Hidden Messages
Now here's a thing. I've always thought that clever people, the thinkers, get to be somewhere in society so their message can get out. The biggest example of this would be Hollywood. Sublime political commentaries, hints and predictions of an existential nature, wry observations on the nature of life, and the meaning (if any) behind human beings being human. Some of the deeper teachings of the western mystery tradition are hidden innocuously within some of the simplest (read: children's) movies and left there for the viewer to discover.

Is this a form of paranoia on my part? Is this pronoia? The idea of conspiracy for good, to plant seeds and feed the unconscious. An ET phone home experience, touching bases with the hidden primordial voices within our heads? Maybe, but I don't have time for that crap today.

Fantastic Plastic
What stoked my coals was reading this article about a possible connection between the plastics around us and that are used to package our food and the nation's growing obesity issue. And I remembered Batman. That scene where the news reporter (who doesn't know his source is the batwinged avenger) telling the minions that it is not one product, but many combinations that is making people sick.

"The evidence is preliminary, but a number of researchers are pursuing indications that the chemicals, which have been shown to cause abnormal changes in animals' sexual development, can also trigger fat-cell activity -- a process scientists call adipogenesis."

This got me to thinking about the top three things I seem to see pushed as 'lifestyle' medications... for weight loss, for sexual function and for sleeping.

I remember something Bernard Sumner once wrote. "We use machines instead of our bodies, and when our bodies fail us, we use machines to keep us alive."

As odd as it may be to think about, setting an alarm clock to wake us in the morning has to be about one of the dumbest things we've ever developed. But it doesn't end there. I was going to say imagine setting a stop-watch every time you meet a friend for dinner or a date. Beep, time's up.. gotta go. Imagine setting a stop-watch as you get in your car or hop on transport to get to work in the morning... tick tick tick, gotta get there before the buzzer. Imagine setting a stop-watch on your life, hit lap every time you hit 20, gotta be a beautiful young thing, abs, tan, teeth.. 30, should be settled now, great partner, just like those around me.. 40, dude, if you haven't 'made it' by now, you're a loser...

Beep, you're dead.

But the fact is we are living in a stop-watch world. We do hit the start button to sleep, we count-down to getting to work, we lap time our lives in segments of time that apparently carry consequence for either making it 'on time' or not.

The next time you go to bed, imagine what you are doing is setting a stopwatch counting down to getting up again. See how relaxed you are thinking on that lying in the dark!

No wonder plastics are killing us.

Electricity Lite, New and Improved
In other developments, I've more or less converted to using these doohickeys in my house. A 75 watt CFL uses the same energy equivalent to a 20 watt regular light bulb. Apparently if every home in the U.S. swapped just two of their incandescent planet destroyers to these miniature Guggenheim sculptures of light, we would save the equivalent amount of pollution that 2 million cars put out daily. Not to mention the energy savings in an average home using them. That's estimated to be around $120 a year. Imagine getting one month of your electricity bill paid every year..

I may not recycle, but I like to save.

Course, the light they emit is different. Cheaper inferior brands cast horrible grey-green white light and bleach everything it falls upon, whereas the higher end brands have almost gotten to the point of being indistinguishable. Almost. I must admit, a lot of the artwork in my rooms looks different. I found myself looking at two large canvasses I painted that are hanging in the dining room asking myself, "hmmm... did I really paint them in those colors?"

Not bad, just different. Course, let's just ignore the mercury that's involved in making them...

Asylum Planet
According to this article, the new religion of Global Warming (not to be confused with the serious and credible study of climate change) seems to be predicated on the horribly short memory spans of our generations.

"In the 1970s, the fear was "global cooling." The Christian Science Monitor then declaimed, "Warning: Earth's climate is changing faster than even experts expect," while The New York Times announced, "A major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable." Sound familiar?"

I saw "The Day After Tomorrow" on TV tonight and laughed at the absurd pseudo "science" and the license taken with both the plot's determination and the viewer's intelligence. I wondered how many people watched it and believed that an ice age could not only start but develop and establish in a matter of weeks. I won't go into the facts they mashed but I'll leave it at this... I think this is exactly what people may think could happen and what is spurring horrible amounts of money to be spent all in the name of 'doing good' when all it is doing is lining the pockets of fat rich men. Nod to Alcan for their recycling plants. Sure, why not give back freely what you bought from them and let them use it again... What a fucking swizz.

Anyway, Phillip Stott's Op Ed is somewhat of a balance to the glossy hype being used to shunt people into a new era of shame, sans Jesus, for what they have done. My jury is still out on this, something tells me the sensible way is somewhere in the middle, between positive change to become more efficient in our energy uses and ignoring the doom-sayers of Global Warming^TM dogma.

So it all goes full circle, Movies with a message, credible or not, things we create and how they kill us, and Batman's kevlar crotch. That last one was gratuitous. But you knew that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 12:28 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.