All Rights Reserved
© 2003. No portion of my work may be used without my permission.
As you'll discover, my point of view is definitely different. Read my thoughts, learn a few things, have a chuckle.
September 2, 2003
My dishwasher died so I headed out to Sears to buy a new one. Before I did, I downloaded a Consumer Reports report on dishwashers. It took me about half an hour to read it and absorb the key points. I arrived at Sears and found the salesperson who handles dishwashers. I had seen her before so I knew she'd been working there for a while. I told her what I was looking for, mentioned that I had read the reviews in Consumer Reports and asked her to recommend a dishwasher. She said:
"This here is the one recommended by Consumer Reports."
I told her it couldn't be since it was twice the price and had a dirt sensor whereas Consumer Reports recommends dishwashers without a dirt sensor because they use less water. She asked why a dishwasher with a dirt sensor would use more water so I explained it to her. Then I asked her the difference between a stainless steel tub and a plastic tub. She said:
"Well, one costs more than the other." I asked her why I would want to spend more for stainless steel. She replied:
"It depends on whether you like stainless steel or plastic."
There were two dishwashers in my price range. A Frigidaire and a Kenmore. Kenmore is Sears' brand. I asked her which one was more reliable. She said there was no difference. Then I remembered that Consumer Reports had rated Kenmore dishwashers among the most reliable and Frigidaire among the least reliable. When I shared that information with her, her only comeback was:
"There you go. You have your answer."
One dishwasher had a hose to feed the arm on the upper rack. The other one shot the water up through the center of the arm. I asked her if the first was better in some way because it was a bit more expensive. Her answer:
"I honestly don't know."
A customer walked and asked the sales clerk for help. She shot back sternly:
"I'm with a customer right now. I can't help you." The customer left. She could have smiled at her and said:
"I am helping a customer right now but I will be done shortly and will be delighted to help you. Would you like to look at some brochures in the meantime?"
She rated a zero as far as technical knowledge. I knew more than her with just half and hour's preparation. And she rated zero as well as far as salesmanship.
I made my selection and she rang up my purchase. As I left, she handed me the receipt and her business card which read "Brand master, ranges, dishwashers, air conditioners." Master my foot!
September 5, 2003
I was reading the August 25 issue of Newsweek and was delighted to discover that Anna Quindlen (on page 68) shares my views on the environment. Here is some of what she wrote, with my comments in brackets:
"The way in which modern people interact with their animal counterparts [by the way Anna, you'd be surprised to learn that Humans are animals too. Can't you tell from the way they breed like rabbits?] is one of those things that make us look as though our evolution took place on a bell curve and it's currently on the downside. Most of us now act toward native creatures the way our ancestors once acted toward Native Americans: we know that they were here first so we're willing to tolerate them as long as they don't demand to share when we build unattractive structures atop their former homes. If they don' cooperate, we slaughter them.
Ultimately the deer abattoirs along the highway, or the pest-control experts pulling bats out of attics, are, as one town official in New Jersey said of the bears not long ago, signs of a 'people problem'. (...) [It's always struck me as odd that a town of 3,000 people is considered 'small' but an area with 3,000 deer is considered to be way overpopulated by deer. And yet, deer have much, much less of a harmful effect on the environment than people. If we consider 3,000 deer in one place a problem, then we should consider 3,000 people in one place a much bigger problem. We've gotten so used to high Human population densities, that we don't even flinch when we're told that there are 6 billion Humans on this planet and yet we can't even grasp the enormity of that number. Can you imagine if there were 6 billion elephants on Earth?]
Americans have been careless and casual with our natural resources for a long time. Can an accounting be long delayed? (...) [As I said here in July, we are stealing from future generations. The answer, Anna, is no, an accounting cannot be long delayed. The chickens are going to come home to roost.] Watch great cities fade to black, look at the unchecked and unsightly overdevelopment all around them, and it is hard to imagine this will be a livable country a hundred years from now. [As I said in June, it's time to stop destroying pristine land. If you want to build something new, then redevelop the brownfields.] The battle between human and animal is merely a reflection of that. Public officials are notoriously leery of the long view, but ordinary people are no better. The great contradiction: all those alleged nature lovers who fall for a forested range, then bring in the bulldozers. [They cut down all the trees then give the new streets the names of trees.]
(...) family life has devolved into individual isolation, everyone with his own TV and computer, centrally cooled to a frosty edge or heedlessly heated. [I've never understood why people like to freeze in the summer and swelter in the winter. They'd save a heck of a lot of money if they did the opposite.]
