- Reprieve for plastic bags in the state of California? That was the verdict Tuesday as the California State Senate has rejected a bill that would have banned the use of plastic bags by the state's retailers, such as grocery stores, convenience stores and drugstores. The legislature’s session ended Tuesday and it was their last chance to pass the bill, which sailed through the California Assembly in June and has the support of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has said he would sign the measure into law. Despite strong support from environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the outpouring of support for the bill from enviro-friendly Californians who contacted their state senators to push for the measure, the bill simply did not have enough votes to pass. Even a "mockumentary," narrated by Jeremy Irons, called "The Majestic Plastic Bag," was not enough to sway the senators. Instead, the bill’s opponents were able to achieve a triumph that may well screw over the environment but will keep their business interests unharmed. Those opponents would include the American Chemistry Council, which criticized California Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica, who proposed the bill. "Assemblywoman Brownley's inflammatory comments are obviously intended to distract public attention from the substance and dire consequences of Assembly Bill 1998," the group said. "Her proposed legislation to ban plastic grocery bags in California ... is bad for the economy and bad for the environment: It will eliminate several hundred California manufacturing jobs and dismantle existing plastic bag recycling programs." Oh, so f*cking over the planet is preferable to finding a new line of work for people who produce plastic bags? Okey doke. If the California Grocers Association supported the bill, which it did, then who am I to question it? Brown garnered their support by simply agreeing to subject all stores that sell groceries to the ban. Perhaps there was no concession big enough to win over the ACC. "Our hope is the consumer is driven towards reusable bags", says Dave Hanley, vice president of the grocers association. "We have a huge responsibility to educate consumers." Instead, the state known as one of the most environmentally minded in the country will do nothing to help reduce the 3.96 million tons of plastic bags, sacks and wraps generated in 2008 in the United States alone. Cities around the country are considering bans on plastic bags, including but not limited to Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Dallas, Texas; and Portland, Oregon, just to name a few. Internationally, cities in China, Africa, Australia, India and Ireland have all imposed bans or surcharges on plastic bags. Thanks for not stepping up to do your part, California State Senate……….
- Feeling overwhelmed by the daily barrage of emails you receive in your inbox, Gmail users? If so, youur friends at Google want to help you out with Priority Inbox, a feature designed to push a user's most important e-mails to the top of the inbox and leave them there. The new service debuted at midnight ET Monday an Google seems pretty pleased with its new offering. "We've been hearing from a lot of our most active users, people around the world, that they're overloaded by e-mail," Gmail product director Keith Coleman said. "They're getting more than they can usually handle with their filters and manual setups. We wanted to give you a solution to this." With more than 294 billion e-mails are sent every day, there are bound to be a few people in need of this feature and on Tuesday morning, Gmail users were greeted with a red "New Features" link in their inbox that will allow them to enable Priority Inbox. A special algorithm (don’t worry, you don’t have to create it) will determine which messages that appear in the priority box based on such as factors as the identity of the sender, key phrases in the message and whether the mail was sent to an individual or a large group. In other words, messages from a spouse or close family member may get ranked ahead of promotional e-mails from a web-based service the Gmail user signed up for. The Priority Inbox is the latest evolution of sorting spam and non-spam from a user’s inbox, according to Coleman. "It used to be people wanted to separate spam from not-spam," he said. "But now, the not-spam is of varying degrees of importance." From those default settings, users will then be able to further personalize their priority boxes, removing e-mails that have been automatically sent there and adding others they wish to prioritize. "It will get better just as you use Gmail," Coleman said. "You can help it learn faster." Priority Inbox joins other popular features added to the Gmail service recently, including the addition of Google Voice to Gmail, allowing users to make calls directly from their Gmail pages, and extending to 30 seconds the amount of time a user, using Google Labs, has to recall a message that was sent accidentally. All seem like positive changes, so we’ll have to see if users feel the same way………
- Lesson in semantics well taken, University of Missouri football program. Whereas some people might call what you have done to running back Derrick Washington dismissing him from the team, you have termed Washington "permanently suspended" after he was charged earlier this week with felony sexual assault stemming from a June incident. Now, I’m not quibbling with the decision itself because according to a campus detective's probable cause statement filed Monday, Washington entered the woman's closed bedroom while visiting her roommate and allegedly assaulted the woman while she slept. The victim was upset enough that she obtained a court order of protection that expired in July. For some odd reason, Missouri athletic department policy states athletes with pending felony charges cannot play. How they intend to become an elite program with that attitude, I’ll never know, but nonetheless they are sticking to their rules and that’s that. However, the school has taken it one step further and decided that even if Washington is cleared or acquitted of the charges against him, he will never be allowed to return to the program. What they have done is to allow him to stay in school and keep his scholarship, which is a nice gesture. "Nothing about this decision will affect his existing athletic scholarship," the university said in a release. Washington himself has refused to comment on the charges against him, but the Tigers now find themselves without a guy who led them in rushing for the past two seasons, compiling 1,901 yards and 27 touchdowns. He tore it up in the preseason after showing up in great shape, healthy after a knee injury slowed him last season. Then again, the team could probably do without another accused criminal on its team after reserve tight end and long snapper Beau Brinkley was charged with driving while intoxicated earlier this week, reserve linebacker Will Ebner was hit with drunken-driving charges earlier in the summer and assistant coach Bruce Walker - leading from the front - was also arrested this summer for possible drunken-driving violations. Way to set an example for your players, coach Walker. Hard to figure out why the program has such rampant discipline problems with men like you in charge…………
- We waited all this time and that’s the best Conan O’Brien could come up with? For a guy who signed one of the most lucrative talent contracts in television history and is reportedly an incredible creative genius, O’Brien sure does come up with sucky names for his much-hyped new shows. Maybe he’s been devoting a bit too much time to the two musical/comedy albums he recently released, but as revealed in a video the carrot-topped talker put out himself, the name of his new TBS late night show will be……Conan. Yes, he not only named it after himself, he simply used his first name. Boy, I bet that took a lot of late-night brainstorming sessions with his creative team. Fans have been clamoring for the name of the new show for months, but O’Brien has clearly been too busy with his nationwide comedy tour and aforementioned albums to devote more than a few seconds to naming his new show. Then again, when you’re serving as the warm-up act for George Lopez, what incentive is there to come up with a great moniker? It’s like installing a new stereo and speakers into a car that’s about to be crushed for sport under the mighty wheels of a monster truck. Not that I expect TBS to yank Conan’s show simply because he gave it an unimaginative name, but I sure wouldn’t take offense if they did. So if you happen to be a major Coco fan who has been down in the dumps with your funny man of choice not on the air of late, I guess take solace in the fact that within two months, you will have Conan back on the air with his smartly named new program…….......
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