DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Wandering around this year’s Green Festival exhibition, I was impressed by how healthy everybody looked. In contrast, take as an example MacWorld Expo, at which many of the attendees are overweight, overdressed, hurried, harried, and ill. I see a lot more armpit stains (an indicator of stress) at MacWorld.

The Green Festival is all about improving one’s health. Litter in the nearest parking lot indicated that the neighborhood residents were partaking of healthy supplements this weekend too.

Vendors hawked high-potency foods, air and water treatments, pesticide-free clothing, recycled building products, solar energy systems, and biodiesel fuel. No wonder I felt at home. At both expos I’m surrounded by nutballs, but only at the Green Fest are the nutballs organic.

Miracle foods were a dominant meme at this year’s festival. I sampled Maca, “the Inca superfood,” although I have to wonder how super this particular food is given that the Inca civilization is extinct. I ate raw cocoa nuts and numerous organic chocolate elixirs. I tasted hemp nuts, Goji and agauaymanto berries. I skipped the soy jerkey and the $5 Sambazon smoothies, made from açaí, a purple palm berry from the Amazon basin that has been scientifically proven to be mispronounced by even more people than jicama.

The vendors of these superfoods, to which all manner of magical properties have been ascribed, appeared to be hydrated, energized, and outrageously healthy. Their collective glow made for a compelling pitch. In general, I think it’s a bad idea to buy food products from people who look like they’re about three more corndogs away from the grave, but I admit that I may be alone in making such a judgement, as evidenced by the crowds around the food-sample stations at Costco on weekends.

The visible good health may have been from an abundance of negative ions winging around the space, both from high-end beeswax candles and this so-called filterless air cleaner (about which some controversy exists). Negative ions notwithstanding, we were certainly awash in positive vibes.

A few other healthy-planet products caught my attention: tree-free inkjet paper (my samples are en route; watch for a review soon), magnet-powered unbreakable LED flashlights, and elegant recycled stemware and tumblers. If nothing else, this Green Festival helped fill out my upcoming holiday gift guide.

I had a lunchtime conversation today about the correct pronounciation of jicama. I have to conclude that I had never heard the word before, at least not from anybody who speaks Nahuatl.

Fortunately for my ego, which bruises about as easily as a bland starchy tuber, I got to school someone later on the correct pronounciation of quinoa. And I was ready to go head-to-head if anyone asked me about haricots.

I’ll be at the 2004 Green Festival in San Francisco on Sunday. Stop by the Online Collaboration Hub on Sunday afternoon and I’ll sell you some, ahh, online collaboration, or something.

Last year’s summary is one of the better things I’ve written: SF Green Festival 2003

Standard mic cables present a routing challenge for drummers. Microphone capsules need to point more or less down at a drum head; therefore the cable points more or less up — interfering with other drums and cymbals. On a tight kit, mic placement is a pain.

Small mics help. But the really helpful thing is to have 90° adapters on the female end of the XLR cable. That way, the cable can be routed away or down, rather than up.

I shopped around. These cables are hard to find. At first I tried to find a simple 90° adapter, male to female XLR, so I could ‘convert’ my mic cables for use in tight spaces. But I believe nobody makes such an adapter.

A soundman friend turned me on to an inexpensive drum-specific XLR cable from Audix, sold here for $18 (at the time that I write this). I disliked this cable for three reasons: at 25 feet, it’s too long; I couldn’t find any information about the connectors, which in my opinion affect sound quality and product life; the cable itself is not a 4-conductor design, which makes it (according to cable manufacturers) more susceptible to electromagnetic interference and noise.

I found a superior solution at Markertek.com. They can make mic cables using Canare “Star Quad” 4-conductor cable and Neutrik XLR connectors, with a 90° female end. The price is about $25 apiece, including a lifetime warranty. Ask for item #SC15XXJA.

More studio-blogging

Faced with another four years of the Bush administration — an administration that has been roundly denounced as the most environmentally destructive in the history of the nation — our correspondent asked: Where should environmentalists put their energies for the next four years?

It’s a good question, and I’m grateful to Grist Magazine for asking it.