- Find someone to fist-bump and crack open the champagne,
mankind. It’s time to celebrate. Together, we’ve achieved something amazing and
that something is having such a detrimental impact on the environment that the concentration of carbon dioxide in our
planet's air has reached a level that is unprecedented in human history. Never
before has so much of this greenhouse gas loomed in the skies above and the
credit/blame goes nowhere but on humanity for burning so many fossil fuels that
the planet’s ecosystem is helpless to defend itself. According to the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Earth's atmosphere now has about
400 molecules of CO2 in every million molecules of air. Scientist Charles
Keeling first monitored rising CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory on
Hawaii's Big Island in 1958 and at that time, the concentration was 317 parts
per million (ppm). The ascent from that sadly low number to 2013’s impressive
figure is shown in a graph known as the Keeling Curve. Fittingly, two
instruments at Keeling's former observatory recorded the milestone of 400.03
ppm on that curve Thursday. Keeling, a bleeding-heart liberal back before it
was cool, warned in the 1950s that rising CO2 would result in droughts, heat
waves, higher sea levels and scarcer food supplies. He tried to warn the world,
but no one listened and the past few decades have yielded a steady stream of
natural disasters that have increased in frequency as time has worn on. Scientists
now hope merely to stabilize CO2 concentration below 450 ppm and reduce short-lived
warming pollutants in the lower atmosphere and even those goals seem lofty.
Sure, reaching them could save 4.5 million lives that are now lost to
indoor smoke and outdoor pollution and save as much as 100 million tons of crops
destroyed by ozone pollution, but the world has a proven track record of
ignoring this type of ominous information…….
- A good ghost town is tough to find. Argentineans know
this. After all, it was back on Nov. 10, 1985 when water burst through a retaining
wall and spilled into the lakeside streets of a small, popular lakeside resort
known as Epecuen. A massive rainstorm followed a series of wet winters led to
the flooding and it was so sudden that people fled with what they could as the
homes they left behind were eventually submerged under 33 feet of corrosive
saltwater. For more than a quarter of a century, the town remained underwater
and the saltwater baths and spas that tourists once came there to enjoy were
beneath the surface. That has changed of late as the waters have receded,
leaving behind in the Argentine farmlands southwest of Buenos Aires that looks
like a scene from a movie about the end of the world. A place that once served
20,000 tourists a season is once again drawing the visitors in even though the drive
from the capital takes nearly six hours along 340 miles of narrow country
roads. As James Earl Jones promised in “Field of Dreams,” people will come.
They’ll come to see a ghost town fill with rusted hulks of automobiles and
furniture, crumbled homes and broken appliances. They’ll come to climb broken staircases
that lead nowhere and wander through a graveyard where floodwaters have toppled
tombstones and left graves exposed to the elements. While they’re visiting
these lovely and uplifting sites, they can have a friendly chat with
82-year-old Pablo Novak, who still lives on the edge of the town, welcoming
people who wander into the town. "Whoever passes nearby cannot go without
coming to visit here," Novak said. "It's getting more people to the
area, as they come to see the ruins.” Many of those who fled Epecuen now live
in nearby Carhue, another lakeside town. The rebuilt many of the city’s
most-popular features there and have no plans to return, but that doesn’t mean
the tourists won’t………
- The nightmare won’t go away. Cher, a.k.a. Cherilyn Sarkisian, has been tormenting the world with the crap she calls
singing, but her terrorism via horrible music has mostly been contained to her own
awful albums or those she recorded with her late husband, Sonny Bono. Now, her
mother is getting in on the party (that no one wants to attend) by releasing
her own album. Yes, 86-year-old Georgia Holt has dropped “Honky Tonk,” her debut album. It
entered the Billboard Heatseekers chart at Number 13 and the Top Country Albums
chart at Number 43 following its release last week and despite the fact that it
is utterly unlistenable, it does have an interesting back story. The album was originally
recorded in 1980 with members of Elvis Presley’s band, but it was never
released – much to the relief of the world. However, as so often happens with
forgotten recordings of music in a horrible genre sung by someone with little
or no vocal talent, the session tapes were recently rediscovered in Holt's
garage. Some of the songs are original material written by Holt, but there are
also crappy covers of “Love Me Tender” and “Cryin’ Time.” Oh, and there is a
duet with Holt and her musically inept daughter, so maybe there’s something the
U.S. government can use to coerce a few more confessions out of the detainees
at Guantanamo Bay before it closes, whenever President Obama gets around to
that. Cher took the tapes to her musical director Paul Mirkovich after finding
them and he spun them into a truly forgettable and regrettable finished
product. "He went in and took it all apart and put all new music in it.
