Jake Sigg’s Nature News Special to Bayview Hill Association

1.   Fish & Game Dept studying closure of 21 state game refuges2.   National Public Lands Day September 25/California Coastal Cleanup Day September 253.   Intern / Teaching Assistant Wanted4.   9-year-old receives letter from the deep blue sea/River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things5.   Outdoor education and adventures with Richard Louv and the Tuolumne River Trust6.   California Native Plant Society Curriculum for Children Needs Reviewers7.   Feedback:  By-passing of CEQA8.   Blog about Golden Gate Park9.   World Giving Index:  1/3 giving to charity, 1/5 volunteering10. Home Energy Efficiency:  What’s New with Audits and Rebates – Sept 22 in Redwood City11. Remembering Barbara Pitschel, September 2812.  The Watershed Nursery now open on Sundays13.  Rare earth minerals from China are rarer14.  Alan Simpson likens Social Security to “a milk cow with 310 million tits”.  He’s sucking on the biggest15.  Public rebels against high fructose corn syrup – so they want to change its name16.  Map makers attention:  The world isn’t topsy-turvy enough17.  Why some people have power over companies and others don’t – some surprising facts18.  “Evil must be the negation of something man had added to the world.”  Vietnam stories coming back19.  Notes & Queries:  The “nothing” that the universe came from:  wasn’t it something?20.  Tennessee Williams has a thought about that “nothing”/a quip from Oscar Wilde
 
1.  The State Dept. of Fish & Game (DFG) is reviewing the status of California’s 21 state game refuges (totaling about one million acres, mostly in northern California).  At present, NO hunting is allowed in these areas.  The Dept. apparently would like to close 19 of the 21 refuges, and thereby open them to sport hunting.  The Dept. is accepting public comments on this matter until December 1, 2010.California currently  has 21  wildlife refuges spread across our state. They were established a century ago with the intension of enhancing and protecting California’s wildlife populations. Below are some things I feel you should be aware of regarding these refuges. ·       The California Legislature has directed the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) to review and evaluate the existing State Wildlife Refuge system (also known as State Game Refuges.)·       DFG feels that the purpose for these refuges is no longer valid,  it does not want to be responsible for continuing to “manage” them, and is considering eliminating nearly all (19 out of 21) of the wildlife refuges in the state.·       Before DFG can make its recommendation to the Legislature, DFG is required to provide an opportunity for public comment. It is apparent that DFG has extended minimal effort to inform the public of their right to comment on this issue, as very few Californian’s are aware that our wildlife refuges are about to be eliminated. The required public comment period will end December 1, 2010.If you are concerned about the future of California’s wildlife, and the refuges that were established for their protection, please take a moment to give your comments to DFG regarding this issue. There is a short survey they are offering along with an opportunity for additional comments at the links below: DFG’s Perspective and Evaluation of the Status of Existing State Game Refuges:http://www.dfg.ca.gov/wildlife/gamerefuges/ DFG’s short survey soliciting public opinion:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/gamerefuge Additional comments to DFG can be sent to:wildlifestrategy@dfg.ca.gov Please pass this information to others, as many fellow Californians are unaware that we are about to lose our wildlife refuges and of the public comment opportunity.
An excellent article on this issue by Marlin Jasper, Chair of the Sierra Club in Placer County, was recently published in the Placer Sentinel, the link to the article is below.http://www.placersentinel.com/2010/protecting_state_game.html

·       Marin County (Mt Tamalpais)·       Contra Costa County (Mt. Diablo)·       San Mateo/Santa Clara counties (Stanford Univ.)
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2.  National Public Lands Day – Saturday, September 25Get up and get out for National Public Lands Day on September 25, 2010 and join the largest hands-on volunteer event to improve public lands across America! Come out to your Golden Gate National Parks and PLAY, SERVE, SHARE! PLAY: Visit the parks, bring your friends and/or family, and just enjoy the parks. Play in the Parks by joining the Presidio Y’s Fun and Fitness activities!
SERVE: Help out for California Coastal Cleanup Day.
SHARE: Share your park adventure by filling out a Golden Gate Log or entering the KQED’s QUEST photo contest.For more details, visit our website: http://www.parksconservancy.org/help/volunteer/special-volunteer-events.htmlContact: (415) 561-3077 or volunteer@parksconservancy.org
Pitch in for California Coastal Cleanup Day!Date: Saturday, September 25
Time: 9 am-Noon
Contact: (415) 561-4751 or volunteer@parksconservancy.orgAnswer the statewide call to action on Saturday 9/25! It’s the 26th Annual California Coastal Cleanup Day and we need your help at sites throughout San Francisco, Marin, and Pacifica. Lend a hand in the Golden Gate National Parks and beyond. It’s a great day and a great way to make a difference in your community.For more details, visit our website: http://www.parksconservancy.org/help/volunteer/special-volunteer-events.html                                    *******************************************
3.  Intern / Teaching Assistant Wanted!
 
