I'm thinking of calling 1-877-JOE-4-OIL just to see if ole Joe Kennedy himself shows up to fill up my oil tank. That commercial I saw last night for his "citizens energy program" had him carrying the oil truck hose up the walkway to some poor lady's house. He was even wearing sturdy work gloves!
Here's what I want to know: After he finished hugging that poor lady and sopping up her Camelot-worshiping gratitude, did Joe Kennedy tell her where her tank full of oil came from? Did he mention that he got that oil from the power-mad, America-hating, Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, who's been Kennedy's South American sugar daddy for the last three years? That guy makes me miss the CIA.
Let me get this straight—I'm not allowed to have any of those tasty hand-rolled cigars I like so much because there's a power-mad, America-hating, Marxist running Cuba. But I'm not only allowed, I'm encouraged every night on prime-time television to call Joe so he can personally deliver a load of Communist oil to my front door. That doesn't seem fair—but then those sneaky Kennedys don't play fair. Just ask Richard Nixon!
I think Joe Kennedy should get back to work cleaning up my Hudson River and quit petro-pimping for his good friend Hugo Chavez. In the meantime, though, I just may give Joe a call. Times are tough and I guess I wouldn't mind filling 'er up and putting it on Hugo's tab!
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
fridge fools
This is what I'm talking about, people. You saw the GIGANTIC piece in the Times yesterday about the "trend" among greenies getting rid of their refrigerators.
First of all, I know I don't have to tell you when the Times devotes this much space to something, you can be sure a) The Wall Street Journal wrote about it a year ago and b) they're stretching the data more than a little to suggest a trend. Whatever. My real beef is with the people in this article who were crapping on refrigerators!
Moses didn't lead us to the Promised Land of Sub-Zeros and central air and TVs in every room so we could later turn up our noses at God's miracles. Every one of these innovations—and a whole bunch of others, including, but not limited to, the electric wine bottle opener my parents gave me for Christmas last year—was a reward to modern culture for managing to survive the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, two world wars, and mid-1970s prime time network television programming (S.W.A.T., Caribe, One Day at a Time—huh?!?). For slipper's sake, we deserve this stuff!
I love all my TVs as if they were my own children, but I couldn't live without my refrigerators. That's right, refrigerator plural—I've got two of them. One is a ridiculous GE Profile Arctica, a stainless steel side-by-side that has been the bane of every day since we bought it five years ago. And one is a brokeny old something-or-other we've dragged around the country for 25 years. This one lives in my basement and I would throw myself on the train tracks before I'd let someone take it away.
Why two? Because the kitchen fridge really is that stupid (it doesn't fit anything, stuff is always falling out, the vegetable drawer broke on like the second day we had it) and the basement fridge keeps things so super cold we fight like kindergarteners over who gets to have the first sip of "downstairs" milk. Plus, it fits everything—Thanksgiving turkey, all the beer you could ever think of drinking, emergency stores of Oscar Meyer bacon, and a vast collection of condiments and ingredients for dishes I'd like to make (pot pies!) but that have recently fallen off my son's list of favorites and moved over to his list of most despised. I don't get that. Anyway, my point is those people in the article who claim they'd rather be without their refrigerators than be responsible for their fridge's millions of pounds of CO2 emissions are lying.
People who unplug the TV so their kids' brains don't turn to mush, fine. Folks who dry their laundry on a clothesline instead of in a dryer, go for it. But getting rid of your refrigerator and using coolers and root cellars and keeping food outside during the winter? That's just posing. These people love it when their friends say, "What, you don't have a refrigerator?" Then they can go on and on about how "easy" it is to be refrigerator-free, how much healthier they're eating now, and how much better it is for the environment, i.e., how much better they are than the rest of us.
I liked the lady in the article who said she'd rather give up meat to reduce her share of CO2 emissions than get rid of her fridge. That's not a bad idea, but then what would I do with all that ground sirloin I bought on sale that's stacked in the freezer side of my idiotic upstairs fridge?
Here's a better idea: Breathe less! For the average 28,000 breaths you take a day, hold your breath about 120 times and reduce your daily personal CO2 emissions by 6 minutes! It doesn't cost a dime and you'd get to keep that awesome refrigerator (or two) that makes life worth living.
Just doing my part,
Karen
(PS, that appliance pictured above is my beloved basement fridge. She's a keeper, am I right?)
Thursday, February 5, 2009
green stuff
My name is Karen and I am an auto-environmentalist.
This simply means I don't care about how conservation or preservation or recycling or precycling will help to save the world. I only care about how it will help me. I'm here to tell you that following a strict policy of environmental self-interest is an amazingly practical way to live. It's not a bad way to raise a family, either. In fact, it was one of those special "parenting moments" that turned me into an avowed auto-environmentalist in the first place.
No, it wasn’t cradling a precious newborn in my arms that made me want to buy myself a leotard and join the Planeteers. It was a chilling moment some sixteen years later, while doing the fifth load of laundry in three days, holding in my hands my son’s yellow tee-shirt, the one with “Let’s Hug It Out” in faded letters across the front. I had seen this tee-shirt before, exactly two loads ago. Why was I washing it again, drying it again, and folding it again—when I didn’t remember seeing him wear it in the first place?
