As noted in my previous post, today is Earth Day. Today we cherish the mother who bore us, and make plans to keep her alive and healthy.

More than a decade ago, I first saw the pictures of the disappearing glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Humanity shrugged. Eight-two percent of the cap has vanished since 1912, accelerating rapidly as we speak.

Kilimanjaro is predicted to be ice-free by 2020.

I’m trying to avoid spewing vitriol here, but I get told by religious evangelists that I just need to open my eyes to see God all around me. My eyes are open. What I see is a species that is destroying their Garden.

I think that it’s depressingly probable that, as a species with too much power and too little care, we’re too stupid and selfish to survive.

I don’t know an answer. I wish I had more to offer than another Jeremiad. I’d rather be proposing something positive and clever and upbeat in this post.

But all I have tonight is this:

It’s coming at us fast, people. We need to change ourselves and the way we do our business, and we need to find some most excellent technical fixes before the mass extinctions kick in.

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Kilimanjaro
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Science fiction has a rich tradition of telling stories with the theme ‘If This Goes On….’

I wrote and recorded ‘Kilimanjaro’ this weekend. It’s not final draft, but I learned more about how to use my tools. I’m rather pleased in that the whole thing is handmade. Not a loop or any automation in it anywhere.

There has been some vocal tuning, of course, and will be much more when I get back to editing some more. You have no idea how yowling-awful it sounded originally.

It kills me that I can’t sing the song that is in my heart.

Fortunately, I have some friends who sing — you know who you are — and I’ll eventually bully them all into singing what I cannot.

 

 Kilimanjaro: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today is Earth Day, as all of us good lefties, libs, enviros, and rads know.

Our friends on the right gently admonish us that injecting over six and half billion humans into an ecology, along with all of our toys, has no significant deleterious effect on the environment.

I wish I could believe their insane, self-serving fantasy.

I’m struggling with a rather humorless song this weekend, trying to keep it from sucking too awfully. Probably failing — and you’ll get to be the judge later tonight, unless I just abandon it.

I’m also finding myself contemplating what will happen when we hit the big tipping points in our destruction of the environment. Say, when all of the bees die, perhaps within the next year or so.

As a result of all of the above, I’m feeling a modicum of melancholia.

I figured I need an antidote for that, one that takes the more responsible longer environmental view.

So, how about Bill Bailey’s ‘Insect Nation‘?

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I feel better now.

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Here it is, 11PM Saturday, and I haven’t written my blog post yet. You see, I have a very good reason for not having my post up: My office is strewn about the house. The upside? There’s a gorgeous, new wood floor in my now-empty office.

Today, Jesse and His Crew of Renown installed the last half of the new floor. They would have had it done yesterday, but, as I have discovered in all the projects I’ve done in Casa Spector, if there was a funky/cheap/bizarro way of fixing/installing anything, that was the method preferred by the previous residents. Every man Jack of them.

This means every project, no matter how apparently straightforward, takes roughly three times as long as it normally would. (I realize that this is the case with most household projects, but really, it’s super-special in my house. Really. We just don’t have room here for details.)

And now I need to paint the office.

I hadn’t planned on painting the office, but there were places where the walls needed patching. When I went to look for my can of touch-up paint, it had vanished.

I found my original paint sample and took it to the office to compare the colors. The paint on the wall had faded, so even if I got a quart to match the paint sample, it would be darker than the walls.

Now I have to paint that bad boy before they deliver the new bookcases on Wednesday.

New cases that I wouldn’t’ve needed, except when we were moving the old bookcases out to put the new floor in, we discovered that most of them were too rickety to continue using. (They’re fifteen-year-old particle board with melamine coating. Hard to believe, eh?)

Somehow or another this floor thing has snowballed . . .

And it’s all the cats’ fault. I wouldn’t have needed a new floor in the office were it not for the cats.

And I’d explain why all this is the cats’ fault, but it’s 11 PM, and I’m falling asleep, and you’ll just have to trust me.

It’s the cats’ fault.