the frig blig

There seems to be a bumper crop of new bumperstickers popping up this spring. This one was on a Prius on Jackson Street:

Runners-up for today’s award:
2nd place goes to ‘Your humvee looks stupid’
3rd place goes to ‘WTF’ using the Bush team’s re-election logo design.

Met a gentleman the other night who adamantly insisted that global warming is a hoax. What’s more, he claimed that he had two college degrees in physics and a PhD in mathematics, and was an active participant in the scientific community, having just published his n-teenth research paper last month.

Very curious. His primary argument was that it’s impossible to accurately predict the weather, citing the Lorenz effect as proof.

Before I could muster my defense he baited me into saying I wouldn’t believe his story about how spotted owls also were a hoax — then triumphantly exclaimed “why should I bother explaining it to you when you won’t believe me anyway.”

His preemptive strike successful, he sat back smugly in his happy little room of delusion.

I spent the next few hours thinking about what’s up with him. First, I noted that he was a refugee of the USSR, and had up-close familiarity with state propoganda from the left. This made him skeptical of official explanations, sensitive to propoganda, and wary of being fooled again.

Clearly, forecasting climate change is vastly different from forecasting the weather. But he had shut me down before I could even start a rebuttal, and I suspect should I have started he had more tactical verbal weapons at his disposal.

I also noticed that he believed in god, and clearly there is less evidence for the existence of god than for the existence of global climate change. I didn’t mention this either.

His foolish beliefs made me question the veracity of his claims of education. Of course I kept mum on this too,

And so the evening ended with the Russian emigre and myself both convinced we were correct, smiling and shaking hands taking our leave.

I recorded this video of my friend playing guitar on Thanksgiving 2007 and finally got around to editing it and posting it to youtube:

S and I went to see Dalai Lama yesterday at the football stadium with 50,000 other intrepid souls on a beautiful sunny spring afternoon. After an hour of introductions followed by introductions, he took the microphone. A few things he said included:

Men are bigger troublemakers than women.
The concept of war is outdated.
We need inner disarmament.
The more you forget about others, the more you will suffer.

In his newspaper column yesterday, Anthony Robinson discussed the age-old debate of whether more compassion is, in fact, a good thing. Or does it just encourage bad guys to feel free to do more evil without suffering consequences?

I believe that teaching and practicing compassion reduces the number of evildoers. I also believe this is not a black-and-white issue; sometimes hitting back or restraining the bully is appropriate behavior, rather than turning the other cheek. But I would feel safer in a world where compassion is the norm and fists are used as a last resort, rather than one of the first. And I find living examples of compassion inspiring and joyful.

Lemon pledge malfeasance to the stag
of the unflighted snakes of Ontario
and to the recumbent Ipswitch bit planned
one vacation under fog
invisible
with Ruth and rust bliss for all.

S asked her friends for tunes that, when heard, made them get up and dance. The list was begun with several of her own picks, and as I was anointed the compositor, I added a few of my own. Here then be the list:

13_step_boogie - martin sexton
ants_marching - dave matthews
burning_down_the_house - talking heads
dannys_allstar_joint - rickie lee jones
every_little_thing_she_does - police
fever - peggy lee
Funky Town - lipps
gloria - patti smith
go_go - galactic
grazin_in_the_grass - friends o distinction
im_gonna_be - proclaimers
jump_jive_an_wail - louis prima
misirlou - dick dale
PrettyGirls - brisbanes
stoned_soul_picnic - laura nyro
st_thomas - sonny rollins
the_angels_wanna_wear_my_red_shoes - elvis costello
you_can_call_me_al - paul simon
you_cant_always_get_what_you_want - rolling stones

OK when I was a boy ketchup came in glass bottles and you could watch the bottle’s contents go down as you used it over time. Hence when it was almost empty, you put it on the shopping list and got a new bottle. Simple, right? So simple it didn’t even seem remarkable at the time.

Today, ketchup comes in an opaque plastic bottle dyed the color of ketchup. So it always looks full. And the only way to get a clue about how much is remaining is to judge by the bottle’s weight in my hands. So it’s way easy to run out before it gets on the shopping list.

This is progress — not. I figure fewer bottles probably break during shipping now, but hey — why not use clear plastic? There are umpteen million food products that you can buy in clear plastic containers: milk, mustard, salad dressing, salsa, horseradish — OK you get the picture. What’s up with the opaque ketchup bottle?

I snapped this photo of my coffee cup the other day and gosh but if it isn’t one of the best coffee cup photos I’ve taken in recent memory…if I do say so myself (pat pat).

In other extremely nonimportant news, whilst driving J and W on a short tour of Seattle this afternoon I noticed the bumper of the car in front of us bore a sticker with the following message, which made S and me smile and nod:

Born OK the first time.

The thrill of marking up a library book (about thinking, no less) is reinforced by the startling sight of a black 8-sided asterisk penned into the margin on page 5 — yes!

Libraries empower by helping us share not just books but our ideas and feedback about those books…inside them, becoming part of those very books.

Yowza! Every book a blog!