Jesus Creed
Mexico’s largest mural:
PACHUCA, Mexico (AP) — A community project in central Mexico is bringing art to people’s homes. Literally.
A group of artists known as the Germ Collective have spent 14 months turning the hillside neighborhood of Las Palmitas into a giant, colorful mural in an effort to bring the working-class “barrio” together and change its gritty image.
Working hand-in-hand with residents, muralists have painted the facades of 200 homes bright lavender, lime green, incandescent orange — hues more commonly found in a bag of Skittles than in the drab, cement-and-cinderblock neighborhoods where many of Mexico’s poor live.
Seen from afar, the individually painted houses combine to form a cohesive, if abstract, swirly rainbow design. Bright stripes that begin on one wall run across several homes before swooping into graceful curlicues.
It’s an homage to the wind: the city of Pachuca is nicknamed “la bella airosa,” a Spanish phrase that loosely translates as “the beautiful breezy city.”
Project director Enrique Gomez said the goal is to promote community integration and change the negative image of the neighborhood.
“I never thought we would have such a big impact,” said Gomez, a tattooed and goateed former gang member who turned his life around when he rededicated himself to graffiti art and muralism.
Check out those homes in Mexico with this story from Emily Badger:
The single-family home in America has evolved in one particularly remarkable way: It has gotten bigger, and bigger, and bigger. New homes built today are about a thousand square feet larger than single-family homes completed just 40 years ago (that’s about the size of an additional modest rowhouse in Washington, D.C.).
All that space is a sign of our times — of the relative wealth to afford it, thegovernment policies that incentivize it, the tastes we now have for third bathrooms and fourth bedrooms (even though the size of the typical American household has actually been shrinking).
In fact, in many ways — most of them more subtle — the American single-family home has changed with time in ways that say much about us and how we live. Vertical town houses built in the 1800s gave way a century later to horizontal homes, 3,000 square feet on a single floor. Compact ways of living that made sense when we got around on foot faded with time in favor of the spacious homes made possible by ubiquitous cars. And the popularity of cars changed the very design of our homes, too, as we created places to park them indoors.
We’ve gone over time from the row house to the ranch home to the McMansion, with myriad variations along the way determined by the climate (a New Orleans shotgun house demands a front porch for cooling off) and the culture (prairie-style homes mimic a favorite Midwestern son, Frank Lloyd Wright). Our homes have been reshaped, reformatted, and reimagined depending on the availability of land and the materials on offer and the earlier styles that have come back in vogue.
Speaking of big ol’ houses, what about the grass to mow? Christopher Ingraham is a bit cranky about mowing the grass, something I enjoy immensely:
The average American spends about 70 hours a year on lawn and garden care, according to the American Time Use Survey. Considering that this is an average figure that also includes people who don’t spend *any* time mowing, the number for people who actually have a lawn, and actually mow it, is going to be considerably higher than that.
Some people take pride in their lawns, and get a lot of fulfillment by keeping them immaculately-manicured. So for these folks, this is time well-spent. But for many of the rest of us, mowing a lawn is nothing more than a chore, and a despised one at that. A November 2011 CBS news poll found that for 1 in 5 Americans, mowing the lawn was their least-liked chore — ranked lower than raking leaves and shoveling snow. Interesting aside: Democrats (25 percent) were considerably more likely than Republicans (16 percent) to say mowing the lawn was their least-favorite chore.
Again, in some cases the time investment may be worthwhile — some families use their lawns all the time. But think of your own neighborhood, and of the number of houses where the only time you see somebody out on the lawn is when it’s getting mowed.
It doesn’t need to be this way — there are plenty of low-maintenance alternatives to turf grass out there. But some homeowners associationsrequire residents to keep a lawn. And plenty of municipalities, like Sarah Baker’s, have strict guidelines on how a lawn should be maintained.
But in the end, much of the pressure to keep and maintain a lawn is self-imposed. Freeing yourself from all those hours on the lawnmower might simply be a matter of realizing that there are alternatives.
Pope Francis on the divorced and remarried, by Rachel Zoll:
NEW YORK (AP) — Pope Francis’ call Wednesday for a church of “open doors” that welcomes divorced Catholics prompted speculation over whether he was signaling support for easing the ban on Communion for couples who remarry without a church annulment.
The issue is at the center of an extraordinarily public debate among cardinals from around the world who will gather this October at the Vatican for a synod, or meeting, on the family, where treatment of such couples will be a key topic.
“He wants the church to get over a psychology that if you’re divorced and remarried that you’re a lesser Catholic,” said Phillip Thompson, executive director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. “But it doesn’t address the real issue of what is the path forward for Catholics who want to enter into full communion with the church.”
Under Catholic teaching, unless a marriage is annulled, or declared null and void by a church tribunal, those who remarry cannot receive Communion or other sacraments because they are essentially living in sin and committing adultery. Such annulments can take years to process — if they are granted at all — a problem that has left generations of Catholics feeling shunned by their church.
Catholics who divorce after a church marriage, but don’t remarry can receive Communion.
The pope, speaking at his weekly general audience at the Vatican, underscored Catholic teaching on divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment, saying, “the church knows well that such a situation contradicts the Christian sacrament.” But he emphasized, “these people are not at all excommunicated.”
