Interns Kellie Burdg and Michael Rogers chose Paws for Freedom, a program that helps children with disabilities help people with disabilities.  Through its Student Trainer and Retriever Teams (S.T.A.R.T.) partnership program, Paws for Freedom offers animal-assisted therapy to youth with learning disabilities at Horizon Academy, as they help train service dogs.  But we chose to ignore the advice given to people in film and video to avoid working with children and animals.

Kellie commented, “On the day of the shoot, I began to feel nervous.  We arrived at Horizon Academy a little after noon … However, we had some issues setting up with one of the cameras, which caused us to run late … When S.T.A.R.T. club began, my fellow intern took one of the cameras to shoot b-roll footage while I conducted three additional interviews upstairs.  I also captured some footage at the end of the club as they loaded the dogs back into the van.  Despite the obstacles we faced, I felt confident that we had shot plenty of good material to make the video.”

We were proud of Kellie and Michael for how they dealt with the unexpected, which is a critical skill to develop.  They did a wonderful job in both capturing and editing a video that communicated the spirit of the work.  The director of Paws for Freedom was overjoyed with the results, and it is now being used as a call to action on their website as well as at fundraisers.

It will take a lot more videos for the “good guys” to dominate the news, but we’re happy to do our small part and hope our production colleagues will do the same.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now Ripple is teaming up with Deffenbaugh Industries to make glass recycling affordable and easy for KC-area businesses. Here at Proffer, we may not generate the same volume of glass as some of the larger participating companies, but we can share with others the reasons why commercial recycling with Ripple just makes sense.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For many people in America and in Kansas City you can add another reason. They go because they don’t have a feasible alternative. Beans & Greens, a public health program based in KC, is working to change that.

A food desert is a term more people are becoming familiar with, but in case it’s new to you, here’s the USDA definition: an “area in the United States with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly such an area composed of predominantly lower income neighborhoods and communities.” In Kansas City alone there are 85,144 people who live more than a mile away from a grocery store. If that doesn’t sound like a long distance to you, when was the last time you walked a mile and more to buy a week’s worth of groceries? Lack of transportation can make that simple errand a serious time commitment. When there is no convenient option except liquor stores, bodegas, and fast food, groceries stop being the first choice.

This is where Beans & Greens comes in. Beans & Greens is run by the Menorah Legacy Foundation (along with ten or so partners) with the mission of doubling the amount of money low-income people have to spend at farmers’ markets. They do this by matching the money provided through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP) dollar for dollar up to $30 when that money is spent at markets. For fifty cents from SNAP, low-income people get a wooden token that’s worth a dollar when it’s spent at places like City Market.  Beans & Greens volunteers hand the tokens out on site to SNAP participants, and from there they can get the healthy food they need.

This is a huge boon for Kansas City’s urban core. In Jackson County alone, 670,000 people were enrolled in the SNAP program in 2009, an all-time high. For areas of the city that are extremely underserved, Beans & Greens has created a Mobile Market. The group also provides demonstrations of ways to cook healthy food quickly and easily, and the matched dollar amount also covers seeds and plants people can use to start their own gardens.

By making healthy eating a clear way to save money, Beans & Greens has created a primary motivator to cook well.

by Ben Proffer

We’ve got no shortage of pumpkins, and as long as we remember to wash them every now and then with a mix of water and a little bleach (keeps fungus away) we should be able to keep them until it’s cutting time. On the way to Halloween, though, there are plenty of other seasonally appropriate activities to be had— pick-up football games, orchards to be visited, vegetables to be canned or jarred, and the unmistakable rustic smell of burning leaves to romanticize. But stop! An important reality check: burning leaves is dangerous and potentially harmful to your health.

Most municipalities and the EPA would rather you not burn your leaves as they tend to either become airborne embers or factories for producing hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are created when wet matter burns incompletely, and this along with carbon monoxide create that delicate earthy smell we enjoy so much. It turns out that smell includes particulate matter and carcinogens.

A better plan would be to compost those leaves, either privately or with one of thousands of communal composting programs all over the country. It’s the easiest thing in the world. All you need is a dedicated place in the yard for your grass, leaf, fruit and vegetable clippings, and tea and coffee dregs. Just pile these on top of each other and turn the pile with a shovel or pitchfork every once in a while so the microorganisms growing inside can breathe, and soon enough you’ll have perfectly organic compost. There are also bins you can purchase if you don’t like the idea of keeping organic matter rotting in the open. This option is good if you have a small yard, and some of them are suspended so all you need to do to turn it is rotate the bin.

Just stay away from composting meat, grease, or dairy products. You won’t like the neighbors this will attract.

This is probably the most productive option; but if you still feel compelled to burn your leaves, please contact your local fire department for information on how to do it safely. If they can’t convince you it’s a bad idea, they should be able to tell you how to do it right.

You read that correctly. It was initiated after a survey in 2004 found that the rate of literary reading had not only dropped to less than half of American adults, but was collapsing at an accelerating rate. From 1982 to 2002 the rate of decline jumped from five percent to fourteen percent, with the sharpest loss in literary reading in the youngest age groups. Describing the survey’s report, the organizers of the Big Read were endearingly frank: the concerned citizen in search of good news about American literary culture would study the pages of this report in vain.

