A
Feature Story - The ditty bops
by Karen Solomon - S.F. Chronicle 7/31/2007
From cars to clothes, kitchen cleaners to ketchup, nearly every product imaginable is wet with greenwash, and the next natural, organic step would be to wrap the message of sustainable food within the fat folds of indie rock.
The unique and excellent music of L.A. duo the Ditty Bops is certainly not the first to flower an environmental message from the stem of popular music. But partners and real-life couple Amanda Barrett and Abby DeWald - who last year raised an environmental flag by doing their entire coast-to-coast tour via bicycle - are bringing together an unusual recipe for marrying the flavors of environmentalism, sustainable agriculture, local farm support and green eating.
Two decades after Willie Nelson brought guitars to the heartland with Farm Aid, the duet is starting a six-week tour packed with farm visits, farmers' markets and herbs growing in the tour van. Whether they will succeed in changing the mind of a single Big Mac eater or if they're just preaching to the choir remains to be seen. What's really important is their ear-alluring sound: the Andrews Sisters meets Sleeter Kinney - a piquant and vibrant combination of Western Swing, early jazz and Led Zeppelin The pair got the idea for the Farm Tour while on their 4,700-mile bike odyssey last year. "It occurred to me that our slow movement and the Slow Food movement are kind of similar.
We couldn't believe how many acres of farm land that were just corn and soy beans along the way," says Barrett. The next leg of the tour begins Wednesday on Windrose Farms in Paso Robles. This outdoor show, the first of their hay bale-side performances on the 31-stop tour, will include farm fresh produce for nibbling and a tour of the farm's sheep, lilacs and antique apples included in the ticket price. And the entire show's proceeds will benefit this independent, 50-acre farm.
The next day, the show spreads its roots to a free performance at Concord's Todos Santos Plaza, with a farmers' market in front. Friday, the Ditty Bops play Berkeley's Freight & Salvage Coffee House, with a handful of local co-op Arizmendi pizzas to feed the crowd, gratis. Saturday, a Santa Cruz performance will feature another farmers' market, and the UC Santa Cruz on-campus sustainable gardening sciences leg, Life Lab, may be cooking what its members have grown. But wait, there's more: There's the 2007 Vegetable Bikini calendar, which features the musicians in creative bikini-wear made from cabbage, lotus and carrots in artful, pinup quality collage.
The tour van will be equipped with an EarthBox - a 29-inch, water-saving terrarium that will be sprouting lettuce greens and herbs - nestled in with five musicians, their gear and two bicycles. One EarthBox will be raffled off at each show, with all proceeds to support the Growing Connection, an organization promoting EarthBoxes as a way to grow inexpensive produce in the United States, Ghana, Mexico and Nicaragua. The herbs and lettuces will be incorporated into the band's hotel-room salads. Still hungry for more?
There will be the tour blog covering food facts. They will be collecting donations for Farm Aid. And then there are the meetings with local farmers, chefs and food folks along the way. Locally, the biodynamic duo plans a visit to Strauss organic dairy and a performance at Sebastopol's Redwood Hill Farm - strictly for the goats. "We're expanding our demographics to interspecies," quips Barrett. "It will be some interesting acoustics out there, and a nice break from our regular audience, who usually talks back. I want to see how the goats will react." No tickets will be sold for this event. Why the focus on farming? "I hope people are turned on to the variety of foods available directly from a farm." Barrett says. "And we hope to learn more about the farming process along the way - about how animals are treated, and about renewable energy use." And doing so in a tongue-in-cheek manner, as exhibited by tools like the calendar, which features images of DeWald as a carrot being picked by bunny Barrett, or an all-goat show, is the medium and their message.
Simplifying agriculture and simplifying diet ( both women are vegetarian) are themes that will permeate the tour. Whereas last year's performance saw multiple costume changes, elaborate painted sets, a skeleton, pagoda and other hefty stage props, Barrett reports this summer's performances will be slim and trim, with the duo playing instruments - Barrett on mandolin, dulcimer and vocals, and DeWald on guitar and vocals.
