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The illustrated woman
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ast Thursday me and Marshall went to the Nocreet Dam an saved a bunch a tadpoles that was getting eaten by stocked carp the state stocked for the purpose of sucking silty stuff off from the floor of the reservoir. Me and Marshall burn trash, but at the core we’re quite environmentally robust. A person needs to be robust if he’s going to catch tadpoles using a silver-bowl bowling trophy, and a Frisbee. Comin’ home we stopped in for a treat ta the Frosty Wosty. There’s a Home Depot-sized pond behind the Frosty Wosty that I set the tadpoles free in. Must have been over a 1,000 tads me and Marshall saved— and just in time; they’re soon going to lose their tails and become frogs, and when they do, they’re going to spend summer evenings creating a cacophonous chorus of ribeting. Is there a better way to spend a lifetime of summer evenings than eating ice cream near a pond full of frog’s ribeting? I thinkest not. After the rescue was fully complete, and the tads were swimming gaily about, (tell me they don’t look gay swimming, with their tails all lolly gagging behind—and please, please don’t call my editor or publisher to complain; I’m not anti gay, I’m pro gay; I’m just sayin’, relax and get the point), me and Marshall walked back to the Frosty Wosty, went roun‘ roadside to the window that has a sign over it reading, ‘You scream for ice cream here’. We ordered our treats. Marshall got a kid’s size pistachio with Jimmies. I had a jumbo banana boat. I like to mix fruit with my chemically flavored ice cream. Me and Marshall set and et, and listened to the gathered throng of ice cream lovers gossip, about divorce proceedings, mostly. “Sad,” I said, “Marshall, ta’ think half of all marriages end in divorce.” Marshall’s nicotine-stained tongue darted from his mouth, feathering the mountain of coiled pistachio creemee with a lick that was so industrious it left a small group of pink, red, and white jimmies stuck to a wayward nose hair. After a much less ambitious follow-up lick, Marshall replied, “Even sadder ta’ think, the other half of them marriages might last forever.” ‘Bout time I was tippin’ my banana boat, letting the melted remains run to the back of my gullet, Marshall was poppin the bottom half-inch of sugar cone wholly into the far reaches of his. I asked: “Marshall. What is love?” “Well I’ll tell ya,” Marshall said, “I’ll tell ya what love is.” He paused. “After I get some water. Gadfrey them creemees is good, but they make me thirstier than a Camel with dry humps.” He drew half a Dixie cup of water from the Frosty Wosty’s outdoor faucet, placed the cup to his bottom lip, snapped his head back and drew the content of the Dixie cup in one short-loud-gulp. Then he crumpled the cup, pegged it into the bed of his black and white 1968 Chevy pick-up, burped the words, “all my ex’s live in Texas,” and commenced to telling me what love is.
See LOGGER, page 17
Identity zoning T
his reading audience being, I’d guess, composed of sophisticated practitioners of contemporary political vernacular phraseology, there’s no need for me to waste any of my allotted column-inches on an explanation of “identity politics”. Nor, I’d guess, do I need to describe how identity politics leads inexorably to identity jurisprudence. More than a century ago, French author Anatole France (false name) wrote “Le Lys Rouge”, 1894, which contains this well-known quote: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges…” sarcastically illustrating through his Communist world-view, the Leftist support for the idea that members of different groups are entitled to different treatment under law and regulation. Lady Justice now peeks around her blindfold to determine who, appearing before her, should be treated more gently or more harshly, depending on their group identity, for the same crime—or, in modern Vermont planning and zoning situations, the same permit application. So the new logical sequence is: 1. identity politics, 2. identity jurisprudence, and 3. identity zoning. Just as, under the Anatole France view of things, the rich are to be judged more rigorously for stealing than the poor, so, under contemporary P&Z doctrine in many Vermont towns, corporate permit applicants are to be treated more rigorously than equally-for-profit mom-and-pop applicants, and both such identity groups are to be treated more rigorously than government or non-profit applicants; this explains why Middlebury has granted multiple variances for various non-profit housing applicants and why the Addison County’s shire town raised no environmental objection to the construction of its own exemplary countycourthouse-in-a-swamp—a bit of regulatory empathy which, I’d guess, wouldn’t have been accorded a for-profit private developer. Selective empathy is a big part of identity politics, jurisprudence, or zoning. Sometimes the empathy is negative, as exemplified by WalMart in St.Albans, a 20-year P&Z odyssey which the corporation has stuck with to the (almost) end; or Home Depot in Montpelier, where the corporation fairly quickly decided to exit from an unpredictable conditions-laden not-by-the-book permitting process. Most recently, corporate applicants in Ferrisburgh (fast-food/fuel-stop/convenience store) and Middlebury (first, high-end coffee and now office supplies) have been the targets of negative empathy expressed through identity zoning, In the latter instance, both withdrew once they realized what unpre-
Too close for comfort
