Pedestrians and Daylight Savings

from: Majors, Dan. "Pedestrians 3 times more likely to be killed when clocks change, study says," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 03 November 2007.

Two Carnegie Mellon University scientists are warning people that there's much more to daylight-saving time than just setting your clocks back an hour tonight.

You need to get your mind right.

Professors Paul Fischbeck and David Gerard have made a study of traffic fatalities that shows pedestrians walking during the evening rush hour are nearly three times more likely to be struck and killed by cars in the weeks after the fall time change.

The problem, they suspect, is that pedestrians and drivers have gotten used to more than six months of visibility during those hours and are slow to adapt to the danger of the darkness. . . .

"Pyschogeography" by Will Self

from: Higgins, Karrie. "'Psychogeography' by Will Self: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place," Los Angeles Times, 4 November 2007.

Self begins "Psychogeography" with a long "introduction" describing a walk he took from London to New York. That such a thing is impossible is part of the point entirely: The idea is to walk from his London home to Heathrow Airport before flying to JFK, where he will set out again, on foot, for Manhattan. Here, Self sets up the strategy of his book by giving a nod to Debord while at the same time mapping out his own psychogeographic territory.

His long walks neither emulate nor resemble the dérives of the Situationists, in part because he carries his usual purposes and motivations -- promoting a book, say, or attending a meeting. He has no intention to "outfox prescribed folkways," but he also delights in exploring true "Empty Quarters," those zones that lie outside urban boundaries and off the paved paths. For him, these are the true frontiers, the last places left to discover and explore. . . .

A poet who walks and memorizes . . .

from: Kilen, Mike. "Bard's Dreams Channel Poetry," The Des Moines Register, 14 October 2007.

Joe Plum lives in the wooded hills of rural Monroe County in a home built from scraps without electricity or plumbing.

It's no environmental statement. Plum, 55, has never had indoor plumbing. A man asked him once if he lived "off the grid." Plum didn't know what that meant.

He wakes from dreams and walks into the woods, sometimes for hours, reciting and memorizing the poems that come to him in his sleep. . . .