The photos above were taken of animals at the Alachua County Humane Society (ACHS), a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to finding homes for adoptable pets. “When you adopt a dog, you’re saving a life and helping us get a step closer to ending euthanasia,” said Eric Van Ness, the humane society’s executive director.

ACHS initially gets all their animals from Alachua County Animal Services just before their last day on death row (AKA the euthanasia list). Adopting a pet from ACHS is less expensive than patronizing a pet store, and all the money is directed toward saving as many lives as possible. Since 2000, ACHS has worked hard to reduce its own euthanasia rate by 98 percent.

“People don’t realize that when they buy dogs from pet stores, they’re only adding to the overpopulation problem,” Van Ness added. Any dog or cat adopted from a shelter is always spayed or neutered, healthy and up to date on its shots. At no additional cost to adopters, ACHS provides a veterinary exam, a dog training session, a 30 day gift of ShelterCare Pet Insurance and a microchip for detecting the animal’s location if it ever gets lost.

ACHS is the leading agency of Maddie’s Pet Rescue, a coalition of five local shelters that have worked to reduce the city’s euthanasia rate from over 7,000 animals each year to under 3,000. The coalition’s goal is to completely wipe out the city’s need for euthanasia by 2015. Unfortunately, the road is paved with obstacles and can’t be crossed without an increase in volunteers. Read more >>

Reporting by Barbara Bermudez. Photos by Erik Knudsen and Ashley Crane.

On Jan. 26, UF hosted former-New York Mayor and United States Attorney Rudy Giuliani.

UF’s Accent Speakers Bureau hosted the event. The Accent program, which claims a national reputation, works to engage the student body through events with “prominent, controversial and influential” speakers.

Giuliani has been deemed “America’s Mayor.” His presence in U.S. politics has spanned no less than four administrations. To most, though, he is known for his leadership throughout the tumultuous months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The evening’s turnout was impressive with a filled theater. Ideologies aside, the night came together in a bipartisan showing of Gainesville community. Giuliani spoke without an overt agenda and left students with an inspiring message.

The beginning moments of Giuliani’s talk were interrupted by a long-haired protester, who shouted at the speaker from his seat mid-audience, asking for an explanation as to “what happened with building seven.”

“You are too rude to be entitled to an answer,” Giuliani said, with great composure as the man was escorted from the auditorium. He then quipped that the man ought to get a hair cut.

Giuliani was undeterred by this interruption, and one that followed a few minutes later, and went on to outline his speech.

“I’m going to talk to you about leadership,” he said from the podium as he began to list the six principles he considers paramount to success. Learned throughout his tenure in office, the principles were at once relatable to college students as well as the political arena. He would dabble with stories from his own career and his time in politics before diverging into real-world applications of each trait.

With emphasis placed on a strong set of beliefs, Giuliani cited Ronald Reagan, a hero of his, and his quest to shrink the ever-growing government.

“Government had gone from helping to mocking people in poverty,” said Giuliani, who was a strong advocate of welfare reform during his time in office, a quest that did not exactly boost his popularity.

Giuliani went on to list optimism and courage as other traits required for success. He called upon Winston Churchill as an example of a realistic optimist. Next, he talked exclusively of his time in office, giving the audience a glimpse into his battle with the “ungovernable” New York.

Serving to guide the speech towards the looming topic of terrorism, he began to speak of relentless preparation, relating this to how a lawyer prepares for his or her time in court. Many times, he returned to an old mentor of his, a judge for whom he had worked.

“Something unexpected will always happen,” Giuliani explained, calling upon the adage of the judge.

Throughout the evening, Giuliani dabbled in discussing the September 11th attacks, but he saved the bulk of the description until the end. Giving the audience an idea of what his day had been like up until the news of the attacks — he was having breakfast in Midtown Manhattan when he heard the news — and what it was like after the second plane hit the tower. However chaotic the efforts were directly after the attacks, they were buoyed by previously installed plans for smaller-scaled emergencies, like an anthrax scare and periodic blackouts on the island.

“If you prepare for everything you can think of,” he said, “you can prepare for even the unexpected.”

Giuliani’s used the final point in his speech to discuss the importance of effective communication in a leader. Referencing his highly criticized “Job Stat System,” he upheld that his desire was to help maintain the dignity of those on the program—to change what it meant to be a welfare worker.

The evening was decidedly apolitical in terms of the upcoming presidential election, aside from a few comments made by Giuliani during the question-and-answer session that followed his speech. One of the pre-screened questioned prompted a lightly-colored opinion from Giuliani, who called each candidate capable, with the exception of Ron Paul.

“Very few people get to success by accident,” Giuliani explained early in his talk, directing his words to the students sitting before him.

His speech did just what the Accent program set out to do: to educate, enlighten, engage and entertain.

Giulani has evolved into a controversial political player over the years. Some love him, others fear him to be a second-coming of George W. Bush . What do you think of “America’s Mayor”?

Above: Onna Meyer shows her opposition to the use of genetically modified organisms at a protest Jan. 24 in front of a Monsanto tent on UF’s campus. “I do it because I’ve got to stand up for what I believe. I believe in environmental justice.” Photo by Erik Knudsen.

Monsanto Hits UF on Nationwide Tour

There’s a new act in town, folks.

Monsanto has had a giant trailer plastered with “AMERICA’S FARMERS” and blown-up images of shimmery fields and harvests parked on the Reitz North Lawn on UF’s campus for the past few days. This trailer is part of Monsanto’s outreach tour, visiting community centers and college campuses in suburban and urban areas across the country.

“Our goal is to let people know where their food comes from,” said Kera Relando, an agricultural educator for Monsanto who is a member of the traveling troupe of Monsanto representatives.

Ed, a man with respectably well-kept scruff, dressed as suavely as a member of the “one percent” himself, was part of the group of Occupy Gainesville protesters demonstrating at the Monsanto trailer on Tuesday. Ed is one of his pseudonyms, anyway. He led the protesters’ people’s mic and die-in.

“There are…15, 16, 17… about 20 protesters. They’re lying on the ground,” one Monsanto representative reported to his earpiece, just after Ed and the rest of the protesters collapsed on the lawn as part of the die-in.

“We want people to become aware of where their food comes from,” Ed said.

Hm, this sounds eerily familiar. Oh right, it’s because we just heard that line from Monsanto’s rep, Relando.

So, if the corporate giant (Monsanto) and the corporation haters (Occupy Gainesville) are at the same place for the same reason, shouldn’t they be collaborating and not butting heads?

Their purposes are essentially identical, but their intentions are “diametrically opposed opposites,” as Ed explained.

The protesters were also there to educate, just like Monsanto. Same motive, yet on complete opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of educational content.

As Ed explained, the protesters stand against Monsanto’s business practices and attempt to control all aspects of agriculture. Protesters handed out fliers all day, urging students to push for responsible food labeling, distinguishing Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), or “Frankenfoods,” from unaltered foods. These GMOs, as the flier elaborated, may “increase cancer risks, create super-pests, super-weeds and new plant viruses, increase use of toxic pesticides, and contaminate organic and non-GMO crops.”

Of course, Monsanto had a different story. Their tour took students through three sections: challenges faced by America’s farmers, a 10-minute film featuring farmers attesting to Monsanto’s technology — subliminally relaying a sense of community and trust through presentation of the farmers’ grandparents and children — and finally a room full of promise, cheer and hope for the future, all made possible by the Monsanto’s biotechnology research and genetically modified crops.

Oh yeah, and they were also giving out free lip balm.

The first welcoming room, presenting the farmers’ challenges, even featured a quote relating Monsanto’s agricultural practices to world peace.

The themepark-esque tour was aesthetically pleasing and so were the “educational” handouts, especially juxtaposed with the simple black-and-white fliers the occupy protesters were handing out. Let’s just hope students are smart enough to take a closer look at the content of each.

Standing on a bench in the middle of the University of South Florida campus, megaphone in hand, student activist Tyler Crawford speaks about corporate greed, student debt and the declining middle class. A crowd of about two hundred listen intently, cheering or booing along, holding up signs of the times. One of them reads, “Oppose the Spectacle,” another held tightly by an older woman, “They only call it class warfare when we fight back.”

This is what participating in the democratic process looks like for many who feel shut out of the presidential debates. Although this group came to protest the Republican agenda, none came holding an Obama 2012 sign. The general sentiment is that of disillusion and outrage against the entire political system of which they feel left out. Not even the students enrolled at USF were able to witness the supposed marvel of democracy at work on their campus. The seats were reserved for those who paid top dollar, a pretty good analogy for the presidential election process.

The students and residents who wanted to watch the spectacle were stuck in a tent set up on the lawn outside the auditorium. When the protesters organized a march toward the auditorium, the lawn became the site of the real political debate. Chants denouncing racism and demanding higher taxes on the rich were yelled out as the march continued toward the metal barricades set up by police. Some Ron Paul supporters clashed verbally with members of Occupy Tampa Bay, and the chants grew louder and more aggressive as Newt Gingrich supporters tried making their way toward the tent.

The unexpected arrival of controversial pastor Terry Jones (read: Koran burner) riled the crowd even more as the chants turned to “Stop the Hate.” People started surrounding Jones and his dozen or so followers, all of which were sporting Terry Jones for President 2012 T-shirts. Ironically, Terry Jones seemed to be marching around, demanding that his voice should also be heard. He tried standing on a bench with his sidekick, holding a megaphone up to his mouth, but the surrounding crowd muted his words. No cheering for the right-wing extremist. His group eventually walked away.

The protesters reassembled around the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial and had a couple of speakers share closing comments before ending the event. Marisol Marquez, a member of the Tampa chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, said the following: “As a woman, a Chicana and an activist, I’m the embodiment of what they [Republicans] hate.” She asked the crowd to remember that the political process they were building was unlike that of the debaters inside the stadium. “We’re doing it from the bottom up. Whatever it takes, no matter how long it takes, we’ll make our voices heard,” she said.

Photos taken Jan. 23 by Michela Martinazzi outside outside Florida’s Republican primary debate in Tampa.

In the past, Gainesville voter turn-out has been low. Last spring, out of 73,914 registered voters, 10,989 cast ballots in the at-large 2 City Commissioner election, that’s only 14.87 percent.

UF College Democrats is looking to change this low turn-out by focusing on students, 42 percent of Gainesville’s overall population. The group’s Vote 100 Campaign is an effort in which members are calling on students to sign placards committing that they will vote in the 2012 city elections.

In the past week, the organization held a phone bank for two of the Democratic candidates — Lauren Poe and Yvonne Hinson-Rawls — and made nearly 800 calls.

“Turnout is so low in local elections that those calls could literally have made the election for those candidates,” the club’s president, Erin Murphy, said.

In the 2010 mayoral election, only 2.5 percent of students who live on campus voted. And Mayor Craig Lowe was elected by a margin of 42 votes, building the College Democrats’ argument that 100 votes can make a difference.

College Democrats is also offering rides to the polls for early voting on Jan. 25 and 26, in an effort to streamline the voting process and entice more student voters to participate.

The next step for young voters is to become informed. The two most talked-about issues the candidates have laid out in this campaign are Gainesville’s biomass plant and the 130 meal cap at St. Francis House.

The biomass plant, nicknamed “Gainesville $3 billion mistake,” is a controversial project that will turn scrap natural resources into fuel — unused trees, for example, torn down to make way for new building projects — at what many consider a great expense to the area. GRU bill prices are expected to rise within the coming months. Those opposing it consider the plant to be a waste of taxpayer money and hope that the incoming at-large City Commissioner will be less eager to expand the project, which has been championed by the current at-large City Commissioner, Jenna Mastrodicasa. Ray Washington is firmly opposed to the expected price hikes in GRU bills.

The 130 meal-limit issue has been the source of a longstanding dispute. This past November, it was repealed under the current District 1 City Commissioner, Scherwin Henry, who first entered office in 2006 and was re-elected for the following term. With the repeal, though, other compromises were made. The daily meal cap was replaced with mandatory background checks for those receiving meals from the shelter, which has left many lost in a sea of bureaucratic red tape. Lauren Poe, Mastrodicasa’s favorite for the at-large 1 City Commissioner slot, is known for his favorable stance on limiting meals given out by St. Francis House.

These are only two issues among many that will affect Gainesville residents, regardless of whether voters turn out to the polls or not.

James Ingle has been earning a great deal of notoriety among students by working with both the Gator Student Alliance and the Graduate Assistants United to stop tuition hikes and help secure fair contracts for graduate assistants. Beyond this, if elected, he says he plans to support local businesses and protect the unique culture of Gainesville.

What may be of interest to most students are the lesser-mentioned platforms, such as that of City Commissioner candidate Dejeon Cain, who plans to expand the University’s S.N.A.P van to Archer Road and is eager to promote soft-closings of bars (meaning that no alcohol would be served past 2 a.m., though doors may remain open until 4 a.m.). Cain, who works with the UF police force, seems to focus his platform on lowering crime rates in Gainesville.

There is hope that, with the presidential primaries closing in, the long-standing tradition of heightened voter turn out in local elections will continue. Perhaps a dose of healthy competition will pull more Gainesville voters to the polls at the end of the month.

Check out The Fine Print’s voter guide for more info on each candidate. Also, see a recap of what the candidates talked about at The Fine Print’s candidate forum. Remember to bring an ID with you to the polls that has both your photo and signature. And go vote on Jan. 31!

Both the at-large and District 1 City Commission candidates will be there to answer your questions about how they plan to contribute to our community over the next three years.

For some background on each candidate, check out The Fine Print’s election guide before heading to the library on Wednesday.

And remember to vote on Jan. 31. For your convenience, here is a list of polling locations.

If you want to vote early while listening to local bands and enjoying some great local food, check out Gainesville Rocks the Vote on Jan. 21 between noon and 5 p.m. at Bo Diddley Plaza.

The Think Local Civic Forum is co-sponsored by The Fine Print, indiegainesville, The Iguana and the Alachua County Library District.

The Winter 2011 issue of The Fine Print is out and about town. Can’t get your hands on a copy? Here you go.

New feature: links. If we’ve posted an article online, we linked the print headline to it so you can see what others are saying and join the conversation. (Also, all website/email mentions within the issue are functional links.)

Cover illustration by Kelli McAdams.

In 1870, African Americans won the right to vote, followed by women 50 years later. In 1971, the voting age went down from 21 to 18, a critical victory for young soldiers who fought and died in wars without any voice in the political establishment — not that they were smart enough to vote responsibly, according to a handful of politicians and conservative pundits.

“[Voting liberal is] what kids do. They don’t have life experience,” one legislator said about young voters. “They just vote with their feelings.” The legislator was New Hampshire Speaker William O’Brien (R), explaining the need for tighter voting restrictions to an assembly of Tea Party members in January.

In recent months, voter ID laws have provoked heated debates throughout the country. Republican lawmakers claim voter fraud is a pressing issue and that voter ID laws present a solution. Opponents tend to be women, minorities, college students and the poor — who are far more likely to be inconvenienced by voter ID laws and, coincidentally, more likely to vote Democrat.

In 2008, only Indiana and Georgia had voter ID requirements. At the start of 2011, both had adopted strict voter ID laws, followed more recently by Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. None of the most recent laws are in effect yet, but they will be by January 2012, before national elections.

There are currently three levels of voter ID law restrictions: non-photo, photo requested, and photo required. Florida’s laws fall under the middle category. A “current and valid” photo ID must be provided at the polls. For those without valid driver’s licenses (namely the elderly, the poor and students without cars), the restrictions are a hindrance. Luckily, alternative forms of ID are accepted, including a student ID with a photo and a signature. This works out fine for UF students, but the latest Santa Fe ID does not include the latter.

Is preventing voter fraud worth the inconvenience and potential deterrence to legitimate voters? The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law pointed out in 2006 that voter fraud is a “foolish way to attempt to win an election.” In exchange for just one extra vote, offenders risk thousands of dollars in fines and up to five years in prison. As a result, “fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare.”

In the 2008 election, for example, 2.9 million votes were cast in Wisconsin. Out of those votes, 18 were reported as cases of ID fraud (less than one thousandth of 1 percent). Other closely scrutinized elections in 2004 revealed similar ratios: 0.0009 percent in Washington State and 0.00004 percent in Ohio.

Comparatively, Campus Progress estimates that 15 percent of low-income voters, 18 percent of the youth (read: students), and 24 percent of black voters would lack the qualifications to vote in 2012 based on the requirements of current voter ID laws. Additionally, a majority of women change their names after marriage and may face further complications with paperwork when discrepancies arise from previously issued IDs.

Richard Scher, a professor of political science at UF and author of The Politics of Disenfranchisement, contends voter fraud is a partisan fabrication. He points out that there’s a difference between voter fraud and voting fraud. The former means to accidentally vote twice, while the latter classifies any ballot that must be thrown out for being marked incorrectly in some way. This means even the trivial number of cases marked in studies as “voter fraud” may be incorrectly classified.

“In the old days during the Emancipation up until 1865, the Democrats were trying to keep blacks from voting,” he said. “Everybody does it. Now it’s just Republicans’ turn.” As far as the new laws in Florida, Scher said he thinks Florida has gone as far as it can with a “back-door approach” because “no matter what your politics, people just aren’t going to buy it.”

Voter ID laws are not the only bureaucratic obstacle threatening inclusive participation in Florida’s elections. Erin Murphy, president of the College Democrats at UF, contends that third-party registration is the most important change in the state’s voting laws. Now, all third-party organizations, from College Democrats to the NAACP, have to register with the Florida Division of Elections to get approved for registering citizens. But that’s not all. Every registration has to be meticulously documented, the forms numbered, and any mistake results in a $50 fine per form.

Murphy had some experience with the issue as a legislative intern for Senator Nan Rich of Florida last spring. She helped file 18 amendments against House Bill 1355, which “requires that third-party voter registration organizations register with Division of Elections and provide division with certain information.” Though none of them passed, she said, “it did make a statement and at least delayed the process of passing.”

Third-party organizations have been a great convenience to those who aren’t able to get to specially designated locations for registration, especially college students who don’t have transportation or permanent addresses in Gainesville. Murphy said that of all those who registered with the help of College Democrats for the 2008 election, 90 percent came out to the polls.

She said College Democrats is currently registering people of any party at Turlington on Mondays and Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

So, what’s Murphy’s advice in these bleak times for would-be voters? “Register,” she said. “Just get it done.”

Florida’s Laws
The following types of ID are accepted at the polls: Florida driver’s license, Florida ID card issued by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, United States passport, debit or credit card, military ID, student ID, retirement center ID, neighborhood association ID, public assistance ID

(Note: If your picture ID does not contain your signature, you’ll need additional identification with a signature.)

Top: Voter ID laws, state-by-state. Info graphic by Kelley Antoniazzi. Information courtesy of the Florida Divisions of Elections and the National Conference of State Legislatures. For complete state-by-state requirements, see NCSL’s website.

For the latest coverage of voter ID laws, see Campus Progress’ website.

In his weekly blog series The Last Generation—really more of a highly flirtatious conversation, littered with innuendo—Max Warren discusses matters of general interest to our generation, frequently quotes things, and spills out the addled contents of a deviant mind.

As we move into 2012, I’ve noticed that most people seem preoccupied with two things. The first, of course, comes with every new year: resolutions and the bright, shining future we intend to build for ourselves—this year, finally, is the year. The second, on the other hand, is something new: will December 2012 really, as some doomsayers claim, be the End of Days—have we truly seen our last Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest New Year?

The first is vital because, I truly believe that, regardless of fervently made resolutions, time is running out for us. The second matters because, well, if the Mayans are being read correctly, then we’re the Last Generation in more ways than one…

Now, being a confirmed skeptic, I personally am expecting little on December 21, 2012. Don’t misunderstand; I’ll be drinking as much champagne as possible with my nearest and dearest just in case, but I’m expecting to cruise right through to another sunrise. Even if I weren’t, though, I don’t see a potential apocalypse as all that consequential — and that, dear readers, is what I want to discuss.

You see, there’s a secret that I’m going to let you in on.

The world is ending every day.

I know that sounds obvious, at first glance. You can hardly read the news without being depressed by tinpot dictators, the collapse of the euro, or horrendous natural disasters. But those are big, abstract fears, and not what I’m talking about. After all, you can write all of them off as problems in a far off place that most of us are fortunate not to inhabit; problems that are not likely to affect our fat and prosperous American lives anytime soon. No, what I’m concerned about is more personal.

Do something for me. Breathe in. Breathe out. Feel your heartbeat in your own chest. That’s a timer and it’s counting down to the day you die. Now close your eyes and picture nothing but nothing but nothing but that blackness, forever.

Scary? It can be. At the end of the day, we’re nothing more than walking bags of ephemeral thoughts and squishy organs and we’re all marching towards that long, long night. Death—to use the word—is something everyone before us has done and everyone after us will do. You’re going to be dead far, far longer than you’re alive—forever even. And, you know what? Eternity is a really long time, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Your world is ending every single day. And guess what? There’s no promise of a ripe old age. Sure, it could be sixty years before your time runs out, but it could just as easily be tomorrow. At the end, as Neil Gaiman put it, you get what everyone gets—you get a lifetime.

Doesn’t that sound like a pretty good goddamn reason to do something while you’re here?

You know, we talk a big game, most of us, about all the things we’re going to do and all the things we’re going to be. The world is ours, to hear it told. But all that talk is just that—talk. I think that too often we convince ourselves that we’re immortal (much better than having to face the thought of all that blackness) and, as a result, it becomes far easier for us to say, “I’ll turn my life around tomorrow.”

That’s fear. It’s fear of making a bold commitment and its fear of facing our own mortality. It’s the belief that if we can convince ourselves there’s room to push things back, then we can’t die — simply because we haven’t had time to accomplish our goals yet. That’s our conceit and our self-delusion. Well, the thing is, death doesn’t care how far down you’ve gone on your bucket list.

I have a friend, we’ll call her Aiden, who recently escaped Zion, fled to Chicago and began a new life. Going into it, she had nothing but a very few friends in her adoptive city, and the commitment that comes with deciding to pursue her dreams. A scary situation to dive into and, the caution mongers might even call it ill-advised—but it’s working out swimmingly so far and, even if it weren’t, I know she’d still rather have taken her shot than played it safe.