They will sport their signature plastic outfits, an homage to the band's nonprofit organization, You and I Save the World, whose flagship cause is the abolition of plastic bags. While waving the flag of environmental awareness may attract attention to some real issues of the day, Barrett confesses the whole (grain) inspiration for the interest in farming. "This will probably be the best food we've ever eaten on tour." For tickets and show information, visit http://www.thedittybops.com/. This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle.
A
An electric car for the common man. One company is hoping to bring a $30,000, 80-mph battery-powered sedan to the market by 2009.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- If all goes according to plan, by 2009 you could be sticking it to Big Oil by driving an all electric, Chinese-made sedan for little more than the cost of a Camry.
Electric cars are nothing new. But until now they've either been very expensive to produce or, if not that, then small and relatively slow - little more than glorified golf carts.
Miles Rubin, with his $30,000 Miles XS 500, is hoping to change all that.
Hybrid power served 5 ways
According to Rubin, Founder of Miles Automotive Group, the XS 500 has a top speed of 80 miles per hour and a range of 120 miles at 60 miles per hour.That's about as fast as GM's late-90s era electric car, the EV 1. And the XS 500 will be a lot cheaper to produce, the company says. Both the low cost and the high range can be attributed to China, where low labor costs keep the price down and state-sponsored research into battery technologyyielded what Rubin said was an advanced lithium ion power pack produced by Lishen Battery.
Plug the car into a normal wall socket and, according to company literature, six hours later you've got a full charge.While this sounds like the perfect vehicle, serious challenges remain.The first, of course, will be bringing the car to market. Rubin said he'll have 6 prototypes of the XS 500 by the fall, but they still need tinkering to get safety approval from U.S. regulators, plus do additional battery testing.
Then there's the competition. Phoenix Motors has a four-door utility truck with similar performance capabilities that it's planning on selling to the public around the same time. And Tesla Motors, makers of the $100,000 all-electric Tesla Roadster which is expected to enter limited production by the end of the year, has plans to enter the sedan market next. (An e-mail to the company seeking comment was not returned. For more on Tesla's sedan plans, as well the recent departure of that company's CEO read the Green Wombat blog.)The big automakers are also getting in on the electric game with their plug-in hybrids - vehicles that use an electric motor all the time but can recharge with both a plug and a conventional gasoline engine, giving them far greater range.General Motors, the only big automaker to announce anything like a target date, said Thursday mass production of its Volt plug-in should begin by 2010.
Selling the car is another obvious challenge. Ford, GM, Toyota and Honda all had electric vehicles back in the late 1990s. They were sold in California at a time when state regulations basically required car makers to do so. All of them halted production after those regulations were changed. "But the world has changed," said Rubin. "We need to get off our reliance on oil and we need to alter our carbon footprint."
Rubin has previously worked as a corporate lawyer and, later, headed several companies, including a company that sold metal forms to Detroit automakers. He most recently headed Polo/Ralph Lauren Jeans.Even if U.S. consumers flock to electric cars out of environmental concern, Rubin may still have to convince them to put their bodies inside a Chinese vehicle, especially in light of all the news lately of recalled Chinese goods. To ensure quality, he says there are inspectors in both Chinese factories that will produce the car. He also touts the car's safety features including as reinforced doors and both front and side airbags. "The cars will speak for themselves. You can PR it to death, but if it doesn't perform well, it's dead on arrival," he said.Rubin will also have to answer skeptics who wonder how an electric vehicle is actually better for the environment, given that the electricity to run the car is produced largely from coal and the nation's electric grid is strained as is.
Rubin retorts that the electric grid is plenty capable of handling demand from electric vehicles, provided people recharge them at night. On the environmental question, he says just because electricity now is mostly made from coal and natural gas, renewables like solar or wind or carbon-free nuclear power could play a larger part of meeting the nation's electricity demand. Environmentalists also support the development of electric cars, noting that it's much more efficient to create electricity than it is to power a vehicle with a combustion engine. 
copyright 2006-2007
maxxorganic.com - the norcal development group - rideshasta.com