Are you considering a career in teaching or the environment? Are you punctual, friendly, ecological-minded, and reliable?
 
Acterra is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that brings people together to find local solutions for a healthy planet.  We are conducting a new program near Redwood City to teach landscaping professionals and homeowners about environmentally friendly landscaping; water conservation, reducing pesticide usage, proper plant selection, and more.  The program is based on this model: http://www.green-gardener.org/.
 
We are seeking a volunteer and/or intern to assist with the classes and planning process.  Bilingual Spanish ability and familiarity with the subject matter is preferred, but not required.  You must be available during the class times (Tuesdays from 6:00 – 8:30 and/or Thursdays from 6:00 – 8:30 in Redwood City) and for some planning meetings and administrative work (flexible schedule).  
 
This is not a paid position, but we are willing to provide any documentation needed to help you get course credit.  This is an opportunity to work with an experienced teacher, learn a successful and relevant environmental landscaping curriculum, and improve or solidify your skills and contacts in environmental work and the non-profit world.  This pilot project is in the planning stages now.  Classes are run for eleven weeks begin ning September 28 through December 2.
 
If interested, please send a resume to Miriam Sachs Martín at m.sachs.martin@gmail.com.
To learn more about Acterra, please view our website at: http://acterra.org/.
 
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It’s a LetterIn the dark blue sea
I saw a letter, it was

very small and this
is what it said:

I miss you in the dark blue sea.

I love to read but I need help
with some of the words.

I need help but I usually
read alone. I read one book

about Marvin becoming a king,
another book was about a shark.

Every time he sees legs or an arm
he goes into a wave and nothing

is there. Sometimes when I am
sad, I say I hate my life.

I run away, hide under the covers
And nothing is there but my book.Yalonda Lockett, age 9Category II (Grades 3-6) 2009 Grand Prize Winner
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Fulton Elementary School
Teacher: Barbara Strasko
(2009 River of Words Teacher of the Year)A New Anthology of Art & Poetry from the River of Words Contest

River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of ThingsFeaturing children’s poems and works of art, this delightful anthology showcases the work of children seeking to explore, appreciate, and protect the watersheds in which they live. A remarkable confluence of K-12 curriculum, children’s literature, environmentalism, poetry and art, this enchanting volume speaks to the creative spirit in all of us.
Get your copy today!
Also, check out the free, downloadable teaching guide that accompanies the anthology!
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Celebrating outdoor education and adventures with Richard Louv and the Tuolumne River Trust
 You’re invited to a very special presentation with internationally acclaimed author Richard Louv celebrating the Tuolumne River Trust’s education and adventure programs. Meet children who have participated in our programs and learn how we’re planning to protect the Tuolumne for generations to come. We expect this event to sell out so we urge you to get your tickets early. You’ll find links to purchase tickets below. Thursday, September 30th, 6:30pm – 8:30pm San Francisco Live
Marina Abramovic Institute West
575 Sutter Street, San FranciscoTicket price $15/$20
Ask about our meet-and-greet reception with Richard Louv at 5:30pm
 
