In So Many Words

When I was little, I had the habit of hoarding candy. Whenever my brother and I got candy on Halloween, Easter, or Christmas, Phil would tear into his immediately, eating nonstop until it was gone and he was ill. I, on the other hand, would just add my candy to what was left of my stash from the year before. Clearly, both of us had problems.

Well, to my embarrassment, it appears I haven't quite kicked the hoarding habit. I recently discovered a candy bar I'd been given about nine months ago, languishing in one of my cabinets at work. I was sad at first because I figured it wouldn't be good anymore. I ate it anyway (of course) ... and, to my wonder and amazement, heaven opened and pure bliss descended on my tongue.

Caffe Acapella's silky smooth and utterly delectable gourmet coffee bars are awesome. Transcendent. Sublime. Order them online or find a store near you, but if you haven't given the world's first and only coffee bars a try, you must. I'm totally hooked. When it comes to these bars, my candy-hoarding days are definitely over.

Heads up! Stop what you're doing, log in to Gmail, click on "Settings", then scroll down (under the General settings tab) until you see "Browser connection". Select "Always use https". Breathe a sigh of relief. Why?

Webmonkey explains it best: "Because without it, anyone can easily hack someone’s account and in two weeks it is going to get even easier. Mike Perry, a reverse engineer from San Francisco, announced his intention to release his Gmail Account Hacking Tool to the public."

Nice. Thanks, Mr. Perry.

To be fair, Mr. Perry claims he's releasing the tool to attack Google for failing to emphasize the importance of SSL encryption. Kind of mean-spirited, but point taken. So, an even bigger sarcastic thank you to Google for making internet security optional. My unequivocal recommendation is to opt in.

During the summer of 2004, I spent a month in Okinawa, Japan helping to teach English in local schools and communities. While there, I fell in love with sushi, fresh mango, dragon fruit, Aquarius, snorkeling ... and Engrish.

Engrish is misused English. It usually happens when Japanese designers and advertisers try to use English on their products to "look cool" and end up writing really funny (and often shockingly inappropriate) things on T-shirts, store fronts, and packaging. The best part is that Japanese consumers often buy and use such products without ever realizing that anything's amiss. For example, the pastor of a small church on Ie Jima often wore a T-shirt covered in nonsensical English phrases laced with profanity. (No one had the heart to tell him what it said — he'd received the shirt as a Father's Day present and it was one of his favorites.) I bought a couple shirts myself. One had the words "Dearest Monkey" and a picture of a smiling monkey with a speech bubble that said "A banana isn't given to it!" Too awesome not to have.

Here in the U.S., Engrish.com has been my go-to spot for butchered English hilarity. Just to give you a taste...


Classic. To see more and laugh harder, click here. Enjoy! Happy Monday.

In the spirit of making sense, it's time we started thinking long-term about energy and the environment. Even if you discount the arguments of various global warming/climate change doomsday prophets, you're going to have a hard time sounding intelligent arguing that wastefulness and air pollution are good things.

But even if the environment were in pristine condition (it's not), we'd still be headed for trouble. Why? Because nearly 80% of U.S. electricity comes from non-renewable resources and nearly 100% of U.S. transportation systems are dependent on non-renewable resources. "Non-renewable" means "incapable of being replaced by natural ecological cycles or sound management practices." Let me break it down: sooner or later these resources will run out completely. Thanks to population growth and the rise of the developing world, that'll probably happen sooner rather than later. So, to prepare for the future, we need to start doing things differently today.

Here's what we do:

Force Big Oil to Develop Its Land. The fact is, it'll be quite a long time (if ever) before we can completely eradicate oil use in the U.S., so if we're truly going to be energy independent, we'll eventually need to drill for more oil on our own turf. Here's where we start drilling: on the land Big Oil companies already lease from the federal government. Right now they have about 68 million acres of oil-rich land stockpiled, and they've left it unexplored and undeveloped. So ... what were you saying about supply and demand? C'mon, Big Oil, you're not fooling anybody. Be honest, remember?

Permit Offshore Drilling. But do so only after Big Oil starts producing on the land it already leases. If executed responsibly, it's not the worst idea ever. And if we absolutely need more oil, drilling for it off our own coasts is better than importing it from foreign war zones and hostile nations. Even then, I have a few caveats: even as a short-term solution, offshore drilling is far from ideal. Yes, it helps move us (just a tiny, tiny step) toward energy independence, but it does nothing to address environmental concerns and long-term sustainability. Even worse, it only serves to perpetuate our dependence on oil. It also runs the unnecessary risk of damaging the tourism industry and local economies for some of our shoreline destinations. That said, if local and state governments support drilling in certain regions, the Federal government should let them — and charge Big Oil big money for the lease.

