Crashing in Michigan, and other tidbits

I’m just back from a trip to Mich-again, by way of Atlanta. I spoke several times and consulted on a couple properties. I fell in love with Michigan and Michiganders, and my messages were generally well-received. In other words, the number of messages under the heading of “hate mail” was greatly exceeded by the number of serious conversations with generous people.

I’m in possession of a couple ginormous video files from the International Conference on
Sustainability, Transition & Culture Change in Bellaire, Michigan. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to transfer these high-definition video files from e-chip to blog. So, if you’re interested in hearing my not-so-usual shtick, you’ll have to patiently deal with the archived livestream (a term which, at least to me, seems a bit oxymoronic and even counter-intuitive).

I spoke about breaking away from empire in a TED-style talk posted here. Later, I was featured as one of four people in a “fishbowl” and those clicks are best viewed sequentially: here, then here.

At some point perhaps I’ll manage to convert these files, and the others featuring me from the Local Future conference, to relatively clean clips. If that happens, I’ll post them at my YouTube channel and in this space. Don’t hold your breath.

On the topic of my technophobic inadequacy, I asked Carolyn Baker to write a guest essay for this space. Although she submitted me plenty of material, I’m stuck in Ludditeville, and therefore able only to include a link to her excellent piece, Welcome to Happy Valley: Occupy Penn State. The opening paragraph gives you the general direction this essay is headed:

State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University, is ensconsed in a somewhat bucolic region of the commonwealth called Happy Valley. The name exquisitely connotes tranquility, American values, and the smiling faces of guileless, hard-working citizens. It is also home of the Nittany Lions, a name long synonymous with Penn State’s football team. The Nittany lion was adopted by the student body in 1907 as the official football mascot and was taken from the name of nearby Mount Nittany, which derived its name from a Native American word meaning “protective barrier.” Since then, Penn State has become synonymous with football and all of that sport’s infinite sexual connotations such as “penetration,” “tight end,” and “wide open in the end zone.”

With apologies to Carolyn — and to the rest of you — for my general sloth, indolence, and Luddite-ism, please follow the link to Carolyn’s full article. And stay tuned for future news from the former conference.