Basically, we just kept mom's voice and put everything else new on it," Cher
explained………
- Pedophiles will have to find a new method of luring in
children from now on in Coachella, Calif. The city, which typically only gets
any attention when it hosts its annual music festival at which iconic, deceased
rappers occasionally perform in hologram form, is making headlines of another
kind by announcing a decision to stop issuing new permits to ice cream truck drivers,
a.k.a. the child molesters of the food truck world. Going forward, vendors who
already have permits will be allowed to continue selling, but once those
individuals shut down their business, pass away or grow tired of hearing “Do
Your Ears Hang Low?” on their truck-top speaker for eight hours a day, the ice
cream truck industry will wither and die in Coachella. The official reason given
by city leaders for the decision is that there are too many vendors already and
combined with a recent wave of crime (i.e. statutory rapes) involving drivers,
putting an end to permits for these shady characters just made sense. In first
few months of the year, police arrested one ice cream truck driver for DUI
(sounds like those Irish Car Bomb Pops were a bad idea) and another was cited
for urinating inside his truck, which is probably unsanitary. Oh, and there was
that one incident last month when police arrested 40-year-old Israel Ayala for
exposing himself to children on at least two occasions while selling ice cream.
Ayala was charged with indecent exposure, which is actually one of the least
offensive and unsavory offenses an ice cream truck driver could commit with
children involved. There is a chance this is part of a secret, all-out war on
ice cream in the city, as small pushcarts selling the frozen treat are already
illegal in Coachella…….
- Rutgers men’s basketball is under new management. That is
the more pertinent fact when digesting the news that the new coach, Eddie
Jordan, apparently lied on his résumé when he claimed that he graduated in 1977
from the same university he now works for. According to the university registrar's office, the former NBA player and coach
never received a degree from Rutgers despite earning 103 credit hours from 1973
to 1985. University officials haven't said it the screw-up in on them for not
vetting the résumé or if Jordan deliberately lied to them, but admitted
only that “was in error when it
reported that Eddie Jordan had earned a degree.” However, the university tagged
that admission by pointing out that Jordan’s new position does not require him
to have a degree. "Rutgers sought Eddie for the head coach position as a
target-of-opportunity hire based on his remarkable public career," Rutgers
said in a release. "Eddie Jordan was inducted into the Rutgers Hall of
Distinguished Alumni in 2004, and he has been a part of the Rutgers family
since before 1977." Not verifying the information listed in a bio of their
new coach by checking with their new coach just never crossed anyone at
Rutgers’ mind, it seems. Jordan admits he did not receive a diploma, but said
he did complete his school hours in 1985 and blamed his lack of an actual
degree on a registration issue after he finished playing at Rutgers in 1977. He
returned to school to complete his degree after his NBA career ended in 1984
and claims that’s where the confusion occurred. "Some of the professors
are still around and some are gone, but they all know I was in class and did my
work,'' Jordan said. "There was arrogance on my part when I was told I
didn't register right, and then I left to (coach at) Old Dominion. I was told
my classes were never recorded. I saw a transcript. I will have to find it. I
was there and I completed the work. My professors that are still there know
that. That's it." In Jordan’s version of the story, he went to class in
1984 and did all of the work to earn his degree, only to learn he wasn’t
officially registered. Of course, he was a physical education major, so
a degree wouldn’t prove much anyhow. Degree or not, what really matters is that
unlike his predecessor on the Rutgers bench, the disgraced Mike Rice, Jordan
isn’t known for assaulting players, blasting them with basketballs from five
feet away and hitting them with homophobic slurs. If he doesn’t do those
things, then he’s a massive upgrade already………
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