Sri Lankan Animals Avoid Disaster

This is wild. Apparently officials in Sri Lanka have yet to find any animals killed by the massive tsunami, not even rabbits, who are DUMB. (If you don't believe rabbits are dumb, try getting a rabbit to review a book, or change a tire, or prepare a tasy meal. Rabbits can't do anything, but people still love them. What gives?) How do animals figure this stuff out? I think it's intuition, or maybe Jesus protects them with some kind of ray. What do you think, my nonexistent readers? Link to this incredible story.

Public Enemy #1

PE rules. Incidentally, so does KEXP Seattle for playing "Lost at Birth." Also, I'm not black. Does that change the authenticity of my love for Public Enemy? I don't think so...

Red Cross Donations for Tsunami Relief

In the off chance that for some reason someone will read this blog I just started and feel compassion or at least guilt and decide they should somehow help tsunami victims: Donate to the Red Cross, too. They do good work. Oh, thanks for reading my blog, too.

Donate to Help Rebuild

I don't know if anyone will read this, but if you do, consider donating to Architecture for Humanity to aid in the rebuilding efforts in tsumani-lashed areas.

Environmental Degradation Increased Tsunami's Power

Yahoo had a really interesting article up on their top headlines for a few moments earlier today about the effects the dredging of coastal areas and the destruction of mangrove swamps had on the tsunami. Mangroves especially blunt the fury of incoming waves, and a good many have been cleared out to make room for shrimp farms. It almost goes without saying that most of said shrimp makes its way to European and North American markets. That doesn't mean it's our fault, and even with the swamps in place this probably would've been a terrible disaster, but overdevelopment only made it worse.

Germany Opens Huge Solar Installation

The Germans, having done the kind of 180 I dream of here in America (OK, we're not that bad, but still...), are putting up loads of renewable power sources all over the country. Just recently, they opened the largest solar power installation in the world, in Bavaria. They've also implemented heavier taxes on petroleum products to help encourage a switch to greener power sources. The installation was built by an American company, PowerLight. Thankfully Germany and other forward-thinking countries are keeping companies like this afloat, so we'll have them around when we realize it's not just a good idea, but vitally necessary.

Ennui of the City Streets

I hate commuting. I never wanted to commute, and I moved to the middle of a city (Denver) hoping to find a job somewhere in range of my bike or at least the city bus. So after three months of fruitless job searching, I finally found something. Where? You guessed it: the suburbs. And not just any suburb, but Longmont, which is really not even a suburb it's so far away. So now instead of floating in my cheery urban bubble, I have to haul ass out of town every morning and home every night.

This is more trying than I first thought. Usually when I leave work, I'm tired, but not freaking exhausted. Plus I'm pretty pumped to be coming home, so I can get some dinner, see my girlfriend, and do some reading (not necessarily in that order, dear). But after driving through worthless amounts of traffic on I25, I AM freaking exhausted. Traffic on I25 southbound in the evenings is freakishly heavy. Usually not as bad as northbound, but I can't figure it out. When I drive north in the morning, traffic is usually pretty light. I laugh at the people driving into Denver, who are usually going about 10, but I secretly wish I could trade jobs with one of them, someone who works close to downtown, preferably with a nice office. (OK, as long as I'm wishing, I wish I had an awesome job as a mountain guide or renewable-energy researcher. Yes, I'm a nerd and that would excite me.) I guess southbound traffic is just heavy, no matter what.

So here's the point of my excursion into traffic patterns: Why do we put up with this shit? I like driving sometimes, when there aren't a lot of people around, and it's nice to have a car sometimes so you can get certain things done without sitting on the bus for hours just to go 5 miles across town. But when I'm going to work, the same route every day? I would pay bankloads of money to get to ride a nice train or subway to work. I could read, listen to music, or just relax. Let someone else worry about running into stuff or crashing in a snowstorm. I honestly don't get why Americans are so into driving. It's become one of the major headaches of modern living, and if we only had decent public transit I think people would realize this.

Pitchfork Top 50

Looking for something to buy? (Why not just P2P, biznatch?) Pitchfork released their top 50 list for 2004 today, so you know what's on their ultra-hip Christmas lists this year. As with most top lists, I agree with about half and disagree with the rest. What's a music-lover to do? Congratulate your taste where it meets theirs and write them off as irrelevant critics the rest of the time, I say.

Christmas

It's been said before, but... I think it's interesting to note that Christmas has become so divorced from its Christian roots and has become primarily a capitalist holiday. Sure, Christmas is still an important holiday in the Christian calendar and is duly celebrated by many faithful in memoriam of the birth of the prophet Yesu bin Yosef. But studying Christmas from a purely phenomenological perspective I think is very revealing. The majority of thought and effort related to Christmas regards the purchase of vast quantities of stuff--presents, food, decorations, music, and on and on. This is something that can be shared across cultural lines, anywhere the cult of materialism and work has taken hold. It is the most important, indeed the only important, holiday in the capitalist calendar, a time when lost revenues from a few days' vacation are more than compensated for by the orgy of consumption that has paved the way for this rest, which we all sorely need after the nerve-wracking experience of holiday shopping. (Especially if the 'we' in question is quite poor in the midst of all this largess. It takes an advanced soul, indeed, to not feel the bitterness of poverty in such circumstances.) Fat merchants chuckle over their fatter balance sheets as we rest atop the piles of junk we've dutifully purchased, loyal subjects. Every year they exhort us to buy more (must keep the economy growing!) and every year we faithfully obey. It is the only way the cult of materialism knows how to fete itself, by growing yet another appendage. We all participate and wonder at all of our things, these chimera of the natural world we neither need nor, after a few days or weeks, want. This is the only transcendence materialism can offer. And we love it. We are all rapt devotees, myself included. It may be sick, but what an illness!

deus minimus

I have a blog now. Being validated by the Web, I can tell you, feels great. Now. Now... Now? Something will happen.