Modesto reception and live-stream
Martin G. Petersen Event Center
720 12th Street
5:30pm – 8:30pm
Ticket price $10/$15
Hosted by the Stanislaus County Office of Education
 Richard Louv is a journalist and author of seven books about the connections between family, nature, and community. His latest book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, translated into 9 languages and published in 13 countries, has stimulated an international conversation about the relationship between children and nature. He has written for many publications including The New York Times and Washington Post, and has appeared on many national TV and radio shows. He served as an advisor to both the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World award program and to the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. He is currently working on his 8th book about the restorative power of nature. BUY TICKETS: SAN FRANCISCO LIVEBUY TICKETS: MODESTO  Who should attend this event?Teachers, administrators, parents, students, politicians, foundation representatives, volunteers, outdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists, and anyone who cares about protecting our natural environment for generations to come. Questions?  Call Karyn Barnes toll-free at 1-888-994-3344 or email karyn@tuolumne.org
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6.  California Native Plant Society Curriculum for Children Needs Reviewers
CNPS has developed an exciting new observation-based curriculum that gets children outside drawing and writing about nature. This fall, we plan to offer a working draft of the curriculum to a few teachers, group leaders, scout masters, and naturalists for review. Although much of this work has already been extensively field-tested, there are some new sections and arrangements of exercises that could benefit from review.

Opening the World through Journaling: Integrating art, science, and language arts is a curriculum tailored for CNPS, by John Muir Laws and Emily Breunig. It is geared primarily towards children age 8 and up (grades 3 through 7). By completing games and exercises throughout the curriculum, children learn to become keen observers of the natural world through drawing and writing. Later, they employ these skills to assemble a field guide, make treasure maps, and write short stories and poems. These journal activities tie directly into the State of California’s science framework content standards as well as the visual and performing arts framework content standards. 

Many of you are familiar with the work of naturalist, educator and artist John (Jack) Muir Laws. He has worked as an environmental educator for over 25 years in California, Wyoming, and Alaska.  He teaches classes on natural history, conservation biology, scientific illustration, and field sketching. He is trained as a wildlife biologist and is an associate of the California Academy of Sciences. In 2009, he received the Terwilliger Environmental Award for outstanding service in Environmental Education. Laws has written and illustrated books about the natural history of California including Sierra Birds: a Hiker’s Guide (2004), The Laws Guide to the Sierra Nevada (2007), and The Laws Pocket Guide Set to the San Francisco Bay Area (2009). He is a reg ular contributor to Bay Nature magazine with his “Naturalists Notebook” column.

Emily Bruenig served as associate director of education, editor, and writer at the California Institute for Biodiversity (CIB) from 2005 to 2010, and still helps to design and lead CIB’s summer teacher institutes. She also teaches English at De Anza and West Valley Community Colleges in Silicon Valley.

CNPS is looking forward to making this wonderful work available for wide distribution in the fall. If you or someone you know would be interested in helping us review the draft curriculum before the fall release date, please contact Josie Crawford at jcrawford@cnps.org. Once released, the curriculum will be available for free and easy downloading
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7.  Feedback
 
Chris Darling:
If you already covered this foul news in a previous edition of your Nature News, I apologize for bothering you.  If you did not, Chevron is seeking an exemption from CEQA for its overhaul of the refinery in Richmond.  A bill was introduced in the last session but died due to lack of time.  Will they try it again?  I think so or there would not have been a story in the Mercury News.  It would be a bad precedent if they win as every big bad developer and industrial facility would try to do the same.  Since I live in Richmond, I also think it would be a disaster for my hometown as it would undoubtedly mean worse air quality.
 
Here is the link:
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_16018970?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com
Chris:  Yes, this bypassing CEQA is a very troubling thing.  First there was the stadium down in City of Industry that for no apparent reason succeeded in getting an exemption, then the bill that died this year in the Legislature that would have opened the exemption floodgates.  You can be sure it will be back next year, and pols are panicked over the jobs issue, phony as it is in terms of environmental review.  And if Meg Whitman is governor you can be sure she’ll sign the bill.  The Planning & Conservation League has been especially effective on this issue for years, but I’m afraid one of these times–perhaps next year–the developers will succeed.
 
