Thursday, June 28, 2007

Taqueria Trucks




This article from the Times-Picayune is about Jefferson Parish banning the operation of mobile taqueria trucks that serve hot lunches to the huge population of construction workers still rebuilding the region. The taco trucks followed the vast migrartion of Hispanic workers who flooded in post-K to commence the rebuilding.

The comments on the story mostly go back and forth about whether the ban is racist or not, whether the taco trucks are enabling illegal immigration.

Not being on the ground, I can't comment on the true purpoise of the ban, but I have nothing against teh taqueria trucks. This was, in fact, the only major thought I had about the influx of Hispanic workers during the rebuilding:

Better Mexican food.

Some of these people will like the New orleans region, and stay, and some of them will open up restaurants, melding their cuisine with the local cuisine, using fresh local ingedients. Jamabalaya with chorizo! Crawfish-stuffed chile rejillenos! Yay!

This is what New Orleans does. It is syncretistic. It takes people in, absorbs them -- eats them if you will, subsumes them, and they become part of the delicious melange, the gumbo of New Orleans. If New Orleans culture could survive the annexing by the United States, it can certainly survive this, and will be the richer for it. Remember, this was a Spanish city once, after all. We already have Vietnamese Pho houses and Salvadoran papusarias. So why not taco trucks?

It's all good. When I get home I look forward to eating my first meal from a taqueria truck.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

news @ nature.com - Plants can tell who's who - It's not just animals that can tell siblings from strangers.

Now this is coll. This is the kind of cool thing you can find on the Net:

news @ nature.com - Plants can tell who's who - It's not just animals that can tell siblings from strangers.

Plants -- plants! -- can recognize their own relatives. In experiments, they grow and compete for nutrients more agressively when they are potted with non-relatives than when with theie leafy kin.

Awesome! It is a mystery how they do this. Perhaps some kind of chemical signature? Plant pheromones?

Plants are far more aware of their environments than is generally known. They can infer the presence and the abundance of neighboring plants by their own experience of nutrient and water levels in their soil, and act accordingly. I like what one of the scientists in the story said, "plants have a secret social life."

I took Botany for my life science as an undergrad, and I'm really glad I did, because it have me a different view of life, of the nature and processes of life. I learned the basics of biology -- mitosis/miosis, genetics, cellular metabolism, the Krebs cycle. But from a different viewpoint, vegetative instead of animalistic.

Plants are for more complex organisms than people generally realize. A flowering angiosperm like a rose bush or an apple tree is a highly complex lifeform, as complex in its way as a mammal, but we think it less because it is so different from us. Vegetative. They seem less alive to us because they don't move and react like animals. Well, actually, they do, but we can't see it because it is on a slower scale -- hours and days instead of moments.

And now we see that they are more aware, more alive, yet.

This is one of the things I love about libraianship -- the ability, the need, to always learn new things.

Friday, June 08, 2007

My Facebook

So my former classmates (wow, it feels weird to say that) keep telling me to get onto Facebook so that we can stay in touch. So, I did. Here's my profile:

http://www.facebook.com/p/Kirsten_M_Corby/548301382

I can see how people get obsessed with this, adding pictures, tracking their friends, writing on walls. But personally I prefer blogging.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Kudos for Me :-)

Hey, check it out, Jeffrey over at Library Chronicles gives me some love.

WE have had our differences, but he is still a fellow NOPL staffer and therefore one of my peeps. Awright!

Friday, June 01, 2007

Bad Mojo

The first resume I send out comes back marked "Undeliverable."

Mike the Tiger dies on Commencement Day.

First day of hurricane season, there's a storm in the Gulf.

The bad omens keep piling up. I'm getting kind of freaked.