A Tale of a Fateful Trip…

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QUICK.

If you were to be stranded on a desert island what ten things would you want to have with you? (Assuming a water supply and some kind of food source.)

1. ipod with everything imaginable on it including the musical equivalent of the cyanide capsule, My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas, in case I couldn’t take it anymore.
2. industrial sized drum of Dr. Bronner’s soap
3. I’m thinking I’m not going to get a way with counting a subscription to People Magazine as one thing, so…maybe the Norton Anthology of British Literature, the one with the tissue thin pages – multi-purpose, you know.
4. a big ass knife
5. George Clooney. What? Why not?
6. I guess saying Diet Pepsi would be really short-sighted and silly, but honest to god, it’s what I’m thinking of right now.
7. shoes – not Jimmy Choos, but practical, wear around the coral reef shoes.
8. fire, and lots of it
9. sunscreen, especially now that I’ve got The Cancer
10. something warm and weatherproof to wear, preferably in pink, bright pink. You never know when the paparazzi might turn up. Do they make Gortex, fur lined Snuggies?

Um, Jane?

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This is a deserted island. Clooney would make it decidedly undeserted. Desserted, maybe.

Anyway, my list:

1. A laminated picture of my family
2. Laminated dirty picture of my wife
3. iPod loaded with every Lost and Gilligan’s Island episode
4. Bag of weed with the seeds in it
5. Pack of Bic lighters
6. Voltmeter
7. Tattooing equipment
8. Set of Ginsu knives
9. Wilson brand volleyball
10. Tuxedo

P.S. Jane: cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater.

Jane says…

Here’s what Sarah Palin said about who is responsible for the oil spill in the gulf:

“With [environmentalists'] nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you’re doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You’re not preventing environmental hazards; you’re outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous.

Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country’s energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It’s catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.”

Sarah Palin is a clown. A stupid clown. Not even a fun, non-threatening, balloon animal making clown, but a scary, dumb, John Wayne Gacy clown.

Because environmentalists argue against drilling in environmentally fragile and valuable ecosystems like the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, oil companies are FORCED to engage in deep water drilling and are FORCED, at gunpoint, I believe, by tree hugging vegan environmentalists weilding Kalashnikovs (commies, you know) to install faulty equipment and violate safety standards and claim massive profits. Those nutty, lying, freedom-hatin’ environmentalists are responsible for BP’s 760 safety violations citations. Apparently, the environmentalists were asleep at the switch or else their resources were spread to thin to attack all the oil companies at once, because Exxon has had 1 safety violation citation in the same time period.

Listen up, clownlady. Less yammering on about the poor oppressed oil companies suffering at the hands of greedy environmentalists, more talk about renewable, non-polluting sources of energy. You can’t be a leader, in whatever bizarro incarnation you are hoping to become, if you can’t offer solutions.

…but Dan thinks…

Jane and I aren’t always on opposite sides of an issue. True story.

Take today, for example. I’m pretty sure if you were to ask an environmentalist (a person for whom the term “nutbag” also comes to mind for me), they’d tell you they want cars to run on rainbows and sunshine.

Not oil from the sand.

Not a well on the land.

Not oil obtained using a bore.

Even when it came from way off shore.

I read the Sarah Palin quote indirectly blaming environmentalists for the BP rig explosion and subsequent unabated oil leak, and I’m reminded of a fight I broke up between my kids yesterday. You see, there was a spider on my son’s arm. So he hit my daughter.

Makes perfect sense, right?

I don’t hang out in the Self Improvement section at the local Barnes & Noble, but I’ve dabbled in Tony Robbins. I think Sarah should meet Tony. First, because he could hold her and squeeze her and pet her and love her like a little Daffy Duck (Tony’s ENORMOUS). But second, he could tell her that everyone’s responsible for their own actions/reactions. That you can’t blame someone else for the way you behave. Your behavior, a 3 year old punching his older sister or an oil company operating in a dangerous manner and not having plans prepared for swift intervention should something go wrong, is on you. Your fault. Nobody else’s. That’s the education my son got, and it’s the education I’d give BP and Sarah Palin. Childish for either to think otherwise. But my son’s three, so I cut him some slack. Palin I would totally spank for what she said. And not in the good way. (Ok, maybe in the good way.)

And here’s the other thing. There’s a finite quantity of oil in the ground. Even if you put everything else aside – the oil leak, combustion engines causing harm to Earth’s atmosphere, the pollution of ground water, etc? It’s still a finite resource. One day there won’t be anymore of it. And we need that oil to make plastic. You know, the mouse to your right? The frame of the monitor you’re reading this on? The thing you use when uh, your husband’s not around? Plastic, plastic, plastic.

We can fuel our daily travels on something other than petroleum, but I’ll be damned if we don’t need plastic as much as a diabetic needs syringes full of insulin (which are also made from plastic!).

Sarah. Sweetie. I’ll never be a member of your double entendre party, but I like to consider myself a conservative on many issues. You make it embarrassing for me to admit that in public.

You’re trying to assign liberal blame to everything, everywhere, and it makes you look either nutbag crazy, party blind or just plain old stupid.

Podcast

The use of ink to adorn the human body has been practiced for thousands of years. Tattoos can serve as declarations of love, as a rite of passage or inclusion into a higher status in a tribe or even a gang, as a form of punishment or as simple adornment.

In today’s podcast, Dan and Jane tackle one form of tattoo, disaffectionately called the tramp stamp.  A little fluffery for your Wednesday.

Audio gadget not working? You can download the file here. Just click!