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8.  Blog about Golden Gate Park:  http://fromthethicket.wordpress.com/
 
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9.  Guardian Weekly editor:
My favourite story this week looked at the World Giving Index and found a third of us had given money to charity, a fifth of us had volunteered and almost half of the world’s population had helped a stranger. Those are the stories that keep me going from week to week.  
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10.
Verde Talk: “Home Energy Efficiency: What’s New with Audits and Rebates”September 22, 2010 – 6:00 pm to 7:30 pmRedwood City Council Chambers, 1017 Middlefield Road, Redwood City [MAP]
Want to learn about the new PG&E Energy Upgrade program, where homeowners can receive rebates up to $3,500 for making energy efficiency upgrades? Then attend this talk! A panel of experts will explain how the program is structured, if it is right for your home and how you can take advantage of these rebates. This a free event. Refreshments will be provided. For more information and to register, please visit the Redwood City Verde Speaker Series website.
“Verde Talk – A Green Education & Mixer Series” is the first talk in a new monthly series on home energy efficiency sponsored by the City of Redwood City.
 
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11.  Remembering Barbara Pitschel Please join Barbara’s friends and colleagues for a celebration of her life
Tuesday, September 28, 2010 from 4-7pm
At San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture
 
Friends are invited to send memorial contributions to the Helen Crocker Russell Library, the California Native Plant Society, the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries or a favorite charity.  For further information call 415-661-1316 x403
 
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12.  The Watershed Nursery, 601-A Canal Blvd., Richmond, CA 94804, USA
 
In time for the fall equinox, we have added Sunday to our retail hours.  Beginning Friday September 24th we will be open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 4 pm.  http://www.thewatershednursery.com/ 
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13.  What’s the matter?
Always a sucker for items that pertain to basic reality–ie, what is matter; what is it made of–I keep a large laminated poster of The Periodic Table in Earth and Sky in front of me where I can contemplate it frequently.  There are seven horizontal rows, the number of each row depends on the number of orbital shells in any element shown in that row.  The elements in each vertical group resemble each other closely in various properties.  (A striking example of that is inert gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon.  None of them will unite with other elements to form compounds.  This is caused by each having all of its electron orbits filled to capacity.)
One of the things that fascinated me was the bulge in horizontal rows 6 and 7.  At its intersection with the 3rd vertical column the horizontal line in 6 and 7 develops a big bulge, like a hernial rupture.  Where there is only one element in that space in the other horizontal rows, there are 15 in each of 6 and 7.  (Why this odd design on the part of nature?  I keep wondering about it.  Look at the many websites, eg, this one:  http://www.chemicalelements.com/)  The elements in row 6 are called rare earths.  They are, well, rare.
Now they are in the news.  Last June my eye was caught by this:  Fact of the week: China controls 95% of the global production of rare earths, a group of 17 elements that are equally essential to the development of hybrid vehicles as to the super-alloys deployed in aviation.  Guardian Weekly 29 June 2010
I have been carrying this in my computer ever since June, wondering what, if anything, to do with it.  Today [this is written August 31] I heard the following item on NPR’s Marketplace (condensed).  
Rare earth minerals from China are rarer
China scaled back its exports of rare earth minerals — all those essential metals that make cell phones and hybrid cars work — and that’s making several industries around the world nervous.
Host Kai Ryssdal: Gold hit a two-month high today: $1,248 an ounce. As attractive as gold is when the economy is questionable, though, neodymium may be a more important metal today. What’s that? You never heard of it? What about lanthanum? They’re what’re called “rare earth metals.” There are about 17 of them. They’re used pretty extensively in things like hybrid cars, and smartphones and a lot of other gadgets we are coming to depend on.  Thing is, China produces almost all of the world’s rare earth metals. And last month Beijing cut way back on exports of them.
Dudley Kingsnorth is an industry consultant. What’s scary to him is not that China controls the world’s rare earths. It’s that China doesn’t want to share. It’s put quotas on the amount it exports. Last year, China allowed less than half of what it mined to be sold to the rest of the world.
Kingsnorth: Now, if these quotas stay in place, then what’s going to happen is that less and less of the manufacturing is going to take place in the U.S., and more and more of the manufacturing is going to take place in China. And we all know once those manufacturing jobs have gone, they’re gone. It’s not a temporary situation.
And that could be bad news for the Obama Administration. The president wants a clean energy work force to help revive the U.S. economy. Industry insiders say China’s export quotas are already causing a global shortfall of rare earths. Toyota wouldn’t comment on how this is impacting production of the Prius, but the company is reportedly looking to Canada to find more of these minerals.
Lifton: “We’ve been outfoxed in capitalism by our friends, the communists!”  Lifton blames decades of outsourcing by American businesses.  “They gave away the farm. They gave away the intellectual property, all of this technology given away, to get access to raw materials and cheap labor. And now all of the sudden, it’s a problem. Fortunately for the Chinese, the same stupid people run the American economy that ran it into the ground….”
 “We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.”        Samuel Butler 1835-1902
 
