Salt City Sinner

Today was quite a day for me! The Trayvon Martin March was one hell of a way to end it. I also got to bust rocks with my friend Topher,  ...and I also assisted in Salt Lake City IRC's move from our old headquarters to a new headquarters. But before I did any of that, I helped to build the new community gardens in Sugar House. When I got there, there was an assembly of untreated boards (good so far) and a few drills. Things progressed quickly, with teams forming (strangely, without authoritarian intervention!!) to drill guide holes, steady the boards, and screw them together. Once the beds were constructed, a small front-end loader, expertly piloted by a guy whose name I did not catch, performed some magic: The end result? Beautiful raised beds with rich, amazing soil (full disclosure: I have a bed at Sugar House Gardens).

On the off chance that you do not  have a partially infected USB plug installed in the back of your head into which your brainstem receives news (and please, gods, count yourself lucky if that is the case) there is a chance you haven't heard of Trayvon Martin . The long and short of the story is this: a black teenager named Trayvon Martin (armed with an iced tea and a bag of Skittles) was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman. Due to some convoluted gun nut laws in Florida, where this took place, the shooter has not been charged with anything. On a personal note, this has led me to reconsider my views on personal defense laws and gun rights, but that's a story for another day. In solidarity, OccupySLC hosted the following tonight: My schedule lately has bordered on the amusing and played slap-and-tickle with the insane, but I felt I had to be there for this. I was right in my instincts. The March for Trayvon was insane . The crowd tha...

If... I won the Mega Millions lottery what would I do with it?  I would buy a large chunk of property out in the country.  My children would spend their mornings and evenings surrounded by dirt, and animals- and one MASSIVE garden. Do you spend time dreaming of a perfect life?  Do you wonder how much more beautiful moments would be, and how much more simple things could be without the everyday issues of going to work and making ends meet with meager paychecks- going from week to week hoping there will be enough left over to feed your family.                                                                                                                            ...

5400 South, the heart of Kearns Township has been lined with the same houses for several decades.  Having grown up in this area I recall driving down the hill and looking at these tiny old houses thinking how beautiful and simple they were, someday I would have enjoyed owning one.    Standing alone... this one house remains, covered with no trespassing signs and legal notices, broken windows and a boarded up door.  This home was once one of the most lovely in the area, now it is to be torn down and moved to the landfill with the other houses that have been demolished.   Maybe I am a little less educated with the practice of demolition but could the doors, cabinets, windows, other portions of the home not have been removed and used with habitat for humanity?  Many of these homes had been updated with newer window and door fixtures which may have been very useful for the non profit organization in building new homes for less fortunate.  Again, I...

A quick update on Tim DeChristopher's incarceration situation - as I wrote yesterday , Tim had been moved to the Special Housing Unit at FCI Herlong for an e-mail he sent. This morning at 8 AM MST, Dylan Rose Schneider from Peaceful Uprising received a call from Tim: THANK YOU for all of your support and work on this - I received a call from Tim this morning at 8 am letting me know that he was transferred back to the minimum security camp late yesterday due to the thousands of calls that were received. There's a blog post with further details from PeaceUP   here  . It would appear that if you piss enough people off by running roughshod over the civil liberties of a sort of folk hero, those pissed off people can get results!

Most (if not all) prisons have a "Special Housing Unit" (SHU). Previously known as "the Hole," or, in cases where occupancy is one, by the good old standby " solitary confinement ." The use of SHUs is controversial, with many organizations claiming (and research backs them up ) that it constitutes psychological torture. You may remember climate activist and political prisoner Tim DeChristopher. I certainly do. I've written about Tim before ( here  ,   here  and   here ), but a quick recap may be in order. In 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended an oil and gas lease auction held in the hideous, radioactive sunset years of the Bush Administration, when public lands were being ruthlessly auctioned off in an extremely legally questionable last-minute fire sale. DeChristopher "posed" as Bidder 70 (actually, he was mistaken for a bidder by staff and just went along with it), and purchased 14 parcels of land for a cool $1.8 million, w...