That’s what matters: that we take our shot, rather than wasting weeks, or months, or even years lining it up. Life is constantly in motion and, when it comes down to it, everything is a moving target. If you wait too long, you’re apt to find that your target has moved and you’ve missed all the same. Only now, you’re left with that much less ammo and time.

I’m not advocating action without deliberation. What I am advocating, though, is that once we’ve thought it through and made our decisions, we don’t then delude ourselves into paralysis. There’s simply not enough time.

Are the aliens coming in 2012? Is it Ragnarok? The Battle of Meggido? It doesn’t matter. The point is that on December 21st, no matter what happens, all of us will be nearly one year closer to death — if we’re fortunate enough to make it even that far. So seize this year you’re being given, make it yours, rely on yourself to change your life and not the fairy dust of some arbitrary resolution.

Let me leave you with a thought by “Wild” Bill Saroyan. He was speaking to writers, but I think it’s applicable to all of us:

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

Tick-tock, kids.

Max welcomes your comments and criticisms in the appropriate section below. He further wishes to direct all conspiracy theories and requests for invitations to his 2012 party—to be held at the Flat Iron Lounge in NYC—to Max.Z.Warren@gmail.com

Above: Kim Kruse works on her favorite sewing machine. “I paid for it with my hard-earned, waitress money. I’ve had it since ’94.” (Photo by Erik Knudsen)

Six sewing machines are each perched on their own white and orange IKEA table. There’s just enough room at the tables for small sewing projects like pin cushion and aprons, examples of which peek from around the room. The six tables are lined in a horseshoe within the white brick and wood walls of Sew Make Do, Gainesville’s new sewing studio.

Here, people can take a shot at sewing for the first time without having to break their bank, or they can continue to expand their skills. Between open-studio nights and a multitude of classes, Sew Make Do is working to create a space in the community for crafters of all levels. The 600 square-foot studio is moderately decorated with handmade creations. Pillow-case dresses for girls, a game-day dress, wallets and aprons are displayed under the soft lights of the studio.

The eclectic space is Kim Kruse’s labor of love. Kruse has wanted to open a studio for years, and that finally became a reality when a space on the northeast side of town opened up.

“Sewing allows people to make their own choices,” she said. “It’s so great to make something with your own two hands.”

‘Empowering’ is the word Kruse uses when she talks about sewing. Every part of a sewing creation is up to the maker, from the pattern, the cut to the thread color, something Kruse found rewarding since she started sewing back in middle school.

Kruse says sewing allows people to take what they like out of the fashion world and tailor it to their needs. Mimicking ideas from runways or recreating a street-wear ensemble lets people create whatever image is in their heads and also learn a traditional art form.

Some of Kruse’s first endeavors in the craft were a black poodle skirt and a corset. She became involved in costume construction during her high school years and carried her growing love for making handmade creations through college. She created clothing and accessories, a fun hobby and also a way to conserve money. Friends would express interest in sewing, and the idea of teaching and opening a studio always sat high on her list of ventures to try.

Over the years Kruse collected more sewing machines and held onto that idea. She taught classes at the UF Leisure Course Program for knitting and sewing as well as worked as a teaching assistant for an introductory class in the College of Journalism and Communication.

After studio space became available, Kruse gathered her machines, enlisted the help of her husband and put Sew Make Do together. They transformed the space together and have since done a soft, or unannounced, opening, to gauge how the community reacts with the new space.

With the studio, Kruse wants to take sewing away from some of its negative connotations. Sewing carries baggage from pre-women’s rights, but Sew Make Do strives to show just how creative and personal the activity can be, some of its many empowering qualities. The classes she’s designed are meant to take people with little to no experience and have them fabricating something within three hours.

Instead of asking for two-week commitments of weekly meetings, Kruse aims to show people how easy and fun sewing can be with simple projects, such as pin cushions, to start them off. That way, they can leave accomplished by their own hand.

“Seeing their face light up once they finally see what they’ve made is great,” she said.

Currently, Kruse offers her intro course, Get Started in Sewing!, twice a month. Other classes vary based on different projects Kruse has tried and planned. Previous classes included sewing a modern apron, using zippers to create wallets and making your own game-day dress.

Upcoming classes include creating a girl’s dress out of a pillowcase and a patterns class. Social media like Blogger and Pinterest have helped her stay connected to the sewing community beyond Gainesville and translate it back for locals with project ideas.

Kruse keeps the class size at six people to maximize the help she can offer everyone. The studio is equipped with a large table in the center for demonstrations and tutorials, and each student has their own sewing station to work at. Kruse’s advice and encouragement are another plus.

Each sewing machine is different with its own quirks so students can try different models. Kruse liked the idea of allowing people to try the craft first. Sewing machines can run up a decent bill, and here people can try sewing without having to fully commit to buying one without really exploring the craft first.

Open-studio nights are another key point of the studio. Kruse opens her doors on Thursday evenings to anyone who doesn’t own a machine or someone looking to bounce ideas off of or encourage them on a project. For $15, anyone can claim a machine for a three-hour block.

“I’ll be there cheerleader,” she said with a laugh.

People can use her sewing machines for a full-three hours, more than enough time to finish a small project, or they can lay projects out on the larger cutting table. A serger machine is up for use to tie up seams for a more professional look.

As the studio gains its footing in the community, Kruse hopes to create a place where sewers can communicate and connect with one another – the local sewing spot. A tea and coffee station and more decorations to match the 50-esque décor are on her list.

Selling fabric is off her to-do list, she’s joined up with other local shops to further immerse people into the sewing community. Chicakadee Quilt Shop opened recently near the Oaks Mall and specializes in fabrics.  If someone signed up for her beginner class, Chickadee offered discounts if they purchased fabric from their store. Those connections are pivotal to further link the sewing community together, explained Kruse.

Something she does hope to start in the future is selling sewing machines. Until then, she says she’s fine running on her six machines.

So far, the studio’s soft opening has helped Kruse better understand the sewing pulse within Gainesville. Her grand opening will be Jan. 21, and all are invited to attend.

Anyone interested in taking classes can purchase a ticket online and can check back as more classes are listed. Open studio nights are for everyone; you can swing by the studio at 706 NW 23rd Ave., and maybe have a nice cup of coffee and chat while you work.

Above: Kim Kruse plans to hold the grand opening of her new sewing shop Sew Make Do on January 21. (Photo by Erik Knudsen)

Greenland is Melting

Album Title: “Where Were We”
Released: Oct. 11
Recorded at: Medusa Productions
Sounds like: The Avett Brothers,
Inspiration: Stories from the band members’ lives
Key tracks: “Always”
Where to get it: Order it here.

Upright bass/ Kick drum/ Rhythm section: Will Dueease
Electric guitar: David Low
Acoustic guitar/ Vocals: Shaun Perira
Banjo/ Vocals: Karl Seltzer

Greenland is Melting doesn’t just play bluegrass. And they certainly aren’t strumming high-fallutin’ “blu gras” with French accents. They prefer to define themselves as Americana grass.
On their sophomore album, “Where Were We,” narrative lyrics blend with banjo and guitar-strumming for an appropriately swampy album. The band’s songwriting has come a long way since their first album, Seltzer said. The first full-length album, “Our Hearts Are Gold, Our Grass Is Blue,” was recorded in three days and mostly influenced by other bands.
“Where Were We” is like listening to a collection of short stories set to a unique folk music soundtrack. If you close your eyes, you’ll be transported to a wooden swing on the back porch, sipping sweet tea. The banjo chords on the opening track “For What It’s Worth” will keep your toes tapping.
This year, the band, who are all 24-year-old UF graduates, have taken their Florida sound all over the country. They spent the first half of September playing a cross-country tour that ended at Awesomefest V in San Diego, Calif.
Although the festival was their endpoint, it was “really just an excuse to go on a road trip,” Dueease said. They put 5,500 miles on their ‘93 Ford Econoline van, which served as kitchen, bedroom and lounge. It is outfitted with flannel sheets, a laptop mounted in the TV cubby, a single burner stove and a bag full of orange candy slices.
They spent 18 days on the road together – and still don’t hate each other.
“It’s like I’ve been dating three dudes for four years now,” Dueease said.
And they hope to continue their long-term relationship into the future.
“We want to bring back the Gainesville music scene,” Perira said.
By Ashira Morris

Far Away Planes

Album Title: “Water on All Sides”
Released: Oct. 6
Recorded at: Black Bear Audio Maul in Gainesville
Sounds like: Minus the Bear, Vampire Weekend
Inspiration: Minus the Bear, Kings of Leon, Two Door Cinema Club
Key tracks: “Stow Away” and “Midnight”
Where to get it: $5.94 download on iTunes and Amazon and free downloads on their Facebook page

Bass/ Vocals: Tim Anderson
Drums: Kevin Biegler
Guitar/ Vocals:  John Ketcham
Keyboard/ Synthesizer:  Luke Spika
Guitar: John Stoltz

Far Away Planes makes a smooth landing with “Water on All Sides,” their newest dance-rock album.
Though their first album, “Movie Night,” released in Feb. 2011, has the same catchy intros and spunky drumbeats, the band agreed that their previous recording experience allowed them to fine tune tracks on “Water on All Sides” in a new way.
“When we went in to record the second time around, we knew what we wanted and weren’t afraid to ask for it,” Ketcham said.
Strangely enough, the band’s solid vision of the final product rarely included lyrics. Biegler explained that most songs on the album began with a basic keyboard riff. If everyone liked it, individual instrumental parts were added.  Lyrics always came last – sometimes last-minute.
“We’d go in to record and the guys would look at me like, ‘You do have lyrics for these songs, right?’,” Ketcham said.
Even though each band member writes his own part based on the initial first riff, their individual styles blend together for a cohesive and structured sound.
“It’s very boom-box-to-beach-party. Perfect for a chill weekend, yet up-beat enough to be your Monday morning upper,” Spika said.
By Erica Kenick

Ancient River

Album Title: “Songs From North America”
Released: Aug. 3
Recorded at: Their home
Sounds like: Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix
Inspiration: (for this album) Neil Young
Key Tracks: “Not Here,” “Solid Ground” and “Flood”
Where to get it: $5 download on ancientriver.bandcamp.com or $10 CD on the band’s website.

Bass: Zach Veltheim
Drums: Chad Voight
Guitar/ Vocals: J. Barreto

Ancient River breaks the Gainesville mold of hipster, punk rock by staying true to their love of classic rock.
Their ‘60s and ‘70s American rock-and-roll sound manages to attract a diverse fan base. Older fans appreciate the reminiscent experience of the days of old rock-and-roll, while younger fans are excited to get a piece of that ‘60s lifestyle.
“Songs from North America” features tracks inspired by traditional and classic Americana, but with a psychedelic edge. Think Bob Dylan meets Jimi Hendrix.
Ancient River, who have been together for eight years, create a unique viewer experience by combining their live music with projection slides, colored oil and smoke machines.
Barreto explains that while other bands put out maybe one or two albums a year, they release between four and five.
“We’re the most prolific and versatile [band]; our biggest strength is that we keep putting out records,” Bareto said.
When working on new material, which is often, they say they naturally feed off one another. Their motto: “Less talk and more rock.”
By Natalia Sieukaran

The Boswellians

Album Title: “Hello hands”
Released: Oct. 14
Recorded: Between Travis Atria’s Experimentorium and Collin Whitlock’s The Warren
Sounds like: Regina Spektor
Inspiration: Department of Eagles, Billie Holiday
Key Tracks: “Cloud dancing,” “Warm Inside” and “Don’t Wait”
Where to get it: theboswellians.bandcamp.com and at Hear Again for $5

Vocals/ Guitar: Amy Lobasso
Piano/ Backing Vocals: Ryan Backman
Drums: Collin Whitlock
Bass: Scott Kauffmann

The heart and soul of 1920’s jazz and big band eras have caught on in modern-day Gainesville. On their new album, “Hello Hands,” the Boswellians give traditional jazz a catchy 1960s pop twist.
The Boswellians, named after James Boswell, a famous biographer who was an ardent follower of others’ works, formed in April 2010 and have already gathered a large fan base.
In the midst of heavy guitar- and bass-driven bands, their prominent piano sound is rare and distinguishable. Originally, Backman was hesitant to play piano for the band.
“I felt weird about playing the piano, but in this band I appreciate it more,” he said.
While most bands create new material when jamming together, blues-inspired Lobasso explains a piano demands a more meticulous approach when creating new material; there needs to be structure and melody.
For their new album, “Hello Hands,” the Boswellians were inspired by modern composers as well as French Impressionist music.
The track “Cloud Dancing” has a vintage 30s-like vocal recording quality that’s reminiscent of Billie Holiday.  It manages to capture the pathos of the time as Lobasso croons lyrics, “Mistakes are often made, perhaps we’ll find a way.”
For a change of pace, “Don’t Wait” provides an upbeat melody with drum fills, cymbal crashes and heavy piano riffs that resonate well when the song slips into a gloomy trance as Lobasso chants, “Don’t wait for me.”
The band says they are interested in “activities of a Boswellian quality,” an interest that is certainly evident in their era-spanning album.
By Natalia Sieukaran

Ars Phoenix

Album Title: “Hanging Fire”
Released: Sept. 23
Sound like: Soundtrack to an ‘80s horror movie
Recorded at: Various private residences
Inspiration: The Cure, The Smiths, Clan of Xymox
Key tracks: “Secret Manuscript” and “0011001”
Where to get it: Free download at arsphoenix.bandcamp.com

Vocals/ Guitar/ Synthesizers/ Rhythm Programming/ Five-String Bass: Jon Glover
Guitar: Paige Fowler

Fueled by 10 years of the FEST as well as a colorful punk rock history, Gainesville tends to produce and encourage punk angst and experimental hipsterdom among its musically inclined, often leaving other genres to fend for themselves.  However, Gainesville’s own goth scene, though grossly undervalued and comparably smaller than others, is no less talented and productive.
Ars Phoenix’s new release, “Hanging Fire,” has been in the works since its members Jon Glover and Paige Fowler first met in 2009 through the University of Florida’s English department. Both musicians were seeking doctoral degrees in English literature, as well as someone to jam with.
Though Glover had previously released an album as a one-man band under the name Ars Phoenix, “Hanging Fire” is the first album to feature both artists. According to Fowler, the addition of his guitar gives Ars Phoenix a “crunchier” sound.
Building on material Glover had already prepared, the duo gradually pieced together a post-punk album with gothic flavor. Skilfully layered sounds of keyboard, guitar and synths give each track a haunting, cinematic feel comparable to the psychotronic film genre.
Despite a dark sound, moments of suspense and track titles such as “Phantom Pain,” the album’s release a month before Halloween was merely a timely coincidence.
“There’s nothing tame about what we do,” Fowler says. “We’re there to get people amped up and give a sonic boost.”
By Erica Kenick

For more local albums, check out For the Record: Spring 2011.

Local startup engages the community with composting services

Compost! I bet you’ve heard the word. And if you’re a hip n’ happenin’ green mean environmental machine, it’s probably one of your favorites. But what is this magnificent pile of brown stuff that gardeners hail as “black gold”? Essentially, compost is a mix of organic food waste, dry leaves, paper and cardboard, harmoniously decomposing into the best soil food your garden could ask for.

The most indispensable compost ingredient, food waste, is also the most abundant — the United States produces 34 million tons in one year alone, and Gainesville is no exception. So, it was only a matter of time until environmentalism and entrepreneurship met, fell in love and married into a little local business named Gainesville Compost.

Chris Cano, the Compost Guy

Gainesville Compost began this September when 25-year-old UF graduate, Chris Cano, turned his passions, sustainability and gardening, into his own business. The goal was simple: to turn waste into food using local resources. Having reaped the benefits of composting in his own garden, he decided to expand the operation into the community. With the help of friends employed by local restaurants, he developed a pilot program that included various local joints, such as Karma Cream, Reggae Shack, The Midnight and The Jones.

By participating in Gainesville Compost, restaurants are able to cut down on the amount of waste their businesses produce. Food scraps are collected in old ice cream containers donated by Karma Cream and carried back to Cano’s home and composting site using a bike trailer as carbon-neutral transportation.

Science!

So, is it as easy as throwing a bunch of leftovers and dried leaves into a bucket and letting the magic happen? Hardly. Composting is a process. It takes a minimum of six weeks for the raw composting goodness to turn into useful organic fertilizer. But, the longer it stays in the process, the better the results.

Here’s how it works. In large containers, food scraps, which supply the nitrogen and water, are mixed with dried leaves, paper and cardboard, which supply the carbon. The mix is then aerated by being turned periodically.

This procedure creates the perfect environment for microbes to start breaking things down. The energy created by the working bacteria generates heat that reaches temperatures as high as 145 degrees Fahrenheit, giving off steam as a visible side-effect of the process. The heat contributes to decomposition, decreasing the volume of the original compost material.

Because the food is naturally deteriorating rather than rotting, compost gives off a pleasant, earthy scent, not the stinky smell of your kitchen garbage can. The resulting compost is sifted and should resemble crumbly, dark brown potting soil when ready for the garden. As opposed to the inorganic fertilizer sold at generic home improvement stores, a good pile of compost has the quality of being a soil-builder — a time-consuming but valuable long-term benefit.

From a Healthy Garden to a Healthier Economy

In addition to creating and selling compost to restaurants, Gainesville Compost also has plans to extend its services to the homes of environmentally-conscious Gainesville residents interested in growing their own food. This new project would be based on the farm Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) model, where paying members receive fresh seasonal produce each week. In this case, Compost CSA members will receive nutrient-rich, local compost products, educational resources for gardening with compost and weekly face time with local compost experts. The program will launch early next year, likely operating from the weekly Farmer’s Market at the Bo Diddley Plaza.

Cano’s complete vision for Gainesville Compost goes beyond the vertical business model, which tends to exploits resources to turn a profit and be unfavorable to laborers and the environment. The objective is to create quality compost out of available waste resources, while engaging the Gainesville community in the process. The beauty of this “pedal-powered, community compost network” is its potential long-term effects in the sustainable urban agriculture movement, as well as in our local economy.

Creating your own job, especially one that speaks to your interests as well as to the greater good, sounds impossible in today’s economic climate. But it’s not. Cano threw out the Classified ads and started a business that corresponds to his own interests. It’s not just about wonderful soil food; it’s about creating an alternative way of doing business that is both environmentally and financially sustainable. Now, that’s an idea worth recycling.

If you’re interested in becoming a Gainesville Compost CSA member, contact Chris Cano at GainesvilleCompost@gmail.com.

Photos and illustration by Diana Moreno.

Walking and biking aren’t the only ways people can get around without driving. Gainesville offers an array of transportation options that are more eco-friendly than driving a car.

Being aware of transportation options is the first step to sustainability, said Ashley Pennington, the outreach coordinator for Sustainable UF.

Sustainability doesn’t have to be a chore. “Figure out what resonates with you,” Pennington said.

The goal of Sustainable UF, and many other environmental organizations, is to inspire individuals to become involved in environmental consciousness in a way that makes sense to them, Pennington said.

Calin Wilson, a sophomore advertising major at UF, makes his 15-minute commute from his apartment complex to class the good, old-fashioned way.

“I enjoy my walks in the morning,” Wilson said.

Another of Gainesville’s many options is Zipcar. This car-sharing program provides the public with a rental car that is parked at multiple locations around UF. Once registered, individuals receive a Zipcard that becomes a key for any of the cars.

Since individuals can rent a car on an as-needed basis, they can enjoy the benefits of a car without the monthly costs of car upkeep. According to Zipcar’s green benefits web page, every Zipcar takes at least 15 personally-owned cars off the road. This saves an estimated 32 million gallons of crude oil per year.

Gainesville’s bus system is another alternative to driving. Many of the buses are specifically routed to student apartment complexes and the UF and Santa Fe campuses to encourage students to use the system more. Plus, both Santa Fe College and UF students ride for free with a student ID.

Working toward a more sustainable world is rooted at an individual level. So this year, find a sustainable new year’s resolution that works for your life. And collectively, “a small behavior can have a tremendous impact,” Pennington said.

Wondering what effect the food you eat has on greenhouse gas emissions? Check out this story for more info.

Above: Bea (left) and her Sylvia (her teacher) knead dough at Morning Meadow, an alternative preschool and kindergarten in Gainesville that utilizes a century-old but still uncommon teaching method. Photo by Erik Knudsen.

At 5, Sylvia Paluzzi had to complete a task, putting pegs in their proper holes, before she could join her friends outside. At 6, teachers pulled her out of class for coloring outside the lines. They told her she was careless and couldn’t draw.

Some kids withdraw from school because of incidents like these, Paluzzi said, now a teacher herself. Positive preschool experiences can make children think school is wonderful, while negative ones can make them lose their natural love of learning, she said.

Paluzzi hopes this never happens at her school.

“I think we as human beings are unlimited,” she said.

All children can be artists, musicians and growers and can understand chemistry and math, she said, if they are exposed to the material in a pleasant way by a teacher who helps them find their natural talents, strengths and passions.

Paluzzi, 48, is the founder and director of Morning Meadow Preschool and Kindergarten, an alternative private school in Gainesville for children aged 2 1/2 to 6. For almost 20 years, she has been igniting her students’ fire for learning using the Waldorf method. This century-old, nonreligious educational system emphasizes not only children’s intellectual development, but also their emotional, physical and spiritual growth.

Although the number is growing, the United States has fewer than 200 Waldorf schools, so Paluzzi’s approach to education is far from common. So is the way she dresses. Paluzzi teaches and plays with her students wearing long, flowing skirts, an apron and bangles that cover her forearms. She frames her big, brown eyes with thick, black eyeliner, loosely wraps her long black hair with a headscarf, and pins flowers in the back.

She looks like a gypsy, said Cristina Eury, a friend who used to teach with her.

Nina Hofer, a friend whose children attended Morning Meadow, said she was overwhelmed when she first met Paluzzi 15 years ago. She said Paluzzi is “the most amazing and insightful person I’ve met in my life, by far.”

Discovering Waldorf

Growing up in Miami, Paluzzi was one of six children. At 17, she gave birth to her first son.