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14.  Alan Simpson, Social Security, and the Welfare Barons of the Livestock Industry – OpEdNews: Bill Willers – Writer
 
Alan Simpson, co-chair of President Obama’s Deficit Commission, likens Social Security to “a milk cow with 310 million tits.” But Simpson, a Wyoming rancher, is certainly familiar with a welfare “tit” that is a con game of continental magnitude maintained for “permittees,” mostly ranchers like himself, who lease grazing allotments on America’s public lands.
 
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Alan-Simpson-Social-Secur-by-Bill-Willers-100912-410.html
                                                                                                                                                                                                ***********************************15.  Corn syrup v. Corn sugar?
The Corn Refiners Association has just about had it with the campaign against high fructose corn syrup and how in some studies it’s been linked to obesity. People have started not buying products that have high fructose anything listed in the ingredients. So refiners would like to suggest a new name. Today, they applied to the Food and Drug Administration to get “corn sugar” approved as an alternative.  (From Marketplace)
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                ***************************************16.  (A topsy-turvy world you say?  No, it isn’t.  And that’s just the problem.  Northern Hemisphere-centric, that’s what we are.  JS)
LTE, The Economist (not published)
 
Long an admirer of your graphics and art work, I was stunned by your front cover showing the southern hemisphere on top of the globe, with Antarctica and the southern end of Chile and Argentina at the top.  You turned my mental world upside down.  (Believe it or not, pun really is not intended.)  Such simple visual manipulation had a powerful effect on my mind.  Cartographers and globe-makers:  Why don’t you produce maps this way occasionally?  It is a potent educational device.
 
Jake Sigg
San Francisco
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17.
The will to powerWhy some people have power over companies and others don’t
HENRY KISSINGER was guilty of understatement when he said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. In fact, power is the ultimate life-improver tout court. Powerful people not only have more friends than the rest of us. They also enjoy better health. Numerous studies demonstrate that low status is more strongly associated with heart disease than physical hazards like obesity and high blood pressure….Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Business School starts by rubbishing the notion that the world is just—that the best way to win power is to be good at your job. The relationship between rewards and competence is loose at best. Bob Nardelli was a disastrous CEO of Home Depot. But he was paid nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to leave and quickly moved to the top slot at Chrysler, which then went bankrupt. Mr Pfeffer points out that CEOs who presided over three years of poor earnings and led their firms into bankruptcy only faced a 50% chance of losing their jobs (and perfectly successful senior managers are routinely cleaned out when new CEOs take over). There are plenty of things that matter more than competence, such as the ability to project drive and self-confidence….And what happens if all this loyalty and networking pays off? How do you keep power once you win it? The old saw about power corrupting has been laboriously confirmed by academic studies of everything from risk-taking to cookie-eating (powerful people are more likely to eat with their mouths open and to scatter crumbs over their faces). The key to keeping power is to understand its corrupting effects. Powerful people need to cultivate a combination of paranoia and humility—paranoia about how much other people want them out and humility about their own replaceability. They also need to know when to quit. People who do not know when to leave an organisation frequently crash and burn. People who jump before they are pushed have a good chance of leaping to yet another aphrodisiacal throne.Disconnected excerpts from Schumpeter in The Economist 11 Sept 2010                                                                                                                             *****************************
 
18.  Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Excerpt from review in Observer (Approx July 2010)
 
…The process of composition was accompanied by the nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Remarkably, after more than 30 years, the novel exudes a desperate fury as Marlantes drags the reader (and Bravo Company) through firefight after firefight.
 
Combat is not Marlantes’s deepest subject.  Metaphysically, he wants to grapple with the relationship of killing to the nature of evil.  In a key passage, he writes:  “No, the jungle wasn’t evil.  It was indifferent.  So, too, was the world.  Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world.  Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil.  Caring.  And then the caring gets torn asunder.  Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.  It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring.  He could nullify the indifferent world.  But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away.”
 
