Musings

I've been thinking about a bunch of sh*t today. I don't mean metaphorically; I've actually been thinking about sewage. It seems appropriate on Earth Day to ponder environmental issues.

Here in the Advanced Countries, we generate human waste in our houses and workplaces,as everyone does--but then we add lots of water and pour it into septic tanks which go to leach fields, or into public sewers which carry it many miles away to be put through a long process which destroys pathogens, cleanses the water we added, and releases it all as harmless stuff.
In the old days, they used outhouses. Not so good either. But there is a better alternative.

Composting toilets really make the most sense. They're not exciting and will probably never catch on for more than a few people, and I'm not suggesting we all install them. But think about it. Sewage is essentially biodegradable matter that really doesn't need to go anywhere. A composting toilet doesn't add extra water. It lets the natural microbes and bacteria break down the toxic components. What ultimately emerges is a moist, odor-free mulch which can be used on lawns, shrubs and other non-food crops. With a little further composting, it can be used to grow food. Even dumping it in the back yard or woods or paying someone to pick it up periodically would make more sense than shipping it far away.

We are supposed to get our furnaces and cars serviced regularly, so it would make sense to have periodic service calls set up, much as dental checkups are, so the work of maintaining the proper moisture content, temperature, etc. wouldn't fall on the homeowner. Right now, if you buy a system, you're responsible for watching over it for the rest of your life. A bit of a burden.

I imagine that, as adequate water resources are harder to come by, our grandchildren may see these systems become more prevalent. In a world where cars run on fuel cells and homes are heated and powered by solar, it doesn't seem far-fetched.

When the Rural Electrification Act of the '30s went into effect, millions of rural Americans were connected to the electrical grid. Prior to that, many farms had on-site generators to provide electricity. The total cost of the electrification of the rural U.S. was higher than setting up generators and/or windmills, with batteries, for all those country-dwellers would have been.

Of course, now the damage is done. We expect someone miles, maybe even thousands of miles away, to take care of us. The big electric, water and sewer companies or municipalities provide their products and services to us, when local service technicians could probably maintain smaller rural systems for a comparable price. Is the possibility of a site-based system failing for a day or two any worse than the four or five times a year I currently lose power because of a downed power line somewhere far away, while my own neighborhood, with its buried cables, is not the problem?

For urban and city dwellers, the larger, centralized grid makes sense, but not for Joe and Betty Corn-Farmer out in East Cow Flop, Tennessee. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have imagined 5% of cars on the road being hybrids, as they are now. So I can imagine a day when many of us stop dispatching our doodoo to a distant destination, and importing our electricity from an offsite entity.

So Happy Earth Day to you future composters!

Minor changes

Funny how a little change can make a big difference. I'd noticed that some of my cartoons were more difficult to draw, in part because my hand simply isn't as steady as it was for many years. It occurred to me that I could start drawing in a larger format, so I increased the size of the original panel(s) from 13" x 4-1/4" to 15" x 4-5/8". This means that details are easier to draw smoothly. There's still a certain roughness to my line work that I accept as part of my style, but now a circle doesn't have to come out like an oval or a cursive "c".

I also bought a set of new pens, thinking that I'd expand from the .7 mil size I've been using to a 1 mil thickness, to account for the larger scale. But I realized as I began the first drawing that I'd bought roller ball pens, not the gel pens I prefer. Rollerballs, like ballpoints, tend to skip upon first touch---not an issue for regular handwriting or note-taking, but critical when one may be drawing a line that's only 1/4" long and the lines are supposed to connect. So I'm sticking with the .7 ones, at least for now. Maybe I'll go with thicker lines later.

I also ordered PhotoShop CS5, an upgrade from the Elements version of PhotoShop I've using. It will enable me to do color separations for the calendar and newspapers. (In the past, I had to send the files to my son, Dan, and have him use his computer program to convert the files to four-color for the calendar.) CS5 will also allow me to resume exploration of an unusual approach I was toying with for the strip, and which I had abandoned as too difficult with Elements.

None of this affects how you see or receive the cartoons--that'll come later--but it makes me feel that, like spring, there's a reawakening in this process of creating QlownTown. All hail Spring, bigger paper and CS5!

 

Statistics and questionnaires

I just received an email full of fun facts, such as "A comet's tail always faces away from the sun". I was reading them in hopes of finding inspiration for cartoons. One item really caught my eye: "The Swine Flu vaccine in 1976 caused more death and illness than the disease it was intended to prevent." As I tried to grasp the meaning of this so I could turn it into a cartoon, I realized that it was a prime example of how statistics can be used to mislead us and twist our perceptions. My first reaction was, that must have been a misguided vaccination campaign...until I realized that it was still to the good. Fewer people died from the flu itself because fewer people came down with it, having been protected by the vaccine. Let's say 100,000 people avoid coming down with the flu because they were vaccinated; another 100 die from the vaccine and another 100 get sick from it. Ten die from contracting the flu. So the vaccine killed or sickened 200 people, while the flu only killed 10. But what if those 100,000 hadn't been vaccinated, and 20,000 of them got the flu, and 5,000 of them died from it? Then there would have been 5,000 flu-caused deaths and only 200 deaths due to the vaccine. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure this was a case of statistics implying a result that is the opposite of the truth.

I had a guy working for me years ago, and he bragged that he and his wife had never had their child vaccinated, and she'd never come down with any of the diseases the vaccines were intended to prevent. Well duh, I thought to myself---there's no polio to catch because everyone else got it taken care of. If everyone stopped getting their children vaccinated, these diseases would come back.

Now, I'm not campaigning for universal vaccination; everyone must weigh the risks and proceed accordingly. But to say that vaccines haven't helped or should never be administered is a bit unrealistic, don'tcha think?

It brings to mind the questionnaires I get in the mail occasionally, or phone polls I sometimes get sucked into because I forgot to check Caller ID first. The questions are generally phrased to make the "logical" answer the one which favors the inquiring party's position. Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Right-to-Lifers...they all do it. Instead of asking "Do you think people should use crosswalks?", for example, the wording might be, "Would you rather be forced by the government to use crosswalks or have the freedom to make your own choices about safety as a thinking adult?" What gets me is when the organization doing the asking then touts the inevitable results as supporting their own position.

Maybe misleading statistics and leading questionnaires aren't really the same, but that's how my mind goes about its business sometimes. Hey, I was just looking for a joke, and I managed to come up with a topic for a new blog, which I know I should do more often. It's Friday. It's cloudy. So is my head. Did you know that most people who write a blog on an overcast day tend to be less coherent in their writing? No? Well, I'm putting together a questionnaire that will prove it...