What's Happening?

Such odd weather! I certainly like being able to wear shorts, but this is still March and that means it’s winter. And they are having Santa Ana winds in Orange County, driving up the temperatures and creating terrible fire conditions. But Santa Ana winds are usually over and done with by the end of December and not to be seen again until October.

The library called and I picked up the book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky. I’m just a few chapters into it and I have to say that it’s quite good. It’s filled with the kind of facts that I love to learn about. Useless but fun! And if we follow the authors lead, we could easily come to believe that it was the Basque fisherman that were among the earliest of visitors to North America as they fished for cod, just offshore. Cabot, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus, spotted over a 1,000 Basque fishing boats near the Saint Lawrence River. Apparently they had been fishing there for hundreds of years, coming onshore just long enough to salt and dry their catch.

Fish aren’t changing our world today. So what is? I think it’s information. It’s the fact that we can now spread information to every spot on the planet. Information that isn’t always well received; there are plenty of people in power that don’t want to see it happen but the flow of information is inexorable. And if we look back in history; just a short look back…widespread literacy is a fairly new phenomena. In 1900, there were just 305,750 white males over the age of 21 that were literate in California.

An unexpected result of my looking into the subject of literacy was that I found out that a lot of the information about it, the data, are locked up in websites that demand credentials and payment for access. And there is some suspicion that literacy rates are manipulated for power. Hmm? Who would have thought?