(...) New Jersey wants to allow the hunting of bears. No one seems to have considered the obvious alternative: instead of issuing hunting permits, call a moratorium on building permits. Permanently. [But Anna, if the population continues to grow, where are you going to house all the new people? A moratorium on human growth is what you really need.]
September 9, 2003
I was helping a friend reserve a rental car on the Avis website. She had a coupon for a free weekend day with a weekly rental. I entered the dates for an eight-day rental and the coupon code. The website rejected the coupon. I was flabbergasted when I got the error message below. I took a screenshot so people would see it to believe it.
Avis. We try harder. Sure you do. And try as you might, you still can't figure out that there is a 100% chance that any eight-day period will include a full weekend!
My friend ended up renting from Hertz instead. The reservation went off without a hitch, which inspired me to come up with a new slogan for Hertz: We're so good, it Hertz.
September 12, 2003
Newsweek says Britney Spears "shared an open-mouth kiss with Madonna at the MTV Video Music Awards." Personally, I prefer not to share my kisses.
September 15, 2003
Here's the answer to last month's mystery picture: that woman is a masseuse. She is walking on the patient's back as a form of massage. She is not striking her with an iron pipe. She is holding on to an iron pipe that runs from one wall to another, to steady herself. The caption in the newspaper did not explain all that. Someone not familiar with massage would have been left wondering about that picture. Luckily, you had me to enlighten you.
September 18, 2003
I have just finished editing a digital video I made about robin chicks that hatched in an apple tree just outside my window. If you have a DSL connection, you can view it now. View it in full screen mode for the best experience. I narrated the video with the voice and accent of Georges Brossard, the host of Insectia on Animal Planet. He is from Quebec, Canada, and has a very distinct accent. I'm thinking of doing my next video with the accent of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter.
September 23, 2003
I watched a rerun of Scientific American Frontiers on PBS. Alan Alda interviewed Peter Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and an acclaimed conservationist. Several things Dr. Raven are congruent with my views. The following quotes are from the program, with my comments in brackets.
"Biodiversity's species become extinct and communities and ecosystems are lacerated and lose their vitality because of human pressures, which have to do with consumption. More and more people wanting more and more. (...) now there are about 6 billion. The pressure of all those people in changing the natural forests and prairies and fields and places where plants and animals live, that conversion of habitats is the greatest threat to biological diversity."
"The population of the United States has doubled since 1943. The 135 million people that we've added since then are consuming at 30 or 40 times the rate of a person in rural Brazil or rural Indonesia. This means that the consumption and the waste and the pollution associated with those 135 million people is nearly equal to the entire population of the developing world. We often don't think about that, but it's true."
"Human beings regard an image of progress as clearing forests, clearing prairies, building cities and the like, but ultimately, the roots are always in natural productivity. And the extent to which we understand that is the extent to which we'll really be successful."
"(...) during the last 50 years, we've wasted 25% of the topsoil, we've lost 20% of the agricultural land, we've added 1/6 of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we've cut down 1/3 of the forests that were around 50 years ago. We've depleted the stratospheric ozone layer, increasing our risk of skin cancer. That's not sustainable. The world has only so much to offer. What we're really talking about is what kind of a world we want our children and grandchildren to live in. It's either a diverse, nourishing, healthy, prosperous, productive, interesting, beautiful place to live, or it's a dull, homogenous, uninteresting place to live. That's the most basic answer. It's not that we have any choice about attaining sustainability. It's what is the world going to look like when we do attain sustainability."
Alan Alda: Is it possible to make it clear to somebody in Utah that it matters to them if the last elephant dies in Africa?
Peter Raven: Whether the last elephant dies in Africa matters morally, in the first instance. Most of us believe at some level that we have an obligation to save the products of 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth, and that the enhancement to our lives of knowing that we live on an Earth with all of this diversity in it is exceedingly important. But beyond that, we use biodiversity to support our lives. We're just beginning to understand how life differs, how it works and how it evolved. It seems an awfully good idea, whether we're talking practically or morally, to save as much of that diversity as possible, to understand it as well as we can and to keep it around for our descendents to enjoy, to study, and simply to have there as a resource for their future." [Other creatures on this planet have a right to exist for their own sake -- even if our descendents will not enjoy them, study them, or use them as a resource. That may seem revolutionary but to me, it is self-evident. This self-centeredness is inherent to so many human beings (including enlightened ones like Peter Raven) and is the cause of the problem. Once we recognize that all other life on this planet exists in its own right, we will stop abusing it.]