While at the University of Florida in the early 1980s, Paluzzi drifted through pre-med courses she didn’t like, then took a year off. Back home in Miami, her mom pointed out that every job she picked involved kids. Upon returning to UF, Paluzzi graduated with a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.

After having her second son, Paluzzi’s best friend introduced her to the Waldorf School of Gainesville, open from 1979 to 1996, where Paluzzi could bring her baby with her to work.

She became an assistant teacher and was struck by how happy the children were. They still fought from time to time, she said, but they were laughing and singing and the teacher wasn’t micromanaging them like some from her childhood.

At a traditional school where she worked previously, Paluzzi saw kids brought to tears when learning fractions. But at the Waldorf School, they seemed vibrant, harmonious and carefree.

A few months later, the teacher she assisted left, and Paluzzi was asked to replace her. She spent three summers training to be a certified Waldorf teacher at Sunbridge Institute in New York while also teaching at the Waldorf School in Gainesville.

That’s when she met Edy Zettler, a mother of one of Paluzzi’s “original families.”

“She’s a fabulous person, but that’s obvious. You’re able to tell right off the bat,” Zettler said. “She’s very straightforward, honest, no nonsense.”

In 1993, Paluzzi left the Waldorf School and started her own school out of her house with five students. After nine years, Morning Meadow moved out of her house, and five years ago, it settled at its current location. Paluzzi’s school has grown to 48 students in two classes, each with two teachers who are encouraged to bring their young children with them to work.

This fall, the first-, second- and third-grade students left Morning Meadow and moved to Heart Pine Elementary, a new outgrowth of Morning Meadow that is renting space at Highlands Presbyterian Church. Heart Pine is run by a board of parents, including Paluzzi, whose 7-year-old son attends the school with 14 other students.

Teaching at Morning Meadow

Instead of labeling their cubbies and art projects with their names, preschoolers in Paluzzi’s class use their spirit symbols.

She tries to pick a symbol, like a tree, cat or heart, that fits the child’s personality. One student, Maya, was a “light-filled, ethereal being, flitting from one activity to the next,” she said, “and you felt like if you tried to hold her, she would flutter away.”

Paluzzi chose the butterfly as Maya’s spirit symbol.

Sometimes she assigns symbols to the children before meeting them. Most of the time, she said, they unknowingly go to the cubby labeled with their symbol.

Although her students are very young, “She really sees them,” Hofer said. “She’s really listening.”

The school day begins outside.

“I think it’s important for children to have an experience with nature,” she said, “to dig, and look for worms and bugs, and plant seeds and watch them become something.”

Most kids today have lost their connection to nature, she said — a connection that is important if society wants responsible adults who appreciate the environment and fight for its preservation.

Surrounded by a tall wooden fence covered in chalk drawings, her kids sing, crawl and jump around the trees, monkey bars and vegetable garden. In their minds, they are gourmet chefs, truck drivers or puppies.

Paluzzi walks among them, solving disputes, offering words of wisdom and engaging in their fantasies.

As a gentle signal, Paluzzi and her co-teacher sing to their class of 4- to 6-year-olds, and they line up to wash their hands. Paluzzi sits with a large ceramic bowl in her lap and scrubs their hands. Then, the two teachers and the preschoolers form a circle on a large rug. They hold hands, dance and sing about the wonders of nature, tasks like washing the floor and baking bread, and make-believe creatures.

Then, it’s snack time. The children sit at tiny tables, where they thank Mother Earth and Father Sun and bless their friends and families before eating. Blessings said throughout the day are often earth-based, Paluzzi said, “because I wanted the children to have an experience of reverence without an attachment to any one religion.”

The school has parents from many religions and cultures, so in addition to more general blessings, Paluzzi also chooses fairy tales from cultures around the world.

While parents pack their children’s lunches, the school prepares their snacks. Students eat a vegan meal of whole grains and vegetables, such as rotini sprinkled with broccoli and nutritional yeast.

Though not a vegan, Paluzzi buys organic food when she can and supports local farmers at the downtown farmers’ market.

At school, her kids use glass cups and ceramic bowls instead of more kid-friendly disposables, because Paluzzi said she likes to live by a Native American saying: “Whatever you do, do it with the seven generations after you in mind.”

After the preschoolers clean up, Paluzzi sings again to signal playtime. Her classroom is filled with “open-ended toys” — objects like colorful cloths, shells and wood that students can transform into whatever they want — which Paluzzi said encourages creativity and imagination.

The boys and girls ask, “Miss Sylvia, will you help?” and she pulls out art supplies or ties cloth around their bodies to make costumes. Waldorf teachers make toys in class so students see the time and effort involved, and thus, have more respect for toys when they play with them, she said. All their toys are made from biodegradable materials.

Waldorf ideology discourages plastics as well as TVs and computers around young children, so Paluzzi encourages her Morning Meadow families to find other avenues of entertainment.

Creating an Extended Family

The school doesn’t have room for all the children who want to attend. Paluzzi is trying to find a larger property so she can enroll more students and give them “a more wild setting” with less urban noise, where they can explore nature.

Friends of Morning Meadow Preschool, a nonprofit devoted to establishing a permanent Waldorf school in Gainesville, found a 14-acre property that Paluzzi said would be convenient for families because it’s only 10 minutes from University Avenue, but “you can still go into the woods and hear the sounds you should hear.”

The nonprofit’s Waldorf initiative keeps attracting more supporters, she said, and every year it raises more money than the year before. Last year, it raised about $35,000.

But the organization still doesn’t have enough to buy the property and build a facility that unites the growing preschool and elementary school.

Paluzzi said she’d like Morning Meadow to outlive her, and might someday pass the school on to one of the younger teachers. But for now, teaching and running Morning Meadow has her up at 6 a.m. every day.

“I really, really love it,” she said, “so to me it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. It feels like a blessing.”

Paluzzi seems to embody the spirit of Waldorf education; parents talk about her and the school’s ideology as if they were one and the same.

After almost 20 years in the Gainesville community, Paluzzi says Morning Meadow is more like an extended family than a school. Parents whose kids are long gone from the school still volunteer, and former students return to help with summer camp or holiday parties. Paluzzi keeps in touch with several students who are now in their early twenties.

She takes pride in knowing her students leave Morning Meadow with “a sense of openness and possibilities awaiting them.”

After teaching children, Paluzzi said teaching parents is her second favorite thing.

They come to her with their questions and concerns, said Ashlee Sharpe, a mother and Morning Meadow teacher.

“She’s good at listening, thinking about it, picking apart the issues and helping you figure it out,” Sharpe said.

It’s not always obvious, said Peter Polshek, a Morning Meadow parent, but Paluzzi has an incredible depth of understanding of each child. And not only does she understand the children, he said, but she also understands the families and the parents.

Hofer agreed.

“She’s not just a teacher for my child,” she said. “She’s a teacher for me.”

The photos above were taken by Erik Knudsen at Morning Meadow Preschool and Kindergarten. Interested in learning more? Check out their website.

The most Kevin Priest has spent on his electricity bill this year is $4 in one month. And that was only because it was a particularly cloudy month.

For the rest of the year, Priest’s energy bill has essentially been paid for by the sun.

The 30-year-old graduate student is a participant in Gainesville Regional Utilities’ solar photovoltaic feed-in tariff (FIT) program, an energy initiative that encourages solar energy use in Gainesville by paying participants for the energy produced by their solar panels.

“Every month I get a check from GRU, and every month they send me a bill for the energy that I’m using,” Priest said. Usually, he receives more than he pays.

Participants in the Solar FIT program sign a contract to sell the energy produced by their solar energy systems back to GRU, at a fixed rate, for 20 years.

In the eyes of Mark Robinson, another participant in the program, the situation is a win-win. Robinson will earn more than 13 percent a year in profit through the program.

“The system should pay for itself in about eight years,” Robinson said. “Everything produced after that is profit. The panels have a 30-year warranty, so one can expect 20 plus years of prepaid clean energy.”

Bill Shepherd, GRU’s energy and business services manager, anticipates that the program will have almost 11.3 megawatts’ worth of solar energy installed by the end of the year and 32 megawatts’ worth by the end of the program’s duration in 2016.

“That is equivalent to about just under 2,000 homes effectively being powered by renewable energy annually,” Shepherd said. “By the end of this year we’ll be reducing 16,400 tons of carbon annually from those systems generating electricity.” That number is based on how much carbon would have been produced had that electricity been made using fossil fuels.

For many, the deciding factor about whether to apply for the program comes from an economic standpoint. Although participants must pay for the initial installation of the solar panels, GRU strives to provide solar energy users in the program with a 4 to 5 percent rate of return, Shepherd said.

However, it’s not always just the economic incentive that leads Gainesville residents to apply for the program.

“I think it’s a very clean and efficient way to do things,” Robinson said. “Economically it makes sense, and environmentally I think it’s the right thing to do.”

The program has drawn steady interest in the Gainesville community since its initial opening in 2009, but it has its limits.

GRU allocates 4 megawatts per year for the program, an amount determined by funds provided through a $1 addition to monthly GRU utility bills to help cover the program’s costs. Some of this year’s capacity was already taken up by a queue that was implemented before the year even started.

When GRU began accepting new applications in January, there were 2.7 megawatts available for new FIT users, Shepherd said. But GRU received 9 megawatts’ worth of applications.

Unfortunately for those eager to apply, GRU does not currently have the capacity to reopen the application process in January as previously expected, Shepherd said.

Despite its popularity, some Gainesville residents argue that the program could be managed better.

Due to allegations that GRU did not execute the 2011 application process fairly, GRU opened an additional megawatt for applicants who were not selected this year. This utilized all of the open capacity that GRU had planned to offer to new applicants in 2012.

One applicant, Annie Orlando, filed a lawsuit on Nov. 22 claiming that GRU had given an unfair advantage to select applicants while denying the same options for others.

According to a review of the application process conducted by the City Auditor’s Office, GRU granted an exception for one contractor, allowing the company to submit multiple applications through limited-liability corporations that were not registered until after the selection process.

Orlando said that when she asked GRU if she could submit more than one application, she was told that it would not be permitted. She expected that other applicants would be told the same.

“All I wanted was to be treated fairly,” she said. “I told GRU, ‘I don’t care what your rules are; I just want to play by the same ones.’”

The auditor’s report had suggested that GRU make an effort to further clarify its application regulations and to notify applicants of exceptions granted to other applicants.

Shepherd said that GRU regularly changes its processes to improve the program along the way.

Although still evolving, GRU’s Solar FIT program serves as an example for many utility companies across the nation. Inspired by similar efforts in Europe, it was the first of its kind in the United States.

She may not be happy with the management of the Solar FIT, but Orlando recognizes the significance of the program’s presence in Gainesville.

“This is a very important program,” she said. “The whole country has their eyes watching us, and it’s a shame that it’s been hijacked by people who took advantage of the weaknesses in it.”

Above: Stefanie Samara Hamblen, owner of the now-legal “Illegal Jam Company,” cans a batch of her locally-sourced jams.

Recent legislation enables entrepreneurs to sell homemade goods

Ruthann Macheski used to drive 40 miles from her farm in Williston to Gainesville, just to bake in a commercial kitchen. Some did not have the equipment she needed, so she lugged pounds of large-scale pots and pans, baking sheets and springform pans back and forth.

When House Bill 7209, commonly referred to as the Cottage Food law, passed on July 1, the breads and cakes made in Macheski’s own home kitchen became legal to sell.

“[Before] I would go wherever I could get space,” she said. “It was a hassle. Now I don’t have to leave the farm.”

Before the law passed, any food for sale had to be cooked in a commercial kitchen. These kitchens are inspector-certified and guarantee a government-approved level of sanitation.

Macheski, who formerly worked as a kitchen inspector before permanently moving out to her farm, can now sell homemade breads and cakes under her company name, Ruthie’s Country Kitchen, at the farmers’ market.

Food sold under the Cottage Food law must be a direct sale. It can be sold from the seller’s home, at farmers’ markets and at roadside stands. Macheski now sells baked goods in addition to meat, dairy and produce from her farm and at local farmers’ markets.

The law does not cover indirect sales, such as providing for a restaurant. Selling online is also not allowed.

Although some rules are well- detailed, the entire law is not clearly explained. The pamphlet printed by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services was not explicit enough, said Macheski. Her copy of the brochure is covered in penciled notes and questions.

She called the lawmakers in the Florida Senate with a list of questions.

Did “homemade pasta” refer to fresh or dried noodles? Did dehydrated soups fall under the category of “dry herbs, seasonings and mixtures?”

“I burned up the phone line to Tallahassee,” she said. The government workers were stumped. Although they promised to call back, her questions remain unanswered.

The guide says to check with local municipal, city or county government for official requirements. The problem? Not all of these officials are even aware the law exists.

With her calls and questions, the local officials who oversee this new law have realized they may have to address it within their business structure.

“I have brought this to the attention of so many county and city inspectors,” Macheski said.

She had followed the law as it went through the house and legislature. After it passed, she began spreading the word to her friends. For farmers already selling at markets, baking, say, a zucchini bread out of the squash that didn’t sell, allows them to effectively double their profit. They can make more money without growing more produce.

In addition to baked goods, the Cottage Food law covers jam and other fruit products like vinegars, pasta, dry herbs, granola, nuts and honey. The product must be labeled with the name of the Cottage Food Operation and product, all ingredients, the net weight and any allergens.

The new law does not cover many food items, including meats, dairy products, ketchup and canned pickled products. If these products aren’t made properly, they can cause salmonella or botulism. To prevent any sanitation disasters, Macheski recommends that anyone interested in selling from a home kitchen take an online course in food handling.

“My worry is that too many people will get involved, who don’t know what they’re doing,” she said.

Stefanie Samara Hamblen, who owns the Illegal Jam Company, understands the importance of food safety. She gets a certain satisfaction out of the noise the jars make when they are properly suctioned, guaranteeing that they won’t spoil.

“It’s that ping you hear when you know they’re sealed,” she said. “That’s when you know it’s done.”

Her jam hobby started four years ago, when she took the excess figs from her neighbor’s trees and re-created her grandma’s preserves.

By this summer, jam had grown from pastime to obsession. She was able to give some jars away to friends and family, but her jam-making outstripped her gift-giving. By June 30, there were 160 Bell jars of homemade jam stacked in her kitchen, overflowing out of the pantry and on to her front hall table.

“It was out of control,” Hamblen said.

Since the jams were made in her home instead of a commercial kitchen, Hamblen couldn’t sell them. She dubbed her enterprise the “Illegal Jam Company” in the July issue of Hogtown HomeGrown, the monthly newsletter she writes and publishes that promotes local eating and home cooking.

But after the Cottage Food law passed – ironically, the day after she published the newsletter – her homemade jam became legal. Suddenly, Hamblen’s passion for preserves had the potential to become a profitable business.

“I realized I was sitting on a gold mine,” she said.

Hamblen keeps her operations as simple as her recipes.

She uses her “plain old four-burner” stove to make the jam. Her part-time job as a nanny provides her with toddler taste-testers.

Hamblen sells her jams at the Alachua County and Haile Village Farmers’ Markets and from her house.

Though at one point she was making more jam than she could give away, Hamblen doesn’t anticipate selling over the profit limit of $15,000 per year.

Macheski, however, is considering building a separate commercial kitchen on her farm within the next two years.

Although the Cottage Food laws cover her current operations, a commercial kitchen eliminates restrictions. She could start selling homemade pickles, tomato sauces and other products not covered by Cottage Food laws and would not be subject to the profit limit. She would also be able to sell these products in restaurants and specialty food stores.

These new laws work well for simpler operations, but a commercial kitchen still allows for a wider range of options.

Correction (1/4/12): Currently, Stefanie Hamblen does not sell her jams at the Alachua County or Haile Village Farmers’ Markets. We apologize for the error. For more about the “Illegal Jam Company,” check out its Facebook page.

Gainesville’s downtown post office was already shut down in September, and now its sorting facility is on the chopping block. USPS will make a final decision on May 15, and if the currently proposed plan goes through, mail will be shipped to Tampa and Jacksonville to be sorted and then shipped back to Gainesville to be delivered.

What is at stake?

Gainesville is set to loose 232 good, local jobs. And because the national American Postal Workers (APW) Union reached a new four-year agreement last May, the majority of these employees cannot be laid off or transferred more than 50 miles away. Those currently under this contract would be sent to other cities to work, most likely Jacksonville or Tampa.

Postal workers at a Dec. 1 town hall forum stated concerns that workers in Jacksonville are still waiting for the placement from downsizing earlier this year. The new increased capacity in Jacksonville will open more jobs, but Gainesville postal workers are worried about becoming surplus labor as Jacksonville workers will get first priority for placement.

Closing the sorting facility would also mean no more overnight local mail. All mail would take 2-3 days minimum.

According to plant managers, closing this sorting center would lead to a net $5.8 million in savings. But, there will also be an increase in $2.3 million for transportation costs. Many have pointed out that the price of fuel is expected to increase, meaning the savings will be lost in the coming years. There is also the unnecessary environmental toll from driving mail out of town and back.

Fiscal irresponsibility or manufactured crisis?

The yearly operating budget of $75 billion per year has been met (or nearly met) until 2008 by a nearly identical revenue. Because of falling volume, revenue has been declining since 2008 hitting a $5.1 billion operating deficit for 2011.

But this crisis traces it’s roots not only to falling demand but also to the 2006 passage of H.R. 6407: Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). This law forced the postal service to pre-fund future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years. The pre-funding of retirees benefits for workers who have not even been hired yet is something unknown in any government or private industry.

Without this bill, the postal service would have a $1.5 billion surplus today.

Postal workers at the Dec. 1 town hall forum speculated as to why the bill was passed. Some expressed concerns about “bleeding USPS into privatization by FedEx lobbyists.”

The current narrative has been captured to make it seem that the postal service is a greedy, irresponsible dinosaur that needs to adapt to the times.

Not so, according to Brian O’Neill, president of American Postal Workers Union (APWU), Local 3525. According to him, Congress can act to save the post office.

The passage of H.R. 1351: United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011 would allow USPS to use money that it overpaid into the retirement systems to pay toward its deficit. This bill currently has 227 cosponsors, does not use any tax payer money, and would save more than 28,000 jobs nationwide.

Congress has already started to act. A decision to close the Gainesville sorting facility was to be made by mid February but the actions of 15 senators has postponed any facilities closing until May 15. This agreement was reached in order to stall, allowing time to pass comprehensive reform that could save the postal service.

How You Can Get Involved

To help get H.R. 6407 repealed and pass H.R. 1351 in order to allow the postal service to make itself solvent, you can write to or call your Representatives.

In his weekly blog series The Last Generation—really more of a highly flirtatious conversation, littered with innuendo—Max Warren discusses matters of general interest to our generation, frequently quotes things, and spills out the addled contents of a deviant mind.

First, let me apologize for my absence from your hearts and screens last week. Law school snuck up and forced an actual week’s worth of work on me as punishment for a four month long movie and liquor binge (most recently, Welcome to the Riley’s with Wild Turkey). Now, on to business.

I promised in my first post that this blog would not be a neo-Luddite rant and I’m going to honor that, at least inasmuch as I’m able. I do have something to say, however.

We are, as a generation, becoming increasingly plugged in, whether it be to our ear buds or e-readers. And I worry, as everything that possibly can go digital does so, that we’re going to be unwilling to wait patiently on the things that can’t—that we may cast them aside as remnants of the stupid ages. Ultimately, I’m worried that we’re building a world less beautiful. Life is a play (or maybe a Showtime series)—I’ve always believed this—and I think it would be good for us to pay some attention to the type of stage upon which we’re choosing to act it out.

Ain’t she a beauty? She’s a Remington Rand Model 1, circa 1935. As of a week ago, she’s mine—an early Christmas present. She doesn’t have a name yet and I’m open to suggestions, but I have to admit I’m leaning heavily towards River Tam.

Now, I didn’t just show her to you because I’m proud/aroused just looking at her. River is going to help me make my point. When you punch those keys you feel the words you’re writing. You hear the goddamn smack when the type bar bangs each letter onto the paper. Even though it’s only ink, you write like you’re carving each word into stone.

Now, a brief contrast.

That, on the other hand, is a Kindle. As far as I can tell, they’re basically amazing devices that can carry around all the books that have ever been written or ever will be written. They’re portable, lightweight, user-friendly, focus-grouped and built for a modern user. They also have an unfortunate connotation in my head, however, because of one incident.

I was on a bus, sitting behind an obese woman, who was holding her Kindle in one hand and a big, salted pretzel in the other, pausing from her read only long enough to wipe the grease and errant salt grains from the device.

It’s still a fine device, and I am willing to accept that she may not be the product’s average user. But, let us compare the general experience to reading from a good old-fashioned book.

There’s a certain powerful feeling that comes with holding a book in your hands and cracking the spine. There’s a certain sensation—something like awe—that can come from feeling the weight of the words (if you don’t believe me, go find a copy of The Brothers Karamazov). And there’s a certain pleasure in picking an old book off the shelf and re-reading your favorite passages, which of course you dog-eared. Reading a book is an experience and I, for one, believe that merely displaying the words on a screen is not the same thing.

Then, of course, there are the intangible things. My loyal and attentive readers will recall that the first time my calling—my raison d’être, if you will—hit me in the face was after I read a book called This Side of Paradise. I actually discovered Paradise by accident. Walking around the bookstore, I vaguely recognized the name F. Scott Fitzgerald and randomly picked it off the shelf. It was a very important moment in my life and when I close my eyes I can still recall that store, the smell, the very moment in time. I can relive the scene.

And maybe people who browse on their Kindles have similar experiences. Maybe those experiences feel the same to them. But, if you were to close your eyes and think about a cinematic life-changing event, is it more likely to be finding some treasure in a brick-and-mortar store, or pressing a few extra buttons on a handheld? The point isn’t that the latter is less valid, the point is that it feels less valid in that it makes for a much worse anecdote.

Like I said, there are obviously practical benefits to a device like Amazon’s Kindle. I can’t drag my whole goddamn library around with me, obviously. As far as tools go, Kindles could one day become the intellectual swiss army knife. But, to someone like me with a love of all things past (if you picture Owen Wilson’s character in Midnight in Paris, you won’t be too far off), the experience can never compare. I believe it’s this type of implicit trade-off that deserves our reflection.

