Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   price to be paid for good rock and roll
Thursday, May 28 2009

It was a cool and cloudy day, not a bad one for frequent visits to the greenhouse for dirt moving shifts. I've been attacking the last remaining soil in my single remaining "loan/borrow" pile from all sides and it ended the day as a three foot high and three foot by eight foot mesa.
Meanwhile my feet are mostly recovered from their recent insults. The welding burn on the sole of my left foot is now just an irregular patch of tough skin that might remain scarred and irregular the rest of my life. If so, the benefit might be increased traction when walking on smooth surfaces. I still have tiny splinters of something in my big toes, but I've been unable to do anything about them and at this point I'm depending on my body to generate the proper solvents. One assumes that the body can even break down fragments of glass, since glass is a natural material that animals have been stepping on and eating since they first evolved feet and mouths.
In the world of web development, my task today was mostly the building an administrative tool for downloading a spreadsheet representation of the data collected by the questionnaire referred to in yesterday's entry. Happily, today I could rely mostly on functions encapsulating the long-ago-figured-out details of what needed to be done, and building the tool was sort of like putting together a complicated device (say, a modern computer) using prebuilt modules (printed circuit boards, drives, a power supply, and cables). The difference, of course, was that I didn't have to spend time on my knees alternately reaching for a flashlight and a Phillips screwdriver.


I don't often read the Wall Street Journal opinion page (the only part of the newspaper available free online) because the fascist mouthbreathers who publish stuff there are not usually particularly entertaining with all their loving of torture and hating of empathy. However, something sent me over there today to read an opinion piece by a Mr. Daniel Henninger decrying President Obama's automotive policy and what it will do to the widespread availability of muscle cars for the youthful songwriters of America. Evidently Mr. Henninger sees America's squandering of increasingly-scarce fossil fuels and its contribution to a pathological global climate as the price to be paid for good rock and roll.
I'm content with my penis size and it's safe to assume that my taste in music and cars is at odds with Mr. Henninger's (the only Beach Boys song I like is their cover of "California Dreaming"), but I can't help but believe that there will be plenty of great musical inspiration in our grim fossil-fuel-free future, although it might have to be served up live on instruments made from scrap PVC washing up on the palm-studded beaches of Greenland.
I don't often respond to articles except via web-viewable fora, but this time I wrote a personal email response:

Hello Mr. Henninger--

Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating book entitled Collapse about what happens when a culture clings to the increasingly-deleterious trappings of its culture even as the world changes. On Greenland, the Vikings lived for 400 years raising cows and eating beef and milk. And then came the Little Ice Age, but (for cultural reasons as deep as our car culture and seemingly deeper than our disgust at gay marriage) they never took up fishing and hunting Walrus. And so they went extinct, which they would have rather done than change. Similarly, the people of Easter Island had a culture of logging until one of them cut down the last massive palm on their remote island. That island is still mostly a barren desert, and there are many fewer people living there today than lived there in the year 900.

Our car culture was a blast! Lots of great car music came from the Beach Boys and even creepy cerebral bands like Rush. But you know what? It turns out that the world is a finite place and our supply of oil is even more finite that the world it's buried in. Our culture is going to have to change, and it would change even if President Obama did nothing. Mark my words: when the economy begins to rebound, gasoline will go right back to $4/gallon, and even a President Limbaugh wouldn't be able to hold back the emergence of a transportation grid based on bicycles. It's coming. And I'm sure some great music will be written about those bicycles as well -- indeed, Queen wrote a song for our future society back in the 1970s. Get on your bikes and ride!


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