They're not all bad

All this talk about the worm that ate the internet yesterday reminds me to say something good about the worms that eat my garbage.

At our house we have a compost bin, and in it live thousands of redworms. We started our relationship with this colony's great-great-great-great-grandparents around 10 years ago, after hearing about the benefits of worm composting from a co-worker. At the time, some friends of mine were starting up a new ecology institute called the Northwest Earth Institute, and they had us all buzzing about small things we could do to move our lives toward the ecological ideal. They held some really interesting classes called "Deep Ecology," and included in our class was one stubborn skeptic who forced us all to admit that ecology is really a religion.

But an hour later, a lot of us said, O.k., but it's still something we want to do.

Shortly after that class I went out and bought a humble little book called "Worms Eat My Garbage" by a gal from Michigan named Mary Appelhof, who is the queen of worm composting (a.k.a. vermicomposting). It explains how you do it. Basically you set up a bin; make a nice bed of straw, leaves or shredded newspaper; add water; add worms (we bought a particular strain of redworm through a local greeny store); and start dropping in all of your fruit and vegetable waste, eggshells, coffee filters, and a few other items (no meat, bread or grain). Next thing you know your little buddies are eating it up and pooping out these little black crumbs -- "castings" is the polite word -- that come together to make some of the best fertilizer you ever put on shrubs, flowers or vegetables.

As Appelhof's book points out, it's easy to make your own bin, but you can also buy one already made, for not much money. Our first one (we inherited a bigger one when we bought our current home) was a pretty small plastic bin, a little bigger than the size of a newspaper and maybe 18 inches high. Air holes in the top, drain holes on the bottom for the small amount of worm "tea" that sometimes runs off. (Which house plants love, by the way.)

It sounds gross, but when you start doing it you see that it isn't. There's no odor if you do it right -- neither a garbage smell nor a poop smell. And it's hard to do it wrong. These guys can handle neglect. You don't have to turn the compost, ever. If the bin is big enough, you needn't get around to removing and using the "doo" for years. The stuff compacts down. Every few months, the little devils actually eat the bed they're in (and their deceased brethren, ewwww), so you add some more straw, shredded newspapers or leaves. No big whoop.

You do get fruit flies, lots of fruit flies, so you probably don't want to do this in the living section of your house (although some people do so and simply set up a "trap" for the flies). And the worms can't withstand heavy frost, so in many parts of the world, it isn't feasible unless you winterize your bin. But they can handle a few days at a time below freezing, and in a place like Portland there's never more than that.

One week when we first got the worms, it got really cold for several days and we forgot to move the bin inside. The poor guys froze solid in their mucky little home. So we brought them inside, giving them up for dead. The next day, they were thawed out and recovered fully.

After a while you figure out which kinds of garbage these guys eat quickly, and what takes them longer to chew on. (Yes, I think I read that they actually do chew.) Banana peels disappear in no time. Corn cobs might still be in there when your grandkids are gardening. They (the worms, that is) eat slowly in the winter and pretty darned fast in the summer.

You don't have to be a hippie or a green to try this. It's easy. You can't not like the extra space it makes in your garbage can, which you can use to discard styrofoam if you are so inclined. You also get a ready supply of bait for fishing -- catch-and-release or otherwise. And when you scoop out your first batch of beautiful, free fertilizer and see how rich it is, you'll thank Mary Appelhof, and her billions of little pals.

WWTSD?

Well, the war has almost started -- I guess W. has to wait until the Super Bowl is over -- and the question of the day is, should we be doing this?

As I try to formulate my answer, I ask myself what the political leaders of my childhood in New Jersey would have done -- the most powerful people I observed back in my wonder years.

The Cosa Nostra. You know, the Mafia. The mob. Tony Soprano. What would this character (not entirely fictional) tell us?

Tony: These people have f*cked with us, big time. These Muslim terrorists, they hurt us bad. You can't just let sh*t like that go. You have to send a message back.

But Tony, we've already gone into Afghanistan and unseated the Taliban. We're rounding up Al Qaeda operatives all around the world, and making examples of a bunch of other people who look a little Qaeda-ish and have screwed up with immigration papers or something. Isn't that enough?

What about your own people? Ya gotta make it so that your own people know that you're their protection, and you're still there. Here these guys are on TV telling us they're gonna keep doin' this sh*t. Just tonight I see some bastard tellin' us 9-11 was a picnic compared to what's gonna happen next. That affects your people. You have to send a message. I'll give ya your Al Jazeera, pal -- you'll be eatin' sand pretty soon.

But that's not the American way, Tony. We worry about justice. We honor human life. When someone kills your people, you hunt down and punish the people who did it, but with due process of law, and only after it's proven beyond a reasonable doubt who the true perpetrators were. We don't go killing other, innocent people just because they have the same religion and share the desire to do us harm. At least not if they haven't tried to harm us yet. If one of your capos was assassinated by one of the New York families, you wouldn't be entitled to take revenge on some other family next door, would you?

Hey, look, I don't understand this sh*t. They're all Muslim terrorists to me. We got whacked big time by the Muslim terrorists, and here's their hotshot boss Saddam Hussein over there, and he's been livin' on borrowed time for as long as I can remember. I can understand Bush wantin' his a*s. Plus he tried to kill Bush's old man, ya gotta look at that.

Isn't this an exceedingly dangerous move? In addition to the lives lost in Iraq, we risk igniting a powder keg in that region, and maybe other regions as well.