It seems he'd put it on one morning, changed his mind about wearing it, and tossed it into the hamper instead of putting it back in his drawer. Didn't seem like a big deal, he said to me when I asked "What the @#$#% are you doing, buster?" Look. I don't care if we were all lazy, inconsiderate teenagers once. I'm getting scoliosis from hunching over mountains of laundry day after day while he's trying on and tossing off shirts until he lands on the one that brings out the blue in his eyes? Homey don't think so.
The day of my epiphany was special. Life-altering, paradigm-shifting, game-changing special. One moment I was wondering like a dimbulb why I was holding that shirt and the next my life took on a focus so sharp it could take your eye out. Seriously.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Al Gore is a self-righteous stiff and I’d step in front of a moving bus before I would describe myself as an environmentalist. And I reject anything marketed to me as “green” or “eco-friendly.” That stuff is for suckers and the folks who are selling it to you are laughing all the way to the off-shore accounts where they stow their mattresses full of green money. How’s that for an inconvenient truth?
I’m just a born-again kitchen table conservationist with a moral obligation to change how my own little family operates. To raise the one child I’ve got to think about where things come from, what happens when we use them, where they go when we’re done with them. To know exactly why he does or buys or uses something. And to quit standing in front of the open feckin’ refrigerator looking for desirable snack options that AREN’T THERE.
We don't recycle in my house to help reduce the size of that putrid landfill we drive past when we go to the airport in New Jersey. We (by "we," of course, I mean Mr. Let's Hug It Out himself) take those empty bottles and cans back to the grocery store for all those shiny nickels that add up to crisp dollars that won't put a dent in the tuition bill we'll be receiving from the lucky university that has agreed to take him off our hands next year.
See what I mean? Quit worrying about how your using less electricity will help the people of some village whose name you can't pronounce that's in some country you wouldn't visit if someone paid you cash money. I promise you, they're not worrying about you right now. You've got your own problems, friend, and if you can find ways to solve them playing the environmental angle, hey, you may just walk off with your own Nobel Prize. A girl can dream, can't she?
This simply means I don't care about how conservation or preservation or recycling or precycling will help to save the world. I only care about how it will help me. I'm here to tell you that following a strict policy of environmental self-interest is an amazingly practical way to live. It's not a bad way to raise a family, either. In fact, it was one of those special "parenting moments" that turned me into an avowed auto-environmentalist in the first place.
No, it wasn’t cradling a precious newborn in my arms that made me want to buy myself a leotard and join the Planeteers. It was a chilling moment some sixteen years later, while doing the fifth load of laundry in three days, holding in my hands my son’s yellow tee-shirt, the one with “Let’s Hug It Out” in faded letters across the front. I had seen this tee-shirt before, exactly two loads ago. Why was I washing it again, drying it again, and folding it again—when I didn’t remember seeing him wear it in the first place?
It seems he'd put it on one morning, changed his mind about wearing it, and tossed it into the hamper instead of putting it back in his drawer. Didn't seem like a big deal, he said to me when I asked "What the @#$#% are you doing, buster?" Look. I don't care if we were all lazy, inconsiderate teenagers once. I'm getting scoliosis from hunching over mountains of laundry day after day while he's trying on and tossing off shirts until he lands on the one that brings out the blue in his eyes? Homey don't think so.
The day of my epiphany was special. Life-altering, paradigm-shifting, game-changing special. One moment I was wondering like a dimbulb why I was holding that shirt and the next my life took on a focus so sharp it could take your eye out. Seriously.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Al Gore is a self-righteous stiff and I’d step in front of a moving bus before I would describe myself as an environmentalist. And I reject anything marketed to me as “green” or “eco-friendly.” That stuff is for suckers and the folks who are selling it to you are laughing all the way to the off-shore accounts where they stow their mattresses full of green money. How’s that for an inconvenient truth?
I’m just a born-again kitchen table conservationist with a moral obligation to change how my own little family operates. To raise the one child I’ve got to think about where things come from, what happens when we use them, where they go when we’re done with them. To know exactly why he does or buys or uses something. And to quit standing in front of the open feckin’ refrigerator looking for desirable snack options that AREN’T THERE.
We don't recycle in my house to help reduce the size of that putrid landfill we drive past when we go to the airport in New Jersey. We (by "we," of course, I mean Mr. Let's Hug It Out himself) take those empty bottles and cans back to the grocery store for all those shiny nickels that add up to crisp dollars that won't put a dent in the tuition bill we'll be receiving from the lucky university that has agreed to take him off our hands next year.
See what I mean? Quit worrying about how your using less electricity will help the people of some village whose name you can't pronounce that's in some country you wouldn't visit if someone paid you cash money. I promise you, they're not worrying about you right now. You've got your own problems, friend, and if you can find ways to solve them playing the environmental angle, hey, you may just walk off with your own Nobel Prize. A girl can dream, can't she?
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