Ever have one of those days?
Ever have it start less than 15 minutes after you got out of bed?
It’s not an experience you want to try if you haven’t.
And for our added convenience:
For Washington, DC on 21 July 2007
Length Of Visible Light: 15h 31m
Length of Day: 14h 29m
Tomorrow will be 1m 33s shorter.
compared to
For Washington, DC on 21 June 2007
Length Of Visible Light: 15h 58m
Length of Day 14h 54m
Tomorrow will be 0m 1s shorter.
We’ve lost 27 minutes in a month. To think, I didn’t used to start noticing this until around the beginning of September.
And just because I’m cranky, here are a couple of other things I’ve been randomly wondering:
Don’cha think you’d notice
I just finished reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. I’m not usually a fan of the graphic novel – I prefer to make my own graphics in my head from the words thank you very much – but her drawings are packed with such detail, and it was a gift given in the most generous spirit so I took a stab. Fun Home is stark, sad, and sometimes a bit weird but I’m glad I read it. My only question: don’t you think you’d notice a woman had a glass eye before you had sex with her? I know they’re not as obvious as artificial limbs but still, if you can see Robert Goulet’s from the upper balcony at the National Theater, which I know for a fact you can, you’d think up close and personal one would be a little more obvious.
Qui bono?
So…Live Earth…seven venues in seven continents on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new century. And all to raise awareness about the fact that humanity’s shortsightedness has finally reached the point where we should put ourselves on the endangered species list.
What? Did I hear “it’s about saving the planet” ? Yeah, tell someone who believes that. The planet will probably live on long after we’re gone.
The reality is this: if we don’t change the way we consume and discard resources eventually we will have shit where we eat so much that this planet won’t be livable. Imagine Blade Runner only with no noodle shops, no hot redheaded androids in see-through overcoats, and more early death from lung cancer because you can actually see the particulate matter in the air.
So we have a global concert to raise awareness as if 07-07-07 were actually globally significant (uh, could someone tell Al Gore that on the Jewish calendar it’s 5767, the Islamic year is 1428 H, and the Buddhists call this 2550? Thanks.). Lots of hoopla, television and internet coverage out the proverbial – television and internet coverage which was then analyzed to death by both progressives and conservatives (see Slate for a good round-up of coverage including an hilarious minute-by-minute critique by conservative mag The National Review) – and yet, no one has managed to tell me the one thing I really want to know: Where’s the money going?
I wasn’t willing to consent to the full-frontal lobotomy that would have been the result of reading every single Live Earth article and press release – seriously, guys, press releases don’t have to be boring (is there anything less exciting than someone calling something “emphatic” ?) – but you’d think that in the gallons of ink, miles of newsprint (is that recycled paper?), and billions of pixels someone, somewhere would have been able to tell me where the $37.50 (USD) ticket price went, and where the money from all of those bottles of water – recycle here please – is going. I mean, when George Harrison put on The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 UNICEF got the US$243,418.50 it raised. So, who benefits from Live Earth, exactly, besides Al Gore and MSNBC?
Lots of questions but not many answers.