Honor Among Vagrants

"I'm a friend!" screeched one vagrant as he thew another vagrant to the ground. "I'm a friend!"

Yesterday when I was walking home from work I noticed these two beating the shit out of each other beside the Park Street fountain. I adjusted my path to take me around the opposite side from where this vagabrawl was going down.

"I'm a friend!" screamed the first vagrant again. Other vagrants standing around said "Let him up" in hushed throaty tones. But the first vagrant was having none of it. The other vagrant lay stiffly on the ground on his back, while the first vagrant jumped around on top of him. And finally we (we as in all the passersby), who had missed the beginning of this fight, got more information: The first vagrant screamed, "How could you think I'd mean anything by it!??!" He screamed this in agony, the agony of someone whose car has just cruelly been driven into a lake, and then he resumed slamming his buddy, his pal, against the concrete.

So this wasn't a dispute over the half-empty Starbucks cup some officeworker had left on the curb, or a stray nickel, or even an old mitten. This was about honor. Something had been said in jest, but not received that way.

I imagine it went a bit like this:

"Haha," the first vagrant laughs, pointing. "Look how shiny your baldino is."

"What?" retorts the other vagrant. "Why you talking about my baldino? You're a fucking asshole, talking about my baldino."

"I'm just kidding, I didn't mean anything by it."

"I thought you was a friend, but you're talking shit about my baldino."

"AAAAHHHH!!!!" The first vagrant erupts and lands a punch in the other vagrant's toothless kisser.

It was funny to me, at first, that these people would care so much about their reputation. But, on second thought, what else do they have?

The first vagrant is a friend, goddammit. And there's a puddle of blood on the sidewalk to prove it.

Hemingway's shortest story...

...consisted of six words. Here it is, in its glorious entirety:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Earth breath

One of the most interesting things pointed out in An Inconvenient Truth can be seen in this graph, which measures the growing amounts of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.



Disregard the overall increase (but don't disregard it too much, of course) and notice how the levels go up and down every year, like teeth on a saw. This is because each year green plants take in carbon dioxide when they're growing and give it off when they die in the fall. It's like every year the whole earth takes a giant breath. Ahhhhhh.

Isn't that cool?

On a related note, Stephen Hawking says we need to establish colonies in space soon to ensure the survival of the human race.

[I]f humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, [Hawking said,] they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

My bet? We don't make it in time. Thus my theory of time travel would work out perfectly. Mwuhahaha.

MySpace priorities

Have you ever bumped a real-live friend out of your Top 8 to make room for the profile of a fictional character?

I'm a little embarassed to admit that I've done just that. But hey, it's Superman!

I'm sure the bumpee will understand.

Hear ye? Hear ye?

Can you hear this ringtone?

According to the NY Times, this new ringtone, which only young people can hear,

is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.

"When I heard about it I didn't believe it at first," said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. "But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could."

I can hear it. Thank god. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to. Guess I can push that quarter-life crisis off a little while.

An Inconvenient Truth

I've been interested in seeing this movie for a while, mostly out of curiousity. What would a 90-minute science slide-show by Al Gore be like?

Turns out it was pretty damn good... which made it also pretty damn depressing. Seeing the man who was almost president made me long for what would have been, or at least what would not have been. There would be no war in Iraq, Americans wouldn't have to say they were Canadian in order to travel abroad -- to name a few. Gore needn't have been the next Lincoln to have had the country better off than it is.

And then it was further depressing because I could see how different Gore is when he's not campaigning (something he's admitted he sucks at). He was less stage-managed in this movie than during his 2000 campaign. He was knowledgable, approachable, even funny (it wasn't a political movie but he still got in two or three humorous jabs at Bush), and, most imporantly, curious. He likes to learn. He has imagination and vision. And it was depressing to think that all of these things can so easily get shoved aside in modern presidential campaigns, where the focus group is everything, and you have to be so careful about what you say because every word that comes out of your mouth will play on a hundred news stations.

After my regrets and my election-pessimism passed, the movie started to get scary. Terrifying. Because if it's even half correct on the effects of global warming (which apparently is agreed upon nearly unanimously by scientists even though the media portrays it as a theory), we're in big trouble.

If I had any problem at all with the movie as I was watching it, it was that I felt it sometimes portrayed Gore as too knowledgable, too borderline omniscient on the subject of global warming. He has been pushing this for over twenty years, but there was never a sense of "I told you so" from him -- that wasn't the issue. The problem I thought I would have was that the movie would end up presenting Gore as The Man To Fix This. And that gave me pause.

Everyone knows that the best way to gain power is by scaring people. It's been demonstrated in fiction, in, for example, V For Vendetta, wherein the regime seeking power secretly creates and unleashes a deadly virus and then runs on the platform of finding a cure. And it's been demonstrated in real life by the Bush Administration working the terror angle till they're blue in the face -- the old "Only we can keep you safe" routine. So I thought, is Al Gore showing this problem and positioning himself as the answer, as our best hope? Because this movie was pretty damn scary. Scarier than anything the Republicans have come up with.

But it didn't stay scary, and that's what separates it. After the pictures showing that there are no more famous "snows of Kilimanjaro," and that Glacier National Park is now more accurately called Lake National Park -- and after the simulations showing what the country would look like if the polar icecaps melted and the oceans rose twenty feet... after all that, it turned out to be inspiring. And it eased my earlier fears of a Gore power-grab. Because, at the end, he asks us to fix this problem. It was the furthest thing possible from Bush's tactic of "Go about your lives as normal while we handle the problem." Gore says the opposite: Do these things, some simple, some difficult, change the way you live, and you can fix the problem. He himself didn't factor into it. It was all about us.

And that's great. Because when was the last time we were asked to do anything? When was the last time we were made to feel like we can? It's as though our leaders are afraid of pissing us off by asking us to get off the couch. We are a great people in America, but we're lazy. We need to be inspired. Not since Kennedy has anyone looked to the stars and given us a seemingly impossible goal and told us to meet it. "America, get yourself in gear. Go, go and get me the Moon."

Gore, though not as eloquent as Kennedy, is giving us a similar goal with An Inconvenient Truth: Go, go and get me the Earth.

www.climatecrisis.net
watch the trailer.