Outside Tropical Storm/not quite hurricane Edouard is drenching my lawn. It's a soothing sound. And I expect it will be at it half the day and into the night.
I live far enough west of Houston - that the vicissitudes of the coastal weather usually don't bother my family, far enough to be cheap as well. Lucky me.
I've taken a new job this fall. I'll be teaching in the school district I live in. I suspect I'm not alone. Lots and lots of people have either changed jobs or contemplating changing jobs to find work closer to home, pushed by the rising cost of gas.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, which will probably piss some people off, but so be it. (I know how many people read this blog. I'm not stupid. Both of them can get in their SUV's and come throw dirt clods at my house if it will make them feel better.)
Guess what? Four dollar a gallon gasoline has proven in some ways to be a blessing. It's made lots of people park their honking pickups and suv's and find alternatives, if nothing else just to lessen the sting of paying a hundred dollars or more at the pump every week.
I own a ten year old Toyota Avalon; it gets about twenty miles to the gallon in the city if I'm not using the air conditioning.
Course, six months out of the year, I am using air conditioning. So it doesn't get anything like twenty to the gallon.
Lots of people are doing the same. I suspect that lots more people will be planting vegetable gardens next spring. They'll be looking for locally grown produce. They'll maybe shop at their neighborhood grocery instead of driving extra miles to the local GigantoWalmartotron.
People may look for kids clothes at their nearest garage sale, rather than at the nearest store.
They'll maybe buy a small car that gets 30+ miles to the gallon. Still can't figure out who exactly will buy those gigantic Ford 350's and GM Hummers. Perhaps someone will paint them and turn them into lawn art.
Our way of life is changing.
Change is hard. But change can be a good thing.
The end result is that we may take a look at ways out of all this, and quit arguing amongst ourselves. Take global warming - normal historical warming or warming caused by too much carbon dioxide in the air - either way, it's getting warmer, though so far by smallish amounts.
Those smallish amounts are causing things to happen - ice to melt and things to change - such that we can either place our heads further up our backsides or do something sensible about it.
Personally, I'd like to see us free from buying oil abroad. But unlike many, I think the worst thing we can do about it is simply to drill for more. If you are addicted to crack the way we are addicted to oil, a solution to same is not to just find a cheaper local dealer, or to start growing coca plants.
Some time in the next fifty years we need to give the oil economy the boot, and switch to the hydrogen economy. GM and Ford and Toyota are ready for it; they've already built their hydrogen cars. Ten years from now would be a whole lot better than fifty years from now.
The way to go in the meantime is not only more electricity-making fueled by clean moving air and moving water, but a host of things - not just drill more and use more clean coal and build more nuclear plants. We need to change laws to make electric cars legal - in most states they are not allowed. We need to regard nuclear plants as giant bulleyes for terrorists - and therefore to be avoided. We need to change laws to allow plants to turn their excess heat into electricity. We need to improve our pitiful mass transit system. We need to revamp our infrastructure. We need above all to quit doing what we were doing, just because we were doing it. We need to be daring. We need to think outside of the box.
What we really need is fusion - that is the nearly limitless power that fuels the atomic bomb.
Problem is that the power that fusion produces is so great we have yet to figure out how to contain it.
The Manhatten project that is spoken of to get us off our dependence on foreign oil should be started, but it's impetus should be to harness fusion.
To placate the oil corporations, whose money and influence are vast, we should invite them all in, and spend the next eight years in a wild search to develop a method to harness and controll fusion. They provide energy to us now, they can have a piece of providing hydrogen to future generations. Fair is fair. Once fusion is controlled, then use it to builg plants both make electricity and change water into hydrogen.
I'm no expert. But I imagine that the pipeline system that now crisscrosses and snakes across our country carrying petroleum can simply be replaced with hyrdrogen pipelines and we can cheerfully shoot the Saudi's the finger and leave them to their lakes of oil.
The sooner we get there, the better.
We'll still need petroleum. The plastics that we make from it we be useful for generations to come. But the sooner we get to a time when clean hydrogen powered and electric power vehicles
move us around, and gas powered vehicles become as antiquated and rare as console sized radios, the better.
I tell my daughter the story of how in high school the math/science club wanted to buy a calculator. They were brand new things from Texas Instruments. All they could do is add, subtract, multiply and divide. They cost two hundred dollars, and budding technogeeks, we wanted to buy them. We started raising money. It took a couple of months, and by that time, the price had dropped to about a third.
Technology is a blessing. It's nimble, and ever changing. It gets better, and smaller, and cheaper. But it only came about because people were daring and though outside the box. They didn't listen to the naysayers, they forged on. Our desktop computers, which you can buy for less than five hundred dollars, would run rings around the enormouse machines that in my day took up large rooms and cost millions. What stories will our children tell about the technology they now use?
