Earth Hour minus one

I enjoy protests which is what Earth Hour was supposed to be as opposed to the fatuous publicity stunt it is. It reminded me of when everybody held hands across America back in the seventies or eighties or nineties, which ever decade it was when Americans were out of their pea sized, drug addled brains. Oh how often I have wished I could have arranged for the last person in line to grab a high voltage line and we all could have learned the importance of being in contact with someone who was well grounded.

Earth Hour was supposed to raise awareness or protest or speak truth to power about global warming or climate change or global cooling or pollution or conservation or animal cruelty or something. (I think I could be persuaded to oppose animal cruelty if PETA would persuade more models to walk around naked in protest. I'm just saying...) At any rate we are supposed to turn off the lights to remind us to stop using oil and other fossil fuels which will make the lights stay off all the time, which would just about solve everything.

Now I love to protest, I wouldn't be what I am today, a bitter, middle aged man without employable skills if I hadn't been protesting during college instead of studying. Speaking of protests, what's wrong with kids these days, sure they're opposed the war but I didn't hear about any coeds gunned down at Kent State this time around. You're all a bunch of slackers! You aren't going to generate many good songs that way, it takes a body count to get Crosby, Stills and Nash off their duffs and writing.

I love protests and marches, its away for you and your friends to demonstrate (Yeah, I know.) your sincere and principled concern for an issue you don't want to waste any time doing something about. You get to hear people no more qualified than yourself lecture you on the urgency of a crisis they had no idea was going on until their basic cable package started including the Discovery Channel. Its activism lite, you don't have to go to meetings with skinny bearded guys or intense chubby women and best of all you can shave. Protests keep police crowd estimators employed and gives politicians parades they can get in front of and pretend they're leading.

I'm not a nut bag, OK maybe that isn't completely true but I don't advocate spilling tankers full of oil on sea birds no matter how much fun it is. Oil is a complex compound we have turned into a myriad of products, there is no organic analogue for Plexiglas or PVC so conserving this limited resource is a good idea. The problem is not that we are using it up at an unreasonable rate or doing stupid things with it, hydrocarbons are one of the most recyclable things around and even its most disposable products have secondary uses. (Think about that when you are picking up your dogs poo, although if you live by me I know you don't bother.) The problem is there are too many people using fossil fuels and until somebody addresses how we reduce the numbers sucking on the straw, pollution, congestion and fossil fuel usage will grow no matter how many lights we turn off.

I hope Earth Hour and Earth Day get to expand into an Earth Month where everybody does without fossil fuels for the good of the planet, ah the bliss of no electricity, no fertilizer, no transportation, no food. We could follow that up with Earth Year and discover the kind of lives our ancestors enjoyed without heat, clean water or a life expectancy. Behold a pale rider? Hell's Bells that's how we'll all have to get around without fossil fuels, it'll be like the best Christmas ever and we'll all get ponies because we'll need them to get where we want to go. It could be followed by Earth Famine Decade or Earth Destitution Century to put some natural order back in our civilization, after all why should Islamic Fundamentalist get to be the only ones living in the sixteenth century. I'm sure the Earth will appreciate it.

A Very Special Olympics

The President of late has run afoul of the parents and advocates for children that go to school via the short bus. Imagine my surprise when I learned we were all supposed to take the Special Olympics seriously, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean what are we to make of kids in wheel chairs being tossed into pools and told to swim or that competition where you ski and shoot and ride a horse, oh wait a minute that’s the Pentateuch or Biathlon or whatever and real people do it in Finland.

I assume that one solution would be not filling the little tykes in on what all the laughing behind their backs was about, thats what we did with Clinton and Bush. After all there should be a place where adult liberal sophisticates can safely snicker at the unfortunate with out being upbraided for being the callous bigots they are. With George Bush out of Washington how are Bill Maher, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert going to keep coming up with bright, fresh, politically savvy original material? They’ll have to mock the stumbling, drooling and funny looking folks that haven’t been elected to Congress yet, that’s how.

Now I have nothing against Down’s Syndrome athletes competing in whatever they choose, except curling and synchronized rowing because they clearly have an intelligence edge on the folks that do that for real. A very good friend and second most flamboyantly Queenie homosexual I ever knew, Waylon Flowers once told me “Don’t Taunt The Wretched!” and I have always tried to follow that advice. (Actually it’s more like a 500 way tie for second for the Queenie crown, sorry Waylon.) Although that begs the question, who is more wretched: the kids who are just having fun or our gifted President who it seems could medal at the next Special Olympics Spontaneous Public Speaking competition, although Biden is certain for the Gold.

From now on I will refrain from using Idiot, Retard, Imbecile, Shit For Brains, Moron, Hydro Cephalic Crap Head, Quarter Wit, Half Wit, Nit Wit, Melon Headed Nit Wit, French Brained Nit Wit head, Boob brain, Bean Brained, Bungle Headed Moron with a side of Retarded, Mullet Headed B B Brain, Stupid fucking Asshole Nit Wit, Badger Brain, Taco Flavored Doritos Nit Wit Bubble Brain and Dummy when referring to the challenged folks at the Special Olympics. I will reserve these words for the dim bulbs and pellet heads in the general population that aren’t in the Special Olympics and when I’m driving.

I hope we can now watch the Special Olympics with new found gravity and watch the equestrian sailing, rhythmic weight lifting and ice fishing finals with the seriousness they deserve except when that vacuum headed shit melon Bob Costas is doing the commentary.