Say Good Night Dick

My La-Z-Boy sits in front of the TV. On a table beside it are books and magazines I'm currently reading and as I often come across words that are new to me, my 1964 ragged edition of Funk & Wagnalls dictionary, Canadian Edition, sits there also. Every time I pick it up I think of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. "Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls" was a line heard on almost every show.

Unforgetable were Goldie Hawn, the not-so-dumb blonde, Arte Johnson, the Nazi spy peeking through the bushes - "Very interesthting" he would exclaim, and the great Lily Tomlin, the nasal telephone operator. I once spoke to an operator who sounded exactly like her, so help me God; I almost cracked up; I could barely keep my voice normal.

The show always ended with Rowan's "Say good night Dick" and Dick would dutifully reply "Good night Dick" with that goofy grin of his. He was zany, and fabulous.

Dick Martin died this week. We won't see another like him. Good night, Dick.

Saving the Planet

I'm being told that I should turn all my incandescent light bulbs into landfill and buy the screw-in fluorescent type. They use less power and last much longer. Will I do that? Not on your nelly!! And I'm as environmentally conscious as anyone.

In the first place, most of the bulbs in this house that I bought eleven years ago have not burned out. I've replaced the odd one in the kitchen and in locations that get a lot of use, but others may be lit for less than an hour in a year. The price of a fluorescent is an order of magnitude above the price of a traditional bulb. However, I'll make this concession to the breathless environmentalists: whenever I run out of my few spares, I'll replace with fluorescent, and install them in high usage locations. There is an economic benefit to that; very often economic and environmental benefits go hand in hand. If I consume less, I do less damage and save money. Win-win. But this is like adding a drop to the ocean.

Many of the solutions proposed by environmentalists have little effect. Some are disastrous, such as the production of ethanol from grain crops, which has limited value, and which contributes to global hunger by feeding gas tanks instead of stomachs.

Replacing all the light bulbs in North America and having everyone driving hybrid cars will not greatly postpone planetary disaster. It is estimated that in order to meet emissions reductions of 50% by 2050, we need, by 2013, to have up and running, 30 new nuclear plants, 17,000 wind turbines, 400 biomass power plants, two hydro dams the size of China's Three Gorges, 42 natural gas plants with carbon capture - and we'll have to build that much every year until 2030. Is that going to happen? In your dreams. And I'm being asked to replace light bulbs.

Strange about nuclear power plants. They were the bêtes noires for years, but now they're the angels. Pick your poison. Storing nuclear waste safely, if that can be done forever, is better than carbon emissions. Oh, well, I suppose that's right.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Andy Warhol famously said that "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." He was referring to celebrities, who seem to come and go with the phases of the moon. Check the tabloids. Can you remember last month's famous person?

The celebrity du jour is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who is making the most of his time in the sun as media darling, enjoying every moment of it. Barrack Obama supporters fear his former pastor's "God damn America" and "we had it coming to us on 9/11 " pronouncements will damage the senator's presidential hopes.

Is all this a tempest in a teapot or the harbinger of revolution? Given that many people, not only blacks, agree with his views or at least understand the basis of his anger and sympathize, he cannot be dismissed as a crackpot. Will he outlive his "15 minutes"? Will other, more strident voices come to be heard? Has the seed been sown? In a troubled and divided gun-happy nation, a spark could set off a chain of events leading to God knows what. The Clinton-Obama tussle would become irrelevant.

I wrote all of the above a few days ago, but decided to await the results of the Illinois and North Carolina primaries before finishing. The Wright brouhaha seems not to have affected the outcome after all. Good.

A headline at cbc.ca/news reads "2 Canadian tourists hurt in Egyptian tour bus crash, 9 people dead." That's neat - 2 Canadians hurt and, uh, oh yeah, almost forgot, 9 dead.

Food Crisis

Surfing the net today, I learn that in 2007 there were food riots in Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Not all of these countries are poor and backward. What will 2008 bring? Riots in the U.S. and other prosperous countries?

The price of wheat has nearly tripled. There are a number of factors involved, among them the rush to ethanol and other biofuels. While a world crisis develops, there are those who profit handsomely from a policy that feeds gas tanks instead of stomachs. The Brazilian government is actually encouraging the destruction of the rain forest so as to grow crops for ethanol. It's madness. Mid-western farmers are delighted and neither Obama nor Clinton will say a word against ethanol and risk political extinction. There is an old saying that "things are in the saddle and riding mankind". Strike out "things" and insert "madness". In all of this, of course, there are powerful corporate interests. These nabobs are quite comfortable with all this, thank you very much, but how comfortable will they be if the malaise develops into serious revolution? How comfortable will we all be? Check this