Yeah. That bothers me. Bush is stickin' our neck out. But he's an oil man, right? He needs the friggin' black gold from under the desert to get him all hot and bothered. Well, let me tell ya, if this thing gets outta hand, it ain't gonna be good for the oil business, or any other business. There's too many nut cases running around with smallpox, anthrax, atom bombs, all that sh*t. He better hope it stays contained.

So you agree it's a risky business.

Yeah, sure. The whole thing could blow up in his face. But whaddya gonna do? Just sit here and turn the other cheek while these punks take out the friggin' World Trade Center? That sh*t's for girls.

There's no proof it's the same people.

Hey, there's no proof of a lotta things, but you know they're right. There's no proof I can come over there and shove that phone up your a*s, but we both know I can do it, right?

Tony, you're a Christian. The Bible says, "Thou shalt not kill." The Bible says, "We forgive those who trespass against us." You even say that when you go to church.

Hey, don't give me that Bible sh*t, erright? The Bible says not to eat scampi or scungilli too, but they're eatin' them in the Vatican right now. I been there, my friend, and let me tell ya, there really ain't a choice in the long run. Eventually we are gonna have to, like I say, make a f*ckin' statement. So we do it here, with Colonel Mustache. Maybe some of these other freaks over there will lay off. Plus, our people see that we're doin' somethin'.

Y'know, all this war bullsh*t is makin' me nervous. I wish we'd get it over with already. I got enough other sh*t to worry about as it is.

Transition time

Here we are. It's Friday evening. As one of my old partners always used to say (dripping with irony) at this time of the week, only two more working days 'til Monday.

But in the wee small hours of this morning, a blessed event occurred: I finished grading exams for another term. Yes, those 250 lovely little essays -- each with its own individualized meaning, of course -- have all been read, re-read, and arranged into the hideous grading curve. Grade reaction time starts next week, and that can be draining, but it's a Sunday stroll in the park compared to sitting up nights with the bluebooks.

By the way, I'd like to thank the makers of Sanford Col-Erase erasable colored pencils for their fine product. They are the official marking pencils of my tax classes.

Now it's time to start digging into the huge pile of other work that has taken shape on the floor of my den while I have been separating the wheat from the chaff. I ought to be caught up by the end of spring break, in late March!

But hey, it's nice to have a good job these days. I dig in gladly.

What to do

Why blog?

So the reporter asked. There's no simple answer, although parts of the complex answer are obvious. Ego. Extroversion. Frustrated careers as a journalist, comedian, disc jockey, politician. Suppressed creative urges. Anger, I'll have to admit to lots of that.

And around this time of year, there's another big reason to add to the mix. Yes, I'm talking about the age-old practice of work avoidance.

I make my living in higher education, and twice a year, we encounter the part of our job that most of us like the least: giving and grading exams. Once our exams are taken by the students and presented to us by the expert pain administrators in the Registrar's Office, most of us take them home and try to deal with them there.

We sit and look at them in the box they came in. (One year, in an attempt to integrate various facets of my life, I put the box under the Christmas tree for a few days.) After a while, we take the exams out of the box and put them in a pile. The students at our school (like most law schools) take their tests anonymously, and identify themselves only by a number, and so we can always put them in numerical order. We can check them to see if they're all there. My exams come back in manila envelopes, so there's always the task of taking them out of the envelopes.

The pile sits there. We stare at it. We think about opening the first one and reading just a little. But it's too painful a thought.

There's got to be something else that needs doing. Clean out the closet. Rearrange the sock drawer. There's that article I've been meaning to work on.

Anything but grade those exams.

Take the cat to the vet for a checkup. Trip to Costco, we're down to our last 18 rolls of toilet paper. Wash the car. Trim the rose bushes. Heck, wax the car. Feed the rose bushes. How about that inventory of household goods that the insurance agent has been after us to make?

Now's the perfect time. Anything but grade those exams.

And when everything around the house is in total ship-shape? Just when it appears that there is no further excuse to postpone grading?

Now that's where blogging comes in mighty handy.

Photo op

Radio silence

People who aren't Catholic don't know what they are missing. One of things we do is something called the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but old-timers like myself still call it confession. You tell your sins to the priest, you feel sorrow for them, you do your assigned penance, you resolve to do better, and your sins are forgiven.

That last part is really important. Forgiven. Clean slate. That's why you go.

At a recent session with an old school confessor, it was suggested that I perform three acts of self-denial as my penance. Giving up something that I like and that I'm used to, to show contrition. Today I decided to start with music. No radio, no stereo, for a whole day.

It's only 1:37 p.m. and already I'm jonesing.

There's a lot of music around my den, and in the kitchen and in the car. A couple of thousand titles. And as I discovered today, I can't be in the car alone and not instinctively turn the radio on. In all three trip segments, I actually turned the dial and had it on for a second before I caught myself.

Now it's time to tackle the most tedious chore of my job -- exam grading -- and to do so in silence is going to be difficult indeed.

Tomorrow, no caffeine, for a whole day.

And on Sunday, the big one: No internet for the entire day, even though I will doubtlessly be seated in front of the computer as part of my grading chores for most of the time.

To people who are really suffering in this world, stories like this one are disgusting. Here's this rich, spoiled American boy bitching about no music, or caffeine, or internet for a day like it's real deprivation.

But to me, today, it is.

I'm doing my penance, wimpy as it is. I don't want to end up in hell like Tony Pierce.

Remember, the judges' decisions are final

What were they thinking? It was tough to narrow it down to 10, but here they are, with malice toward none, but constructively critical toward all, my --

UPDATE: Identifications and explanations added 3:30 am 1/2.