10/25/2012

Attack of the Giant Pandas

I don’t have a dog in this fight.  By “this fight” I mean the World Series.  My team, the Orioles, not only had its first winning season in 15 years (which is all I asked for), but also made it to the wild card round, beat the Texas Rangers in a one-game playoff and took the Yankees to seven games (two of which went into extra innings), exhausting them enough to allow the Tigers to sweep in the ALCS.

Which may not have been a good thing, since the Tigers looked as rusty last night as they did in the 2006 World Series.  That year, Detroit swept the Oakland A’s in four games in the ALCS, then waited until St. Louis took a full seven games to get past the Mets.  By the time the big show started, the Tigers couldn’t pitch, hit or throw like major leaguers should.  The Cards won in five.

We don’t have cable (much to the teenaged girl’s chagrin) so I have to go over to the neighbor’s to watch baseball, presidential debates or anything else.  (I keep waiting for the teen to call me a hypocrite, but it hasn’t happened.  Maybe she’s saving it for Christmas.)  Monday, I had to switch away from an exciting final NLCS game to watch an excruciating final debate.  (One, it’s not my tee vee; two, I felt guilty and unpatriotic if I chose baseball over the debate and three, I followed the game on my smart phone anyhow.)
Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
10/18/2012

Geography, For Example

Some things we can’t control.  Geography, for example.

Mountains ranges in Europe tend to run east-west; in North America, they run north-south.  A new report by the reinsurance company Munich Re cites this fact as one reason North America experiences more weather related disasters than Europe – there’s no east-west mountain range to separate cold air from warm.

(I’d never considered that.  Perhaps the difference in temperatures north and south of the Pyrenees and Alps suggests the perceived differences in temperament between Northern and Southern Europeans.  Just a thought.  Might help with all those financial negotiations.)

Droughts and floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, thunderstorms, blizzards and wildfires – North America gets it all.  The effect of this extreme weather is not only unhappiness in the suites of reinsurance companies, but real misery for millions of people around the globe.  Food prices are expected to rise precipitously in the early months of 2013 as a result of last summer’s drought, which withered corn and soybean crops across so much of North America.
Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , | Comments (1)
10/11/2012

Judging By the Cover

I love books.  I’ve always loved reading, a gift from my mother’s (Irish) side of the family.  Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me or her father telling me stories.  To be honest, I suppose what I really love are stories and books represent stories to me the way the aroma of coffee and bacon represent breakfast to someone who wakes up hungry.

My dad, German and practical, appreciates my love of reading but has never understood why I don’t just take books from the library, instead of acquiring them myself.  (I do use and love libraries; I support our local library, which gets me access to the opening night of the library’s annual book sale, allowing me to buy more books).  I’ll admit being at a loss for an adequate explanation for wanting to own, rather than just read, books.  I think my dad and I have both come to accept it as one of those gaps in understanding which occur between fathers and sons.  (I’ll never understand his fascination with using sticks to chase a little white ball through a pasture on a regular basis.  So be it.)

A combination of German thrift, relative penury and a footloose lifestyle kept my bookish habits in check for four decades, then e-books began to emerge, leading to a glut of cheap, used, dead-tree editions for sale.  Online vendors of used books put almost any volume I could imagine just a keyboard away.  I resisted the online thing for several years, preferring to keep a list of desired tomes in my pocket and hunting them down in used books stores.  There are few more enjoyable ways for me to spend an hour than by wandering through the stacks, inhaling the must of dried paper and hunting treasures.
Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
10/04/2012

Mulch Ado About Nothing

I promised myself in January I’d devote the first comment of each month to the world immediately around me.  Today I feel obligated to say something about last night’s presidential debate.  I’ll try, perhaps foolishly, to do both.  Hang on.

It’s rained every day of October, so far.  Right now it’s relatively warm and non-relatively humid in Burlington.  The streets are hung with fog and the first maples to blaze look like sentinel fires against the hillside.  While rain and the evening dim of shorter days triggers blue moods in some, we’ve needed the rain.  Lake Champlain’s water level remains below average, as it’s been for six months.