Will their children and grandchildren scoff at stories about stinky gas powered cars?
I sincerely hope so.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
You read it here first! Smellovision!
In some far off future, or hell, maybe three years from now, you will go into your local movie theater, and while being blasted by sounds which are a bit too loud - loud enough to shake the seats - you may notice that there is something new - smell. Imagine seeing a movie like Saving Private Ryan - which is gripping as hell, visually and audially, if you could also smell what was going on screen.
The result, I think, would be an experience so gripping that people would cry, vomit, shake uncontrollably, etc. For those of us old enough to remember, people had similar reactions after watch Linda Blair in The Exorcist. People fainted, cried, went into hysterics, shook, or came out of the theater with the stunned look of a deer in the headlights. I remember only thinking, when she vomited green liquid - Hey that's the same shade as Campbell's split pea soup, I wonder if that's what they used? - but that's me. Losing my sense of disbelief takes a lot, and the Exorcist, interesting as it was, didn't get me there.
Part of the technology for smell o vision already exists. Perfume companies already have small electronic boxes, which at the cost of about a million dollars each, have the ability to mimic any smell. Park one on the beach at Wakiki, and you can smell the beach at Wakiki three thousand miles away - or at least the electronic box's best estimate of the smell.
What probably hasn't been invented is the technology to make smells only linger for a few minutes - long enough to enrich a scene, but not so long that when the next show starts, you are still smelling things from the first.
Why smellovision - and I will also be the first to say that the name, well the name I'm using sucks. Really sucks. But sucks or not, it's a powerful idea. Smells go directly into the emotional part of our brain, whereas most of our senses have to do a bypass through a second part of our brain, then go into our emotions.
That's one of the reasons that smells are so evocative, and one of the reasons why I predict that some time in the future, the way we went from silent movies to talkie movies, we will go from technicolortalkiesoundieshakey movies - what we have now - to sniffies.
No one must, or ONE MUST tell the pencil lead brains in hollywood, who always think that if a little is good, a lot is better, that with smells, understatement is everthing.
As anyone who has ever sat in front of the old lady brigade at church knows, a little says a lot, and a lot makes you want to upchuck.
So, you might not be able to have smellovision in your home, but what the hell - it will be another reason to get us out of the house and down to the local cinema. Imagine seeing Gone with the wind, or Dr. Zhivago while smelling what is going on on screen, and you have the makings of an absolutely unforgettable experience. Plus, instead of only making new movies, you could enrich the coffers by putting smellovision on the older movies.
Wait and see.
And whoever does it, remember me. You can mail me a modest seven figure check yearly, and pretend you came up with it yourself. I won't say a word.
The result, I think, would be an experience so gripping that people would cry, vomit, shake uncontrollably, etc. For those of us old enough to remember, people had similar reactions after watch Linda Blair in The Exorcist. People fainted, cried, went into hysterics, shook, or came out of the theater with the stunned look of a deer in the headlights. I remember only thinking, when she vomited green liquid - Hey that's the same shade as Campbell's split pea soup, I wonder if that's what they used? - but that's me. Losing my sense of disbelief takes a lot, and the Exorcist, interesting as it was, didn't get me there.
Part of the technology for smell o vision already exists. Perfume companies already have small electronic boxes, which at the cost of about a million dollars each, have the ability to mimic any smell. Park one on the beach at Wakiki, and you can smell the beach at Wakiki three thousand miles away - or at least the electronic box's best estimate of the smell.
What probably hasn't been invented is the technology to make smells only linger for a few minutes - long enough to enrich a scene, but not so long that when the next show starts, you are still smelling things from the first.
Why smellovision - and I will also be the first to say that the name, well the name I'm using sucks. Really sucks. But sucks or not, it's a powerful idea. Smells go directly into the emotional part of our brain, whereas most of our senses have to do a bypass through a second part of our brain, then go into our emotions.
That's one of the reasons that smells are so evocative, and one of the reasons why I predict that some time in the future, the way we went from silent movies to talkie movies, we will go from technicolortalkiesoundieshakey movies - what we have now - to sniffies.
No one must, or ONE MUST tell the pencil lead brains in hollywood, who always think that if a little is good, a lot is better, that with smells, understatement is everthing.
As anyone who has ever sat in front of the old lady brigade at church knows, a little says a lot, and a lot makes you want to upchuck.
So, you might not be able to have smellovision in your home, but what the hell - it will be another reason to get us out of the house and down to the local cinema. Imagine seeing Gone with the wind, or Dr. Zhivago while smelling what is going on on screen, and you have the makings of an absolutely unforgettable experience. Plus, instead of only making new movies, you could enrich the coffers by putting smellovision on the older movies.
