Just want to give a shout out to the Best of Blogs award. If your blog gets less than one hundred unique visitors per day, get someone to nominate you (you apparently can't nominate yourself).

Blue Gal, the blog, due to a very recent upsurge in popularity, just barely does not qualify. Thanks anyway.

By now most of us have heard about the Boston Hoax and how a silly cartoon character guerrilla marketing "botched joke" (ahem) fooled the city of Boston into believing bombs were being attached to bridges around the city.

The "controversy" is also being protrayed as a generational battle, between those bloggers who instantly recognized the Aqua Teen Hunger Force character and the totally out-of-it fuddy duddies who got scared by a guerrila marketing campaign. Dude, you are so out of it.

What is not being discussed to my satisfaction is this entire culture's divine right to be marketed to. The trend I hate most is the total acceptance on the part of people in our society that marketing everywhere is okay. It isn't. It's called mental pollution. Not to mention that these marketers left electric items unattended on the street. That's just plain old street pollution. I hope I don't sound like Cheney by asking if someone on the West Bank or Baghdad would have considered this marketing ploy a good idea.

I knew I'd reached total saturation when I saw that the paper on which my son's school menu is printed was provided by cartoon advertisers. It's folded so that the ads are on the outside you open to see more ads, then open again to find out what the public school cafeteria is serving for lunch. On topic, The Center for Commercial-Free Public Education exists to fight this mumbo-jumbo.

It's ironic that the same dudes who think Boston overreacted also think the War on Christmas is cool. Somehow Exxon/Mobil and Wal-Mart are bad corporations, but Cartoon Network? There's no way I could be pwned by a cartoon, man:

I've shown it before but I think today would also be a good day to have Cake's Comfort Eagle playing in your head. I like that this particular version uses video game/cartoon style characters to make the point.

And there's more at Adbusters.org.

Before you think I'm a total hypocrite, I know, I know. I'm getting ready to accept limited advertising here at BG. I joined Liberal Prose because I know them, and because I have complete control over which ads appear here. And I haven't accepted one yet. It'll be a cold day in hell before there's a "you have won a free laptop" pop-up over here, that much I can promise.

I'm not sure I'll even publish this post but it's on my mind so I'm typing it up.

I've been writing a lot lately about Pammy at Atlashrugs and actually reading her blog which I've just got to stop. It's like a car wreck. But I came across this photo of her and I just can't erase it from my brain.

It's got me thinking about conservatism, liberalism, gender, sex, all the things I already blog about.

I am a liberal, and I definitely agree with the C&L commenter who paraphrased Colbert: "Sexual pleasure has a well-known liberal bias." This blog is no stranger to anal sex jokes, and you could tell me one right now and I'd laugh my butt off, no pun intended.

By the way, on another C&L thread we've determined that that snot that comes out of your butt when you sneeze and fart at the same time? It will henceforth be known as "JudyMiller," not to be confused with "Santorum." Pass it on.

But seriously, folks, I'm a liberal gal, and you know I be lovin' the panties, but no woman is wearing the panties on my blog. It's a line I draw here, and it's a conservative line. I wouldn't let my breasts hang out like that, either, out of a sense of decorum, and what is attractive and what is decidedly not the pretty way to display my, um, bodacious rack. I mean, yeah, you could probably put two Pammies on the scale to balance one Blue Gal too. She's got a gym with two TV's in her house, and I don't have one TV or a home gym or her pecs, either. I would not trade my spelling skills for her pecs, though.

Some might say I don't dress like that because I'm a feminist. That's not it, either, though I trust "self-respect" has some play here.

She's actually quite pretty, isn't she? But I think that dress is a challenge to womanhood, and I'm sitting here asking myself if I feel threatened by it, and I'm not sure I like my answer. Still thinking about this. Comments appreciated.

1. Famous Knitter Meg Swanson has posed for a picture wearing a sweater I knit. The picture is hanging on my refrigerator.

True. I went to her knitter's camp in 2003. I wore a sweater knit in one of her yarns, she tried it on, I burst out crying. I was pregnant with number 3 at the time, so that's my excuse for the tears, but really it was Meg wearing a sweater I knit with my own two hands. I could die.

2. During senior year in college I had breakfast several times with former Presidential candidate John Anderson, usually just the two of us.

True. He was a visiting professor at Brandeis and ate breakfast in the cafeteria. I was one of the only students on campus with the wherewithal and guts to approach him and ask to join him. He was one of the first people on the planet to find out I had gotten into Harvard Graduate School, too. Nice, smart guy, and one of the best breakfast partners I've ever had (ahem).

3. During freshman year in college I watched Qwerty fall backwards into a snowbank. At one point I also danced with him while I hummed "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody."

