The Planet is Trying to Kill us!! Save Yourself!!

Some say truth in advertising sells your product. Others say sensationalism in advertising sells your product. Still others point to the concrete evidence that furry talking animals in Collegiate team hooded sweatshirts in advertising best sells your product. And yet still others insist that there is somehow proof in my pudding, yet this has yet to be confirmed. Pudding aside I think there is something to be said for all of the first three comments. The truth campaign against smoking has seemed to have a positive effect on the social perception of tobacco companies and legislature who continue to ban smoking inside public places including clubs and bars.

Way to go California, I can finally have a drink without coming home smelling like I spent all night at a pig roast.

Yet Budweiser and Coors alike move millions of units a year on the perception that if you drink a bitter tasting brown liquid that gorgeous women will flock to your doorstep and shake various parts of their perfect bodies like in a Jay-Z video. Even the national fire service has used the furry, yet strangely intimidating, Smokey the Bear routine to curb wild fires for the past 60 plus years.

So this is my question for Green Peace and the rest of the “Save the Planet” nation. Between truth, sensationalism, and cute furry animals your best effort is…Al Gore?

I learned in high school that people talented or passionate about their particular cause are not always the best people to promote it. My first martial arts teacher may be one of the premiere martial artists in the world and probably one the easiest people to learn from, but his meager business savvy kept the growth of his school at a snails pace for years. I believe the same to be true of the marketing people behind such brilliant earthly campaigns as Save the Whales. The Whales? I know we have to start somewhere but to choose a creature most people have never been able to catch a glimpse of may not have been the best choice. Albeit they did need saving in 1977 when the campaign started, and still need saving today, I just feel that we just could have done better than…whales.

First of all whales aren’t furry. Not even a little bit. They are not cute, and after bible stories of Jonah being swallowed by one, my moniker has been keep the damn whales the hell away from me.

The bigger problem is that in a self obsessed world no one really cares about whales. Or dolphins, or manatees, or certain species of mussels. People care about themselves, and as much as I love the idea of “Save the Planet” I have realized people really don’t care about that either. People will continue to burn fossil fuels in monstrously large vehicles, burn coal and oil in power plants and dump toxic wastes into rivers and streams. It is obvious that more needs to be done before people will be interested in saving something so insignificant as our planet.

The motto of the current movement has been “unless we change our ways” our future is looking grim. That's more like it, just what we need. A little fire and brimstone to get people to pay attention. Churches across the globe have been doing it for years, scaring us into hard uncomfortable benches week after week, handing over wads of cash for them to build more statues in marble and decorate their churches with elaborate nativity scenes at Christmas. It’s time for nature’s image to get a major facelift.

Whether or not we as humans are drastically causing climate change is irrelevant. I know cavemen at the end of our last ice age were sure that smoke from their campfires turned their comfortable frozen island into a flower shirted tourist destination wasteland. Nevertheless the climate is changing and so should her image. It’s a very simple three step process.
TRUTH – Unless we change, this world will be uninhabitable. Forget shopping malls and movie theatres. The deserts will spread, the seas will rise and fresh water will be rationed off like donuts at a fat camp.
SENSATIONALISM – Use energy saving light bulbs and gorgeous women in skimpy bikinis will be knocking your door down as P Diddy drives up in the Diet Pepsi truck just in time to party!!
FURRY ANIMAL – An endangered animal that is cute and cuddly yet slightly intimidating is the Polar Bear. They have sold Coca-Cola every Christmas since I can remember. I’m sure they’ll change allegiance if the endorsement contract is right.

It’s time for action environmentalists. Let’s put away the slide projector and Nobel Prize winning ex-Vice Presidents and save this earth while it still can be saved. Because if we don’t a giant volcano will erupt boiling the seas as lighting scorches the earth at every corner. Scared yet?

Generation "I"dentity Crisis

I am a proud child of Generation X. Or is it Generation Y, or the MTV generation? What ever Generation I belong to I’m sure I’m proud of being so. But maybe my Generational identity crisis is less to do with my ignorance and more to do with the perpetual motion of the world around me these days. It seems like a new generation emerges every 8 to 10 years, when ever the terms attached to the previous Generation become stale in the ever evolving social vernacular. How is it that my mother and my aunt can both be considered baby boomers with a 16 year age difference, and yet my youngest brother, only 5 years my junior, is firmly planted in the Y to my X. What have we missed here?

I’m not sure the point I’m trying to make here. Maybe in our politically and socially correct society, vocabulary and terminology have to change so quickly to keep up with social unrest (and whiny people) that those of us in groups affected by such never ending change are not sure where they belong anymore. Does a disabled person know that through the miracles of modern language that they have been suddenly upgraded from crippled to disabled to physically challenged. Give it another couple of years and you’ll be running the 40 in 5.4 seconds.

Again, I’m not sure my point. All I know is that at a time when the dictionary is going through more rewrites than the Harry Potter Novels ever did, I am losing ground. I have owned my dictionary since the 5th grade. Which means more than anything I am consfused. Another card carrying member or generation Identity Crisis. Totally an udderly confused. But thanks to the latest version of Webster’s for a new generation (which has yet to be named) I am only “slightly unclear.”

The First Blog of Many to Come

My first blog. As insanely nerve racking as some of the most intense moments of my life have been (i.e skydiving, marriage, divorce, climbing K-2) writing my first blog for millions of web browsers to happen upon and stick around long enough to get past the mis-spelling and mis-placed hyphens, I realize that…it really isn’t that big of a deal.
Compared to the previous list of “things I haven’t actually done in my life” from the preceding paragraph, preparing this blog doesn’t really offer the same danger, risk or possible insurance settlement. Then again, I am just guessing, being that I’ve never done any of those things mentioned.
I’m sure this leaves folks with a couple questions I don’t really feel like answering. What I will discuss is my sudden interest in spilling out the contents of my brain in no particular order onto, as we called it in the 90s, the World Wide Web.
I must admit for the longest time I hated blogs, blog sites, bloggers and words that even remotely rhymed with donut. It had nothing to do with anyone that blogged or some long standing feud with the information super highway. No, the evil behind my hatred for what I now have come to embrace was the anti-Christ himself, Caron Daly. Well him, and the creator of the lame segment on his show “Do Your Parents Know What a Blog Is?” You guessed it, during this riveting bit of television Carson would call onto stage a low level member of his staff (PA or Intern who by the way, were usually more charismatic, charming and funnier than he is) and had them call their parents to ask them if they knew what a blog was. The parents would say, “No I don’t,” and Carson would laugh and then would try to adlib as the American audience simultaneously threw bricks at their TVs for being subjected to something so completely un-entertaining.
So I am here online to publicly apologize to members of the blogging world for comments I may or may not have made regarding your lifestyle, mother’s hairdo, brother’s sexual preference or your own choice of hats. As of this posting I am officially one of you. I just hope you hate Carson for putting us all through this awkward situation.