Green Rambling

(this post was written by Justin on May 24, 2007, and it concerns & & & & )

Waste Equals Food: Our Future and the Making of Things. Read it.

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I know most of you are a bunch of commies that hate baseball, but I can honestly say I love it. Now this is weird for me, because I never played baseball, didn’t have any family that liked it (no father-son or older brother thing going on), and to be quite honest, I didn’t even like it when I was younger. I thought it was too slow, the players were too fat, etc.

Anyway, I casually started to follow the Red Sox about six years ago, with the arrival of Pedro Martinez. Since then, it has turned into a minor obsession. I say “minor” because I can sit down and watch the Sox play, but could not do it for most other teams. I have not put my finger on why I like it as much as I do. It could be the personal battle between pitcher and hitter. It could be the fact that out of the four “main” sports (really three and half, because hockey is slowly disappearing), baseball is the only one where you do not have to be a freak to play (basketball and football have outgrown the “regular” guy, and for hockey you have to skate). It could also be because baseball is played in the summer. Whatever the reason, I can now pretty much tell who can hit lefties, who can not play in the field (I am looking at you Wily Mo Pena), and who should pitch to what batter.

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I don’t know if everyone has seen Planet Earth but it’s a must see. The only problem I had with it is they re-used a lot of footage. That might not seem to be a big deal but a Discovery watcher like me could pick out things I’d already seen. This didn’t take away from the awesomeness of it; just something I noticed.

A reason I could not go on one of these adventures, besides not being a camera person or cool animal expert, is that I feel bad for starving animals. There is one scene (spoiler alert) where a polar bear has to swim like 60 miles trying to find some delicious seals. Well he makes it to an island and the only thing there are giant Walruses. Now, polar bears are some fierce animals but they’re no match for a one-ton walrus, but because he is starving and swam all that way, the bear gives it a shot. Needless to say he gets tusked and injured. I turned it off at this point and pretended he found some delicious seals and lived on. If I had been there there, I would have pulled out a gun and shot the walrus in the head and let the bear eat. I figure it is our fault the bear is starving, so fuck it.

This made me think, and I know there is a difference an animal and a human, but why do we send food to starving people? Wait that came out wrong. We support people who live in places where people should not live or in places that can not support the size of the population there. If we send food and let people live there, why not kill walruses for polar bears?

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Well, The Sopranos are two episodes away from the end, and it has been a pretty good season. The fact that they could keep going after the mother died is pretty amazing. James Gandolfini has really done a great job acting and the only complaint I have is his goddamn breathing. I guess the next show HBO is trotting out is Joe from Cincinnati or something like that. All I know is that it’s about surfers, an alien, and a heroin addict. Usually I would say, “What the deuce?”, but as I said before, I will give it at least four episodes to anything HBO broadcasts.

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So yeah. Read the essay I started with. And remember: it was written in ‘98. Imagine what’s been done since.