“They always belong to the church,” Francis said. The church, he said, must be one of “open doors.”
Parents, work time, and their children:
More than three-quarters of mothers and half of fathers in the United States say they’ve passed up work opportunities, switched jobs or quit to tend to their kids, according to a new Washington Post poll.
While it has long been clear that finding affordable, dependable child care is a daily challenge for parents of young children, the new poll provides rare data on the breadth of the problem and how it’s shaping careers for millions of American parents.
The poll also signals that the issue will figure in the 2016 presidential campaign, with about twice as many Americans saying Democrats would more reliably ensure access to child care than Republicans.
For many parents, scaling back at the office has become a necessity when the cost of child care strains even a middle-class salary. Roughly three-quarters of parents with children younger than 18 say care is expensive in their area, The Post’s poll shows, and a little more than half say it’s hard to find.
Have the Dodgers become the new Yankees? Looks like it:
Say it slowly. Savor the syllables. Cue Carl Sagan.
A third of a billion.
That is the amount the Dodgers’ owners are spending on their major league payroll this season.
One-third of a billion dollars. So far.
On the popular scale of measuring the commitment of an ownership group by its willingness to spend, Guggenheim Baseball Management might be the greatest ownership in sports history.
Do these guys even have a financial limit?
“Yeah, absolutely,” General Manager Farhan Zaidi said Friday.
And what might that limit be?
“We don’t have set numbers,” Zaidi said. “Nobody has ever mentioned a number to us.”
We should have seen this coming when Guggenheim blew away all comers in the bidding for the Dodgers — $2.15 billion for the team and half-ownership of the Dodger Stadium parking lots, another $400 million for a real estate development fund run by Frank McCourt.
In the fourth season of ownership — and the first under a front office led by Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations, and Zaidi — the numbers continue to astound.
The Dodgers are paying $86 million for players not to play for them this season. In nine seasons running the Tampa Bay Rays, Friedman never had a player payroll higher than $77 million.
Pope Francis is not a socialist — he’s a Peronist:
Francis attended seminary at the Colegio Máximo, the Jesuit college in San Miguel, an hour outside Buenos Aires, and would spend most of his next 25 years there as a student, instructor and eventually as the school’s director.
It was at the Colegio Máximo that he came under the influence of Juan Carlos Scannone and a group of other young priests who advocated a “theology of the people” (teologia del pueblo) as an alternative to Marxist-inspired liberation theology. It was the pastoral approach that Francis would adopt, emphasizing humility, simplicity and intimate contact with society’s poor and most vulnerable. A theology of the people meant living among the poor, not talking about them in the abstract.
Scannone today is 83 and still lives at the Colegio Máximo, where he attended Francis’s ordination. No, he assured a visitor, the pope is not an anti-capitalist.
Living his beliefs
“He doesn’t criticize market economics, but rather the fetishization of money and the free market,” Scannone said. “One thing is market economics. Another is the hegemony of capital over people.”
Francis’s split from Argentina’s more left-leaning clergy would define much of his career as a Jesuit. But at the Colegio Máximo, he lived his beliefs — and set an example for others — by practicing a politics of humility, austerity and actions over words.
“He would wake up early and do the laundry before the staff arrived,” said Mario Rausch, a Jesuit brother who still lives at the college. There were several poor neighborhoods nearby, and Francis would walk across muddy fields to celebrate Mass there on weekends. Then he would return to cook huge meals for the whole college. He slept in a small room with a simple, wood-frame single bed.
Thank God for the worms — Robert Gebelhoff:
Let’s all take a moment and thank the worms. Seriously, without them (and, to be fair, all of their fellow dirt friends), our world would look dramatically different.
The earthworm is just one example of what is called a detritivore — which includes all the bugs, fungi and bacteria tasked with eating up the dead things in the world and turning them into something that plants can use to grow. Scientists are just now solving the mystery on how worms survive the messy job.
The natural defenses of dead plants — which are designed to inhibit enzymes in the gut to prevent digestion — would be toxic for any other animal. But a group of researchers from Imperial College London have discovered new molecules in the worm gut, named drilodefensins, that can counteract the toxins, breaking them down the way that dish liquid breaks apart grease.
“Without drilodefensins, fallen leaves would remain on the surface of the ground for a very long time, building up to a thick layer,” said Jake Bundy, an author of the study and a professor at Imperial College, in a statement. “Our countryside would be unrecognizable, and the whole system of carbon cycling would be disrupted.”
This story deserves to be circulated:
If you’re a woman who works in an office and you’re always freezing, you’re not alone.
It turns out that most office buildings are kept at a temperature that is comfortable to the average man. But women typically produce less body heat than men, meaning they’re more likely to feel chilled in the workplace, a new study finds….
Although research finds that men and women like their skin to be at a warm 92 degrees Fahrenheit, studies suggest that women prefer a far warmer environment (roughly 77 degrees Fahrenheit) than men (72 degrees).
This could be due to the fact that women’s bodies produce less heat than men’s do. On average,women are smaller than men, and they tend to have less muscle and more fat (and muscle produces more heat than fat).
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