"We'll lose about half of all tropical species during the course of the [21st] century, which amount to about a third of all the species on Earth."
ALAN ALDA (NARRATION) "The images are by now familiar. Tropical forests are rapidly disappearing, at the rate of about 150 square miles a day - 1% a year. Forest is fatally attractive. The timber's worth money, and the space gives room to expand. Developing countries need both, as they follow the way we in the industrialized countries do things."
"I(...) In Raven's world, people acknowledge that we are part of nature, that we evolved in wild places side by side with nature's diversity, and that we have no right to destroy these wonderful things. Who could disagree with such an idea, he asks, when faced with the beauty of the forest? Raven helped coin the term biodiversity to describe the huge range of species that fit together to make ecosystems - like tropical forest or the American prairie. The problem is the forces arrayed against advocates like Raven are immensely powerful, and some would say unstoppable. Just look at our own short history."
"It took us only about 300 years to dam every major river from the Atlantic to the Pacific, cut down all but 2% of the original forest, and plow under a million square miles of prairie. We literally took nature apart, without really understanding it. In the process we found prosperity, and pollution. But now the tinkering is becoming global in scale. Scientists agree we're changing the climate -- and what else could we be doing?"
PETER RAVEN "If everybody in the world lived as we do in the United States, it's estimated it would take about two more of additions of planet Earth to accommodate everybody and we haven't got it."
ALAN ALDA (NARRATION) "People have to understand, says Raven, that we humans are inseparable from the natural world. We use it all the time."
(...)
ALAN ALDA (NARRATION) "More often those choices are not so easy, or so obvious. For example, we filled in a fifth of our wetlands before we fully understood how they purify water, recycle nutrients, absorb floods, and provide nursery grounds for marine life. There may be as many as 20 million insect species in the world. Most are in tropical forests, but many are right here at home, working hard to pollinate our crops. We don't know the effects of destroying a large part of the globe's insects. And we don't know how effectively polluted oceans will continue to help regulate the global atmosphere - which is just one of the things they do, as do forests."
PETER RAVEN "They've been estimated by some economists as worth $37 trillion or some arbitrary number like that. But actually, it's pretty easy to see that they're priceless. If we didn't have them, we'd all be dead so we wouldn't be worrying about what they were worth."
(...)
PETER RAVEN "400 generations ago, just 400 generations, 10,000 years ago, there were only a few million people in the whole world. [and that's the way it was intended to be -- and the way it was for most of the existence of this planet.] It's really only been the invention of crop agriculture that's allowed the global population to build up to where we're cultivating an area the size of South America, producing food, producing poets, musicians, specialists of all kinds that create what we call civilization. But it all relates ultimately on the ability of natural systems to be able to support us."
ALAN ALDA (NARRATION) "The nightmare that Raven foresees is growing poverty and population driving a quickening pace of ecosystem destruction in developing countries. The only possible answer, he believes, lies with new ideas - especially new science - coming from within developing countries themselves." [The only answer is reducing the human population back to sustainable, reasonable, enjoyable levels. Contraception is a great invention. Use it more, make it even more effective, have less sex, make fewer babies. Science cannot perform miracles. It cannot create more land. It cannot allow us to squeeze more humans on the face of this planet. Well, maybe if we made them smaller. The trend, unfortunately, seems to be going in the other direction. You know how at the circus a dozen clowns manage to squeeze into a tiny car? It seems we're trying to do the same thing by trying to squeeze as many people as we can onto the face of this planet.]
September 28, 2003
Bush finds himself between Iraq and a hard place. Withdraw and lose all credibility on the world stage. Or stay and pay with hundreds of American lives and billions of dollars for many years to come. If Bush were to ask me, I'd say now that we started it, we need to finish it and finish it well. We can do with Iraq what we did with Germany, Italy, and Japan after WWII and at far lesser cost. If we succeed in making Iraq a democratic, forward-thinking place - and that's a big if - Iraq will become a catalyst for change in the entire Middle East. To succeed, we must invest tens of billions and stay for eight or more years. The Rumsfeld philosophy is: do it quickly and on the cheap and be out in a few months. That would be a big mistake. We would end up paying much more in the long run. Sometimes the expensive option is the cheapest in the long run.
All Rights Reserved
© 2003. No portion of my work may be used without my permission.