Wait and see.
And whoever does it, remember me. You can mail me a modest seven figure check yearly, and pretend you came up with it yourself. I won't say a word.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The latest heroin
I'm about to go out on a limb, but I think there's something out there more dangerous and more addictive than heroin, meth, nicotine, or fingernails. It's put in little kids’ cereals, and if you are a label reader - and lately I find myself being more and more of one, hard as it is with these weak eyes of mine - you'll find it in the most surprising places.
I'm talking about......(furtive look around)
corn syrup. Or as some people refer to it, high fructose corn syrup.
The stuff.
It's in practically everything. Coke. Pancake mix. Twinkies. Candy bars.
Potato salad, for God's sake!
How it is, that anyone, anywhere, would conceive of putting high fructose corn syrup in potato salad is beyond me. Not for the taste. My Mom, Grandma, next door neighbors, hell even the old ladies who bring potato salads to the church picnic - and let me tell you these are ladies whose larders are well stocked with Wonderbread, Miracle Whip, and mushroom soup - hell they can probably pull out at least three dozen recipes right off the top of their heads using these three ingredients - ain't none of them use high fructose in potato salad, still ......
Sorry. I think I may have erred. It is quite possible that both Miracle Whip and Wonderbread and mushroom soup all contain HFCS.
Still, I'm thinking that even including these three magic ingredients, there's only one explanation: HFCS is the new meth, the new heroin, the new nicotine, the new fingernails.
It is the stuff, and it is the devil.
I think that it is HFCS, and not overeating or couchpotatoism, that is the cause of the sad, and rather stout state of affairs we find our selves in nowadays in the United States of America.
Now, America has always been stout. I remember in 1971, driving cross country, and somewhere in the Texas Panhandle, seeing a sherrif who personified this. When he sat down on the cafe stool, his butt cheeks fell down on either side of the stool. He wasn't tall, but we are talking stout.
But today things have gotten worse. Don't believe me?
Mosey on down to your local trough (that's pronounced troff, ya'll, and it's that half roundy cylindrical thing that one uses to feed cattle in, but here I'm referring to your local all you can eat place. You know the one. Salad bar, desert bar, dish after dish after dish joint.) and check it out. We have a few more stout individuals than we used to. Some of them, I swear to high heavens, look like they come for breakfast and don't leave till they kick them out every evening. And I hate to say it, but a whole lot of the dishes at the trough have one secret ingredient: HFCS. It's cheap, and highly addictive.
So beware. The stuff's out there.
Gotta go. I'm in need of a snack, and there's bound to be something in the pantry with my favorite, sneaky, highly addictive ingredient just calling my name.
Here piggy, piggy!
I'm talking about......(furtive look around)
corn syrup. Or as some people refer to it, high fructose corn syrup.
The stuff.
It's in practically everything. Coke. Pancake mix. Twinkies. Candy bars.
Potato salad, for God's sake!
How it is, that anyone, anywhere, would conceive of putting high fructose corn syrup in potato salad is beyond me. Not for the taste. My Mom, Grandma, next door neighbors, hell even the old ladies who bring potato salads to the church picnic - and let me tell you these are ladies whose larders are well stocked with Wonderbread, Miracle Whip, and mushroom soup - hell they can probably pull out at least three dozen recipes right off the top of their heads using these three ingredients - ain't none of them use high fructose in potato salad, still ......
Sorry. I think I may have erred. It is quite possible that both Miracle Whip and Wonderbread and mushroom soup all contain HFCS.
Still, I'm thinking that even including these three magic ingredients, there's only one explanation: HFCS is the new meth, the new heroin, the new nicotine, the new fingernails.
It is the stuff, and it is the devil.
I think that it is HFCS, and not overeating or couchpotatoism, that is the cause of the sad, and rather stout state of affairs we find our selves in nowadays in the United States of America.
Now, America has always been stout. I remember in 1971, driving cross country, and somewhere in the Texas Panhandle, seeing a sherrif who personified this. When he sat down on the cafe stool, his butt cheeks fell down on either side of the stool. He wasn't tall, but we are talking stout.
But today things have gotten worse. Don't believe me?
Mosey on down to your local trough (that's pronounced troff, ya'll, and it's that half roundy cylindrical thing that one uses to feed cattle in, but here I'm referring to your local all you can eat place. You know the one. Salad bar, desert bar, dish after dish after dish joint.) and check it out. We have a few more stout individuals than we used to. Some of them, I swear to high heavens, look like they come for breakfast and don't leave till they kick them out every evening. And I hate to say it, but a whole lot of the dishes at the trough have one secret ingredient: HFCS. It's cheap, and highly addictive.
So beware. The stuff's out there.