I want to leave you with some wise words, courtesy of Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind:

“Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain. You’ve got to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man behind a counter who says, “All right, you can have a telephone; but you’ll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote; but at a price; you lose the right to retreat behind a powder-puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline!”

As we march on toward greater progress, let’s try and keep an eye towards what we’re giving up in trade. It may be that one day we develop buyer’s remorse.

Live like you’re carving it in stone.

Max may not be up on the newest technology, but he sure does love reading comments. Leave one below and he’ll even respond. In addition, requests/suggestions for new articles, suggestions to name his typewriter, or requests for him to let you touch his typewriter (that’s not a euphemism) may be sent to Max.Z.Warren@gmail.com

Fight Back Florida is a network of progressive students, labor activists, and workers throughout Florida that fight for accessible education and the rights of working families.

In the spring of 2011, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, unleashed his assault against Floridians with a host of laws ranging from tuition increases for college students to pay decreases for teachers. An affordable college education would be a thing of the past: Florida students would be saddled with increasingly high student loans as they pay 15 percent more per year in Scott’s tuition increases, while at the same time slashing Bright Futures scholarships. Governor Scott went after all state employees next, proposing that they pay 3 percent of their current salary into the Florida Retirement System as a forced “contribution,” while also weakening their labor unions through bills designed to cripple their ability to function and negotiate with employers.

The people of Wisconsin were facing similar legislation affecting teachers, students and the rights of union members. In Madison, Wisconsin, over 100,000 protesters occupied the capital building opposing laws very similar to the ones brought to Florida.

It was the ongoing sit-ins and protests in Wisconsin that really jolted several organizers in Florida to “bring Wisconsin to Florida.” The very night that much of the de-unionizing and budget cut legislation was passed in Wisconsin, five student and labor organizers from Tampa, Tallahassee and Gainesville decided to build a network to connect people from all over Florida willing to fight back against the right-wing assault. Fight Back Florida was born that night, in early March.

In order to be an effective resistance, we needed to unite all the labor and student groups around the state. Within a week, groups such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Florida AFL-CIO, and central labor councils all over Florida signed on to the call for a statewide demonstration. Floridians statewide planned and networked for the big event. There was an excitement in the air that had not been felt in some time. It seemed as though people felt they were finally a part of something that would give the people of Florida their state back from those who refrain from taxing the rich while asking the average citizen to sacrifice.

Finally, on March 25, Floridians from all walks of life rallied in over 10 cities around the state of Florida to say no to union busting, no to anti-worker bills, and no to attacks on affordable education. They demanded that tuition stay low so that education could be accessible for all and that unions continue to be allowed to fight and negotiate for their members.

One of the largest rallies in the state was held here in Gainesville. Hundreds took to the streets and marched to city hall, proclaiming Gainesville a “Labor Sanctuary.”

These rallies, alongside an unprecedented unity among all the labor unions of Florida, led to the defeat of most of the proposed legislation. From this success, we realized the need to maintain the network we created not only to fight back against future bills, but also to create an organization that could create a sense of activism both within the student and labor movements.

We set up permanent groups in many cities around Florida to continue to meet and plan. This came to a head during the state wide Fight Back Florida Conference in Orlando on Nov. 5. Over 50 student and labor activists from over seven cities came together to develop a plan for the upcoming year. The strategy was to expose the budget cuts, tuition hikes, and anti-worker legislation for what they really were – attacks on the working majority of Floridians by powerful right-wing politicians.

This Jan. 21, Fight Back Florida is gearing up to lead the struggle against the government’s plans to place the burden of the state economic crisis onto the backs of the people with a multi-city, coordinated rally. Then, uniting activists from all over the state, Fight Back Florida will continue to give average Floridians a voice against Rick Scott and the corporate interests he represents by mobilizing to Tallahassee for a day of action on Feb. 25. Fight Back Florida plans to host another statewide conference at the end of May to plan for the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa on Dec. 6.

Fight Back Florida was created less then a year ago to confront anti-worker and anti-student legislation. We have already helped gain meaningful wins, but the fight back continues.

For more information, check out Fight Back Florida’s website.

The Monthly Manifesto is a podium for local organizations to tell Gainesville what they’re about. Submissions and inquiries should be sent to editors@thefineprintuf.org with the subject “Monthly Manifesto.”

He doesn’t even treat his crops with the few substances permissible under USDA certified organic standards, so he considers Swallowtail “beyond organic.”

“We’re a community farm and, as such, it’s a direct-to-consumer, trust-based relationship that exists between us and all the people we’re feeding,” Noah said.

In June, Florida Organic Growers (FOG), a Gainesville-based nonprofit that works to promote sustainable community farmers like Noah, joined 82 other plaintiffs in a preemptive lawsuit against Monsanto, the world’s leading producer of genetically modified seeds. Plaintiffs claim Monsanto’s predatory patent enforcement tactics threaten the future of organic agriculture. Read more >>

Reporting by Lily Wan. Photos by Ashley Crane.

At-large 1 City Commissioner

Our current at-large 1 City Commissioner is Jeanna Mastrodicasa who has reached the end of her service after two consecutive three-year terms. Mastrodicasa was first elected in 2006 and then reelected in 2009. Her legacy includes adding “gender identity” to a list of classes of people protected from discrimination — a part of a lawsuit that unilaterally changed city retiree health benefits in 2008. She’s also been known as a staunch supporter of the biomass plant. These are the candidates that are up for her spot as the at-large City Commissioner:

Richard Selwach
“Diamond Rick” Selwach has run for local office more times than Pat Fitzpatrick has been thrown out of city hall. Selwach is a local pawn shop owner, something he makes sure to announce at every opportunity, no matter how awkward. Selwach has often referred to unions as a communist plot. He is against the homeless one-stop center and the biomass plant.

Mark Venzke
“Taxi Cab Mark” is a taxi cab driver that got into the Gainesville political scene by advocating for keeping the 130 meal limit at St. Francis House in place even though he frequently uses their services. Currently, Venzke is advocating for limiting the ability of Occupy Gainesville to stay at Bo Diddley Community Plaza.

Nathan Skop
This man is the reason conspiracy theory buff Harold Saive dropped out of the race. Skop has recently developed a strong anti-biomass stance; which is odd because he was on the board that approved the biomass plant.

Dejeon Cain
Cain is a newcomer to the Gainesville political scene. He was on the Black on Black crime task force and is currently a security guard at Shands and a minister for Anointing Truth Ministries. Cain’s platform includes allowing bars to have a soft close (doors open until 4am but no alcohol past 2am) and expanding S.N.A.P to apartment complexes on Archer Road.

James Ingle
Ingle is a union electrician and activist that ran in last year’s Gainesville District 2 race. Ingle’s platform includes a local hiring preference to encourage investment in the local economy and a renter’s bill of rights. Ingle has been seen protesting with Gator Student Alliance against tuition increases and with the Graduate Assistants United for a fair contract.

Donna Lutz
Lutz is a real estate agent who is currently serving on the Community Agency Partnership Program for Alachua County. Although a registered Republican, Lutz stresses that this is a non-partisan race and the need to eliminate labels that parties bring about. Lutz was once a leader in her flight attendants union and advocates middle class politics. Lutz has purposefully left her platform vague and instead focuses attention on the dismal voter turnout for city elections.

Darlene Pifalo
Pifalo is a real estate agent, avid cat lover, member of the Gainesville Chamber of Commerce, and describes herself as “very conservative.” Pifalo’s platform includes increasing private property rights in Gainesville and is very critical of the biomass plant, as it will increase the financial burden on businesses and lead to layoffs.

Lauren Poe
Poe is the former District 2 city commissioner that lost his seat last year to Todd Chase. Poe is a blue dog Democrat who Mastrodicasa has endorsed saying that he is the “biggest fiscal conservative I have served with.” A moderate on most issues, Poe has been criticized for his support of the 130 meal limit restriction on serving food to the homeless. He’s also been criticized for voting for the 2008 unlawful change in city worker retiree health benefits without going through the required bargaining stage with city employee unions.

District 1 City Commissioner

Our current District 1 Commissioner is Scherwin Henry. Henry was first elected in 2006 and then re-elected in 2009. His legacy includes repealing the 130 meal limit at St. Francis House and the redevelopment of the Depot Avenue corridor. These are the candidates that are up for his spot as the District 1 Commissioner:

Armando Grundy
Grundy is a veteran paratrooper for the Army who has held numerous non-elected seats, including the Alachua County Charter Review Commission and the Alachua County Veterans Advisory Board. Current District 1 Commissioner Scherwin Henry has endorsed Grundy saying that “he is duly qualified for the position.” Grundy’s platform includes renaming the downtown bus station to Rosa Parks and expanding RTS service in East Gainesville.

Yvonne Hinson-Rawls
Hinson-Rawls is a retired elementary school principal, on the Gainesville Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and an active member of the Mt. Pleasant United Methodist Church. Hinson-Rawls’ platform includes creating and expanding youth programs as deterrents to crime and extensions of the school day.

Ray Washington
Washington is a former Gainesville Sun reporter, an attorney and a major figure in the anti-biomass movement. Washington registered to run for District 1 very close to the deadline only after he could not persuade any of the other two candidates into taking an anti-biomass stance. Washington’s platform includes increasing government transparency and citizen input at city hall.

Remember to vote on Jan. 31.

The last day to register to vote in this election is Jan. 3. You can register online or at various locations around town. Go to elections.alachua.fl.us to register online or to see a list of locations where you can register in person.

All illustrations by Susie Bijan.

Florida Organic Growers joins defensive lawsuit against biotech empire

For the vast majority of Americans, food is food. And corn is corn. And a soybean is a soybean. And a seed of either of these vegetables is, well, a seed.

Or is it? To the corporate eye of Monsanto, that seed looks more like one of its transgenic creations, and if they can fish a lawsuit out of it, possibly millions of dollars.

Transgenic seeds are simply Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Many crops and foods are genetically altered nowadays. Corn, alfalfa sprouts, soybeans, cotton, sugar beets and rapeseed are just a few of many GMOs being specifically engineered with Monsanto-manipulated herbicide-resistant DNA.

Taking into account all the products derived from GM crops, experts estimate 60 to 70 percent of all processed foods sold in the U.S. contain at least one GM ingredient. GMOs are omnipresent in the modern diet and lifestyle. Omnipresent; however, not omni-wanted.

Organic farmers are trying their hardest to retain at least some portion of our food in its natural state, with DNA unmutilated. This isn’t the fight many are familiar with, or at least expecting.

In a way, this is the stereotypical “little guy vs. massive corporation” fight. But the “little guy” here includes more than just the “crunchy granola” organic farmers. Plaintiffs in Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto also include non-organic farmers who simply don’t want to produce GM crops.

March 2011 marked the beginning of a preemptive lawsuit, with 83 plaintiffs joining forces against corporate giant Monsanto. Florida Organic Growers, a nonprofit organic certification and sustainable farming outreach group based in Gainesville, joined the fight in July.

The 83 plaintiffs, representing a coalition of more than 270,000 farmers, united together as the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association (OSGATA), represented by the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), are filing this lawsuit against Monsanto out of fear.

Some of these farmers have forgone growing certain crops they feared could have the possibility of being cross-contaminated with Monsanto’s seed. They would rather lose money from under-production than subject themselves to the risk of being sued by Monsanto and potentially losing their farms.

Tom Helscher, director of corporate affairs, made sure to clarify that Monsanto would, has and will take legal action if farmers retain or replant seed obtained from the original seed purchased from Monsanto. By buying Roundup Ready seed, farmers are entering into an agreement with Monsanto to not save, reproduce or redistribute purchased seed.

This agreement forces farmers to buy new seed every planting season, guaranteeing Monsanto’s sales will stay strong.

Sometimes a contract isn’t good enough, though. In 2007, Monsanto acquired ownership of Delta & Pine Land Company and thus, ownership of its extremely controversial patent, co-owned by the USDA, for Terminator seeds. Yes, like the Arnold Schwarzenegger terminator.

Terminator seeds only live once, unlike natural seeds that may be saved, cleaned and recycled for the next growing season. After the first round of harvesting, the suicidal seed self-exterminates. This is an especially concerning issue for farmers in developing countries who typically cannot afford to buy new seed every year. Many farmers are also concerned about cross-pollination and potential infection of traditional and organic seed by the terminator gene.

In the eyes of Monsanto, terminator seeds seem like a reliable method to stop biopiracy, but widespread public opposition and uproar has quelled the use of these seeds for now. Monsanto made a legal commitment not to produce, distribute, or sell Terminator seeds, but skeptics believe Monsanto is still furthering research into this technology.

Clearly, Monsanto is willing to go to great lengths to maintain domination of the seed market and safety of its patents from what it sees as intentional theft, even though it is common agricultural and sustainable practice to recycle seed. However, what if this patented genetically modified seed is unintentionally replanted, grown, harvested and sold?

Many of the plaintiffs in this case are modest family-owned farms; their entire life, savings and future is invested in their farms. With commercial farms occupying tracts of farmland saturated in Monsanto’s transgenic seed, the much smaller neighboring farms fear that cross-contamination is inevitable.

Monsanto has suggested farmers create a buffer zone to avoid inadvertent seed drift, which is just one of many ways crop contamination can occur. This is an expensive suggestion; small-scale organic farmers typically are not sitting on wads of cash. And this suggested buffer zone wouldn’t even guarantee their crops’ safety from Roundup Ready.

For farmers like Noah Shitama, co-founder and owner of the small organic farm, Swallowtail, in Alachua, a patent infringement lawsuit from Monsanto would mean complete extermination and death of his farm.

The farmers in this case just want assurance and the promise that Monsanto won’t sue them for patent infringement in the case of accidental cross-contamination by Roundup Ready.

After all, organic farmers don’t want to produce and sell Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds. Such contamination would strip the farmers of their organic certifications that they worked so hard to be granted, following a strict set of regulations set forth by the USDA. Organic crops are more difficult to grow and sell, but the profit the farmers gain is significant enough to encourage them to keep up their efforts. This monetary incentive is, of course, complementary to the farmers’ concern for providing healthy foods to the public.

“I want clean food that’s not going to poison me,” Noah said. “Some non-organic commercial farmers won’t even eat their own crops; how are we expected to be able to eat it?”

These non-organic commercial farmers, “the big guys,” who choose to buy Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds do so for the convenience herbicide immunity affords them. This convenience factor makes theft tempting, so It’s understandable why Monsanto worries.

Genetically modified soybeans, for example, have been engineered to host an herbicide resistant gene. This allows farmers to douse their farmland in herbicide without worrying about its effects on the health of their crops, stripping the land of everything save their desired crop.

But, since the Roundup Ready seeds are entirely undesirable to the plaintiffs in this case, it would seemingly make just as much sense for the plaintiffs to sue Monsanto for having their seed “trespass” onto their farms.

However, “trespass” as a legal term implies that some sort of monetary or physical damage was inflicted upon the victim of the trespassing. And, since this is a preemptive lawsuit, OSGATA is merely taking a defensive stance. The organic farmers are not looking to collect money or damages from Monsanto — they’re just asking for a written promise.

“Right now, Monsanto says they don’t have plans to sue, but they refuse to make a written legally binding promise. So, they could just wake up tomorrow and decide to sue,” Daniel Ravicher, Executive Director of PUBPAT and patent attorney on the OSGATA v. Monsanto case said, explaining the plaintiffs’ worries.

It may seem difficult to imagine how small organic and family-owned farms can show up on such a large corporation’s radar. If a neighboring farmer suspects any seed sharing, intentional or unintentional, he may call Monsanto’s anonymous tip line and report his suspicion. Then, Monsanto may send an investigator to the accused farmer’s land to take samples for lab testing.

Monsanto has made a promise to the farmers; however the confusion resides in Monsanto’s actual intentions and meanings behind its words.

“Monsanto policy never has been, nor will be, to exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of its patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means.” Helscher made this perfectly clear. So did Monsanto’s website, their motion to dismiss, and a letter to the USDA signed by Monsanto Vice President Jerry Steiner.

Yet, despite how confidently Monsanto espouses this promise, plaintiffs feel the corporation’s words are legally insignificant.

To some degree, this case hinges on simple semantics. Marty Mesh, director of FOG, along with the 82 other plaintiffs is skeptical of Monsanto’s vague definition of “trace.”

“What if you get more pollen from your neighbor this year, and that adds onto the “trace” amounts from last year?” Marty said, voicing the concerns of many small farms.

After seed drift, accidental cross-pollination, contamination via harvest and processing equipment, traces upon traces start to become a drawing. And Monsanto may interpret this drawing as a patent infringement.

However, according to Helscher, “defining ‘trace’ doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant.”

“Of course it’s relevant if you’re the one being sued,” Mesh said.

Despite Helscher dismissing many farmers’ worries of this vague definition, the organic farmers are not set at ease.

In mid-July, Monsanto responded to OSGATA’s request by motioning for a dismissal of the case. Monsanto fears granting the plaintiffs the explicit and immutable promise they are requesting would be diminishing the significance of its patents. This preemptive commitment may just be too open-ended. Monsanto worries farmers with intention for patent infringement may join one of the plaintiff organizations and thus be legally protected if Monsanto is forced to issue the promise the plaintiffs are demanding.

The corporation’s motion for dismissal isn’t enough to snuff out OSGATA, though. OSGATA objected to Monsanto’s request for dismissal and is pressing on. As of now, both parties are awaiting the Southern District Court of New York’s decision. Ravicher says if the objection is denied, OSGATA will still push through to the Court of Appeals, unrelenting in this drawn-out legal battle, which has the potential to be an extremely influential case for the agricultural underdog. Although Monsanto would only be legally committed to presenting a written promise to the 83 plaintiffs, this case would set a precedent to any case that may arise in the future.

A documented and unequivocal promise would be nice, and necessary, for the life of organic farms, but there’s also a possibility that the court could deliver a harsher ruling against Monsanto.

This further verdict would potentially deem Monsanto’s transgenic seed patents invalid because of their being “injurious to the well–being, good policy, or sound morals of society,” as presented in OSGATA’s documented complaint.

If the court rules Monsanto’s GM seed patents invalid, “the precedent from such a decision,” Ravicher explained, “may also indirectly call into question the validity of other similar GMO patents.”

“The only real advantage Monsanto has is their deeper pockets,” Ravicher said. “They don’t have the truth on their side.” Monsanto’s seemingly infinite cash flow is intimidating to the organic and smaller-scale farms involved in this case. If the 270,000 farmers prevail and win this case, the final verdict would ripple through not only the United States, but the world.

Remember, Monsanto domineers the world in terms of GMO seed distribution. If organic or non-GMO conventional farmers overseas have their crops contaminated with Roundup Ready and then want to turn around and trade their products in the U.S. market, they will have crossed back into Monsanto’s more familiar territory and onto their radar, giving Monsanto a better opportunity to press charges for patent infringement. Again, these overseas farmers are no different than many of America’s small-scale farmers–their farm is their life and they cannot afford a battle with a mammoth corporation.

“They just lie and lie and lie, and try to keep up the con for as long as they can so they can make as much money as they can,” Ravicher said, likening Monsanto to the tobacco companies in America. “That’s what corporate America is about.”

Ravicher says he feels really good about this case, representing “the best people who are just trying to give back the best foods. They’re not greedy and not corrupt.”

An Inside Look Into the Dove World Outreach Center

“Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you.”

“Sometimes, it’s not true,” Faith Sapp said. When people call you ugly, it stays with you.

Faith has had a lot of close friends change their mind and talk badly about her.

Kids at school didn’t bother to ask her why she wore a shirt that read “Islam is of the Devil.” They just thought it was mean.

“They don’t know how else to express it,” Faith said. “They think ‘If I ask her, I’m going to seem weird, so I’m just going to curse her out.’”

She and other young members of Warriors of Christ, a branch of the Dove World Outreach Center, stand on the sidewalk outside the All Women’s Health Center.

Luke Jones, son of the infamous pastor Terry Jones, drove them here in the church’s lumbering white van. Luke said the center provides a variety of services, one of which is referrals for abortions.

Luke assumed head pastor responsibilities at the church since his father is often traveling on behalf of his political group, Stand Up America. Luke’s administration is called Warriors of Christ.

The young people on the sidewalk held vinyl signs that read “Fear God” and “Repent and Live!”

Some of the men in the group, led by Luke, take turns preaching repentance.

“You’re not pro-choice because you don’t give the baby a choice,” they shout over traffic.

After a few minutes standing by the road, it’s possible to decipher a supportive honk from a condemning one. Drivers reacted to the signs and half of them threw a thumbs-up or a middle finger out the window.

***

“My youngest daughter, Faith, has had some pretty disappointing days,” Wayne Sapp said in an interview at the church. Faith had close friends who started hating her because of who her father is.

Sapp sees the impact of their work in a positive light.

“I think it’s drawn us together as a family,” he said.

Sapp used to manage restaurants. He would leave at 5:30 in the morning and come back at 10:30 at night. His wife would put the kids to bed early and wake them up so he could see them for an hour.

Now he sees his kids every day. He knows what’s happening in their lives, and he gets to mentor them and talk to them.

His kids were at the church during International Burn a Koran Day. They were there when people were coming onto the church property, vandalizing. Sapp and his son were running on the lawn together, chasing people away.

“We were laughing,” Sapp said.

So many families grow up without knowing each other, he added.

“At least my kids know me. They know what I believe in, what I stand for, and that I’m there for them. I think a lot of families don’t have that at all.”

Sapp was a partier who married young. His wife came from a deeply religious background. She pestered Wayne about getting back into church. She said if he’d come to the Dove World Outreach Center once, she’d stop asking.

“I knew this was my chance to get her to shut up and leave me alone,” Sapp said.

He came to church and reluctantly sat in the first row with his wife. There was a guest preacher.

“The most famous verse, everyone knows, is ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only son,’” the preacher said. “But you know, even if it was one person, even if it was one person that had sin in their life that was going to die, go to hell, be separated from God the father forever, Jesus still would have died for that one person.”

Sapp grabbed hold of that thought and dwelled on it.

