Lake Garda, in northern Italy, is known for its crystal clear water.At the south end, the town of Sirmione is dominated by the Rocca Scaligera, a fortress with harbor views. The nearby Grotte di Catullo archaeological site includes a Roman villa. On the lake’s western shore, in Gardone Riviera, is Il Vittoriale Degli Italiani, former home of poet D’Annunzio. The Dolomites frame Riva del Garda, a resort in the north.
Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.
None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.
“To me, that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust,” she said. “I had been lying to people … unwittingly.”
Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.
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Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon.
Rhonda Fleming, the red-haired actress who became a popular sex symbol in Hollywood westerns, film noir, and adventure movies of the 1940s and ’50s, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 97.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Carla Sapon, her longtime assistant.
Ms. Fleming’s roles included those of a beautiful Arthurian princess in the Bing Crosby musical version of Mark Twain’s novel “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (1949); a gambler and the love interest of Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) in “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957); an amorous duchess in Bob Hope’s comedy “The Great Lover” (1949); and the somewhat less bad sister of Arlene Dahl’s bad-girl character in “Slightly Scarlet” (1956), which might be described as a Technicolor noir.
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Rhonda Fleming in an undated photo. Sometimes referred to as the Queen of Technicolor because of her red hair, green eyes and fair skin, she later looked back on that label as a drawback.Credit…Popperfoto, via Getty Images
Bonn is a city in western Germany straddling the Rhine river. It’s known for the central Beethoven House, a memorial and museum honoring the composer’s birthplace. Nearby are Bonn Minster, a church with a Romanesque cloister and Gothic elements, the pink-and-gold Altes Rathaus, or old city hall, and Poppelsdorf Palace housing a mineralogical museum. To the south is Haus der Geschichte with post-WWII history exhibits.
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An image from Bonn, North Rhine Westphalia Germany
In July, three unmanned missions blasted off to Mars – from China (Tianwen-1), the US (Nasa’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover), and the United Arab Emirates (Hope). The Chinese and American missions have lander craft that will seek signs of current or past life on Mars. Nasa is also planning to send its Europa Clipper probe to survey Jupiter’s moon Europa and the robotic lander Dragonfly to Saturn’s moon Titan. Both moons are widely thought to be promising hunting grounds for life in our solar system – as are the underground oceans of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus.
Meanwhile, we can now glimpse the chemical makeup of atmospheres of planets that orbit other stars (exoplanets), of which more than 4,000 are now known. Some hope these studies might disclose possible signatures of life.
But can any of these searches do their job properly unless we have a clear idea of what “life” is? Nasa’s unofficial working definition is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”. “Nasa needs a definition of life so it knows how to build detectors and what kinds of instruments to use on its missions,” says zoologist Arik Kershenbaum of the University of Cambridge. But not everyone thinks it is using the right one.
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‘You can’t hunt for something if you have no idea what it is.’ Credit: Mark Garlick / Science Photo Library / Getty Images.
Derwent Reservoir is the middle of three reservoirs in the Upper Derwent Valley in the northeast of Derbyshire, England.It lies approximately 10 miles from Glossop and 10 miles from Sheffield. The River Derwent flows first through Howden Reservoir, then Derwent Reservoir, and finally through Ladybower Reservoir.
Some questions are infinitely more interesting than their answers. One such question started to echo around the internet in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdowns and has become increasingly frantic in the febrile weeks that have followed. The question was this: How shall we stay productive when the world is going to hell?
Productivity, or the lack of it, has become the individual metric of choice for coping with the international econo-pathological clusterfuck of the Corona Crisis. How should we self-optimize when we’re suddenly having to meet our deadlines with our roommates, kids, and inner critics screaming in the background? If we’re lucky enough to be able to shelter in place and we’re not using that time to launch podcasts and personal projects and life-hack our way to some cargo-cult pastiche of normality, are we somehow letting the side down?
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There has always been something a little obscene about the cult of the hustle, the treadmill of alienated insecurity that tells you that if you stop running for even an instant, you’ll be flung flat on your face. Photograph: Marcelo Santos/Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An image from Lake Garda, Italy
