Transparent wood

“With all of these potential benefits for consumers, manufacturing and the environment, the case for transparent wood couldn’t be…clearer.”

I used to work as a Fact Checker at Parenting Magazine in San Francisco. I was an Intern. That means my stipend did not cover the cost of the parking tickets I acquired while working inside the building, try as I might to move my car every three hours. SF parking cops are ruthless.

Anyway…the Editor-in-Chief, a white wine-sloshing Sausalito liberal, loved this kind of cute wordplay that naturally drove me crazy because…because this isn’t Oscar Wilde wordplay. This is Dave from 6th grade wordplay, the kid who genuinely thought he was hilarious.

Well…from time-to-time, I was allowed to scoop up ten times my weekly stipend by writing a 200-word appetizer for the lightweight crapfest that occupied space between the Table of Contents and and the actual entree part of the magazine. I’d be assigned a little something about the free teddy bear program in a pediatric ward, or the 8-year old girl that swam the bay under the Golden Gate Bridge, or whatever.

Then I met the project that doomed me: the CIA opened a Day Care center for employees’ kids at the Langley, VA headquarters.

This article pissed him off so much, that he personally rewrote it, and asked his secretary how much longer my internship lasted, and that was the end of my magazine career.

Spies `R Us

Spies are people too, and like everybody else they are concerned with family matters. So, when Mommy and Daddy are busy ferreting out top secret information, who’s minding the kids? Big Brother, of course.
In September 1989, the Central Intelligence Agency opened a $1.2 million on-site daycare center for its employees inside its heavily fortified Virginia compound. A guard watches the front of the building to prevent unauthorized people from entering, while inside, 28 staff members – all of whom passed the Company’s intensive background investigations, polygraph tests, and psychological examinations – attend to the covert finger-painting sessions of the 104 junior G-men and women. The list of enrolled children is tucked under a security blanket, and even in the center’s records, the children are identified only by first names and numbers. “Some of the parents are undercover,” explains Mark Mansfield, spokesperson for the agency. Enough said.

Looking back on it now, seems pretty mild. I think it was the Big Brother thing. But he gutted the whole thing.

zn wrote:

Transparent wood. Isn’t it good.

I am skeptical. It means more trees used for more manufacturing purposes, which is the big issue, plus right now, on the smaller end of real concerns, we don’t know how it ages. Glass and the chemical versions of glass we usually use isn’t organic so it doesn’t age. What happens to organic forms of transparent window material when it ages?

I wondered that, too. Likelihood of turning yellow? And how many manufacturing emissions from this process?