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Earth in the Balance?

Click to view on Amazon.So what about global warming, anyway? Is it real? Or is it just a trumped-up card in the “pollution is bad, dependence on foreign oil is really bad” litany? Have you had enough rhetorical questions? Or should I go on?

It may be a dead horse, but Al’s beating it again, and regardless what you think, it deserves critical thought, so I’ll give you a few useful linky-doodles to explore, and I’ll share my opinion.

Al’s got a new movie called An Inconvenient Truth that revisits his arguments from Earth in the Balance, and it’s sweeping theaters across the nation.

Almost simultaneously, Michael Shermer’s Skeptics Society hosted a weekend seminar called The Environmental Wars, with guest speakers like John Stossel and Michael Crichton who agree to disagree with global warming. There’s lots of information and debate over on DeSmogBlog, and The Commons, and this article from PasdenaWeekly. Please read and think and draw your own conclusions.

As for myself, it seems to me that there is a fair amount of incontrovertible evidence that greenhouse gasses are on the rise, that on-average, global temperatures are on the rise, and other indicators point to a global-warming trend that is a real and serious phenomenon to be reckoned with. I’m also fond of the title of the new book and movie – it seems to me that there’s a kind of “reverse Occam’s Razor,” in that it makes a lot more sense to me that the neo-cons and others with a stake in an oil-based economy would like to see global warming as crackpot worry-mongering, whereas, I can’t really see any self-serving advantage to saying we should protect the environment, cut down on energy waste, reduce pollution, and cut our dependence on foreign oil.

Shouldn’t we do all that regardless? Nonetheless, here are some competing views:

Disclaimer: I honestly tried to Google a few good “counterpoints” against global warming, but “global warming myth” actually turned up some really good counter-counter-arguments against the idea that global warming is a myth, and doggone it, the guys speaking out against global warming just don’t seem as smart on the whole as those speaking in favor, at least to me.
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Asparagus Pee QuoteHere at Asparagus Pee, we’re very thorough, so we went back in time and asked Marcel Proust if he had any comments on our blog, and he said:

My greatest pleasure was the asparagus, bathed in ultramarine and pink and whose spears, delicately brushed in mauve and azure, fade imperceptibly to the base of the stalk&#151still soiled with the earth of their bed&#151through iridescences that are not of this world. It seemed to me that these celestial nuances betrayed the delicious creatures that had amused themselves by becoming vegetables and which, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, gave a glimpse in these dawn-born colors, these rainbow sketches, this extinction of blue evenings, of the precious essence that I would still recognize when, all night following a dinner where I had eaten them, they played in their crude, poetic farces, like one of Shakespeare’s fairies, at changing my chamberpot into a bottle of perfume.

&#151 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Whatever.

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A Hole is to Dig

The Lady Janet bought this great old childrens’ book from 1957 called A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss, who also wrote The Carrot Seed, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. (You could do worse for an illustrator.)

It has these wonderful “operational” definitions, mostly by Kindergarteners, like “A face is so you can make faces,” or “Toes are to wiggle.” Here is a quote from this wonderful book:

Asparagus Pee Quote

“A tablespoon is to eat a table with.”

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It’s sad… so sad… it’s a sad, sad situation

That's the ticket.So here’s what may well be the saddest story in the history of rock and roll. (Well, OK, not like that time when the plane went down with Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, but you know…)

When I heard that Paul McCartney was going to play here in Sacramento at Arco Arena, I thought, “Well, I missed the big tour ten years ago and I was just too cheap and lazy to fly to L.A., but this guy could up and die on me, and then I’d die without ever seeing a Beatle!”

So, I hear that Sir Paul’s coming in November, but I hear this in, like, February, and the tickets go on sale at the end of April. Naturally, I forget to be there at midnight on whatever night that was, but I see a news article the next day that they were selling tickets, so I go online and pay double the face value for some Ticketmaster&#153 tickets that somebody else snagged. Fair enough, I snoozed and lost, cost of doing business, whatever, but suffice it to say that it was a decision that required a major financial discussion &#151 we even kidded about putting them in our safe deposit box.

Fast forward six months. The Lady Janet and I had moved into our new house on November 10th, and the concert was on the 16th.

So I come home and The Lady Janet says, “You’ve got the tickets, right?” and I say, “You’re kidding, right?” and that was officially the end of the world as we know it. See, the tickets were eventually found in a box in Emily’s toy closet, but the night of the concert we tore the whole house apart (with help from my parents) and drove down with no tickets and just threw ourselves on the mercy of the Ticketmaster&#153 lady, who couldn’t give us our tickets, but she could sell us more tickets for $50 each to sit in the top row, directly behind the stage.

So, bottom line, we saw Paul, and HE ROCKED!, but we had lousy seats and it sounded terrible, and we were so bummed about losing our really good tickets that we cried.

Now, having said that, did I mention that HE ROCKED! &#151 I’m telling you, that old boy never took a break, he never took a drink, he just switched back and forth between piano and guitar, he was kind to other Beatles past and present, and performed his arse off for over 3 hours.

I’d recommend seeing him any time you get the chance, and after all, it’s only $50!

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Oh my gosh, he’s gonna blog some more…

If you’re an APG&ONS fan, thanks for sticking by me. I haven’t blogged for a little over three months, because we moved to a new house, with a cool inground pool and this really neat stained glass window. The new place also has a tree swing for Emily &#151 and if you look really closely, you might notice that I have a special splint on my left foot &#151 I broke it about 4 days before the big move.

Here’s a picture of Emily with a lizard.

If I were blogging, I’d say something like click on that image of the two hair ads &#151 it looks to me like if you have curly hair, you need to straighten it; if you have straight hair, you need to curl it; and whatever color your hair happens to be, it shouldn’t be, so do something that appears to be really painful, judging from the picture on the box.

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Excuse Me and God Bless You

How come when someone sneezes, 5 people instantly yell “God bless you,” but if they burp or fart, if anyone says anything, it’s “Excuse yourself.” Those all seem about the same to me. And how come coughing gets left out? That doesn’t seem fair. Maybe I can start a trend where, whenever someone coughs, we’ll all agree to say, “Robitussin!”