That being said, here’s the good news; the report also mentions that people who read literature are more likely to be active citizens across the board. People who read 12 to 30 pieces of literature a year are three times more likely to attend a performing arts event, almost four times more likely to visit a museum, two and one half times more likely to volunteer or do charity work, and one and a half times more likely to participate in a sporting activity. It completely explodes the idea of the literary recluse and the notion that literature is a hobby of the affluent.

Among those surveyed, education was the greatest indicator of literary interest, not socio-economics. Only 14 percent of adults with a grade school education reported reading literature, while a whopping 74 percent of graduate students report actively reading for personal enjoyment.

Now, to the skeptics who would point out that illiteracy, at least in America, is a thing of the past. There is a difference between the capacity to read and the ability to understand what you’re reading. In order to understand a piece of literature you have to take the time to explore it with patience and your own imaginative thinking. Ask anybody who has picked up Moby Dick. You don’t read Moby Dick; you journey through Moby Dick, and come out stronger for it.

This September the Kansas City Public Library’s selection for the Big Read is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a celebration of Mark Twain’s classic and a collaboration with the Kansas City Ballet. Two-time Tony winner Maury Yeston has created a new production, Tom Sawyer: A Ballet in Three Acts, which will be debuting at the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts this October. He’ll be kicking off the Big Read at the Central Library (14 W. 10^th St.) on Thursday, Sept. 8^th at 6:30 pm with a piano performance. The library has 500 extra copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to check out for the month of September, and a full schedule of events to keep you coming back for more.

These things are considered perfectly polite because they are not undue impositions on the people around us. Yet, to the chagrin of smokers everywhere, the tide has receded so far from the era of air laissez-faire you get some people coughing and glaring at smokers when they’re outside. As an ex-smoker let me just say that’s annoying.

That being said, idling your car for anything but safety reasons is fast becoming the new second-hand smoke. Unnecessary idling is already illegal in the District of Colombia, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Utah; parts of Colorado, New York State, and Missouri. The long and short of it is that idling burns 6 billion gallons of fuel for no purpose whatsoever every year. At $3.50 a gallon that’s $21 billion, and we all know gas is not going to get much less expensive in the years to come.

Idling unnecessarily exacerbates poor air quality on the hottest days of the summer, and the worst offenders are vehicles loading and unloading (children, equipment, produce, etc.). People of means can switch to hybrid cars, which stop using gas entirely when the car is not moving; for everyone else there is another solution on hot days— turn off the car, and go inside. And for the particularly well-heeled who want to bypass hybrids entirely and go straight to electric, there’s a refueling station at the Boulevard Brewery, which is a catch-22 if you think about it.

On cold days modern cars only really need to heat for 30 seconds or so before they’re ready to drive, because the catalytic converter actually works more efficiently when the car is in motion than when it is stationary. The same goes for waiting outside in the winter; just go inside. Talk to someone. It’ll be good for you. Idle cars are asocial incubators.

Unless you need to be traffic-ready there are very few reasons to idle, and about 21 billion reasons not to. So stop passing gas, especially when it’s hot.

Today at 3 pm, if you get a chance, tune in to the interview with Alice Waters on Fresh Air, in which she talks about her new book 40 Years of Chez Panisse: the Power of Gathering. If you’re a foodie you’ll want to pick it up for your locavore history collection; and if you’re not but you want desperately to feel inspired, this is the perfect place to start. In its forward by Calvin Trillin, he talks about the kind of culinary transformation that took place in the sixties around places like Chez Panisse. The book traces the path of a restaurant that made exotic foodstuffs synonymous with suspect, and local the class favorite again.

If you’re not going to catch either the interview or the book, but you do want to check out what’s in season this fall, a fantastic resource for a farmer’s market in walking distance is local harvest. Not only does it list the farms and their hours, it also lists what produce you’ll find there and even recipes for the produce. It works very hard to make eating local as intuitive as can be.

In the KCK farmers market alone you can find these winter favorites: Beets, carrots, collards, cucumber, eggplant, garlic, green beans, green onions, hot peppers, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, mustard greens, okra, onions, potatoes, pumpkins, radishes, summer squash, sweet peppers, sweet potatoes, Swiss chard, tomatoes, turnips, winter squash, and zucchini.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the local farmer has become something of an endangered species. I’d like to say that the local food movement is a democratic revolution, but the fact is that super food producers and a global supply chain have supplanted the economics of these once-iconic local professionals. Before peppers from Holland and strawberries from Chile were an option, exotic was very rare and very expensive. Today the opposite is the case, and you’d be more likely to find a tomato from Florida at the grocers than a green bean from Kansas or Missouri.

Feed your neighbors and your family.  Visit a farmers market soon.