“If that’s true,” he thought. “Would you have died for me?”

“If so, show me.”

The service was ending and the speaker was praying for people in the church.

“That’s it,” Sapp thought. “I came. Nothing.”

From somewhere across the room, the preacher stopped praying. He walked through the crowd, looking at people.

“This man has lost his mind,” Sapp thought.

The preacher walked up to Sapp and said: “It’s you.”

“You don’t know me,” Sapp said. “I don’t go here.”

“But it’s you.”

“What about me?”

“God wanted me to tell you he would have died for just you. He loves you that much.”

Sapp stood up. The preacher led him in prayer. Now, no one can ever convince him that there is no God.

He came a long way since then, and he carried out the burning of the Koran at the conclusion of a trial presided over by Terry Jones last spring.

***

Terry Jones said he got saved in his living room.

He was a hotel manager in Nashville, Tenn. He married very young and because of that, they had their share of problems. His wife had gotten saved and Terry saw the changing force in her life.

He put on a cassette tape about how to get baptized in the holy spirit by a man called Don Basham. He knelt down in his living room, repented out his sins, asked God to forgive him, stood up and felt like a changed person.

From kneeling in that living room, he rose to the international stage. He was forced to leave a church he was preaching at in Cologne, Germany for somewhat mysterious reasons. The Gainesville Sun reported it was for fraud charges. Der Spiegel said he was expelled by a congregation that found him too extreme. Terry Jones is banned from entering the United Kingdom. Wayne and Luke are on that list too.

Terry grew up in the sixties. He misses the fighting spirit of that time and sees apathy in today’s society.

“Most Americans don’t really live,” he said. “They just exist.”

In Terry’s opinion, if you’re not really making a mark, if you’re not working to improve society, it doesn’t matter if you die at 40 or at 80. You will have just had 40 more years to eat at McDonalds. But most people are satisfied with their station wagon and their wife and kids and gold watch after 50 years. A rare few hunger for more.

***

Luke Jones was born in Germany. He grew up in church, a pastor’s son, but he didn’t live a Christian lifestyle. Around the age of 12 or 14, he started experimenting with soft drugs, marijuana and a little speed.

The Joneses lived in Cologne, Germany, about an hour from Holland. Luke and his friends would drive across the border to buy marijuana cheaply and in copious amounts. They smoked almost every day. One day he was at a friend’s house and took a heavy rip from a gravity bong. He went home and his parents saw him, red-eyed and stoned.

“We know what you’re doing,” his parents said. They were aware that Luke smoked cigarettes out of his bedroom window.

“You need to do something with your life,” they said. “You need to experience God.”

“We can’t do it for you…we can’t help you,” they added.

“I didn’t know what to do with my life,” Luke said. “I was smoking dope. My friends were losers.”

Luke went to bed that night and cried out to God.

“If you are real, I want a sign,” he said.

The next day was church Sunday. Luke went with his family. The church held about a thousand people. Luke got into church and straight away, a pastor named Rob came up to him and said “God heard you yesterday.”

Rob kept talking, but Luke didn’t hear the rest. That was all he needed.

***

Terry Jones, Luke Jones and Wayne Sapp each said the large misconception the public has about their church is that they hate. They said they don’t hate, and they’re worried about the vast numbers of people who are on a path to damnation.

Wayne Sapp explained that it’s similar to what he told his wife’s parents when they were engaged. They thought Wayne didn’t like them.

“If I don’t like you,” Sapp said. “I won’t waste my time talking to you.”

“I’ll keep my thoughts to myself and go down the road and whatever happens to you, happens to you.”

Sapp believes that Jesus is the only way to the father. That means 1.5 billion people are going to hell because they don’t know Him.

“If I hated them, I’d just keep my mouth shut,” he said.

Maybe people don’t get saved when they hear the message of the Dove World Outreach Center. Maybe they get mad. But Wayne hopes that people ask themselves why he and the other church members would take on the wrath of the world and take a minute to think about the message.

Above: An inside look into the Dove World Outreach Center, including its controversial trial and subsequent burning of the Koran. Photos by Andrew Ford. Click any image to start a slide show with captions.

For another side of the story, check out Why Dove World Outreach Matters, Even Though It Shouldn’t.

Above: Pat Fitzpatrick, a longtime advocate for the homeless and hungry, keeps a close eye on the relationship between big developers and the City of Gainesville. (Photo by Erik Knudsen)

Criminal background checks replace meal limit at St. Francis House

After years of protests by activists, supporters and the needy, the meal limit at the St. Francis House, which allowed only 130 meals to be served per day, was finally repealed this November. Now St. Francis House can serve unlimited meals to the hungry men, women and children who line up every day within a three-hour window.

But on the first Wednesday without the limit, The Gainesville Sun reported that only 81 people received meals. Why?

An end to meal limits only meant there were new regulations to be made. The end of one restriction ushers in another.

Recipients of any St. Francis House service are now required to have a police clearance form and picture ID upon arrival at the front desk. Previously, this requirement was only for those who needed to stay overnight at the facility.  Now, it applies to anyone who wants a meal or even just wants to use the bathroom.

Every 30 days, anyone who plans on going to the St. Francis House for food or shelter must first go to the police station to receive a clearance form that states they are cleared from any warrants for arrest. They must also show valid ID, something many homeless people cannot provide. Because of this, the meals that were once expected to increase after the recent repeal have actually dwindled.

Unlike the meal limit law that was part of the City of Gainesville’s City Ordinance, these new rules stem from the St. Francis House’s own board of directors.

After the meal limit repeal, a series of meetings were held among downtown businesses and neighbors and the board members of the St. Francis House. Kent Vann, executive director of the St. Francis House, called the new rule “compromise.”

We were going to be serving more people, so we needed to monitor the people in a safe manner,” he said. “Increasing the crowds calls for increasing responsibility on our part.”

Vann said he had to present the city with a management plan that would address the safety issue. He says that’s when the extension of the background checks was proposed. The St. Francis House already has close to 500 current police clearances on file.

But, not all agree with the new “compromise.”

Arupa Freeman is the the director of The Home Van, a group of volunteers who drive to serve food to people in Gainesville.

As of November 2, the 130-person meal limit at the St. Francis House soup kitchen came to an end. It was replaced by requirements so harsh, so difficult to meet, and so humiliating and demeaning that St. Francis House is now serving lunch to between 70 and 90 people a day,” Freeman said on her blog.

She also addressed the ID requirement issue, citing how problematic it is for homeless people to get the documents they need.

Under the new laws passed as a result of the Homeland Security Act, it has become a long and complicated nightmare for homeless people to obtain state of Florida IDs or even to obtain the documents, such as birth certificates, necessary to obtain a state ID. Many homeless people do not have such IDs and have given up trying to get them,” she said.

Pat Fitzpatrick, a passionate advocate for Gainesville’s homeless, keeps a close eye on the relationship between big developers, like the McGurn and Collier families, and the City of Gainesville. McGurn Management Company is responsible for, among other things, the Union Street Station, the Sun Center, apartments and parking garages. The Collier Companies own and manage more than 9,600 apartments in Florida and Oklahoma.

It was Ken McGurn who, in March of 2009, presented data at a meeting with the City Planning Board indicating the St. Francis House was giving out more meals than was allowed in the permit.

Shortly thereafter, the limit was enforced.

If it seems odd that a homeless shelter would agree to more seemingly self-imposed restrictions on its meal giving, Fitzpatrick says one doesn’t have to look much further than the might of Big Business and developers promoting their interests.

It’s not St. Francis’ fault. They have to stay in good graces with the city. And the city — they just bow down to downtown developers.”

The self-regulation of the St. Francis House seems to be the only way the city would even agree to repeal the limit. And while many don’t like what’s happened, the need for compromise between the St. Francis House and influential forces was necessary in order to change the meal cap.

Ronald Young, 51, is a Gainesville resident who has been hanging around the St. Francis House for years. He says Vann’s a good guy and understands he had to make negotiations with the city.

However, Young knows the deeper implications of the requirements and how they will deter many from getting a police clearance form.

A lot of homeless people have warrants just for some petty 1s [first misdemeanor]. I mean, they have an open container on their record, they’re not about to go down to the Gainesville Police Department. They’re going to try to stay far away from there,” he said.

He says St. Francis House seems anti-homeless now, and that it almost feels like a jail.

This is a homeless shelter, you know? You can’t even use the restroom without a form. What if you just got in town and hopped off the bus?”

Young says these policies are pushing people away, and the long line of people that once stood outside St. Francis House before the limit was repealed has now disappeared.

You’ll still see a little bit of a crowd in the morning. But, it’s not like it used to be.”

The struggle between the homeless and the city has been going on for years.  Unfortunately, the St. Francis House receives a lot of the spotlight due to its mission to feed and shelter the poor.

Providing services to those confronted with homelessness or hunger is never an easy task. But it is even further complicated in a city like Gainesville, where downtown businesses and wealthy developers have strong, conflicting interests with Gainesville’s own population, including the poor and homeless.

Coalition of local pet shelters works to eliminate euthanasia by 2015

The lobby of the Alachua County Humane Society is small and clean. Dogs are barking from the kennels outside in the background. There are black and white portraits of different animals on the walls, pictures children have drawn of their adopted pets and a cork-board advertising the need for various donations: cleaning supplies, 13-gallon bags, and most of all, volunteers.

Next to the cork-board is a small piece of paper with the Humane Society’s goals and policies. First and foremost on the sheet — Alachua County Humane Society is a no-kill shelter.

Alachua County is currently working toward becoming a no-kill county, ending the euthanasia of healthy and adoptable pets. The Alachua County Humane Society is the leading organization of this movement by Maddie’s Pet Rescue.

Maddie’s is comprised of five shelters in the county dedicated toward reaching no-kill status by 2015. The combined efforts of the Humane Society, Haile’s Angles, Puppy Hill Farm, Gainesville Pet Rescue and Helping Hands Pet Rescue have lowered the amount of animals put down from 8,063, the 2000 baseline, to just under 3,000 this past year.

The formation of Maddie’s was brought about by the need to stop euthanasia at Alachua County Animal Services.

The Humane Society, and other local shelters, cannot take animals directly from citizens. Animals must first go to Animal Services.

“Animal Services does all the enforcement work; it’s where strays go,” said Eric Vanness, the executive director of the Humane Society.

It’s the middle-man for Alachua County animal shelters. Since all strays first end up at Animal Services, and not all are able to be taken in by the no kill-shelters in town due of lack of space and workers, space at Animals Services is a constant problem. Euthanasia is one option to continuously open up room for incoming animals.

Before turning to euthanasia, when space is getting slim at Animal Services, its employees send a list of animals on “death row” to the no-kill shelters in Alachua County. Vanness said that his shelter picks last, and they try to take as many animals as possible based on space-to-staff.

The Humane Society relocated in February of this year. With more than double the space of its previous facility, the shelter would be able house more animals and keep more off of the euthanasia list. However, the society was forced to reduce its staff by about half, due to lack of funding and the $400,000 spent beyond projected costs for the new building.

A total of four full-time Animal Care Service Workers, the society’s paid staff, and one of the two administrators were lost in the move.

Opening shifts at the Humane Society are strenuous on staff. They must open the building and ensure that supplies and animals are in order. They oversee distribution of medicine to animals and check in on dogs and cats in quarantine or special care areas.

Cages need to be cleaned, dogs need to be taken out and played with, cats must be groomed and cared for, and food and water must be replenished. Opening shifts pick up where the evenings leave off, and employees must also make sure there are no problems throughout the building in the midst of these tasks. With the aid of volunteers, these tasks can be completed while employees work on their other duties.

The more volunteers there are, the more interactions they can provide with each dog and cat and the more area they can clean and maintain. Thus, the more volunteers, the more animals that can be saved. Vanness said that there are about 900 volunteers on file, but only 60-70 actually come to volunteer. And there are even fewer regulars.

People fill out a volunteer application online and then need to go through an orientation training session. But not all who fill the application follow through with orientation.

Another issue lies in those only trying to fulfill a community service obligation.

“They have 15-hour requirements and they can honestly do that in three or four days,” said Vanness. “It’s not the easiest to recruit past that.”

Audrey Geoffroy, a volunteer since September 2009, said that it doesn’t have to be a difficult thing to volunteer and that anyone should try. Geoffroy is one of the Humane Society’s regular volunteers, and she brings her daughter with her to look after the cats.

“I enjoy it, all [the cats’] personalities, you really get to know them,” she said.

While caring for animals is always on the surface at the Humane Society, economic constraints struggle in the background, dictating what the society can accomplish with its staff and volunteers.

Eric Vanness said maintaining the payroll for his staff continues to be the biggest obstacle the society faces. Without the proper funds, the society can’t hire more hands to help, in turn reducing the amount of animals taken in.

“Everything comes back to staff,” he said.

Donations help, but they can’t fully cover the $130,000 mortgage from the new building, salaries, supplies and expenses.

“People donating don’t want to pay someone’s salary,” Vanness said. It’s easier for someone to donate an old dog bed or toys that the Humane Society’s Thrift Store can sell.

The Humane Socetiy’s Thrift Store is its main source of income. The store offers retail, pet food, flea care and spay/neuter vouchers. Donations are taken and resold for affordable prices, though Vanness did chuckle a bit as he recounted some of the more questionable conditions of a few donations.

Zach Toundas, an Animal Care Service Worker, spoke adamantly about the Humane Society’s mission. He said that with the community’s efforts, the goal of becoming a no-kill county could be reached.

“Volunteers are the only reason we can do what we do here.”

How you can get involved…

To join the Alachua County Humane Society volunteering staff, go to alachuahumane.org and fill out a volunteer application. You’ll be contacted by the Humane Society’s volunteer coordinator and can then sign up for an orientation time.

If you would like to donate, the Thrift Store accepts lightly used donations, or you can give money directly to the Humane Society.

Interested in adopting a dog or cat yourself, check out this story for tips on responsible pet ownership.

All photos taken by Ashley Crane at the Alachua County Humane Society.

Update: We have more photos from ACHS. Check them out >>

Sowing the Seeds of Ecotourism in Haiti’s Rugged Terrain

After last year’s notorious earthquake, Haiti’s recovery has been slow and riddled with setbacks, worsened by an allegedly preventable cholera epidemic. Fortunately, Gainesville hosts a variety of organizations that actively support Haiti, whether by raising money or sending medical volunteers. Jeff Depree, a doctoral candidate in Computer Science at UF, thought he could help in his own way.

Depree traveled to Haiti this year with nothing more than a backpack and some bare essentials. His goal, without the aid of an organized group, was to explore the landscape and interact with locals. He kept a detailed log of logistical issues that could be encountered by travelers and mapped out hiking trails in hopes of encouraging other ecotourists to follow his lead and visit the country’s rugged terrain.

The International Ecotourism Society defines ecotourism as a way to travel responsibly to natural areas while respecting the environment and local culture. It’s not a novel idea, but in Haiti, it’s uncharted territory. Haiti’s tourism industry consists of isolated resorts, providing foreigners with private beaches and bars but no glimpses into the rest of Haiti.

Despite the obstacles presented by deforestation and widespread poverty, DePree hopes ecotourism will eventually become a viable option for travelers, as well as a source of income for locals and an incentive to protect Haiti’s resources.

Depree’s journey began in Port-au-Prince, where he saw the reality of the earthquake’s devastation: a tent city had replaced the main square and most of the buildings were in ruins.

He continued, focused on reaching Haiti’s untamed landscape, and hopped onto a tap-tap, a brightly colored bus or pick-up truck used as a common form of transport.

After spending his first night in a church rectory in the southern town of Furcy, DePree awoke early to begin hiking. Markets and vendors lined segments of the ridgeline to the southern coastline. He picked out a lady with pots in the dirt alongside the trail and bought a cheap and filling meal: a hodgepodge of fried spaghetti, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, and mayonnaise. For the rest of the trip, DePree mapped out up to 50 miles of hiking trails.

“Haiti is one of the last places I would imagine as a destination for ecotourists,” said Dr. Gerald Murray, professor emeritus of anthropology at UF. Murray designed and directed an agroforestry project in Haiti over a 20-year period and conducted research on the country’s culture and religion. Murray attributes his lack of optimism to Haiti’s high population density and rapid deforestation.

The government protects only two patches of land: Pic Macaya in the southwest and La Viste in the south, both national parks. Throughout the country, Haitians clear forests and use the resulting wood and charcoal for energy. The land is subsequently used for subsistence farming until overuse triggers soil erosion, creating a vicious cycle of resource depletion. In the past two decades alone, roughly 13 percent of Haiti’s forest cover has been eliminated.

“Haiti’s environment has been sidelined to deal with more pressing issues,” said Dr. Paul Monaghan, an assistant professor at UF’s Department of Agricultural Education and Communication.

Monaghan worked with the US National Park Service on an assessment of Pic Macaya over a decade ago. Aside from the deteriorating landscape, he encountered human rights issues, including a lack of clean water and no viable economic opportunities. The Haitians he came across on the outskirts of the park had no choice other than clearing the forests to survive.

Although Monaghan doesn’t imagine ecotourism in Haiti would ever replace conventional tourism, he foresees its development as an incentive for Haitians to take the preservation of natural resources into their own hands, reversing the current cycle of deforestation and soil erosion.

Travelers like DePree hope to plant the seed from which ecotourism could expand from the ground up. As of now, ecotourists in Haiti are virtually on their own. Throughout his entire trip, Depree ran into one wilderness guide, an English-speaking Haitian who advised Depree on where to go, despite his inability to afford the guide’s price of $40 per day. He appreciated any monetary help he could get from DePree, explaining that he needed the money to buy bread for his children.

Unlike DePree, the vast majority of tourists in Haiti flock to resorts operated by foreign businesses. Labadee, one of Haiti’s most popular tourist destinations, is exclusively for those traveling with the Royal Caribbean cruise line. The 600,000 tourists who pour into Labadee annually enjoy an assortment of commercial attractions, surrounded by a 12-foot fence.

Haitian locals are not allowed into the fenced property, with the exception of those employed by the cruise line and a couple hundred others who sell trinkets at a small flea market. Aside from these 530 Haitians who receive monetary benefits, the Guardian reported last year that other Haitians lament the loss of one of their country’s most pristine natural areas to foreign enterprise.

“Haiti is beautiful,” said Getro Naissance, a Haitian student at UF. “There’s no place like it.” Born and raised in Haiti until the age of 14, Naissance makes a point to visit bi-annually and explore his homeland. He mentioned that the media focuses too much on the negative without showcasing the unique culture and landscape Haiti offers.

Naissance travels by means of local transportation, getting by with the help of people he meets along the way. Dr. Monaghan encourages Haitian émigrés, already well-versed in the country’s language and culture, to set an example for foreigners and revisit their homeland.

DePree will continue to promote a self-sufficient Haiti and hopes to go back again, next time with more camping gear and a small group of fellow travelers. He and others will build upon previous efforts, exploring uncharted areas and recording their trip in hopes of guiding future ecotourists.

“At present, Haiti has a bit of an image problem,” DePree said. “But the Haitian people are passionate about improving their country and, with a little direction, I think they could create a really enticing ecotourism industry that could put Haiti high on the list of adventure travel destinations.”

Above: Photos taken Dec. 2010 in Haiti by Jeff DePree while hiking between Fermathe, Quest and Depot, Sud-Est. Others taken Jan. 2010, hiking from Baissins Bleu, Sud-Est to Jacmel, Sud-Est.

Above: Luz Reyes, the owner of Bella Headbands, synthesizes headbands to be sold later as holiday gift options. (Photo by Henry Taksier)

Supporting local businesses is a small way you can make a big impact on our local economy. So this holiday season, skip the generic gifts from corporate monstrosities and consider what’s made right here in Gainesville.

Check out these unique, crafty items to inspire your holiday shopping. Just now seeing this and the holidays have already come and gone? These guys aren’t going anywhere. You can check them out anytime during the year for gifts, or just to spice up your own life.

Armadillo Chocolates

This locally owned chocolatier offers a large selection of chocolates that are made with responsibly sourced, high-quality chocolate as well as organic butter, cream and nuts.

“The Ocho” would make a great holiday gift. There are four varieties in this box of hand-crafted delectable treats, including chocolate-dipped caramels sprinkled with Maldon smoked salt.

Armadillo Chocolates are available at Volta Coffee, Tea and Chocolate, The Jones Eastside, Alcove Bar and Citizen’s Co-op. A limited selection is also available online for Florida residents.

Lucky Elephant Designs

When Ana Haydeé Linares, 22, graduated from the University of Florida’s School of Art and Art History, she decided to open Lucky Elephant Designs and pursue her passion for making jewelry. From her travels around the world, Ana found that many cultures, including her own Cuban culture, had adopted the elephant as a symbol of prosperity and good luck.

Lucky Elephant Designs creates one-of-a-kind necklaces and earrings out of locally sourced, vintage and new components. The necklaces cost between $15 and $30. In addition to her re-purposed jewelry designs, Ana also sells a collection of Tarot card designs, handmade rosaries and international good luck charms, which are all featured and available for purchase at www.luckyelephantdesigns.com.

Dragonfly Graphics

Dragonfly Graphics, established in 1976, is a full-service screen printing business. The company gives back to the community through discounted school rates and donations to Camp Crystal Lake, a local outdoor education facility and recreational summer camp owned by the School Board of Alachua County.

The company will soon be launching a line of graphic T-shirts with vintage logos of area businesses, available atdragonflygraphics.com/spirit326. On Dec. 23, Dragonfly is hosting the Loco Bizarre where customers can watch live screen printing. Dragonfly Graphics is located at 319 SW Third Ave.

Moksa

Haskell and Melanie Martin founded Moksa Organics, Inc. on a simple idea: to provide people with bath products made from organic, chemical-free ingredients and responsible packaging.

Moksa has gained national attention for its soaps, bath salts, body oil and body butter. This locally based company has been featured in several publications including Country Living and TreeHugger. Their products are available for purchase online at moksaorganics.com as well as the Citizen’s Co-op on Main Street.

Bella Headbands

Luz Reyes, the owner of Bella Headbands (pictured above), makes each handcrafted creation herself.

Since each headband is made-to-order, customers are able to decide which colors they’d like.

