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Like quite a few Americans, I tuned in the other night to the new Jay Leno Show, curious to see what Kanye West would say about interrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for winning best Female Video for "You Belong With Me" at the MTV Video Music Awards.  According to Rolling Stone, Swift was seen "hysterically crying" backstage and West was bounced from the show.  Now a day later, there was Kanye slumped in an oversize chair sitting opposite Leno ready to discuss the incident.

Watching the interview made me think back to the recent interviewI shot with Leno for his website promoting my memoir Big Sid's Vincati.. Because of my own experience, I could recognize some of Leno's characteristic moves as interviewer. Perhaps because critics were already calling the Kanye West interview another "Hugh Grant moment," Jay begins graciously, thanking the rap star for not backing out.

Then Leno asks his first question: "Tell us about your day, have you had a tough day, today?"  Leno chuckles through the line and the audience amplifies the laughter.

But Kanye's response is totally absent of humor.  Characteristically, Leno persists, feeding Kanye another opportunity to lighten up.  Jay says, "When did it strike you-uh oh...!"

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Buying locally grown food can put interesting, wholesome meals on people's dinner tables, but spreading populations across arable regions at densities low enough to make even part-time agricultural self-sufficiency feasible would be an environmental and economic disaster. Locavorism is appealing as an environmental strategy because it permits its practitioners to believe they're doing good for the world by doing well for themselves, and to recast their own consumption and nutrition preferences as contributions to humanity. But the distance that a particular food item travels between its grower and its ultimate consumer is not an accurate measure of the amount of energy that was required to put it on the table, or of any other environmental impacts; far more significant factors are how the food item was grown, how it was irrigated, which pesticides were applied to it, how it got where it was going, and what else was traveling with it.

 

 

 

 

» Craig Nelson discusses his book about the Apollo 11 mission and his research into what people may not know about this well known achievement in 20th century history. 

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  Craig Nelson, Rocket Man, Apollo 11, space, moon, Current Affairs, History, Penguin Podcast