Everybody's favorite pre-holiday-meal event: A root canal, especially when one hears "uh-oh" from the resident and supervising dentists.
- Fifty years ago, a classic of American serious nonfiction helped pave the way for fundamental changes in policies and mindset that have largely been for the better. Without Silent Spring, even the pathetic response to date to climate change would not be possible.
Rachel Carson's evocation of a toxic environment leading to a loss of birdsong, of tweeting, presages current events around a pile of internet guano. But mere internet guano may be the best available product. (Two hints: Acceleration from zero to thirty demonstrates nothing whatsoever about either merging into traffic at (internet) highway speed or cruising for a long distance; and then there's that maintainability issue (how's that actually going?).)
- Which also — given the horrific misogyny, arrogance, and failure to actually read the source material common to both H'wood marketing and Birdpoop — makes Ms Chastain's objectively justified disdain for the marketing of the film for which she earned an Oscar all too predictable. But don't get me started on how commercial publishing is, if anything, worse… but not as bad as N'ville (or Ticketbastard). Can you even contemplate such a fiasco enveloping a male star? Ever heard of similar problems with boy bands or male solo acts?
- Further along the toxicity stream, consider the location of recycling plants. And it's complicated — there are elements of NIMBYism, of racism, of class warfare, of unenlightened self-interest masquerading as "good old 'murikan profit margins," and above all of the irony that this story is about the adverse environmental impact of actually doing recycling.
The turkey is brining already for the annual Turkey Awards. Not a John Madden Memorial Turducken, but a rather different kind of mutant…