From every college kid's favorite toe-dip into Chuck Palahniuk: Tyler Durden: The salt balance has to be just right, so the best fat for making soap comes from humans. Narrator: Wait, what is this place? Tyler Durden: A liposuction clinic. NO, NO, NO, Tyler Durden! That is not how you make soap. I respect your combination of dumpster-diving and artisan production, but that is not how good soap is made. One the members of my Maoist hive-marriage, Stephanie, has struck out boldly into the soap-making business, and you know what? Doctor Bronner's can go take a flying f*** at a rolling donut. Steph's stuff is the bomb. When I first happened upon her operation (hidden deep in the countryside that constitutes the border between Salt Lake's Downtown and West Side - more about that some other time), I was sold: Those were made for me based on scents I wanted and shapes available. I cannot express the enthusiasm I feel now every morning to run a train-shap...

I love my city! Even though we are flush with no coast pride here, our lack of, say, a gulf coast or a scenic, reef-bejeweled shoreline  didn't stop us from catching an oil spill right in the chops back in 2010 . Yes, Red Butte Creek and the Jordan River were the recipients of a generous helping of 33,000 US gallons of Chevron's finest crude. Chevron's leak lasted a few hours, and they performed a pretty extensive cleanup operation that could be seen mucking around in Liberty Park for what felt like ages. To their credit, Chevron ate the bill in its entirety. From the Tribune back in 2010 : Chevron is pledging to pay all public invoices - expected to reach into the millions - for cleanup services rendered to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, and state agencies.  Unlike the BP Gulf disaster, in which federal hand-wringing has politicized the reparations, the cleanup of Salt Lake City's environmental crisis appears straightforward. And pay they did. The ...

The "reproductive rights" debate, which is a sort of catch-all phrase for smaller, more complex and awful debates surrounding issues of public health, contraception, religious belief, and abortion, is one that I honestly hoped had been, to some extent, shelved. Much like the Democrats wisely abandoned the gun control debate in the 00's, it seemed - for a little while, recently - that Republicans had come to the same conclusion: public opinion had more or less gelled around a fairly non-controversial compromise on the issue, and they should just shut up. Not so! From a bombastic radio host who stuck his fat foot in a big bucket of shit on the issue recently to the resurgence of a Republican primary contender who almost justifies Markos Moulitsas' unforgivable "American Taliban" book - the culture war is alive again! One of the most instructive, horrible, and anti-woman laws imaginable passed in (where else) Texas recently (from a debate over the issue by t...

Recently, #OccupySLC has diversified. There are working groups devoted to street theater, working groups devoted to education, and a new working group devoted to community gardening. I do not feel that I am telling tales out of school sharing this, since every #OSLC General Assembly (or other meeting of any kind) has been open to the public to the best of my knowledge. #Occupy Community Gardens, or the OGs as I will call them/us from this point on, had a project in mind for today. It went very well. the only photo in this post that is not my photo People who know #OSLC know the One World Cafe . It is an amazing institution, and has been supportive of #Occupy and other social and political affinity groups since day one. The food is amazing, you pay what you can or want to; it's a very welcoming environment and a place full of fun people to talk to. On the long march to a kick-@ss garden in back on One World, a few hardy souls took the first awkward steps. The concre...

Once upon a time, there was a large bulge bracket banking and securities firm named Platinum Richard. Platinum Richard primarily dealt with financial securities, including investment banking. i No entity - it would be doing Platinum Richard a disservice to call them a "corporation" - is entirely good or bad, to be honest. That said, In a world of bad companies, Platinum Richard was one of the  very most poorly behaved. Shame on them. A naughty company, stealing from the garden and being very disrespectful! Eventually one of Platinum Richard's friends came forward with some scary facts . Remember, kids - if you think something is wrong, talk about it with a parent or teacher (but not an executive)!. Platinum Richard didn't seem to care. Times are very good when you can steal from the garden! Unfortunately when Platinum Richard's friend told his story to the town it turned out that people didn't like him quite as much! In fact, that nast...

In my line of work I have occasion to chip in (as all members of our office do) in receiving donations from generous souls who have furniture, electronics, or any random assortment of goods that we can redistribute to our clients. Today I had the opportunity to pick up some donations from what was previously the Bay  , a rather eccentric local nightspot. What happens to a local hotspot gone to seed? The building formerly housing the Bay is on the historic register in Utah. It is a nest of unintentionally and quite entertainingly occult architectural insanity. The interior of the building is vacant and gorgeous with potential. The owners, whom I met briefly, are amazing people, passionate about the building and its future and very generous to have given so much of the former furniture to the non-profit I work for. But step through the side gate and into the back courtyard with me, won't you? The area is being heavily renovated, but you can see what used to be an e...