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different shade of brown
Saturday, December 1 2007
I didn't think it was especially cold this morning as I prepared to walk the dogs. The sun was out and bright, and was providing deceptive cues about the weather. I put on my winter coat but figured the thin flannel of my pajama bottoms provided sufficient low-income housing for downtown.
For the past two weeks it's been deer rifle-hunting season, and to avoid encounters with hunters I took the dogs down the farm road. I'll occasionally encounter the parked trucks of hunters there, but no one actually stands around waiting to shoot deer along the farm road.
I usually gather an armload of whatever loose firewood I can find if I'm out walking the dogs. So as I walked back towards the house I was unable to keep my hands in my pockets because they had to be out in the world doing useful work, serving as fork-lift tines for firewood. It wasn't long before my fingers started going numb; there was a strong wind howling through the forest and temperatures were already down to 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
(Other than to mention it parenthetically now, I do not acknowledge nor do I report on so-called wind-chill temperatures.)
By the end of daylight temperatures had dropped to 20, a measure that in this season is normally only experienced for a couple hours in the morning.
At some point I checked what the solar heat collection system was doing and saw it was pumping 109 degree hydronic fluid into the basement slab. That's nothing to percussive exhale nasal mucosa at.
This particular November has been cold and we've been burning through our firewood a bit faster than I'd expected. I think at some point I'll have to go on a mission to gather more, and not just rely on whatever incidental pieces I can find when I happen to be out.
At some point today I watched a Tivo'd episode of the HGTV show called Living With Ed, a celebrity-studded romp through upscale "environmentally-conscious" living in greater Los Angeles. (I throw quotes around environmentally-conscious because "upscale" is inherently incompatible with "environmentally-conscious.") The show is seen through the eyes of actor-celebrity Ed Begley Jr. and his unpleasant wife (who, when not giving voice the blandest of conventional American thinking, is bitching about her husband's latest environmentally-motivated contraption). I genuinely like Begley, though I think he lets his enthusiasm get the better of him, leading him to promote ideas that don't require much analysis to be revealed as environmentally foolish. In this episode he was over at Jay Leno's house, and Leno was showing Begley various vintage dynamos for the generation of electricity. Such dynamos would have to be powered by some form of energy in order to produce electricity, and Leno claimed he was going to use natural gas, an idea Begley endorsed by observing, "If you're generating it in a green manner, it doesn't matter how much electricity you use." But what exactly is green about generating your own power with natural gas? It's much less green than letting a power company do it for you, because at least they have the efficiencies of scale (this is part of the reason it makes no sense to generate your own electricity with gasoline if you are already attached to the electric grid).
In Living With Ed, the solutions are always new products (as opposed to lifestyle simplification). This is to be expected from a show sponsored by the Home Depot, but it's still disappointing. Perhaps the show is doing more good than harm, but I can't be sure. Every time I hear Begley and friends enthuse about things that are "entirely green" or carbon footprints that have been "fully offset," I want to fling my remote. Nothing is "entirely green"; when it comes to the works of man, everything is a different shade of brown. And don't get me started on offsets, which are just a reprise of Catholic indulgences. How, for example, does one offset the addition of an American baby to the world? The only way I can think of is the random murder of another baby of equivalent socioeconomic status. A non-lethal alternative might involve setting up a trust containing millions of dollars, perhaps with an involuntary human spay/neuter program for added measure.
Back for a moment to Jay Leno's appearance in Living With Ed. That guy isn't funny, and, though he's not very tall, watching him interact with Begley I get the feeling he was a bully as a child, one that has yet to be offset.
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