It’s official: Global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it, is in. “Climate Crisis!” “A Threat Graver Than Terrorism!” Wired and Vanity Fair, two popular, mainstream magazines, the kind you see at the market checkout line, are taking the global warming message to Average Joe. About damn time. I suppose there was a time when I didn’t know that global warming was a danger, likely to affect the world within my lifetime, but I can’t remember it. I have fuzzy memories of reading Time magazine exclusives, probably when I was in junior high or my first year of …
Category: current events
I’ve just stumbled across the trailer for a documentary coming out this summer. An Inconvenient Truth premiered at Sundance this year, and the buzz is rather impressive. (Sorry. I looked around for a non-Moviefone, non-AOL trailer for the movie, but they appear to have the exclusive at the moment.) It seems a bit odd to get excited about a movie that’s bound to be as depressing as hell, but there it is. Perhaps I’ve yet to give up on the idea that elements of pop culture (movies, for one) can make a critical difference in how ordinary people live and …
Traipsed down to Portland last weekend; Grandpa is 83. Dinner came to a sudden end, all of us stampeding for the door when my cousin’s husband received a phone call. The information was inaccurate at best; the mountain wasn’t erupting. Ian and I had stopped to see Mount St. Helens on our way south. The mountain seemed smug. . . All these people lining the highway, waiting for it to perform, and it refusing to step on stage. Not even a whisper of steam. The clear spots along the road were populated by lawn chairs, tripods, cameras, telescopes. Small children …
That’s it. I’ve had enough. Time to go. Maybe it was because the right-wing was upset because they lost or maybe it was the belief that if only we change who is in office we could fix the economy. The first option confirms my suspicion that there is a secret society of old rich white men taking over the country. The second affirms my belief that people would rather whine about something than understand it. The fact remains that California is in a financial fix, like everyone I know, thanks to an economy which tanked when Junior took up residence …
Seems to me we stand at a crossroads. On the one hand, there seems to be a growing consciousness that things cannot stay as they are. On the other, our very inertia propels us toward chaos and catastrophe. I went to the market yesterday, and while walking in the parking lot I seemed to see two buildings: the intact commercial center in front of me and a dark and crumbling shell mentally overlaid. I’m never sure what causes the destruction my inner eye sees, just that it’s a possibility. Finished reading Juliet Marillier’s Sevenwaters Trilogy. Wrapped in a story of …
“Don’t suspect a friend, Report him!” The ads are plastered to the sides of the Muni trains I take downtown. “Brazil!” they scream, in a font that seems disturbingly close to that for the title of the Terry Gilliam movie of the same name. It struck me as more than a little odd, an ad campaign that conjures images of tiny offices, bureaucracy run rampant, and duct work. Not to mention the shoe-hat. I wonder if the marketing department has any idea? It’s not dystopia they’re advertising, evidently. No, it’s Macy’s 55th Annual Flower Show. Yes, it seems a bit …