly funded elections, to get the special interest money out of California politics. A long shot, since most politicians are not sure they want to get that money out of politics even if it means they can work for the voters instead of the banking industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the prison industry, the oil industry, big unions, and on and on. Name your pet special interest.

It will involve a lot of walking down crowded corridors, not to mention from a distant parking garage. Wish me luck.

Too skinny, lack of experience

No, not Barack Obama. Abraham Lincoln.

At 6'4", Lincoln weighed 160 to 180 pounds when he was elected president. He lost weight while in office.

Lincoln's political background consisted of four terms in the Illinois state legislature, one term in the U.S. House, and a failed run for the Senate. He had not served in office for 12 years when he was elected president.

Oh, and he was a lawyer.

Photo from the Wikimedia Commons.