Gotta go. I'm in need of a snack, and there's bound to be something in the pantry with my favorite, sneaky, highly addictive ingredient just calling my name.
Here piggy, piggy!
Monday, July 14, 2008
Why not a pie in the eye
James Wan is the director of the latest run of violence porno from Hollywood - the SAW franchise, which glorify violence for it's own sake.
Silly me, but hey, I'm up for starting a campaign. I think we should take on ole James. Not with violence - because hey, that's what offends me - but with old fashioned cream pies in the face.
You can get a good look at him by googling him.
Here's what I propose. Pass the picture around, take a good look at him. He wants to be famous; make him famous. Post his picture everywhere. And anytime he steps out of his apartment, or goes into his local grocery store to buy bottled water, or get a mocha latte at his local coffee joint, or stops to get gas, or stops at Rodeo Drive to buy t shirts, or walks down the beach in Malibu, or steps off the airport in Brisbane, splat! He gets it right in the face with a cream pie. Yep,
someone - anyone - though it strikes me as funnier if its old ladies and little kids - will plaster him right in the face with a cream pie.
No doubt if this starts to happen, and happen often, Mr. Wan will find some way to spin this into even more publicity - maybe even turn it into a People Magazine spread. Any publicity is good, right?
But maybe, just maybe, if it keeps happening, every morning, every afternoon, every evening, turn the corner and splat, Mr. Wan will start to get just a tad skittish.
Hello, Mr. Wan, oh, and by the way - Splat.
Perhaps his own family, his mom and dad will join in the fun, and when he goes home - splat.
Goes to the airport - splat.
Let's turn this into a national - even international phenomenom. And not only limit it to Mr. Wan, who it strikes me got so overwhelmed by the possibility of make it big in Hollywood, that
his common sense, and morality went straight out the window.
Yep, I know: The Saw franchise is only make believe. Movies. It's only pretend. I get it. But it's, well, obscene to glorify violence, so I think the world at large should strike back. Shaving cream or Boston cream, right in the kisser. Further, should anyone be arrested for this: let them ask for a jury trial, and folks, we serve on juries. Let them off.
Hell this could become a national sport.
Now I'm not calling for this in politics, because, though it's been called Hollywood for the ugly, politics is my favorite sport. We can all just agree to disagree. Old fashioned, I know, but there you are.
But Mr. Wan, I wonder if at times your own Mother and Father haven't wanted to wack you upside the back of your head. What you do affects others. You aren't making money in a vacuum.
You look a little young to have kids - but think what you are doing. Wake the hell up.
Please.
Silly me, but hey, I'm up for starting a campaign. I think we should take on ole James. Not with violence - because hey, that's what offends me - but with old fashioned cream pies in the face.
You can get a good look at him by googling him.
Here's what I propose. Pass the picture around, take a good look at him. He wants to be famous; make him famous. Post his picture everywhere. And anytime he steps out of his apartment, or goes into his local grocery store to buy bottled water, or get a mocha latte at his local coffee joint, or stops to get gas, or stops at Rodeo Drive to buy t shirts, or walks down the beach in Malibu, or steps off the airport in Brisbane, splat! He gets it right in the face with a cream pie. Yep,
someone - anyone - though it strikes me as funnier if its old ladies and little kids - will plaster him right in the face with a cream pie.
No doubt if this starts to happen, and happen often, Mr. Wan will find some way to spin this into even more publicity - maybe even turn it into a People Magazine spread. Any publicity is good, right?
But maybe, just maybe, if it keeps happening, every morning, every afternoon, every evening, turn the corner and splat, Mr. Wan will start to get just a tad skittish.
Hello, Mr. Wan, oh, and by the way - Splat.
Perhaps his own family, his mom and dad will join in the fun, and when he goes home - splat.
Goes to the airport - splat.
Let's turn this into a national - even international phenomenom. And not only limit it to Mr. Wan, who it strikes me got so overwhelmed by the possibility of make it big in Hollywood, that
his common sense, and morality went straight out the window.
Yep, I know: The Saw franchise is only make believe. Movies. It's only pretend. I get it. But it's, well, obscene to glorify violence, so I think the world at large should strike back. Shaving cream or Boston cream, right in the kisser. Further, should anyone be arrested for this: let them ask for a jury trial, and folks, we serve on juries. Let them off.
Hell this could become a national sport.
Now I'm not calling for this in politics, because, though it's been called Hollywood for the ugly, politics is my favorite sport. We can all just agree to disagree. Old fashioned, I know, but there you are.
But Mr. Wan, I wonder if at times your own Mother and Father haven't wanted to wack you upside the back of your head. What you do affects others. You aren't making money in a vacuum.
You look a little young to have kids - but think what you are doing. Wake the hell up.
Please.
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