Internal Mono(b)log

The oilspill that’s currently gushing into the gulf of Mexico is a terrible horrible environmental catastrophe and BP definitely holds a great deal of responsibility for that damage. They earned it by cutting corners, using (not) good enough short-cuts and (probably) poorly trained staff.

But! BP alone should not hold the blame for this.

WE (you and I) are as much of the problem here as BP is. WE drive cars. WE rely on trucking to get food to our groceries. WE rely on petroleum based fertilizers to nourish our crops, that we either eat or worse feed to animals that we then slaughter and eat. WE live in a land where we demand such excess that food rots on grocery shelves. A land where it’s somehow acceptable to transport WATER from an island in the middle of the Pacific ocean to hour grocery and variety store shelves so that we can drink the same stuff that comes out of the ground all around us at designer prices in fancy bottles (made of plastic aka petroleum products). WTF!

Did you make a lot of noise to try to stop drilling in the Gulf of Mexico? It’s likely been happening since before you were born. Been protesting much? How about the Alaskan oilfields or the tar sands? Do anything about that? Hmm?? Sell the car yet or just complain about the price of gas? Add better insulation to your home, replace the windows/doors or just complain about how much it costs to heat/cool your abode? Switch over to Bullfrog Power or some other green power supplier? Buying carbon offsets from CarbonZero.ca or others? I thought not. It’s too easy to be complacent until an event like this smacks us around.

BP’s just been doing what we’ve demanded of them: get us oil cheaply. We don’t really care how (until something goes wrong)! Just give us our fix now, we’ll worry about the next hit in the future.

Sure BP’s hands are covered in death and oil in the gulf. But so are ours! So don’t be too quick to pickup and throw that oil-covered stone. It may just hit you in the head!

I had a thought today that I’ll share with you:

A decade ago if you went to buy headphones, your colour choices would have been simple: black, perhaps with some brushed aluminum. Perhaps at that point you would have found the Sony sport headphones in their stunning yellow and black. That was about it. Why were the colours so limited? I have no idea, someone somewhere probably lacked some creativity or thought that people didn’t like colour. Who knows, suffice it to say that a decision was made that lacked vision or foresight.

Today, there are a large variety of colours to choose from, and why not?! Plastic comes in any colour, right?

The thing that I find most notable about headphone colours today is that pretty much every headphone manufacturer now makes white headphones. Why? But of course, the ubiquitous Ipod. First Apple made white stylish, then it became an almost defacto standard. Give consumers a choice and they’ll select what fits their needs the best. Novel concept isn’t it?!

Kind of made me thing of a religious debate I had with one of our desktop support guys the other day. He was trying to convince me that adding Apple to our corporate standard was a bad thing. He, among other questionable stretches of logic, told me that a lot of our infrastructure was geared toward windows and that our standard didn’t include Apple. Of course, none of this made any sense to me since OSX is built upon open standards. His unwillingness to embrace change even in light of reduced TCO, improved employee productivity, and many other arguments too lengthy for this blog left me speechless. His inability to understand that our historical windows infrastructure was built just like the black and aluminum headphones of a decade ago astounded me.

Lets face it, the world has always wanted colour, all that’s been missing is creativity and foresight to make it happen.

Thankfully, the OJ Simpson Special _If I Did It_ has [been cancelled](http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_320.html) by the exec’s over at newscorp.

When I first saw the promos for this I couldn’t believe my eyes. Talk about flaunting it in front of the American judiciary and public.

A study published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science makes a dire prediction for the world’s ocean life. According to researchers, there will be no seafood left to catch by 2048

WTF!!! So how dire does it have to get before people change their ways?

[Full story from "How Stuff Works" here](http://home.howstuffworks.com/ref/no-more-fish.htm)

Cherry Beach seems to be one of the targets for the City of Toronto’s ever hungry need for land. Now there are plans afoot to clear cut it for soccerfields and astroturf. Insane!

Please sign the online [petition](http://www.petitiononline.com/scb2006/petition.html) and forward the link to everyone you can think of.

[The Oil Factor](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1130731388742388243&q=the+oil+factor)

Greg Maldonado, an awesome contact juggler who’s blog I read, posted [this](http://people.tribe.net/gregmaldonado/blog/9854bb3e-1e1b-425d-9be4-739ea316244c) reference to a BBC story about the changing face of politics.

Frightening stuff.

Lately the world unrest has really had me very concerned. I hadn’t, until [today](http://digg.com/world_news/Newt_Gingrich_Says_It_s_World_War_III) heard anyone else liken all the unrest to “World War III”. But think about it for a minute.

- the conflict around Israel is more violent that I can recall.
- North Korea is lobbing around ICBMs like they’re hackie-sacks
- The US’s attack on the middle east (No I don’t agree with the convenient “war on terror” crap. It’s just an excuse that the fear-bound US populace will bite on.)

The potential for this all to explode beyond reason is floating in the air. I just hope that those who have the power and ability to avoid something this horrific are sharing my fears. For what it’s worth, I doubt Dubya is.

I don’t get it.

I didn’t understand when GWBush got re-elected south of the Boarder. I don’t understand the Canadian electorate bringing in a Concervative government w. a Liberal official opposition.

We, the people of the country called Canada, just wasted $300M on an election to return things to almost the status quoe. We’d best launch an investigation into this scandal and waste some more money. _sheesh!!!_

I guess the good news is that when Canada becomes the 51st state I’ll be able to work in the US without getting a work visa.

The Patriot Act is essential to fighting the war on terror and preventing our enemies from striking America again,” President Bush said in a statement praising the House vote. “In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment.”

Ok American people, let me rephrase: “You’re afraid, and so we, your gov’t, are going to take advantage of that to further erode your civil liberties”.

Talk about using terror constructively, at least for the administration.