Here’s a photoset of the largest municipal park in the US burning, taken by a neighbor, Elliot Trinidad. He notes that many people sat and watched all night mesmerized by the flames. He also notes the resemblance to scenes from disaster movies set in LA. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the shots.
We live in strange times. Imagining a future with scenes like these inspired the name for this blog. I wrote an unpublished novel of the same name several years ago that took place in the near future. The narrator described an LA that was a burned out dustbowl inhabited by surfers covered with white sun block. Practically everything I wrote about back then (5-6 years ago) is actually happening including giant F5 tornados destroying midwestern cities.
(thanks to BoingBoing)

Ordinarily I do not plug the media, especially thick glossy magazines, however the current issue of Vanity Fair is a must read for anyone interested in climate change and global warming. Last year they decided to do a major focus on green issues on an annual basis. What they’ve done is create a current report on the state of the world:
- The politics of denial (really frightening)
- The business of water (people in China are paying up to 25% of their income for water)
- Vehicle technology
- The tipping point for the end of the rainforests
And many more very in-depth articles. Despite a stupid photo series dedicated to green ‘celebrities’, the issue is a tour de force look at the green movement and our very real enemies.
I am off to St.John in the US VI and plan to spend some time reading through the mag (along with the new Einstein bio and my boss’s account of his Everest expedition) so blogging will be light for a week or so. No Internet connection and I’m not taking my laptop…bliss.

You might call this an anti-technology post because its about hanging clothes to dry. Today’s Times has a back to the past story from a woman in California who bypassed the rules of her community and put up a clothesline. I remember my grandmother having a line that ran from her second floor open porch down to a pole in the backyard. It was a continuous loop on pulleys so she could hang the laundry from the porch, give the line a pull and add more without leaving the house. Clothesline technology.
The first house my parents had had a t-shaped set of poles set in concrete in the backyard for multiple lines. I also remember a pole-mounted carousel type of thing that was round and rotated.
For a compendium of all things laundry-wise visit laundrylist.org- I couldn’t resist borrowing the image on this post from their site.

Apple has been criticized by Greenpeace for being a poor environmental steward. My personal feelings about Greenpeace are mixed as I don’t care for their holier than thou attitude. The days of crunchy granola environmental activism are over- everyone’s in it now. I also think they have not looked at the big picture with Apple.
Apple just announced that they have sold 2.5 billion songs on iTunes. That’s 250 million plastic CDs and jewel cases that are not out there headed for landfills. Instead we have our music collections as digital files on tiny devices that last for years. Even the SONY walkmans of the eighties were about 15 times as massive as an iPod.
Now they are doing the same with movies, eliminating 2 million DVDs in the last year alone. This will accelerate as the movie studios keep joining them.

Those CDs and cases are made from petro products- if we are going to do environmental audits on companies we have to take a more strategic look these days and weigh the less obvious against the easy target.