Headbands start at $7. For a few extra dollars, she will add additional accessories, such as bows, decorative gators and faux flowers. You can place an order on www.facebook.com/bellaheadbands or by calling Luz at 352-792-7193.

Gift Cards

Sometimes the best gifts are experiences, not things, whether it’s a pair of tickets to a performance at the Hippodrome State Theater or dinner at a favorite restaurant.

DIY

If you are feeling particularly crafty, there are many places in Gainesville that will help you channel your creativity.

At Do Art, you can paint your own pottery and make mosaics. Once you pick your “raw” piece of pottery, you choose your paint colors and stencils. When you’re finished, your piece gets fired in the kiln. You can also create a mosaic including items such as mirrors and picture frames.

Bead All About It and Gifts of Avalon are two bead shops in town to check out if you want to make your own jewelry.

For Other Great Ideas

Be sure to check out local vendors on Etsy.com. Just type “Gainesville, FL” in the search bar.

Many vendors also offer affordable items at a monthly craft market at The Doris, located at 716 N. Main St. For more information, visit the Facebook event page “Monthly Craft Market” or email Zoma, the market creator and director, at mama.zoma.la@gmail.com.

Also, be sure to check out the “Buy Locally, Gainesville!” Facebook page. This page is used to post news and specials from many local business owners.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 29, a female student was raped somewhere between midtown and Fraternity Row. The 20-year-old victim said she accepted a ride from a man she did not know after leaving 101 Cantina and the man then sexually battered her in his car. She was able to escape from the car afterward and was picked up by a female driver passing by who saw her running from her attacker. The driver called the police and took the victim to the hospital.

In both the UF news release of the attack and an e-mail alert sent to the entire university listserv, the University Police Department took the opportunity to remind people of some “basic safety considerations.” The list included: “Avoid walking alone” and “Stay in well-lighted areas away from alleys, bushes, and entryways.”

These “safety considerations” are rape myths. According to a 2005 National Crime Victimization Study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, 73 percent of all sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, not strange masked men lurking in the shadows.

“Most of the cases we see are not the stranger jumping out of the bushes,” said Chris Loschiavo, Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution at UF.

Loschiavo said almost all sexual assault cases at UF involve “two students who have had a lot to drink and the issue is, was one person able to consent to sexual activity.”

In addition to perpetuating false advice and rape myths, every link on UPD’s website that is supposed to lead to UF policies and procedures concerning sexual assault as well as links to rape awareness resources are broken. One link directs to UF’s own rape awareness group, CARE, which is not only a broken link, but is a group that no longer exists on campus.

Despite the public image that UPD presents today, this was not always the case. At one time, UF was a national leader in rape awareness and prevention tactics. Now, in light of the fact that local and national rape statistics have not improved in decades, UF is beginning to make an effort to once again learn and implement effective ways of preventing rape.

STRIVE, UF’s current rape awareness program, reports on its website that one in four female college students will be victims of sexual assault — defined as any unwanted sexual contact. The U.S. Department of Justice confirms this statistic, and states that once women graduate college, the ratio widens to one in six.

STRIVE has also been able to bring that one in four statistic closer to home.

“When we give an anonymous poll in a classroom of 500 and ask ‘Have you experienced a sexual assault?’ it matches up. We’ve asked every time and it’s always in the 20 percent to 25 percent range,” said Ron Del Moro, peer educator in the STRIVE program.

STRIVE, which stands for Sexual Trauma/Interpersonal Violence Education, aims to educate the university community by holding “open, non-judgmental forums where we explore questions such as ‘Why does this happen?’ and ‘What can we do?’”

This January, STRIVE plans to expand by implementing a new program modeled after the University of New Hampshire’s successful program called Bringing in the Bystander. This program has a heavy focus on bystander intervention.

“A lot of people stand around and see a lot of shady stuff go down,” Del Moro said. “We want to get those people involved.”

According to the UNH Bringing in the Bystander website, under the tag line, “Everyone in the community has a role to play in ending sexual violence,” the program “approaches both women and men as potential bystanders or witnesses to risky behaviors related to sexual violence around them.”

UNH developed this program through in-house research conducted by Prevention Innovations, a consulting, training and research unit that develops, implements and evaluates programs, policies and practices to end violence against women on campus. Vice President Joe Biden spoke at UNH in April on the success of the program and called on everyone to take responsibility. Biden, a long-time proponent of rape awareness, co-authored the Violence Against Women Act that passed in 1994.

Back in the 1980s, cutting-edge and innovative rape awareness programs like the current one at UNH were few, but UF had one of the best.

SARS, Sexual Assault Recovery Service, and COAR, Campus Organized Against Rape, were both founded by therapist Claire Walsh in 1981 and 1982, respectively. Throughout the ‘80s, Walsh and COAR representatives spoke on at least a dozen national TV talk shows, supplied information to more than 500 universities and media organizations and served as models for similar programs at other schools.

In the 1988 book titled, “I Never Called It Rape,” one of the first extensive studies of rape on college campuses, COAR was called out as “one of the nation’s most comprehensive programs,” which included a rape-myth quiz, a slide show of sexual stereotypes in the media, and discussions of body language and assertiveness in dating. COAR also made it a point to discuss the societal and cultural attitudes of men, women and relationships that may lead to rape situations as well as ways to enhance general communication between men and women.

Walsh credited COAR’s success to its unique approach to involve both men and women as its target audience. Half of COAR’s members were men.

“We see males as absolutely crucial in helping to change attitudes that are put out by the culture,” Walsh told the Gainesville Sun in 1986. “Women can’t do it by themselves, males can’t do it by themselves — we need to work together.”

However, this nationally recognized and successful program came to an end in 1991. A mess of differing politics, separate budgets and general bureaucracy crippled, defunded and eventually disbanded COAR entirely. SARS was redistributed from the Infirmary, where SARS counselors were able to focus specifically on rape victim counseling, to Mental Health Services, which left rape victims to check in as mental health patients and be randomly assigned to a general counselor, regardless of the counselor’s specialization. Basically, both programs were eliminated

Since COAR and SARS, UF has seen a few half-hearted and not nearly as passionate attempts at rape awareness. The names change almost yearly and are hard to research and keep track of.

“It could change names as the mission evolves and as funding changes,” said Jennifer Stuart, coordinator of STRIVE. “But there is a mandate that any university has to have education on sexual assault. So that will happen.”

That mandate is the Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights of 1992, which requires all federally funded schools to provide sexual assault prevention programs as well as provide information on what to do if an assault occurs and who victims can contact. The mandate is a part of the 1990 Clery Act, named in memory of a sexual assault and murder victim of 1986. The Clery Act also requires every university to publish an annual report of its past three years’ worth of campus crime statistics.

The sexual assault definition used in these reports is “forcible rape,” defined as: “The carnal knowledge of a person forcibly and/or against that person’s will; or not forcibly or against the person’s will where the victim is incapable of giving consent because of his/her temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity (or because of his/her youth). This offense includes the forcible rape of both males and females.” It also includes “forcible sodomy,” “sexual assault with an object,” and “forcible fondling.”

Between 2008 and 2010, 17 “forcible rapes” were reported at UF. This seems more than a little bit shy of the one in four statistic reported by STRIVE and most rape advocate groups.

“The reality is that these kinds of cases go woefully under-reported,” Loschiavo said.

This past summer, in an effort to increase reporting and awareness, the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights sent a “Dear Colleague Letter” to universities and school districts nationwide. The letter clarified exactly how Title IX should be interpreted and what misconduct code guidelines to abide by, specifically in sexual misconduct cases. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education or activity.

Though the letter does not have force of law, the 19-page “policy guidance” outlines the standards that will be considered if a sexual assault case in a school or university is investigated by the Office of Civil Rights. But, if the same sexual assault case is brought to state court, the standards may be different.

“State law has some different standards and so the institution now is forced to choose: do we want to lose in state court if an accused appeals and says these regulations are invalid and violate my due process rights, or do we want to lose in an OCR case? That’s really the choice we have,” Loschiavo said.

In light of how few cases of sexual assault are actually reported and prosecuted, the Bringing in the Bystander program aims to reduce the number of victims overall. Loschiavo is optimistic about the new program, though he does think it’s going to take a long time to effect change.

“We’re working against the culture,” he said. “Even when there were minimal consequences to the bystander getting involved, bystanders have chosen not to get involved. As a campus, we’re trying to have a culture shift to empower bystanders to intervene.”

Legal systems, police departments and rape awareness groups can only go so far in prevention and recovery tactics. The Bringing in the Bystander program affirms that encouraging people to speak up is the most effective way to help reduce sexual violence.

Illustration (top) by Susie Bijan.

yello/blu VI

my name is travis fletcher epes. above is a tea flea, playing a broken piano.

t f epes doesn’t have quite the same ring as t s eliot. so, i tried a more experimental approach to signature with this abbreviation.

yello/blu tend to hibernate frequently, but they’ll be making regular appearances online and in our glorious paper

This year’s line-up includes Drums of Peace, John Chambers, Lauren Robinson, David Beede, Kevin O’Sullivan, Scrub Hill Billies, Talking Stick, Quartermoon, the Heavenly Semi-Angels and others.

The Winter Solstice Concert will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (4225 NW 34th St.). Doors open at 7 p.m., and the concert begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 to $30 on a sliding scale.

Advanced tickets can be purchased at Hyde & Zeke Records (402 NW 10th Ave.) or by calling (352) 375-2563. People who purchase tickets in advance must arrive by 7:30p.m. to assure a seat. Unclaimed seats will be opened up for those in line after 7:30p.m., with no preference given to advance ticket purchasers, until all 400 seats are filled.

Outside the event, organizations and groups from the Gainesville area will set up informational booths and tables. Attendees are encouraged to bring clothing, food and personal items to be collected and distributed by Helping Hands Clinic. Refreshments will also be available.

Parking is available at the event but is limited (carpooling recommended!), and parking attendants will be present to assist drivers.

For more information about the Winter Solstice Celebration, visit the Vets for Peace website.

Originally posted by our friends at The Iguana.

yello/blu V

this week’s comic originally appeared in The Fine Print’s Fall 2011 issue. 

yello/blu tend to hibernate frequently, but they’ll be making regular appearances online and in our glorious paper

In his weekly blog series The Last Generation—really more of a highly flirtatious conversation, littered with innuendo—Max Warren discusses matters of general interest to our generation, frequently quotes things, and spills out the addled contents of a deviant mind.

I come from a truly horrible small town that we’ll call Zion, and tonight, as my mind wanders, it’s the specter haunting my home. Sitting here at my desk, with a Louis C.K. monologue in the background and a gin in reach, I can see it clear as day.

Zion is the kind of small town that too many of us Last Generation kids never escape. Community college and the food-service-industry greedily devour a lot of the town’s youth, ODs get a few more—and then you have the car crashes and occasional suicides to worry about. It’s a bad place, the kind that has a wicked intelligence all its own. And it doesn’t abide deserters. I truly believe that when I go back to Zion for my high school reunion, I’ll be lucky not have a tree fall on my car or to knock up some girl through a Virgin Birth.

But enough of my misty-eyed nostalgia. It occurred to me that a substantial portion of my readership probably comes from a similar version of hell. These blemishes pock-mark America all over. You all know the story; it’s all Americana and bullshit (as covered in my previous column), the suburban wasteland where the houses all look the same and something sinister behind the superficial veneer leads to Xanex-ed adults and disaffected youth. If you’re not from the place, you certainly have friends who are.

Let me be perfectly frank about one thing—I’m thankful to have escaped. I don’t think it was my doing. I chalk it up mainly to good fortune and I know a hundred souls, contemporaries and comrades-in-arms, who didn’t make it out. This isn’t some statement of superiority. I could easily still be there and so could you. But this isn’t an exhortation for Plato to go back into the Cave either. Personally, I can only stomach two trips home a year.

But while I sit here, pondering the place where I grew up, images running through my mind like a montage, it seems important to realize something—if I hadn’t come from there, I certainly wouldn’t be who I am today. Comedian Patton Oswalt comes from a similar place called Sterling, Virginia, and he manages to express the benefits better than your humble writer ever could. Patton is thankful to have come from there because it meant he got to take the Test of the Small Town. You pass it when you say, “I’m leaving this place before I kill myself and everyone around me.” But if you say, “I’m going to get a job at 7-11 and fill my truck up for free!” then you just failed the Test—thanks for coming out.

It’s a striking concept and well-worth considering. As loyal readers, I’m going to assume that you all are, either willingly or else on some deeper level, a part of this Last Generation—the one that’s going to bring about our renaissance. And I think that, as members of our odd Foreign Legion, we all passed that test. And, for the record, I don’t care if you’re still stuck in your wretched hometown or not—it’s the desire to escape, at least intellectually and at best physically—that matters. If that desire burns inside you, and you play carefully and get the necessary bit of luck (without which I’d still be in Zion), then you’ll get right the hell out of there. Onward and upward.

Chuck Palahniuk, in the fantastic novel Rant, describes the places well:

Despite the dreary scenery, it’s all very sexual, these towns. It’s only the individual who attains an early beauty and sexuality who becomes trapped here. The young men and women who acquire perfect breasts and muscles before they know how best to use that power, they end up pregnant and mired so close to home. This cycle concentrates the best genetics in places you’d never imagine….Little nests of wildly attractive idiots who give birth and survive into a long, ugly adulthood. Venuses and Apollos. Small-town gods and goddesses.

His take is harsher on those that stay behind than mine would be, but I think that’s only because I understand that an escape plan takes time to work out—you only get one shot at breaking out of Shawshank and you don’t want to be hasty. One failed attempt and the Town will smell blood. After that, it’s going to keep a much tighter grasp.

As I said, I believe that all readers of these words will make it out of their All-American Hells if they want to and if they haven’t already. But that’s only half the battle and there’s another obstacle ahead: we can’t get sucked back in.

We are currently living in a time where it’s become the norm—far more than ever before—for young adults to move back home after college or graduate school. The reasons are myriad; delayed adulthood, the horrible economy and, really, the world just being such a goddamn lonely place all play a part. And I won’t criticize the decision to do so. But what I will say is this: once we’ve made it out, we have to remember that we don’t belong there anymore. We have to make sure that a visit or a brief recuperation is not the same as a surrender. I think it’s vital that we remember—the past is past for a reason.

Don’t get pregnant and don’t get addicted to pills.

Max may have made a few enemies with this post, particularly among John Cougar Mellencamp fans. He invites friends to use the comment section to praise him and enemies to use it to insult him and his hopes and dreams. He also accepts hate-mail, column-topic ideas and requests for prescription medication at Max.Z.Warren@gmail.com

Hey! Can’t get enough Max Warren madness? Now you can subscribe to his Twitter @MaxWarren3 for updates on blog posts and a whole bunch of late-night drunken quotes and song lyrics.

The Fall 2011 issue of The Fine Print is out and about town. Can’t get your hands on a copy? Here you go.

New feature: links. If we’ve posted an article online, we linked the print headline to it so you can see what others are saying and join the conversation. (Also, all website/email mentions within the issue are functional links.)

Cover illustration by Susie Bijan.

Above: Meaghan Gallagher performs her comedy routine Dec. 1 at The Laboratory, a local venue on West University Avenue. Gallagher continues to chase the limelight, despite an accident that left her paralyzed six years ago.

Meaghan Gallagher, a 28-year-old aspiring comedian, never imagined she would be cast as Tiffany, an outgoing, experienced teenager in “Party Girls,” a sex ed film series sponsored by the National Education Association. She thought the directors would typecast her as Tiffany’s shy, inexperienced best friend, Valerie.

“This is awesome! I’m playing a slutty girl in a wheelchair. How funny,” she said, laughing.

If it wasn’t for her sense of humor and confidence, she wouldn’t be able to push the memory of being involved in a car collision that left her paralyzed six years ago to the back of her mind.

Before her accident, Gallagher, a native from Lake Worth, Fla., knew what she wanted in life. In January of 2005, out of 400 people that auditioned for Julliard’s drama division, she was 1 of 12 who got called back. She also worked at a beauty supply store, and as a hostess and singer at a restaurant.

“Then I went away for Labor Day weekend and got into a car accident,” Gallagher said. “Up until that point, my life was completely focused on acting and working; that was it, just to do acting in theatre was my goal.”

After her accident, what she wanted was put on hold.

Her family and friends were all supportive, and they told her that she could still continue performing.

“At that point, I wasn’t up to hearing that. I can’t do that,” Gallagher said. “I can’t do what I was doing before.”

Six months after her accident, she slowly got into acting again.

“It was really difficult to perform because I was in the same theatre that I had my last show where I was just walking around,” she said. “It was kind of embarrassing to be doing that at such a fragile state.”

She continued to take in opportunities as they came to her, but she did it because she thought they would make her stronger. Instead of being on stage, front and center, Gallagher tried directing.

After directing 12 plays from 2006 to 2009, and even acting in one of them, “The Universal Language,” she found that she didn’t find it as enjoyable as she did in the past.

In search of inspiration, Gallagher moved to Tallahassee in 2010, where she got involved doing speech and debate with the Forensics Team of Tallahassee Community College. She performed a piece, written by Kristen Shaal, one of her favorite comedians.

“When I did that, I got such a great response doing comedy, and it was like I was back in that frame of mind again where I wanted to perform.”

It was the realization that she no longer wanted to perform as somebody else, but just as herself, that ignited the fire within her. Gallagher moved to Gainesville, a town filled with a growing comedy culture.

“I felt this was the place where I could start my stand up comedy,” she said.

With “Funny Bunny” in hand, a bunny figurine that her boyfriend got her during their first date at a museum, she’s a mess before her show.

“I talk to myself all day, telling the same story over and over again like how I’m going to say it on stage,” Gallagher said. “But it’s funny because I’m really confident about myself, but right before I’m about to go on stage, I freak out and feel like I’m going to go in total paralysis.”

If she forgets what she has rehearsed, she just tells the audience about her day. Her injury has also made her more interesting on stage.

“Whenever I have a show, I have to mention it at least once,” Gallagher said. “Come on, I’ve never seen a girl in a wheel chair doing stand up comedy before.”

Gallagher’s quadriplegia doesn’t define her life. What she wanted before her accident is different than what she wants now. From acting to comedy, she has always done what makes her happy.

“It takes work to have a happy life, but it’s more of a choice,” Gallagher said. “I go out of my way to make my life look really easy. I put a lot of work in my appearance, and I put a lot of work into how I handle my business from day to day because I want it to look easy. I don’t want people to make a big deal of how I have to live my life.”

yello/blu IV

ever wonder if you could get in trouble for something you did in another person’s dream? like, imagine (in your dream) that your significant other starts spouting anti-semetic slurs while you stroll down a rainbow shore, or say your genuinely kind employer suddenly approaches you (in your dream) with unwelcome advances. would, or could you look at that person the same way as you did the day before?  to what extent does our unconscious reveal, in dreams, information or observations that would otherwise go unnoticed?

ANSWER: i should sleep more…

yello/blu tend to hibernate frequently, but they’ll be making regular appearances online and in our glorious paper

In his weekly blog series The Last Generation—really more of a highly flirtatious conversation, littered with innuendo—Max Warren discusses matters of general interest to our generation, frequently quotes things, and spills out the addled contents of a deviant mind.

When I was younger, I had a problem with mirrors. I would go out of my way to avoid them, always being sure to keep the medicine cabinet open. The thing of it was, if I looked into one long enough, it really didn’t seem like I was looking at myself anymore. It’s fascinating to me how something as simple as a reflection—really the most accurate portrayal of what you are—can seem so separate.

This got me thinking about identity and the way in which something you really should recognize can appear so alien. Then, because it’s what I do, this got me thinking about the question of identity for this Last Generation of ours.

I recently had an interesting conversation with my friend Rose (a better journalist than I) and she really framed the issue brilliantly:

“I’ve been thinking about us, about our generation, about who we are,” she said. “You call us the ‘last’, yet others call us makers while some dare call us emotionless. All in all, we are oft-talked about, oft-portrayed, but hugely misunderstood. That’s a problem. If we’re going to be the shining future, shouldn’t we create a coherent identity? Or maybe it could be that our lack of self is what will ultimately save us—we’re are each diverse individuals, with something different to offer and if we just accept that we can all settle into our roles peacefully and all will be good in the world.”

It’s an interesting bit of observation and it ends on an optimistic note—a good thing, too, since some have accused your humble writer of cynicism. Rose is right. We are talked about, dissected, portrayed and, without doubt, misunderstood. But I think that those flawed portrayals are part of the disease and not merely symptoms of it. Let me be clear; by disease I mean our own ennui and pallor—like that Danish Prince, we’ve become sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought, too anemic to even understand who we are, much less what we should do.

This diagnosis set me asking, with appropriate urgency, why haven’t we formed a coherent identity and, what’s more, why we accept so passively our lack of one. I wonder this, despite having my own doubts as to whether it’s a common or even a positive thing for a generation to do.

I feel I’ve traced the root of this collective quarter-life crisis. I’ve decided to call it The Great Betrayal because I think it’s the most accurate name possible and, hey, what would a Max Warren column be without an over-dramatic flourish? (Answer: boring as hell.)

Essentially, the Betrayal of the Last Generation was the greatest crime since the cancellations of Firefly and Dollhouse. In our younger and more vulnerable years we were all fed a serious line of bullshit by movies, music videos and television shows. They taught us to believe in a very particular and packaged idea of American young adulthood—an idea that isn’t bearing itself out.

There’s this grand conception of American youth that we’ve all come to know well. MTV and Hollister have sold it to us on one front—where everything is, like, totally awesome—and that god-awful Catcher in the Rye has done it on another, where everyone and everything is phony, except for you because you can be sarcastic about it.

I remember when I was a kid—writing diatribes with crayons and drinking Wild Turkey from a sippy cup—thinking that when I was a teenager life was going to be one big, crazy adventure. There were going to be parties every night and fistfights over girls and, with a bit of luck, I might even race somebody around Dead Man’s Curve.

None of us were stupid and I think we all understood that obviously it wouldn’t, you know, be exactly like The O.C., but it would be of the same general flavor. There would be constant excitement and what we were supposed to want and chase and struggle for would be clear. Most of all there wouldn’t be this nagging, soul-deep doubt, this worry that I firmly believe nags most of us, that we might somehow have missed the boat.