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ASA science writer and former colleague D. C. Agle likes to describe them as “the celestial equivalent of sonograms.” They are radar echoes that are bounced off asteroids passing close to the Earth. And astronomers love ‘em. Coordinated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., these microwave images from the outer limits have stories to tell us about near-Earth objects or NEOs. It is believed that massive NEOs have hit the Earth’s surface in the past causing mass extinctions and global climate change. “The standard ground-based tools for asteroid science require a night's sky, and what you come away with in the end is a pohotgraphic image of a dot,” said JPL radar astronomer Steve Ostro. “But with radar astronomy, the sky at high noon is just as inviting as that at midnight, and without launching a full-blown space mission we can actually get valuable information about the physical makeup of these objects.” Enter the World War II-era technology of radar—short for ra(dio) d(etection) a(nd) r(anging). The obscure field of radar astronomy uses tools that are similar to your kitchen microwave oven. Those readers old enough may remember that the first microwave kitchen ovens manufactured by Raytheon for $5,000 in 1947 were called “radar ovens”. Modern microwave ovens are no different—you are cooking your food with radar waves. Radar antennas on Earth emit a radio beam of directed microwave signals toward a passing NEO. These microwaves don’t cook the asteroid, but when the radar pulses bounce off the asteroid they produce what’s called an echo. “You can make out surface features (on the echo images),” said Ostro. “A good echo can give us a spatial resolution finer than 10 meters." More than 190 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered using radar. The objects are somewhat like snowflakes since no two are exactly alike. NEOs can be both rocky and metallic; some even have their own orbiting mini moons. While there’s plenty of evidence of ancient terrestrial impacts by NEOs, what are the chances of being whacked by one today? In the winter of 2004, a big asteroid named Apophis got the full attention of JPL astronomers. Astronomers figured out a rough orbit for Apophis, a 1,300-foot-diameter cosmic mountain tumbling end- over-
SATURDAY July 18, 2009 dictable permit conditions they were facing. Which, of course, is what the p&z folks, reflecting majority anti-corporate-identitygroup community sentiment, wanted. It wouldn’t have been seemly to have denied the application for overtly-stated identitygroup reasons, just as it wasn’t seemly for the next Supreme Court justrix to have overtly declared Hispanic females juridically superior to white males—an arrogant policy statement which had to be “walked back from” (a little D.C. new-speak lingo, there) in order to keep the preference doctrine unspoken, invisible—but unchanged. I’d guess that it’s the desire of folk,s who enjoy occupying P&Z board seats, to exercise their superior discretion— in the Progressive model, the brighter have the obligation to govern the dumber for their own good, what Rudyard Kipling called “the white man’s burden”—by dealing with permit applications on a case-by-case basis, thus providing positive or negative regulatory empathy as members of various identity groups appear before them. The theory would explain why “conditional use” has acquired such increased popularity amongst planners and zoners in recent decades, and the regulatory process has become progressively (pun intended) less transparent and predictable over the same time span. It would likewise explain why P&Z folks who, decades ago, enthused theoretically over performance-standards zoning, have since become increasingly hostile to the concept. A regulatory model, which establishes quantitative measures for all the various aspects of development in various zones—such as traffic, lighting, lot size, building footprint, noise, smoke, utility requirements, service impacts, and so on—would transparently and predictably approve any proposal which met the printed quantitative and qualitative standards. Conversely, it would disapprove one which didn’t. The opportunity for the P&Z folks to exercise discretionary identity zoning would likely disappear because they wouldn’t have the courage to list—in writing—the favored or “disfavored” identity groups deserving of positive or negative empathy (which might appear before them with a permit request). More next week. Former Vermonter Martin Harris lives in Tennessee. end through space. The astronomers realized that, based on preliminary calculations, the NEO’s orbit took it mighty close to terra firma. Scribbling a few numbers, Steve Ostro made a sobering prediction— Apophis might slam into the Earth in the year 2029. Alarm bells went off in the minds of Ostro and his JPL team. It was time to get more accurate information about Apophis’s orbital mechanics. Ostro and three other radar astronomers used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to “ping” Apophis. The radar data significantly improved the asteroid's orbital estimate. “We were able to rule out a potential Earth collision in 2029,” Ostro said looking very relieved. Whew! Earth was lucky this time. Apophis was removed from NASA’s 10 Most Wanted list, but other planetoids like it lurk in the deeps of space. What’s in the Sky: A clustering of heavenly bodies greets the stragazer during the pre-dawn hours of July 18. In the east, above the constellation of Orion, look for the Moon, Mars and Venus. Former NASA science writer Lou Varricchio, M.Sc., isVermont’s NASA/JPL solar system ambassador. You can order his book about the Moon, titled “Inconstant Moon”, through Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com.