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Growing up in a DDT dumping ground

Rat beach near Torrance, California in 2010

Rat Beach in 2010

I came across the article below recently and was pretty floored.

“How the waters off Catalina became a DDT dumping ground” by Rosanna Xia for the LA Times, 25 October 2020

I grew up in Torrance till I was 5 and Palos Verdes until I was 13. I played in the ocean at Rat Beach all the time, caught tadpoles in the storm drain just next to PVBAC, went tidepooling in Abalone Cove. I had no idea about the Superfund site, this is the very first time I’ve heard of it. How on earth is that?

Lunada Bay in Southern California, 2010

Lunada bay in 2010

It looks like the Superfund site starts just south of Lunada Bay and gets worse as you pass Portuguese Bend down towards San Pedro (see map).

And now they’ve verified punctured DDT waste barrels that have been sitting on the sea floor just off Catalina, possibly since the 1980s. This could be three to four decades of leakage from up to half a million barrels.

They leaned in to examine an icicle-like anomaly growing off one of the barrels — a “toxicle,” they called it — and wondered about the gas that bubbled out when the robot snapped one off. To have gas supersaturated in and around these barrels so deep underwater, where the pressure was 90 times greater than above ground, was unsettling. They couldn’t help but feel like they were poking at a giant Coke can ready to explode.

Sea lions up and down the coast have been dying from it for decades, and still are. We eat a lot of seafood from these waters.

How can this possibly be cleaned up, and who on earth is going to pay for it? Certainly not the Montrose Chemical Corp. of California, they’ve been gone for years.

It’s just so exhausting. It feels like so many people’s jobs right this moment are simply running around slapping Bandaids left right and center, scrambling to fix what have become systemic problems caused by the poor decision making of people in the past. Lack of foresight, deliberately turning a blind eye, “we’ll deal with it later”, “it can’t possibly be that bad”. The environment, tech, policing, advertising.

So much firefighting.

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To read: “Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country” by Cristina Rivera Garza

A friend+co-conspirator from FemOS recommended Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza recently, looks incredible. In her words:

It discusses histories of trauma and violence in Mexico, but I think also speaks to people encountering trauma in their work or daily lives, and how to process or experience that through collective grieving. She posits Mexico as a “visceraless state,” where the government has assumed a solely administrative function, and thus has left the citizens are disembodied. Apt language to describe how states around the world are grappling with the pandemic…

Feminist Press (publisher) | Biblio.com (secondhand) | Bookshop.org

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Current listening: “The Best of the Alessi Brothers”

Currently listening to The Best Of The Alessi Brothers (1998). Had no idea about them, came across them via two cool cats on Twitter.

These vibes are the perfect thing right now. Also, will be taking photos of the Alessi Bros to the hairdresser when that’s an option again.

Apple Music | Spotify

The album’s not on Bandcamp, but “Seabird” is included in Late Night Tales: Metronomy.

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Current listening: “From Scotland with Love”

Currently listening to From Scotland with Love (2014) by King Creosote.

Sam took me to the lovely Howard Assembly Room in Leeds to hear him perform this back in October 2014. Probably one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to.

I return to this album a lot. But have to say, “Miserable Strangers” really hurts right now. I miss everyone so, so much.

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Use a VPN when you search for recipes

Highly recommend using a VPN when searching for recipes online. When I set the server to an appropriate country for what I’m looking for, I almost always get way better results. And even when the results aren’t objectively better, they usually widen my idea of what any one particular dish can or should be.

Of course I usually search in English. For better results, search for the dish by the name it’s actually called using the correct characters, not the English name or anglicized spelling. That was the only way to find a decent dökkt rúgbrauð recipe.

If you don’t have a VPN, you can try changing your search region. See Duck Duck Go’s instructions or Google’s instructions.

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Fix for overflow at top / bottom of screen when using CSS Scroll Snap

I’m currently working on a site that uses CSS Scroll Snap to frame some of the content nicely as you scroll through. In Chrome though, I was getting weird overflow issues at the top and bottom of the screen. If I scrolled to the bottom and then kept attempting to scroll down, it would gradually add more and more length to the page. Same with scrolling back up.

Adding overscroll-behavior-y: none; to the body element sorted it out. Read more about overscroll-behavior on MDN.

I originally tried to add this property to the html element since that’s the element with scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;. This didn’t work though, it seems that overscroll-behavior has to be on body.

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Disabling “save to Pinterest”

Just had a collaborator ask if we could disable the “save to Pinterest” button even if a visitor has a Pinterest addon / extension in their browser. My immediate reaction was “Maybe? I’d think not but will see!”

Turns out something like this should be possible. Pinterest supports disabling saves from a site, see their documentation. You can either enable it site-wide or per image.

I’m surprised but really happy to see that they offer this, hope that they continue to do so.

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Single `mv` command to change all filenames in directory to lower case and replace spaces

This is the mv command I use to change all of the filenames in my current directory from mixed case to lowercase and replace spaces with underscores.

for file in *; do mv "$file" `echo $file | tr ' ' '_' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`  ; done

The ; semicolons indicate the end of each line of this command. To break it down:

  1. for file in * loops over all the files in the directory. You could change the * wildcard to something like *.jpg if you wanted to only target JPG files.
  2. do mv "$file" instructs the system to move each file in the loop to the location that immediately follows.
  3. `echo $file | tr ' ' '_' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` is the location we’re moving the file to. We use the tr “translate” command to replace spaces with underscores, and then again (separated by the | pipe character) to replace uppercase letters with lowercase letters. Then we echo that translated filename.
  4. done lets the system know that the loop is done.

I use this occasionally to prep files for use on the web when working on a static site, one that isn’t hooked it up to a CMS.