BABY BRAINS ARE BEAUTIFUL

I listened to this very interesting podcast on my walk to the Farmers Market the other day (how green of me you say).  I was walking listening to talking about a man who walks the walk AND talks the talk.  Geoffery Canada is an American who has developed a program designed to lift the poorest children in the US out of poverty, and stop the cycle forever.  He and his program, the Harlem Children's Zone, are on my hot list of things to investigate and get behind. 

The casualties and ghosts of the abandoned war on poverty sit in our classrooms, walk our streets and waste away in our prisons. This is truly the American Nightmare: impoverished, uneducated and unemployable amid a land of plenty. We can continue to ignore them and pay the price or we can call up the national resolve to fight – and through education, win – the country’s abandoned war on poverty.  Geoffrey Canada

Don't be fooled by the first few seconds of this Charlie Rose segment with Geoffrey. It's not about Bill Clinton (a mantra I recommend Bill learn and repeat, repeatedly).

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

Today I took my cankles out for a walk and was nearly plowed over and devoured.  Or at the least the first part.  A woman in a hurry was backing out of her driveway.  I watched to make sure she saw me because she was, after all,  driving a white Mustang (who drives mustangs any more... this is not a muscle car town?!).  I stopped on the sidewalk as she started pulling out.  She stopped.  I started walking again. Just as I was smack dab behind her she hits the gas and I was up to my elbow in Mustang screaming Whoa!  Whoa!  !@#$!!!   She must have heard me or seen me contorted around her trunk because she slammed on her brakes and immediately rolled down her window begging for forgiveness.  She looked both ways!  She's so sorry!  She didn't see me!  She said all this to my back as I was not going to stick around and get in a yelling match with an undoubtedly over caffeinated Mustang driver.

I was of course very shaken by this but continued my walk.  Some survival gene got juiced by the trauma and for the rest of the walk I saw nothing but danger ahead.  There was a small flock of five or so crows on the grass in front of me.  Living in Los Angeles provides them with much to eat (rats, trash, fertilized grass) and they were huge.  As I approached they squawked and flew off but I thought, what if they didn't fly off?  What is they were rabid or as crazed by the heat as I am and decide that between the five of them they could take me?  Their feet are as big as my hands! 

Later I passed a man walking his dog.  Lots of people have dogs in my neighborhood and 8am is when they take them out for their morning constitutional.  One dog was little, but the other was GIANT and hairy, so hairy that you couldn't see his eyes.  Never trust a dog whose eye you can't see.  I imagined what it would be like if he decided he could take me, he's bigger than me AND his owner.  But then I got distracted by the thought that I could never own a pet for whom I had to follow and pick up a HANDFUL of warm poop. I avoided the whole thing by taking an extra wide distance as I passed.

When you are single and not working, you have to ask yourself every once in a while, if I were attacked by killer crows in the middle of the day, who would know?  Sure, eventually someone would notice that I'm not around, but by then it would be too late, the crows would have already told their buddies who would have finished me off.  I would already be calories for crows.

I need to stop listening to Ayn Rand on my lovely walks in my beautiful neighborhood.  In the meantime crows, Mustangs and the people who drive them have been added to my list of notorious outdoor predators (real or imagined).