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A good example is with potatoes -- there are about 200 different varieties of potato, but my understanding is that only four or five of them are seriously grown on a large scale in the US.

Heirloom vegetables are still grown on a small scale just about everywhere. Plants are prolific seed producers, so it'd only take a season or two to get enough seeds for everyone.

Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers: Marginality and Memory in the Conservation of Biological Diversity

The author of this book has traveled around the world, doing research on "seed savers", generations of people who farm, save and share their own seeds.

Also see The Meat You Eat by Ken Midkiff, for how Agribusiness makes us all unhealthy.

I found both books at my public library. Well, I wasn't looking for those particular titles at the time, so I guess they actually found me.

Organic seed companies are a good source for heirloom varieties. Seeds of Change, for example.

Iron Council by China Mieville
Secularity: 10 Technophilia: 10
Quality: 8 Xenophilia: 10
Tilt: 7 Average: 9

"I want to die for the engine I love -- one hundred and forty three"
- a folk song

Two decades after the dreamplague of Perdido Street Station, the industrial metropolis of New Crobuzon bubbles with discontent. Guilds strike. Revolutionary cells meet and blabber. Militia patrol in grim uniforms.

The suffrage remains very limited. Power is still in the hands of the Fat Sun Party, with the xenophobic Three Quillers holding the balance of power. New Crobuzon is at war with the city-state of Tesh, and crippled veterans fill the streets.

New Crobuzon's industrialists have launched the construction of a railroad to span the continent. Hills have been levelled, swamps have been filled, mountains have been bored. Thousands of vodyanoi, human, cactus, and Remade workers have died.

In the meantime, an insurrectionary by the name of Cutter has set out on a journey to find a comrade -- or, as Mieville artfuly prefers -- a chaver called Jonah who is in turn looking for the legendary Iron Council.

The first part of the book is bone-fast. The search for Jonah rushes in a manic whirlwind of activity across Bas Lag. Mieville eventually lets up the pace and slows down to a point that lets the majesty of the universe shine through.

The usual playful nomenclature of Mieville is in full force. Exotica suprises and delights. Events echo real world ones without lapsing into allegory.

Terry Pratchett likes to mumble about the narrative imperative, but he doesn't really grasp it. Pratchett's wars end with the sides realizing that they know each other's first names or that they'd much rather play some footie or something trite like that. Everyone's a jolly swell bloke. Uhm, okay. Very gripping. Not.

Mieville, on the other hand, is possessed by the imperative. Iron Council has, in a way, run away from him. At times, the plot stops being a novel and becomes a tall tale or a Biblical myth. Hyperrealism mixes with airbrushed archetypes. China failed to add enough water to the concentrate and the result is a mix of juice and juice powder.

I recommend it, but not as much as I recommed The Scar.

For an alternate opinion, try bookslut.com: "Well, as evinced by his latest novel, Iron Council, my problem is that Miéville is just an abhorrently boring and pretentious novelist... What's frustrating isn't that Miéville is a bad writer. He's not. Throughout Iron Council, there are moments of near-genius, in which he nicely nails tough bits of dialogue or characterization. There is an entire section describing a radical play that reads as well as anything Kim Newman or Ellen Kushner could write. The man can write. He just chooses not to."

Which is amazingly still fooling retards today, over three decades later.

Here is an excerpt from an interview http://www.bookslut.com/features/2003_10_000738.ph p
with Augusten Burroughs (author of Running with Scissors) that is relevant here:

INTERVIEWER: Are you going to write the screenplay?

BURROUGHS: He is. I'm not going to write the screenplay.

INTERVIEWER: Are you going to have an advisory role with it?

BURROUGHS: Yeah, but I'm not writing the screenplay. That's one of those things -- maybe my advertising background makes it easier -- but when you come up with an ad campaign, you come up with this vision, something you think is really smart, yet really entertaining, and then you give it to a director and he takes it to the next level. You learn early on in your career -- if you're going to have a long career -- that you need to let it go. You either need to have complete control over [a film], write the screenplay, choose the director, much the way John Irving did for Cider House Rules, or you need to let it go. But you can't option it, and then whine about it not being good, because the only reason you option it is for money. That's why you do it.

And of course the fact that *you* have no idea what you're talking about doesn't make you arrogant, either.

I found that line... amusing. Because we all know that American comics are "just for kids," right?

I found that line... amusing. Because we all know that American comics are "just for kids," right?

I found that line... amusing. Because we all know that American comics are "just for kids," right?