What you might not know is that your chances at catching one are better than almost any other person in the United States. They are just one of the 340 different species of migratory birds observed in the Cheyenne Bottoms, a lay-away destination for 45 percent of all migratory birds in the country. The entirety of the wetlands covers around 41,000 acres. It’s the largest inland marsh in the US, and the Nature Conservancy manages and protects 8,000 acres of that wetland. Of the twelve original wetlands in the state of Kansas, only three remain (the Cheyenne Bottoms, Quivira, and Jamestown). Between 1957 and 1978 about 40 percent of wetlands in Kansas disappeared, which produced predictably dismal results for some shorebird species— drops from 60 to 80 percent. The snipe might be harder to catch than even I realized.

However, as this video for the nature conservancy so beautifully illustrates, there is still plenty left to explore and protect. The creatures in these marshes are not your average mallard. The majestic great blue heron (ardea herodias)  still nests in tall marsh trees, or stands still as a reed in the water, waiting to spear unsuspecting pray in the blink of an eye. Or you can catch the snipe’s unusual mating behavior, what ornithologists call drumming. They descend around potential mates at top speed and slowly beat their wings to produce a rhythmic thudding. Musicians get all the girls, no matter the species.

You never really know what you’ll find there. An adolescent bald eagle was spotted on July 28, but the best time to find those are in January and February when the ducks and geese are migrating south. Bring your camera and a Latin dictionary. Who knows, you may need to name something brand new.

Kansas Citians will have a chance to see the real thing in person once Sea Life opens in 2012 at Crown Center.  It’s going to take up all of the first floor and some of the second, and will feature a viewing tunnel so undersea explorers can get close to the creatures without getting wet. It won’t be the first time horrific predators have wandered the plains. But the last time was 65 million years ago.

Kansas was once home to aquatic reptiles that would have eaten Jaws as an after-dinner mint. Long ago this region was the Western Interior Seaway. It was filled with animals that emerged from the water many millions of years ago, only to evolve right back into sea dwellers. But they kept their lungs (air— who knew it could be so addictive?).

These were beasts like pliosaurs, ten-foot-long reptiles with four wing-like fins. They were predators, able to maneuver with agility in the water at extremely high speeds, with elongated snouts like a crocodile’s and fins that were almost equal to their length. Then there was the mosasaur, that ranged in length from 20 feet on the short end to 50 feet on the long, half of that in tail alone. One specimen nick-named “Bunker” found in western Kansas around 1910 had a skull six feet long with 72 sharp, backward-curving teeth. It may have weighed as much as eight tons.

All this information, in exhaustive paleontological detail, can be found in Richard Ellis’ Sea Dragons (2003). Amid the detailed, 180-million-year story of predation and adaptation there are gems of historical paleontology such as this description from Will Cuppy (1941):

The Plesiosaurs were reptiles who had gone back to the water because it seemed like a good idea at the time. As they knew little or nothing about swimming, they rowed themselves around in the water with their four paddles, instead of using their tails for propulsion like the brighter marine animals. This made them too slow to catch fish, so they kept adding vertebrae to their necks until their necks were longer than all the rest of their body. Then they would dart their heads at the fish from a distance of twenty-five or thirty-feet. Thus the Plesiosaurs resembled the modern Sea Serpent above the water-line, though they were almost a total loss farther down.

If you enjoy titanic predators and crime scenes 65 million years cold, you can’t do much better.

Chez Elle Creperie & Art Gallery

1713 Summit, 6-9 pm

Chez Elle advertises itself as the only creperie in KC. I’d go lounge on their patio with a Nutella/Banana crepe (or what have you), listen to some acoustic background music with some friends, forget you’re in KC, and then take a pedicab back to reality, and the poppin’ Crossroads. Or reverse it and end your night at Chez Elle instead.

Beggar’s Table Church & Gallery

2009 Baltimore, 6-9:30 pm

Have you ever come across a problem, realized you didn’t have the solution, and then turned to google for the answer? Have you ever wondered what you would do if google didn’t have the solution?  Does it bother you that I didn’t capitalize “google?” Scary, right? Come to the Beggar’s Table and check out the new show by M.A. Alford, who is exploring how technology has come to replace religion in the secular world as a place of faith.

Buttonwood Art Space

3013 Main, 5-9 pm

The Embassy of the Republic of Slovakia has loaned us works from the Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava, a BFD-art competition for international children’s books artists. Trust us, it’s not going to be Disney approved. Expect to see things that may haunt your dreams, and then realize that these are for kids.

Hilliard Gallery

1820 McGee, 6-10 pm

Continuing on the theme of artwork for children that may be inappropriate for your kids, Teresa Magel has created a show called Wonderland/Wanderlust full of paintings inspired by Mr. Inappropriate himself, Lewis Carroll. If you love dysfunctional relationships between flowers and/or playing cards, come on down and see what all the rush is about.

The Living Room

1818 McGee

The show starts at 8 pm. The Slaughterhouse Opera will present to you a rock opera of the zombie apocalypse in one act. Gird your brains.

One3Studios

419 E. 18^th St.

Monica Davis came back from a tour in Iraq to find herself in art, using it as an exploration of where she’s been, what she’s seen, and where she’s going. See her show, inspired by the vastness of the desert theater, from 6-9 pm.