But the truth is, like the sunrise, the city of El Ray or Boozetown, it’s all an illusion, a myth or a dream.

And so here we are, each of us in, or else fast-approaching, our 20s and learning some harsh lessons. We were raised by that big blue box to believe in the Great American Youth Experience and the Epic Romance. Now, the longer it fails to materialize, the more alone and robbed we feel. Allow me to throw a little Doctor Thompson at you (again, courtesy of The Rum Diary) to finish the point:

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “But I have a feeling that I’m following a course that somebody laid out a long time ago – and I have one hell of a lot of company.”

I looked up at the plantain tree and let him go on.

“You’re the same way,” he said. “We’re all going to the same damn places, doing the same damn things people have been doing for fifty years, and we keep waiting for something to happen.” He looked up. “You know – I’m a rebel, I took off – now where’s my reward?”

“You fool,” I said. “There is no reward and there never was.”

That just may be the case. It seems there is no reward, at least in the sense we were brought up to expect. Instead, we will have to look inward for it, and earn it the hard way, rather than just sliding into it with advancing age.

This is no tragedy. The big dream may have been pulled away, just as we reached out our hands to grasp it. The Great Betrayal may have been traumatic and demoralizing. Hell, it may even have turned us a bit cynical and a bit jaded. But I have a message for MTV and all the other purveyors of the lies and half-truths that got us here. I believe it’s better to know the truth than to believe a lie.

We’re all going to be better for the sting. And we’re going to be stronger in the broken places.

Good night, and good luck. 

Max requests that you comment freely so that the bigwigs here at TFP know that you like him. You may also send suggestions for columns, allegations decrying Max as a pinko, and all donations toward the Boozetown capital-raising-initiative to Max.Z.Warren@gmail.com.

Hey! Can’t get enough Max Warren madness? Now you can subscribe to his Twitter @MaxWarren3 for updates on blog posts and a whole bunch of late-night drunken quotes and song lyrics.

If you’re looking for unique holiday gifts, the GLAM Indie Craft Show may be just the place to start. This Sunday, the third annual craft show will feature a collection of 50 local crafters selling items, such as knitted coozies, hula hoops, handmade jewelry, bags, T-shirts, quilts, hand-spun yarns, home decorations — I could go on, or you could just check out the vendors’ page. And hey, if you buy from the craft show, remember your money will stay right here in our very own community, benefiting those who craft because they love it.

Kim Kruse is the one “behind the curtain,” as she put it. As the Sassy Crafter columnist for the former Gainesville magazine, Satellite, and owner of Sew Make Do, a new crafting and sewing studio in town, she thought Gainesville needed a show for people with “slightly eclectic tastes.”

And turns out, she was right. The past two years have seen as many as 500 people at the craft show, and Kruse expects a similar turn out this year.

Whether you’re looking for a gift for someone else or a unique addition to your own home, head down to Villa East (301 N. Main St.) this Sunday from noon to 5. Admission is $3 for adults and free for children 10 and younger.

For more crafty holiday gift ideas, check out the upcoming Winter issue of The Fine Print around town on Dec. 14.

As the weather begins to cool off, I find myself spending more time baking in the warmth of my kitchen. Lately, I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment with sourdough breads.

Sourdough is a game entirely unlike bread baking with active dry yeast or a bread machine — it requires a little more time and attention. But, once you learn the basics of keeping a sourdough starter you’ll discover an infinite world of bread making.

Sourdough bread has a rich history, dating back as far as the Ancient Egyptians of 1500 BC. Until only 130 years ago, all bread was leavened with a sourdough starter.

A sourdough starter is a community of yeast in water that ferments carbohydrates to transform them into carbon dioxide and alcohol (Thus, the yeast used to leaven bread is the same for fermenting beer), and it is when the carbon dioxide bubbles expand and become trapped in the gluten network of the dough that the bread rises (the alcohol cooks out in the oven).

Sourdough breads are generally considered sourer than breads made with commercial yeast due to the acids produced in the starter. But sourdough doesn’t have to be sour and some artisan bakeries even consider the sour flavor characteristic of negligence (although I love it). The major difference between wild yeast of sourdough and the store-bought kind is purity. When you buy yeast, you know exactly what is in it and its leavening characteristics. With wild fermented sourdough cultures, you encounter a diversity of yeast microorganisms. The benefits of sourdough are extra nutrients and B-vitamins, more thoroughly fermented gluten (thus more easily digestible for you), and a flavor and leavening properties entirely unique to your region and home.

Sourdough starters are easy to create, and can last a lifetime, even being passed along through generations. A friend of mine has a sourdough starter that is 50 years old, passed from her grandmother, to mother, and finally to her. Immigrants would bring their sourdough starters with them to new lands, thus spreading different strains of sourdough cultures around the world.

Creating a sourdough starter requires only two ingredients: flour and water. I stick to fresh ground whole wheat but any kind of flour can be used. Make sure the water doesn’t smell heavily of chlorine (which could kill necessary yeast). The starch water from cooking pasta or potatoes is nutrient rich and great for the starter (cooled to room temperature).

Here’s what you do:
1. Choose a container for your starter. I started with a 16-ounce glass jar, and later upgraded to a quart-size ceramic crock. Choose what feels best to you.

2. Mix two cups each of water and flour in your container, and stir vigorously.

3. Cover the container with cheesecloth (or a porous fabric) and secure with a rubber band.

4. Store the starter in a warm place (70-80 degree F is best, but it will survive cooler climates, too) with good air circulation. For the first week, investigate the batter for bubbling around the surface, and stir daily to stimulate yeast activity. The time it takes for the starter to become active will depend on environmental factors, and the coming winter months will surely slow the process. Some bakers suggest adding a little commercial yeast to enhance fermentation. I like the method of the miners of the Klondike Gold Rush in the 1890’s who were nicknamed “sourdoughs” for hiding their starters under their jackets to keep warm.

5. Once your batter is thick and bubbly, it is ready for use. When baking, pour out what you need and save the rest to keep the sourdough going. Replenish after each use by adding 2 cups each of water and flour, and continue to feed it every few days if baking weekly. If you are not using it often, store in the refrigerator to slow yeast activity, replenishing once a week by pouring some starter out and adding fresh flour and water (ratio 1:1). Make sure to remove it from the fridge and put it somewhere warm the day before baking to reactivate the yeast.

Since establishing my sourdough starter, I have virtually stopped using commercial yeast. Some of my favorite recipes with sourdough starter are pancakes, biscuits, and fruit breads.

Chestnuts
Castanea dentata

The American Chestnut has a long history in the United States, and 100 years ago was one of the most important commercially harvested trees in the eastern US. Chestnut wood was widely used throughout Appalachia in the 1800’s for everything from furniture to railroad ties,

and the tree’s high tannin content was great for tanning leather. The nuts were also a major cash crop, and the smell of roasting chestnuts on the streets of many southeastern cities marked the coming of winter tide.

In the early 1900s, American chestnut trees suffered a major blight from an Asian bark fungus that decimated over 3 billion chestnut trees in America.

Since then, numerous groups and foundations have worked to reintroduce blight-resistant strains of American and European Chestnut trees, but it is difficult to find many of the ancient chestnut trees that used to populate Southeast America. Chestnuts are sweet and easy to harvest, and can be eaten raw or roasted. They also make a great chestnut butter and go well in salads, baked goods, soups, and more.

Around Gainesville, there are some options for chestnuts: I have seen farmers selling chestnuts at the Downtown Farmers’ Market on Wednesday afternoons, the High Springs Orchard and Bakery has a sizeable grove of chestnut trees to pick from (call at 352-222-1343 for directions and information), and the Chestnut Hill Nursery (386-462-2820) even sells a hybrid between American and Chinese Chestnuts called the Dunstan Chestnut tree that have shown healthy results.

An alternative to the chestnut is its cousin- the Florida native Chinquapin (Castanea pumila), with slightly smaller nuts that also bear the sweetness of American Chestnuts. The Chinquapin is drought resistant and grows well in sandy soils. Check out the Edible Plant Project’s website for more information on the Chinquapin and other native edibles.

Additional Resources
Check out Sandor Katz’s book, Wild Fermentation for some easy sourdough recipes. It and numerous other bread-baking resources are available at the Downtown Library, as well as online.

Local Harvester’s List
Some other native plants that are fruiting or ready to harvest now are: Pecans, Persimmons, Jamaican Sorrel, Seminole Pumpkin, Winged Sumac, Sunchoke/Jerusalem Artichoke

Illustrations by Krissy Abdullah.

On the surface, Destiny is like any other four-year-old — easily bored, energetic, and unaware that her future hangs on a thread. Cantrice, her 28-year-old mother, left Chicago last year in search of a better place to raise her kids. In Gainesville, she struggled to find an adequate place to sleep at night. Destiny’s father, who had been “missing in action” for years, wasn’t going to help. On July 10, she entered the Interfaith Hospitality Network of Greater Gainesville, a nonprofit dedicated to sheltering homeless parents and children.

For more journalism documenting homeless children in Gainesville, check out Transient Children of Alachua County, where this story was originally posted. If the topic interests you, check out their event this Friday at Plaza of the Americas.

In his weekly blog series The Last Generation—really more of a highly flirtatious conversation, littered with innuendo—Max Warren discusses matters of general interest to our generation, frequently quotes things, and spills out the addled contents of a deviant mind.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be young and alive. Despite what some readers felt after the last post, in which I outlined the genesis of the term “Last Generation,” my outlook is not one of cynicism, but of cautious optimism. We’ve inherited a world that, in many ways, could not be riper for us to make our mark—that is, because the world is so unrelentingly different from how it has ever been before, we’ve been given our very own tabula rasa.

The trick, then, is for us to not fuck it up.

I can only speak from personal experience—the fount from which my rather astounding worldly wisdom flows—but, with that limitation firmly in mind, I believe that I’ve stumbled across something rather interesting in my Wild Turkey-fueled theorizing. I believe that life can be divided, fairly accurately, into three phases. These can be delineated somewhat by age groupings, but I’m going to use soft estimates and explain them simply as they worked out for me. So, without further palaver, I present to you the Three Phases of Life.

I. Training Montage

For me, this was from about birth until midway through college. During this phase, we’re developing who we are as a person. Naturally, this is subject to some tweaking later, but by and large this is where we lay the large and immovable stones that will serve as our foundation.

Growing up, like everyone else, I tried on many different personalities. There was even a period with blue hair of which I’ve destroyed all evidence—though those familiar with SLC Punk may justly laugh. But despite the ongoing shell game, this was the time when certain seeds were planted that to this day continue to bear fruit.

At 16 I picked a book called This Side of Paradise off a bookshelf–completely by chance–and from that moment I knew that I wanted to be a writer and that nothing else was or would be as important to me. One day, dammit, I’d write better than Fitzgerald. I also discovered a certain political apathy in myself, other than that I was pro-choice and pro-gay-rights. I had a liking for sarcasm and, as high school and college showed, a fundamental aversion to hard work (if it didn’t involve writing), a long with an inability to take anything seriously. These are things about me that have never changed and are as intrinsically a part of my being as the devilish charm and ever-present flask. All of these foundations were firmly laid during the Training Montage.

And Montage, I think, really is the right word. Looking back, I don’t remember the entire period. Instead, it comes in flashes—moments that I didn’t even know had significance until they come to the surface, when the particular lesson they taught or idea they imparted is implicated. Then, almost like muscle-memory, it comes in a flash, and the decision is clear—it’s the only decision that can be made, because, during this first phase, it was already decided.

II. The Big Game

I believe that, after training, when we’ve gotten our bearings and learned to do our barrel rolls, comes The Big Game. This typically begins anywhere during or after college, and stretches on until we’ve settled down—as much as each of us chooses to do, whether it be committing to a career or perpetuating the race by producing of those horrid little creatures known to ruin flights and movies. The Big Game is where we take what we learned in Training, the principles that will flash into our minds at just that moment, and guide and color every important decision we make. This is the Danger Zone. It rewards careful attention, bold action and, of course, one may need to be a bit lucky.

I’m batting about .500 during my own personal Big Game so far. For example, deciding to go to law school was a misstep. It’s put me farther from what I truly want, rather than closer, and looking back is one of the very few life decisions I regret. On the other hand, I redeemed myself, at least somewhat, when I decided not to give up the dream and to plow ahead with the novel in every free instant, no matter how many sleepless nights or bouts of frustration it caused. I wouldn’t trade that torment for all the Paxil in the world and that, I think, is the point. The Big Game is what we’ve all been getting ready for, and I think the difficulty of playing it right can be expressed clearly if you’ll allow me a quotation. Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind puts it best:

It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. It’s like walking down an empty street, listening to your own footsteps. But all you have to do is to knock on any door and say ‘if you let me in, I’ll live the way you want me to live and I’ll think the way you want me to think.’ And all the blinds will go up and all the doors will open and you’ll never be lonely, ever again.

Therein lies the danger. It takes something burning to keep a person warm when the decision is put to them like that. But it’s in those moments that I believe it’s most vital to stay true to one’s Training Montage, because next comes…

III. Austerlitz or Waterloo

The final phase. I can only theorize on this one as I haven’t yet crossed that particular line, and so I present it to you with the caveat that it’s subject to tweaking. To me, however, it seems sound in conception, so I drop the idea and pass on.

At some point, all the big, vital, life-shaping decisions will have been made. We have one of two jobs in this phase—we either live with the consequences or we reap the rewards. If we played the Big Game in good faith and weren’t afraid and didn’t shrink from who we are, or lose sight of what we want to be, then its Valhalla for us and all the mead we can drink. If we compromised on the important decision, or learned to be ashamed, then it’s a well-deserved ignominy.

Black and white, perhaps, but I see the danger as real.

And that’s my theory, as it stands. I wrote this in order to say one thing. I truly believe that we have inherited the world and have as many advantages as it would be fair to have. We also have liabilities. And if we’re going to save this world, if we’re going to work towards something greater than the sum of its parts, then I think we all have a responsibility to tend our own gardens first.

In this column I’ve mixed humor and pathos, but now I’m in earnest. I believe that living honestly is the highest virtue. I believe that living insincerely and dishonestly is a crime. And I believe there is place at the trenches for each of our weary hands. So let’s go chase the green light and I’ll see you all at the front.

Until next week. As always, comment freely, flame me and one another, or even tell me something good. Death threats and nudie pics to Max.Z.Warren@gmail.com.

Good night, and good luck.

yello/blue III

ever dream that you’re dreaming? yello seemed caught in that loop over the last few weeks, what with those weird Rollin’ dreams. now it looks like blu’s turn for some nocturnal turbulence, and something tells me these Dream Police might give him the worse of it…

yello/blu tend to hibernate frequently, but they’ll be making regular appearances online and in our glorious paper

“A healthy performing arts community is music to our ears,” the advertisement said, and in the lower right-hand corner was a picture of the old philanthropist.  Surely in her seventies in this one, I thought; the woman had gone vaguely Asian in appearance with the eye-narrowing effects of old age, lips mauved and stretched in a hidden-tooth smile that showed nothing but tooth-colored gums.  Her hair—blatantly red now—was fixed in a long bob that drew its corners in around her ears.  It made me sad to think that this was the image she would present to the world from now on, ten years past her death, and even twenty years later the philharmonic’s programs would show the same face.

It had been so long since I returned to the cramped concert hall, with its lovingly uncomfortable red cushions, dark as her lipstick.  It had been even longer since I returned to this small Southern town, where the air always smelled powerfully of new-cut grass and thick ripened palm-berries, where nothing comes quickly except hardship and gossip.  Certainly we gossiped enough about the old philanthropist.  Like Proust’s madeleine, the strong magazine smell of the program, the incandescent globes dimming on her dated photograph, the Sibelius quickening like a pulse in the first movement—all of these things together and even their separate pieces were enough to make me reflect on the old woman: her life and circumstances and what we made of them, we young and foolish and old and clever Southerners, we with too much time on our hands, the Sibelius settling now like a large cool hand over my forehead and the meter jarring me, like the stroke of a canoe’s paddle, down memory.

Mrs. Eders and the Old Philanthropist

Our first encounter was unconsummated.  Like the other girls at the strings camp, I had learned “Happy Birthday” in about ten minutes without sheet music; then Mrs. Eders had led the four of us from the camp’s performing space and up to the old philanthropist’s birthday function.

Was it nearly twenty years ago since that August?  She must have been turning fifty. We waited outside the ballroom for an hour as waiters passed with unnameable hors d’oeuvres on plates thin and silverly as compact discs.  Four middle-schoolers in uncomfortable dresses and suits, the bass player supporting her instrument a little helplessly before giving up and laying it along the tile.  We had nothing to say to each other; we barely knew each other at all, though the cellist would stalk me later.  I studied the lovely wayward patterns of a red glass vase, like a flower collapsing in the middle from its own sensuality.

The philanthropist knew, I think, the artist.  When I paid attention to the world again, my pinky was cramping from dangling the rental bow and the strings of the viola pressed under my armpit had left grillmarks all along my forearm.  The philanthropist never came.

“Well, that’s how it happens, guys,” Mrs. Eders said to us with her good-natured smile and customary shrug.

She was as trustable and fatalistic as a rabbi.  Mrs. Eders was in those days infallible, grandmotherly with her grainy pale hair and golden spectacles, her stomach sagging through her black cocktail dress like a heap of slag drifting down a quieted volcano.  With a smile she could make anything right.  I was surprised later to learn that many of my classmates had found the woman intolerable.

“You don’t remember how she was always telling stories?” Jordan asked me in high school.  She was a pretty girl with a snub nose, an ovaline Mediterranean face, and a curtain of barretted brown hair.  “We never got to play!”

“They were good stories,” I said.  I couldn’t remember any noticeable swathes of time being stolen and I often, in fact, doubted that Jordan genuinely liked anyone.  They were all true stories, too.

Mrs. Eders once pretended to vomit into a white paper bag after one class’s lackadaisical practice; Mrs. Eders and her cohorts once found a poorly-made Chinese violin in the music room’s closet and the four women took turns stomping on it, right in front of their students’ eyes; Mrs. Eders didn’t speak a word until she was four years old, in the family sedan on the way to church.

“When’s lunch?” Mrs. Eders asked.  Her father nearly drove the car into a ditch. The woman was, simply, mythology.

She patted us on the backs as we headed back down into the practice room, giving an especially hearty pat to the cellist and long-suffering bass.  It was just as well.  I had already forgotten how to play “Happy Birthday.”

“Come on, folks,” Mrs. Eders said as we retreated down the stairs, her voice shouting off the sides of the stairwell.  “There’s always next year, and you can play for your parents on their birthdays too.”

We had the impression that Mrs. Eders and the old philanthropist did not get along well.  Mrs. Eders had been one of the original quartet of musicians who founded what became our philharmonic; it was the old philanthropist who came late to the venture.  She swept into town with her husband and injected it with capital in a single vicious thrust, like a mother stabbing her child’s thigh with an EpiPen.  The quickness of it all made both sides uneasy.

There were rumors when Mrs. Eders announced her retirement that the old philanthropist had done it, rumors which our teacher cheerfully rejected without addressing directly, flapping her veiny hand at the class.

“Oh, no,” she said with a grin.  “I’m tired of all this.  My husband and I, we’re just going to head into the Canadian wilderness, hitch us to a few backpacks, and get our provisions helicoptered in once a week.  That’s the last you’ll hear of us, folks.” “You won’t even bring your violin?” a student asked. “You know,” she said, stroking her chin.  “I just might.”

We had no doubt that she would do it, too, except that another orchestra teacher died suddenly of cancer—sudden to us, probably less sudden to that shrewd and resourceful woman—and Mrs. Eders agreed to take her place for a year.  After that, true to her word, we didn’t hear from her for years.

The Voice of the Old Philanthropist

The first time I heard the voice of the old philanthropist was at the philharmonic’s twenty-fifth anniversary.  Famous aging personae were shipped in; one woman with blond Louis XIV tresses sang her an operatic “Happy Birthday,” comically running out of breath on her long and illustrious name.  The music students and our families, free admission tickets crumpled in our fists, crowded the back seats and squinted at the stage, squinted at the squinting wealthy elderly in the balconies and front row.  I was there with my mother. A long white screen crinkled down over the stage, the projector droning to life, and there in faint blue was the squat face of the old philanthropist, blinking with froggy disorientation at us all.

“I just want to say what a pleasure this is,” she told us.

She was presumably up in the balconies somewhere, beaming down at us in her severe red dress, her pink forearms sagging out of short sleeves and her neck bulging harmlessly out of the high Chinese collar.  One of her eyes was higher than the other; the Hershey’s Kiss-colored eyebrows were penciled in.

She talked for a rambling while on important things.  (“Art is a business,” for example.  And, “A business both requires and deserves a great deal of money.”)  Her voice was unexpectedly light, childlike, quick.  We could barely hear her at all. “How ironic,” my mother whispered into my ear. “What?” I asked her. Her reply was lost in the sudden din of applause.  Although, knowing my mother, it was possibly she never answered me at all, just moving her lips maddeningly to make me think she had spoken.

The old philanthropist was retreating into the ceiling in a narrow blue slice, smiling with nervous benevolence as her forehead and nose and lips were eaten away.  My mother was in those days a pretty woman.  Never beautiful, it must be admitted, but pretty, and degenerating into tolerable in her later years.  I have always, always been honest.  She had my sunny cheeks and similar hair: curly, but easily persuaded otherwise.  It was ginger-colored and lay limp across her face in those hot summer months, heat like a neighborhood in which we lived, always.  Her eyes the size of thumbprints from small fingers, her raspy trustable voice.  Though of course we couldn’t trust a word she said, my father and I, she being a housewife and unsuccessful poet, inclined to scare us with the words she chose.