It’s at moments like this that Marlantes steps alongside Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and even Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms).  but even after 35 years, his life’s work was no nearer publication.  The typescript was some 1,600 pages.  Vietnam was passe, first novels were a no-no, the author was too old and so on.  Spurned by agents and battered by rejection, Marlantes placed his book with a nonprofit publisher – El Leon Literary Arts.
 
His luck began to turn.  Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, decided Matterhorn was “the Vietnam novel of our generation” and persuaded El Leon to go into a commercial partnership.  Entrekin also persuaded Marlantes to cut his battered manuscript from 800 to 600 pages in one final edit.  “Every cut hurt,” says Marlantes, “but if I wanted to reach a wider audience, this was what I had to do.”
 
Marlantes has been rewarded for his determination.  The commercial tide is turning towards Vietnam stories again.  The conflict has begun to join the US civil war as a national trauma that is finally sponsoring art in new and unexpected ways.
 
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19.
“In reality, nothing but atoms and the void.”   Democritus of Adbera, Greek philosopher, 460 BCE-371 BCE
 
“I will paint for man not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the womb of an atom.” 
            Blaise Pascal, French mathematician/philosopher 1623-1662
 
Notes & Queries, Guardian Weekly
 
Positives, negatives and a universal balancing actThe “nothing” that the universe came from:  wasn’t it something?
• We could be caught in a word snare here. “Nothing” can mean “no thing”, in which case we are asking: Was there any particular entity from which the universe came?However, “nothing” can also refer to “non-existence,” and this presents a bigger challenge: Can something that is come from absence or emptiness; can being come from non-being?  Stephen Hawking has recently argued that something comes from nothing in both senses (ie from no particular entity and from nonexistence). All we need, he says, are certain laws of nature to produce and shape the individual universe in which we happen to reside. But now the question shifts to the status of such laws: Are they something or nothing?  Philosophers hotly debate the issue, with no end in sight. The only thing that seems certain is that laws of nature, unlike constitutional laws or traffic laws, do not require a lawmaker, especially if, as Hawking contends, there are infinite numbers of universes having their own distinctive sets of laws. Each set, then, may be thought of as the settled potential for complex, ongoing occurrences of a characteristic type. And a “potential” is not an “actual.”Michael Allen Fox, Armidale, NSW, Australia
• From a maths example, if you took all the positives and all the negatives in the universe and put them together you get nothing.In the physical world, left can’t be defined without right, up without down, and if they’re in perfect balance and harmony what are they?Start with nothing, separate everything that is “one” thing from everything that is the opposite of that “one” thing and you’ve created somethings out of nothing. It works something like that, unless I’m wrong and then it’s nothing like that. Beth Gorst, Hastings, New Zealand
• It was, if anything.Stephen Meurrens, Brussels, Belgium
Studies in distinctionWhy do authorities condemn prostitution and gambling, but approve of mistresses and the stock exchange?
• Social class distinctions. Poor men squander what little money they have on prostitutes and casinos.Rich men keep mistresses, buy boxes in the race tracks and invest in stocks.John Ralston, Mountain View, California, US
• Pure snobbery. Prostitution and gambling are lower class vices, even if sometimes also indulged in by their social superiors, and are therefore frowned upon. Mistresses are expensive and the stock exchange is the playground of the wealthy, though again not exclusively so. The authorities usually include and/or hobnob with the more affluent members of society, whose higher incomes and golf club memberships endow their activities with an aura of respectability.Joan Dawson, Halifax, NS, Canada
Heights make me giddyWhen does a hill become a mountain?When it comes ‘alive with the sound of music’.Chris Leggett, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia • When it’s in Estonia. Our magnificent Munamägi (Mount Egg) soars to a height of 300 metres, and we’re mighty proud of it.Siria Mitchell, Lähte, Tartumaa, Estonia
Any answers?How long can we go on dumping stuff in landfill?Kate Stewart, Woodford, Queensland, Australia
Dusk, dawn.  Sunset, sunrise. What’s the opposite of  twilight?Donna Samoyloff, Toronto, Canada
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20.
“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.”  Tennessee Williams, 1955
 “I have made an important discovery…that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.”        Oscar Wilde