True. Qwerty and I went to Brandeis together. He had such a mop of hair in Winter '81, I can't tell you. We've been friends for over 25 years? Jeebus. He's also the only housemate I ever had, male or female, who mopped the kitchen floor because he noticed it was dirty. (Fellow Cancerian, natch.)

4. I met Mr and Mrs. John Kerry at a Democratic soiree in Pittsburgh three years before he announced his candidacy for President. Theresa Heinz Kerry told me my hair was "really nice."

Nope. Never met either of them, though my parents do live in Pittsburgh. I do have nice hair, but Theresa doesn't know it.

5. I didn't drive a car or even have a license until I was 32. Some "things" I didn't do until I was 26. But driving a car was 32.

Knitting at 18. Car at 32. Let the record show.

Click on photo to enlarge - image © jim otterstrom 2007
headlight lens © Ford Motor Company 1937

Today marks our 10th Anniversary of living car-free.

By "car-free", I mean that Peggy and I haven't owned a car since January 31st of 1997.

But, we have found it necessary to rent cars on several occasions, particularly during the time our son was hospitalized and recuperating after his near fatal car-wreck in 2005.

Still, cars haven't been part of our daily lives for those 10 years.

When we owned a car, we drove somewhere around the national average of 12,000 miles per year. So, according to this 'An Inconvenient Truth' CO2 calculator, our personal carbon dioxide output has been reduced by nearly 6.5 tons per year.

That's 130,000 pounds of CO2 over the 10 year period!

But, we must also factor in the approximately 6 thousand miles we have driven during that time, which means we need to subtract 6,500 pounds from that 130,000, bringing our net infernal combustion pollution reduction down to 123,500 pounds.

123,500 POUNDS!!!

Talk about a diet, now, to me, that's something to celebrate!

Yet, in a world of 6 1/2 billion people, does it make any difference?

Not really, not to anyone but Peggy and I.

To a planet that's been around for some 6 billion years, and seen millions of species come and go, does it make a difference?

None whatsoever, unless you happen to be one of those species who have come, but not yet gone.

In a vast Universe of countless galaxies, stars, and planets, does it make any difference?

Nope...

...unless, by some miracle of chance, you have the good fortune to be currently alive and breathing oxygen upon the beautiful blue planet, Earth.

No, a few individual members of an entire culture which is addicted to conspicuous consumption and material gratification aren't going to make much of a difference, so why bother?

Well, that's a good question, and one I've asked myself many times.

Once you know that smoking cigarettes causes cancer do you continue smoking?

Many people do, and continue doing so, even when they're hooked up to an oxygen tank or permanently bedridden. I've seen people, whose vocal chords had been removed because of smoking related cancer, sucking on a cigarette through a trachea valve.

That's what I call addiction, mental, emotional, and physical addiction.

Yet, this is supposedly a free country, and I would say that's their business, as long as I don't have to pay the associated medical bills.

So, what is the difference between a person who, through denial, apathy, illness, or self-loathing, commits suicide by ignoring their addictions, and someone who hastens the destruction of a planetary life support system through denial of their addiction and its consequences?

The only difference I see is that people who commit suicide through substance abuse are just hurting themselves, and those who care about them.

But people who would poison an entire planet because they refuse to face their own addictions, are not only suicidal, but homicidal, genocidal, and biocidal as well.

Are we that oblivious to reality, and to our own responsibilities?

Do we just not give a damn, or do we feel too hopelessly addicted to our old habits? Or, are we just in denial that there is a real problem, and that each one of us is a big part of it?

How many drivers, operating the thousands of cars which blow exhaust in our faces every week as we walk the narrow sidewalks of Big Bear, ever think about what they're doing, about our health, or the stench they're spewing into mountain air belonging to everybody?

Why is something like that legal?

Should it be legal for me to shit all over everyone and everything?

What's the difference?

Legal or not, it's most certainly immoral!

Todays' infernal combustion automobile is probably the worst of our addictions, because of the magnitude of its destructiveness, but our disease goes much deeper than that.

How often have you heard the term "for the benefit of mankind"?

Humankind, blinded by its own cleverness, and imagined self-importance, values each technology primarily for the benefits to mankind.

Wouldn't a species with the slightest bit of common sense, and some desire for long-term survival, assess technologies primarily on their benefits to all life on Earth and the long term health of their ecosystem?

Isn't survival considered a benefit to mankind?

We have grossly overpopulated the planet through the invention and use of technologies which supposedly benefit mankind. Yet it is becoming clearer every day that those very technologies may soon render our planet uninhabitable for those who would breathe oxygen, including the mankind they allegedly benefit.

And, once again, we turn to the technologies of an obsolete social & economic model---to the proponents of a failing civilization---for so-called clean car technology, alternative fuels, and renewable energy sources, so the worlds 6 1/2 billion people can, by 2041, become 9 billion »

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