“The moon was howling green tonight,” she would say, clipping the screen door shut. “At the office today”—that was what she called it, at first drolly and then without interest, the separate bedroom where she slept and worked, with its robin’s egg walls and untouched white linens—“at the office today we had a pair of starlings wander in, like they’d lost the trick of flying.  Just pecking at the window like the wind was weighing heavy on them.  So I’ve let them in.” She would come in from the porch at ten o’clock or later with her flashlight and her notebook, the infinite circle of her cigarette, a long papery dimension, rolled up into her hand.  I pitied my mother with the endless pity of the young.  I assumed in those days that she was always lonely, always writing, always waiting for someone to answer in her own language. “Oh darling,” she said flatly.  “You’re home.  Did you find the Italian in the fridge?”

The Memoirs of the Old Philanthropist

I mention all this because of the memoirs and my mother’s response to them, which I think were particularly telling.  The old philanthropist released her memoirs when was just past sixty.  Almost all the old rumors were proven true and expanded upon.

Her husband had inspired “Mad Men,” she said; she had grown up the poor child of a ceiling-fan mogul, put out of work with the invention of air-conditioning and yet, she wrote movingly, “unwilling to acknowledge the persistent push of changing times”; she built the manatee preserve in her backyard after the terribly photogenic slaughter of eighty-three, when a hurricane came thrashing through and lifted several dozen sea-cows out of the water, their muzzles leering and dripping as they spun silver-whiskered through the air and broke every watching heart.  The author’s photo showed her in the preserve with goggles and wet slices of red hair plastered to her forehead, smiling with her white teeth, her left arm circumnavigating the obese scarred side of Charlie, who looked at the camera with mournful eyes the size of scallops.

Melanoma was the old philanthropist’s explanation; we had our own theories about her husband’s death.  Some said uncharitably that she had personally bent down each night, uncapped her veneers, and sucked his neck bloodless as he slept.  He died so young, the old people said, just in his forties.  And look how vigorous and hale his widow was!

In the middle section of the book were pictures of her with various retired presidents and South African leaders and manatees, but also a photograph of the old philanthropist, then quite young, with her husband on the beach.  She was still short, if not shorter, but without vaguely Asiatic features; her face looked small, sweet and pale, her hair dark curls lively.  He was a tall man with a forehead like the prow of a cruise ship, a knob of skull protruding whitely forward from under the tanned skin, the skin beaten with enough gold and red to make melanoma believable.  He wore a red-and-white striped polo and khaki pants belted nearly to the armpits.  He had a trusting nineteen-fifties smile. How could you kill a man like that? I asked my mother.  I was home from college then, no longer a viola player but still a violist, still so certain that I had the right to judge the old philanthropist and everyone else.  I showed her the picture.  She traced the long strong line where their hands drew their arms close.  Then she touched the cord of tendon jarring from his brown neck.

“Oh, I have no doubt she killed him,” my mother said.  “Look at his eyes.  Look at the neck.  He was dead from the moment he married her.”

The Newspaper and the Old Philanthropist

The day she retired the local newspaper ran three articles alongside her announcement: an announcement of the elementary school’s fundraiser; a warning of whales beaching themselves violently along the north coast; and a columnist asking plaintively, “Should Stupid Be a Crime?” But the paper wasn’t done with her yet.  Several months later, Mrs. Eders began to send letters to the editor.  They were quite possibly not by Mrs. Eders; we strongly suspected that she was long dead.  The letters came in and in, my mother mailing them to me—the last two pages of the newspaper, neatly folded into thirds, and bound with a rubber band no bigger than the mouth of a beer bottle—and circling in blue pen Mrs. Eders’s reputed contributions. “I continue to question X’s commitment to the arts,” she wrote. “Can the community at this time afford to invest in diamond-encrusted bluebirds for the museum’s spring opening?” she wrote.  “Why not spend the money on something long-lasting, something not intended merely to awe snowbirds?” “Why not invest in music?” she wrote.

The sentiments were hers, but the vocabulary was not—the delicacy that didn’t seem anything like her plainspoken way—and I soon threw the newspapers out.  Within a week, my mother was sending me the old philanthropist’s rebuttals.  These were circled in cherry red.

“No one has supported the arts more fervently than I,” she wrote. “Art is a business,” she wrote.  “Businesses need money.  Money comes from donors, and it shouldn’t matter where these donors come from.  I pity Eders’s petty regionalism.” “I do invest in music,” she wrote.  “I invest more than any retired music teacher could possibly understand, or be capable of providing.” These I could not throw away.  I pored over them, page-long diatribes, as if they were trashy novels.

This was authentically her, that woman, these words peeling her open and showing her unflattering innards.  I imagined the old philanthropist bent over her desk, writing angrily, impeccably dressed, the head of her desk lamp tilted close to her red hair.

“A handsome woman,” my father once called her. So worked up over old rivalries!  Over false fire, too: what she must clearly have recognized as false fire and pursued anyway.  Someone had known her well enough to know that Mrs. Eders would be enough to make her respond, even knowing that she knew it could not be a real Mrs. Eders at all.  Here was the proof that, as we said, the old philanthropist was jealous of those who made things.

Now I could see it all clearly.  She sponsored them; she loved them; she hated them.  She had attended a small nondescript college in the Deep South or perhaps some wayward school in the misbegotten dairy lands; she had never gotten any closer to the metropolis from the day she was born, nor did culture want anything to do with her except in the form of her supremely cultured husband.  It was her pleasure and her burden to finance talent and never, by buying, get any closer to possessing it.  Because the alternative, of course, was to find that the arts didn’t need people like her at all.

“I do invest in music,” she wrote.  “The arts, like young infants, must be encouraged.  They need food, water, shelter. They would flounder on their own.”

Death and the Old Philanthropist

When she died at last of a long unexpected illness in a wet summer, the manatees came to bear her away.  Dark bulbous blots in a shrouded sky, drifting heavily as crippled balloons, their bodies curled and coy as shrimps, their paddled feet wide as ladies’ fans.  They came from nowhere at all, people said—clearly untrue, because the water level sank ten inches in the bay, despite the rain, between that morning and the settling of night.  If the trees had risen up we would have seen the dank holes in our lawns.

The manatees were plucked out of the water, the self-healing river of grass which leaves no holes behind and seals its own wet wounds. Through the air, one by one like the beads of a rosary.  A nurse opened the hospital windows and three of the smaller manatees floated through.  One snuffled lightly at her dead face.  Another lowered itself to the level of the starched white hospital bed; the third hustled her gently onto this manatee’s round patient back with its petal-like hands.  The old philanthropist’s legs sprawled indecently.  You could see the yellow stains along her fleshy inner thighs where she had wet herself, the nurse later told me. Out the window and into the curdled sky, flying in a gray tilting flock with the old philanthropist at the head of the V.  Over the windless streets with their humidity clutched tight by the asphalt; over the cabbage palms and sagging park benches; over the tourists’ green-and-brown trolleys and the cars simmering in their own exhaust, shining red as lobsters in their clean boil; over the worst parts of town, where the model homes collapsed half-naked into the sea-oats; over all of this and out into a flat pane of sea, her paper hospital gown slinking down to set on the surface of the ocean, the dense salty window where we never really saw anything anyway, and who are we to know?

In his weekly blog series The Last Generation—really more of a highly flirtatious conversation, littered with innuendo—Max Warren discusses matters of general interest to our generation, frequently quotes things, and spills out the addled contents of a deviant mind.

Hello, Gainesville.

My name is Max Warren. As a former Gator (class of ’10 and, of course, an English major) currently self-exiled to the frigid north at Harvard Law, I’ll be your guide—or a whimsical psychopomp, perhaps — on this blog journey we’re about to begin. This blog will update weekly, so I implore you to keep coming back because, if you don’t, I may actually have to go and study law.

So, why title this thing of ours The Last Generation? Well, I assume most of you are passingly familiar with The Lost Generation, but for anyone who wants a refresher, I’ll try to break it down for you old-school without sounding like a 20th Century American Lit professor.

The phrase comes from something crazy old Gertrude “Rose is a rose is a rose” Stein said to Ernest Hemingway, describing his rough-and-tumble band of hard-drinking writers and artists in 1920s Paris. They lacked direction, in a very pressing sense, and pounded back the highballs and the absinthe to make up for it. They also gave us Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Picasso’s oeuvre and lots more. They had lived through the horror of WWI. They bore witness to the birth of mechanized war — many firsthand. The world was changing fast around them and the old ideals of honor and bravery didn’t hold their place in this colder, more modern world. What good was a Washington or a Wellington in the face of machine gun fire? They were a generation who had spent years in trenches, waiting to be ordered over the top for a cause they barely understood. Alienation was the hallmark of the times.

And now to us, The Last Generation. I think we share more in common with those forebears than my brilliant play on the name. I think, in the same sense, we lack direction. The world is changing again, and doing it fast. And if we’re not going to be ordered out of the trenches, to be gunned down in No Man’s Land, then at the very least we live under threat as well—more metaphysical, perhaps, but just as unrelenting. The disconnect and the alienation within this colder, more modern world of ours, if not understood, if not used as a catalyst for renaissance, could destroy whatever potential we have to create beautiful things and build a better world.

I believe we occupy what will be a very special place in our cultural history. Those just a bit older than us still don’t understand how all of this new, world-shrinking technology works, and those just a bit younger than us don’t remember a time before it — a time when, in order to hang out with a friend you had to actually leave your house — a time, dare I say it, before Angry Birds. And so that makes us possibly the last chance—and it’s something to be hopeful about, rather than sad about. Because I think we have what it would take to rise to the occasion, if we play it right. And I think we’re the last chance, the last generation that can bring about an intellectual, creative renaissance before we’re all swallowed under. Après nous, le déluge!

There is, as I said, a danger, and it can be seen with the right kind of eyes. We risk losing both the interest in the world around us and the soul with which to make it better. Let me say, before I explain further, that it’s not technology that I’m against (as I compose a blog on my MacBook) and it’s not even technology that I intend to write about. But, I think that the way we use our newest toys is a symptom of this culture and worth considering.

The other day, I saw a seven-year-old girl texting in a way that I can only describe as aggressive—she played that smartphone like a virtuoso. Now please, tell me, who is a 7-year-old texting and–if you can answer that–what can she possibly be texting about? “Hey! Let’s play later!” Is that really worth a texting plan?

Or, more chillingly, there was this conversation I overheard between two girls outside of Library West during my last trip to the homeland.

Girl 1: Well, what do you think? How’re things going with him?

Girl 2: I’m not sure. I mean, I know his parents really like his ex but…you know…they were never Facebook official, so it doesn’t really count.

Honest to God, has it come to this? We all live plugged into our ear-buds and glued to our iPhones and some of that’s fine – the great wonders of technology and all that. But we’ve come to a point where it functions as a barrier between the outside world and ourselves — a time where a relationship obviously had no substance if it wasn’t Facebook official. I’ll bet any taker my first-edition This Side of Paradise that this 7-year-old will never, of her own volition, make a lasting piece of art, read a great book or contribute something of value to the human soul.

This is not a Call to Arms. This is not a neo-Luddite, Tyler Durden rant. And this is not boy-meets-girl and the rest is history, nor murder mystery, nor comeback story. It’s more like a flaming Viking ship, where we all have to get our jollies in before we die. Or maybe it’s a lone voice, echoing on an empty battlefield, with just one bullet in the gun. Maybe it’s me typing on my computer. Whatever. In this first entry, anyway, I just wanted to extend a greeting to all you wonderful readers out there and lay out the barest of bones regarding what the hell I intend to talk about.

I’m going to sign off now because I’m sure your attention span is starting to get depleted (I know mine is) but let me leave you with one little gem. This is brought to you courtesy of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. (Film-based-on-the-book is in theaters now. Go see it.)

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles—a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other—that kept me going.

Words to consider, at the very least. And now I’m off. I invite any who have thoughts, criticisms or even compliments to utilize the comment section. Particularly vicious hate mail, offers to buy the writer a drink, or requests for specific topics can be sent to Max.Z.Warren@gmail.com.

Here’s looking at you, kids.

David Tran, the owner of a Loving Hut vegan cuisine express truck, is providing inexpensive, convenient and delicious food to Gainesville residents with the intention of showing people how easy eating a plant-based diet is and how it can greatly reduce global warming.

“People typically think of driving less or not owning SUVs, but not eating meat would actually have a greater impact,” said Jay Shooster, vice president of the UF Student Animal Alliance. “Not only does it reduce global warming, it also means that we’re not going to be destroying rainforests to make room for cattle.”

In the Amazon rainforest alone, 80 percent of deforestation is due to an increase in cattle ranching, according to a 2009 Green Peace report.

In addition, “producing one calorie from animal protein requires 11 times as much fossil fuel input — releasing 11 times as much carbon dioxide — as does producing a calorie from plant protein,” according to a report by PETA. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, the gas most responsible for global warming.

Tran is trying to decrease global warming by changing people’s misconceptions about vegetarian or vegan food being expensive and not easily available, said Paula Ziadi, secretary of the Student Animal Alliance.

The photos (above) were taken at Adventure Outpost and Ichetucknee Springs. To learn more, check out When the Springs Run Dry: Independent Researchers Fight to Save Florida’s Springs.

Last month, we promised you weekly Paper Cuts, our quick updates and occasional commentary on headlines that matter. We’ll have to apologize for now and change “weekly” to “whenever we have time.” If you think we’re missing something important, feel free to email us.

Not My Representative
On Sept. 15, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) of Ocala, the chair of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, drew national attention when he challenged Planned Parenthood once again on its spending. Stearns launched an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s financial records, requesting documents that go back 12 years from locations across the country. Stearns has also been making headlines with his new investigation into federal loans totaling $535 million made to Solyndra, a failed California-based solar panel manufacturer. Stearns was quoted as saying the U.S. can’t compete with China to make solar panels and wind turbines. When called out directly by President Obama on this statement, Stearns clarified he was referring to cheap labor. Read more >>

Florida Organic Growers vs. Monsanto
Since March, organic farmers across the country have been at legal war with Monsanto, the world’s leading producer of genetically altered seeds (and possibly the world’s leading producer of public outrage). The conflict emerges when pollen from modified crops produced by Monsanto gets carried by the wind and genetically contaminates organic farms. Plaintiffs claim Monsanto has sued over 100 farmers for patent infringement, even though their crops had been unwillingly contaminated. In July, Florida Organic Growers joined the fight. Read more >>

Bystander Intervention
This past April, Vice President Joe Biden, who wrote and helped pass into law the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, spoke at the University of New Hampshire to promote a new initiative set forth by the Obama administration. A 19-page “policy guidance” was sent by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to all school districts, colleges and universities that receive federal funding. The letter outlines and reinforces current requirements for handling sexual violence under Title IX, which was originally designed to protect students against sexual discrimination, including sexual harassment and assault. Read more >>

Photo (above) courtesy of Nationaal Archief via Flickr Commons

Many, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the senior Democrat of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), the ranking member of Stearns’ subcommittee, accuse Stearns of having no “predicate that would justify a sweeping and invasive request to Planned Parenthood [who had] not identified any pattern of misuse of federal funds, illegal activity or other abuse that would justify a broad and invasive congressional investigation.” However, Stearns is still hung up on the now infamous “other money” riddle.

“Although Planned Parenthood is barred from using federal funds to perform abortions, these funds are fungible and allow the group to use funds from other sources ostensibly for abortions,” Stearns said in a statement.

Stearns is not only looking out for the well-being of federal money already spent but also for money in the future.

“With a national debt exceeding $14 trillion, funding of Planned Parenthood should be evaluated with other expenditures to reduce the deficit,” Stearns added.

In Planned Parenthood’s fiscal year of 2007-2008, according to their annual report, they received $363.2 million in government grants, which represents about a third of Planned Parenthood’s annual income.

Stearns has also been making headlines with his new investigation into federal loans totaling $535 million made to Solyndra, a failed California-based solar panel manufacturer. This September they filed for bankruptcy and laid off 1,100 workers.

Stearns was quoted as saying the U.S. can’t compete with China to make solar panels and wind turbines. When called out directly by President Obama on this statement, Stearns clarified he was referring to cheap labor.

“We should invest in and provide incentives to companies that can exploit our competitive advantage in technology and innovation [...] and not subsidize industries when these other nations have cheaper labor, no environmental or safety standards, less regulation and easy access to raw materials,” Stearns said.

Why waste U.S. money on American workers and companies that actually manufacture a product in the U.S. when it can be done more cheaply in China by exploited underpaid workers in unregulated conditions? What we should really be investing in is developing new technology.

Technology research and development definitely deserve federal funding, especially when it’s for health care for mothers and children, Head Start day care, public education and investing in American companies and laborers. Who these technologists will be in the future, what with a bunch of sick, under-supervised and under-educated children running around these days, is still unknown.

Stearns represents Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, which include parts of Gainesville and Ocala.

If you happen to be a small farmer, and Monsanto decides to take you to court, you can reasonably compare the result to a dragonfly (that’s you) splattered against the windshield of a truck (that’s Monsanto), and you’ll probably lose your farm. Then again, if an entire swarm of dragonflies descended on the truck at once, they may accomplish something.

In July, Florida Organic Growers, a Gainesville-based nonprofit established in 1987 to promote sustainable agriculture, joined a coalition of family farmers, seed companies, and environmental organizations representing hundreds of thousands of individuals in a lawsuit against Monsanto, led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association.

Shortly after the lawsuit began, Monsanto issued a statement saying they wouldn’t assert their patents against farmers who suffer “trace” amounts of transgenic contamination, but the promise wasn’t legally binding, and the plaintiffs aren’t convinced. And that’s all they want—a legally binding promise that Monsanto will end its predatory use of patent enforcement to put smaller competitors out of business.

In other news, a June 2011 ABC News poll reveals that 93 percent of Americans think genetically modified foods should be labelled and that 57 percent of Americans would use those labels strictly for the purpose of avoiding them.

Not everyone shares the same sentiment, though. The Center for Consumer Freedom prefers the term “genetically improved” and criticizes organic farmers for using “junk science” to market their products to a wealthy minority of suburban “elitists.” It should be noted that the Center for Consumer Freedom is a front group for Berman and Company, a public relations firm for tobacco companies, fast food restaurants, factory farms, and—last but not least—Monsanto.

Update (1/18/11): For an in-depth story on the topic, check out Where the GMOs Grow by Lily Wan.

Twenty percent of all female college students will experience sexual assault. That’s one in five. The national average for all women is one in six. The percentage for college males is 6 percent.

Title IX works in conjunction with the Jeanne Clery Act of 1990, which requires schools to report three years worth of campus crime every Oct. 1 as well as certain security policies, including sexual assault policies.

UNH, where Biden made his speech, has been nationally recognized as having one of the most progressive rape awareness and prevention programs in the country. UNH has two initiatives that have served as models for other colleges: Know Your Power and Bringing in the Bystander.

Know Your Power is a social marketing campaign encouraging students to intervene when they witness domestic violence or sexual assault. Bringing in the Bystander is an education and awareness program that teaches students through interactive discussion and learning exercises that everyone has a role in ending violence against women.

Beginning January, STRIVE, UF’s rape awareness program, plans to expand into a model based on UNH’s Bringing in the Bystander program.

Bringing in the Bystander is a “90-minute, face-to-face educational program [...] of structured programming, interactive presentations and discussions, that teaches not only statistics, but skills for helping, too,” said Jennifer Stuart, the coordinator of STRIVE.

“It’s a more direct effort to get out the education and prevention,” said Ron Del Moro, a peer educator.

Look for the upcoming full-length article in the Winter issue of The Fine Print.

Neatly placed inside University of Florida spokeswoman Janine Sikes’ mailbox in Tigert Hall is a Facebook photo of a girl in front of a 20-foot statue at the Plaza of the Americas, giving the camera the middle finger as she holds up a monster-sized yellow price tag reading “$35,000.”

Sikes and fellow UF spokesperson Steve Orlando confirmed the cost of the statues at $35,000 – and that’s only for the 15 on campus.

Student opinion on the statues has been fierce, to say the least.

And despite Sikes’ professional demeanor, the friction in the room was undeniable.

“If you’re asking me if I understand people are upset, then yes,” Sikes said.

“Crossing Paths,” the traveling sculptures by Seward Johnson, were presented by the Creative Campus Committee, whose 16 members include Lucinda Lavelli, the dean of the College of Fine Arts.

The statues were funded by the Provost Discretionary Fund. Dawn Riedy, office of the provost budget coordinator, explained that the ways in which the funds are spent are not up to a committee but the sole discretion of provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, Joe Glover.

According to Reidy, though, “there are rules.”

“Could he have bought books from the library instead of putting up art? I guess so, but fine arts is as much of an education as anything else,” said Leslie Bram, the associate vice president of the University of Florida Foundation.

Both spokespeople, Orlando and Sikes, confirmed no tuition or appropriated state money was used for funding the sculptures.

Instead, the money came from donations made to the fundraising arm of UF, the University of Florida Foundation, which hosts 8,000 different funds.

Riedy said the funds are non-restrictive, meaning they are given freely by donors.

“Nobody makes a gift to the Provost Discretionary Fund – if they make a gift for a non-student financial aid scholarship that is not restricted to a college, it is managed by the provost,” Bram said. “It may go into the discretionary fund or it may go into one of the many other funds we have.”

Money gets funneled into the provost’s fund by donations, fees, corporations and alumni dues. For example, in 2009 the provost received $2 million from University Athletic Association, Bram said.

Bram looked up the disbursement report for the Provost Discretionary Fund. It turns out within the last fiscal year the Provost Discretionary Fund has also given $80,000 in non-need based scholarships, $1,000 to faculty senate, and four separate disbursements towards Gator Nights at the Reitz Union.

Riedy added that the Provost Discretionary Fund also finances faculty development functions, student organization functions and Education Celebration, an annual Homecoming event that awards distinguished professors and undergraduate research mentors at the University of Florida.

Janine Sikes, speaking on behalf of Mr. Glover, said the Provost Discretionary Fund is meant to “help support programs that we do not believe should be paid for with state or tuition dollars.” The fund gives the provost the ability to support programs that “supplement campus life” or “enrich campus activities.”

According to the director of the sculpture foundation, Paula Stoeke, the fees paid to sponsor an exhibition go toward the costs associated with the project, including transportation, conservation and insurance.

“It’s not like it was decoration,” Bram said. “Why would you have a lecture series? Why would you have Gator Growl? Because it enhances the academic community.”

Editorial cartoon (top) by Diana Moreno.