Thursday, October 05, 2006

Help Save The Planet. It's Really Easy.

There's a great piece by Andrew Postman called "The Energy Diet" in today's NY Times.

Go read it.

Posted by bjkeefe at 12:31 PM

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of course you are well aware of your faux paxxxxxxxxx (I have no idea how to spell this, I TOOK SPANISH):

George Carlin pointed out in the 80's that we are not "saving the planet," but rather attempting in vain to save ourselves, HUMANS.

If AND WHEN we warm the globe to our own demise (which may be a chain of events already uncontrollably set into action), or cause nuclear explosions that destroy all humans, the planet will recover just fine (if it is "damaged" to start with - ooooh sorry I almost ended a sentence with a preposition).

In fact, the process of our human self-destruction is akin to the "dog" Earth simply brushing off some bothersome fleas.

1:34 AM, October 06, 2006
bjkeefe said...

I agree with Josh on this one. It's true: "Save the planet" is inaccurate. Michael Crichton, speaking through Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park, also said this very well. So did Isaac Asimov (I forget in which book), when he talked about how the introduction of free oxygen into the atmosphere was a catastrophe, wiping out nearly all of existing life. (This occurred about 3 or 3.5 billion years ago, or it happened in 3997 B.C. at 2:17 pm, or it never really happened, depending on who you ask.)

I confess to being a little species-centric with my choice of title for this post. In my own defense, I'll claim that I was trying to be a little humorous; like most headline writers, I was most concerned with trying to grab the reader's attention.

I also might argue that along with making life more miserable for ourselves, we do seem to be doing an efficient job of ruining things for a lot of other species. While we humans may be incapable of completely killing the planet, we're displaying an awesome ability to mess it up.

So, "Save the Planet" as an ongoing political slogan might be better replaced by "Don't Foul the Nest" or "Let's Clean The House" or something similar. These lack a little something in the way of panache, however.

I think that's also a French word. If not, it is in any case a bon mot.

1:37 AM, October 06, 2006
Anonymous said...

Bitch, you stripped my comment of its poetic "Scrubs"-like ending:

Bye bye life!
Bye bye happiness!
Goodbye loneliness...
I think I'm gonna die.
See ya Brendan.

Bye the way, this blog site has the following bug:

If you leave a comment and identify yourself as "Other" (maybe not "blogger"), and then you use a profanity in the URL, it rejects the comment (expected) and then offers you a second, third, fourth chance (and so on), each of which will ALSO BE REJECTED regardless of whether there is a profanity in the URL.

-SENIOR QA Engineer

10:48 AM, October 06, 2006
bjkeefe said...

To: Sr. QA Eng.
Re: Blue Pencils and Blue Noses

Glad to see that you can post comments again.

I'm sorry for stripping your poetic ending when I posted your emailed comment. I wasn't sure if it was part of the comment or part of the email.

Sorry, also, to hear about the new bug that you just described, but doubtless, the Blogger team considers it a feature. Next time you cuss in the web site field when posting as "Other," try clearing your cookies (which may mess something else up about the comment-posting session) and see if that'll work.

Probably an easier solution: Restrict your use of profanity to the main body of the comment.

--Management

11:01 AM, October 06, 2006

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

ShareThis