Save the ANWR Coastal Plain ... For Now. Despite what you hear, there aren't any good environmental reasons not to drill in ANWR. This oil-rich region is little more than a barren wasteland and developing 2000 acres out of over 500,000 square miles wouldn't come close to disrupting the ecosystem or damaging its natural beauty. The piping infrastructure is already in place from the nearby Prudhoe Bay oil field, so development in this area would be (relatively) inexpensive. However, as I mentioned above, drilling in ANWR now will only serve to perpetuate our dependence on oil. Catering to our dependence on oil today, while it might bring a temporary spike in supply and short-term relief from skyrocketing prices, could fatally delay overdue innovation and speed the inevitable day when the earth runs dry ... leaving us with a nonfunctioning transit system and the surface temperature of Venus. As bad as price increases hurt now, it's better to use the cost of oil as a disincentive for overuse and a catalyst for innovative and radical change. Now is the time to transition to renewable energy and, perhaps more importantly, a sustainable American lifestyle. If innovations come slowly or the transition to renewable energy doesn't go as smoothly as we hope, it'll be better in the long run if we've saved our precious ANWR oil reserve for when we truly need it. Bonus: if it turns out we don't need it, we can export it at a premium to the other oil-starved countries.

Preserve the National Oil Reserve. Our reserve is for emergency use only. Needless to say, it astonished me when Barack Obama suggested handling the energy crisis by tapping into our national reserve. Dear fellow Americans (and Senator Obama), this is reality talking: $4 for a gallon of gas isn't the end of the world (to put things in perspective, gas costs about double that in Germany). Certainly, rising gas costs are putting a squeeze on some people. But high oil use is putting a squeeze on the entire country, the environment, and the world's resources. There are other, better, but sure-to-be-politically-unpopular solutions to high prices at the pump (keep reading). Catering to our dependence on oil and artificially lowering prices by depleting our national reserve is short-sighted and foolish. See above.

Phase Out Fossil Fuel Power Plants. Do away with fossil fuel subsidies and use the money to subsidize sustainable energy development and production instead. Currently, fossil fuel-fired plants account for nearly 80% of U.S. electricity production, burn non-renewable resources, and aren't doing the environment any favors. Still, even if the need for coal and petroleum is eliminated completely, we should continue to harvest and store these natural resources for a rainy day (if anything, our national reserves should be expanding). Also, as we phase out many of these plants, we should investigate ways to repurpose and/or recycle the existing infrastructure. And, of course, we need to be careful to replace the jobs lost when scaling back these energy sectors.

Make Fossil Fuel Use Unattractive. In direct contrast to McCain's ill-advised suggestion that we suspend the gas tax and Obama's equally short-sighted and potentially more damaging plans to provide relief at the pump, we phase in a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The plan outlined by the Carbon Tax Center is brilliant.

Yes, this is one of those sure-to-be-politically-unpopular solutions I spoke of earlier. But hear me out: taxation always acts as a disincentive. Therefore, the Federal government can use taxes to indirectly influence citizens' behavior — most people will alter their lifestyle to avoid higher taxes. Since we're trying to decrease our national dependence on oil and fossil fuels, it makes sense to create or increase taxes on these items to discourage consumers from overusing them.

Also note that I'm suggesting a revenue-neutral carbon tax. That means the government wouldn't be allowed to take any more money from the American people than it already does by heaping a carbon tax on top of everything else. Rather, they'd have to scale back other taxes to offset the tax on carbon (this is called tax-shifting) or implement some sort of rebate/dividend program. Personally, I'm a huge fan of scaling back the Federal income tax or significantly shifting the tax brackets. This would lessen existing disincentives for earning more and let Americans keep more of their paychecks, a desirable scenario with the possible pleasant side-effect of stimulating the economy.

Lastly, bear in mind that this tax would be phased in. That is, it would start off on the lower end of the scale, and then increase some percentage annually to give individuals and businesses the opportunity to adjust. Commitment to keep raising the tax is important to ensure that long-term, energy-critical decisions are made with the increasing cost of a large carbon footprint in mind. With the appropriate disincentives, it shouldn't be long before Americans change their personal habits and adopt emerging carbon-neutral innovations.

