FestiFools Puppet Road Trip

From Festifools 2009

FestiFools is a street parade of giant puppets that normally takes place near April Fool's Day in Ann Arbor. But they're doing it again this Saturday, this time in Grand Rapids! It is a competition with many other art exhibits for a $45,000 in prize money called ArtPrize.

They put out the call for volunteers to operate the puppets. They will provide vans from Ann Arbor at 2 PM, arriving back at 11 PM, with box lunches. I took them up on it and am very excited!

The puppeteers have normally included many inhibited college students who are too concerned with their appearances to operate the puppets with any flair. From what I observed, most of them seemed to participate only because they want to date an art major who begged them to help out. I expect the quality of this weekend's performance might be more enthusiastic because it is likely to include only those who want to be there. Do any of you want to come along?

Norman Borlaug, RIP 1914-2009

Nobel Peace-Prize winner Norman Borlaug moved around the world to its hungriest places, breeding new strains of wheat and rice. Depending how you count, his genetically modified food saved between two hundred million to ... get this ... one billion people from starvation. It is difficult to find any other person who has saved that many lives. Quadrupling productivity of fields also reduced deforestation for more fields. Now that he has died, there should be a Norman Borlaug day.

Where is the Norman Borlaug of Peak Oil? The Malthusians, the nineteen-sixties equivalent of today's Energy Decline movement, said he could never succeed and we would see mass die-offs. Some, perhaps, would have preferred mass die-offs for aesthetic, philosophical, or spiritual reasons. The ethical paradigm exclusive to the political far left is almost as concerned with the purity of food as the far right is concerned with the purity of sex.

To feed the next six billion, we must oppose patents on DNA to prevent genetically modified crops from being the property of corporations. Here is a riveting interview on this topic with Joe Jackson from the Network for Open Scientific Innovation, who some of you may have met at Penguicon. Maybe you will agree with him from an Open-Source standpoint of intellectual property. Maybe you won't. But I am surprised not to have heard his viewpoint more often!