(Speaking of damp fog, who was that guy debating Mitt Romney last night?  OK, so it was Barack and Michelle Obama’s wedding anniversary.  I had to work on my anniversary this year (on a Saturday no less) and I didn’t act bored and petulant.  What an insult to all the people out there busting their humps to get you re-elected, Barry.   Although Gov. Romney came out with a host of positions completely at odds with what he’s been saying for the past 18 months, at least he came prepared with something.  POTUS didn’t seem to notice the lies and looked like a 12th grader who stayed up late smoking pot, then crammed on the bus on the way to school.  He certainly didn’t call Mr. Romney on his BS.  I hope the plan is NOT to leave it to Joe Biden.)
Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Electoral Politics, Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
09/27/2012

Can You Recommend Journalism as a Career?

Later this evening, I’m supposed to speak to a class of college students.  My topic is “environmental journalism.”  I suspect one reason I received this invitation is a similar talk I gave to journalism students last year, in which my topic was “how to make money selling out as a journalist.”  What I said then was if you want to make money with a journalism degree, you probably won’t make much as a journalist, but if you put in a few years in the media trenches and then switch to public relations, you’ll get to the big salary quicker than if you start in public relations right out of school.  (This scenario, of course, assumes a college graduate can latch onto an increasingly rare job as a journalist.)

I got out of college and worked as a journalist for four years.  That was long ago and instead of moving on to a higher-paying PR job, I actually took an even lower paying job in public-interest activism.  (Why would anyone accept career advice from me?)

I got into journalism because of bad timing.  I came of age in what I now consider to be The Great American Journalism Anomaly.  It lasted about a decade, between 1965-1975.  Just before this period, White House reporters were smirking and keeping mum about John Kennedy’s none-too-well hidden infidelity.  Then came the Vietnam War and a reporters’ rebellion against the arrogance of those who waged it, civilian and military.  I’m not sure that it was a desperate search for truth that caused the press to report what was really happening on the ground, I think it was the assumption that the “patriotic press” would play along as it always had.  The arrogant way in which the politicians and generals rubbed the press’s nose in it played an outsized role in the backlash.
Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
09/20/2012

The Most Typical Political Event

If you follow the presidential election and have a pulse, you know Vermont is one of the least battleground states in the country.  Mitt Romney was here recently, not to campaign, but to prep, at the home of former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, for his debates vs. President Barack Obama.  His motorcade got stuck behind a tractor (a true Vermont experience), he posed for a photo with VT GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock at a hardware store and didn’t take questions from local reporters.  That’s about all I know.  (Tip to Romney campaign: it’s legal to pass on a solid yellow line in Vermont, as long as you don’t exceed the speed limit.  It’s a tractor thing.)

On the Democratic side, an Obama fundraiser this week at Nectar’s in Burlington (the bar that launched Phish) was headlined by Jonathan Goldsmith.  Who?  Exactly.

Mr. Goldsmith is better known as the “most interesting man in the world,” a character the actor portrays in Dos Equis beer commercials.  Yes, that’s the kind of “celebrity” one gets when your state is in one party’s category long before any hustings have been taken to.
Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
09/13/2012

The Grandkids

It’s mid-September and scientists are floating around the Arctic, something far easier to do this year than ever before.  Other scientists are far away, peering at satellite photos and maps.  They’re all doing the same thing: trying to gauge the minimum extent of the north polar icecap.

This is the week every year when the northern icecap tends to reach its minimum for the year, before cold temperatures cause the ice to reform.  (The maximum usually comes in April or May, just as things are beginning to warm.)

We know 2012 will be a record year, because the old record, set in 2007, was broken last month.  It was no surprise that the ice minimum is getting smaller, it IS a surprise that the record was broken with three weeks left in the melting season. This year’s icecap will be about one-third smaller than the 2007 record.  The northern icecap minimum is now around four million square kilometers.  Thirty years ago, the minimum was eight million square kilometers.  For years, ice scientists have been predicting that the Arctic may be ice-free in the summer by 2035.  Now they think it’s likely to happen before 2020 and may happen as soon as 2015.
Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)