Either way, the oil-guzzling lifestyles we Americans have grown so accustomed to needs to change. The sooner we start, the easier it'll be in the long run. In the end, it's all about foresight.

Additional Reading:
Part 1 — Making Sense
Part 3 — Creating a Sustainable Future

Our dear friends, Josh and Abbie Cobb, flew in from Los Angeles to spend several days with us this past weekend. On Saturday we'd planned to drive to Trenton, NJ and take the train into Penn Station. Instead, I drove in the wrong direction and ended up in Allentown, PA before I realized anything was amiss. Naturally, we gave up on Trenton and drove to Hoboken, NJ and took the Path into the city instead. Then, on the way home, I mixed up 276 and 295 and took a short detour through south Jersey on my way back to West Chester. Not the most direct route in the world, but I felt some consolation at the opportunity to buy relatively inexpensive gas — it helped compensate for all the extra driving I did. Anyway, these directional errors were entirely my fault (honestly, I tend to be directionally dyslexic — I even confuse my right and left hands). In my defense, however, I did copy my directions from Google Maps, and Google Maps, as we know, can be a little...

Tell you what — why don't you just read this. Props to Heather for sending it to me. Props to David for introducing Heather to xkcd webcomics in the first place. Enjoy.

I'm growing tired of the pandering political responses to our economic and environmental energy crisis — vague promises, illogical challenges, and imbecilic proposals that cater to popular (uninformed/misinformed) opinion, big corporations, and big-shot environmentalists. In what's shaping up to be a fairly tight presidential race between Senator Change and Senator Straight-talk, I was hoping for more imaginative (or at least sensible) policy ideas. In the absence of such, I've drafted a rough plan, offered in three parts.

Part 1 — Making Sense
Set Broad, Meaningful, and Inspiring Goals. We'll never hit the target if there isn't one. And it won't matter if we hit it if it isn't any good. Let's try something like: "Achieve complete energy independence & sustainability within the next 20 years." Crazy? Maybe. I'd call it visionary. Let's not be underachievers, here. In pursuing such goals, it's important to keep other factors in mind — funding, energy costs (for production and consumption), the national economy, local economies, trade, foreign policy, global responsibility and world leadership, etc. But it's time to move away from "reduce greenhouse gases to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050" jargon. Those type of goals are painfully uninspired and completely meaningless to ... just about everybody. Kyoto Protocol, anybody?

Start Defining Our Terms. Efficient, sustainable, carbon-neutral, zero-emissions, environmentally friendly, renewable, eco-centric, green — everyone is making claims these days, and almost none of these claims are regulated. Fuel efficiency and energy efficiency aren't necessarily the same thing. Just because something gets better gas mileage doesn't make it better for the environment. And just because it's better for the environment doesn't mean it's better for the country, the economy, or the world. Are we talking about relief at the pump or relief for the planet? Let's not confuse the issues.

Be Honest. Unless it really is significantly better for the environment, don't call it "green" if that's not its color. Admit to some inconvenient truths, like the fact that shaping wise environmental policy for our future will require compromise and sacrifice. The economic situation may get worse before it gets better. Admit that Cap & Trade is a bad idea and "carbon offsets" are little more than useless gestures. Admit that manufacturing fuel-efficient hybrid and electric cars isn't always as environmentally-friendly as people assume. Just be honest. People are confused enough as it is.

Additional Reading:
Part 2 — Treating Fossil Fuels with Foresight
Part 3 — Creating a Sustainable Future

Last Thursday night, Heather and I flew out to visit her granddaddy and extended family in White House, TN for a long weekend. After shooting turtles and catching a huge catfish in her granddaddy's little pond, Heather tells me I'm officially part of the family. Finally. (I thought marrying her had sealed the deal.)

Heather's cousins were our gracious hosts for the weekend and, to everyone's delight, they had a glorious pool. So we swam, ate biscuits and gravy and all manner of Southern goodness, listened to Granddaddy tell stories, spent hours out by the pond, shot .22s, fished, and drank Coke from glass bottles. (Jamin picked up some PBR to complete the Tennessee experience but I couldn't stand more than a sip of the stuff.) We also played Guitar Hero III for Wii. Well, David, Jamin, and Heather's cousins' daughter, Sarah, played ... I pretty much just got booed off the stage for trying. Meh. Also, my cousin, Kylen, drove in from Nashville to eat dinner with us one night. Totally random, but good times all around. If you'd like to see some pictures from the weekend, check out my slideshow on Picasa.