Summertime Sign Off

Back again after Labor Day. Who wants to work on Labor Day? Or blog either?

I planned to cook some Jimmy Dean Pure Pork Sausage today, which comes in a tube. The tube has been stored in our refrigerator for a while now, shunted back to the back as things sometimes are in refrigerators. I went looking for it, and discovered that the tube had ballooned to about twice its size. What's going on inside that tube? I don't want to know. Luckily, it hadn't exploded, or even leaked. Now I have to remember to take the kitchen garbage out before it decides to explode in the trash can.

The 10th anniversary of the death of Diana Spencer has been an echo of the maudlin twaddle that filled the airwaves at that time, and a few days ago I saw an ad for a made-for-TV movie with a title that declares how ridiculous it must be: The Murder of Princess Diana. A Reuters review put it this way: "The project exploits every suspicion ever held by every conspiracy nut, and invents new facts, events and dialogue to bolster rumors that will not die as long as vultures eagerly pick at whatever scraps remain on the carcass."

Why, of course it was murder. Diana was too special to have died in something as ordinary as a traffic accident. Only ordinary people die in ordinary ways.

As long as I'm editorializing, I might as well mention the nascent attack on people trying to live interesting lives, in the form of complaining about the carbon emissions from modes of transport -- transport of people, such as cars and airplanes, and transport of goods, such as by ship and truck. I heard on the radio not long ago about one wanker who said he felt "guilty" about taking an airplane somewhere, and the "local sourcing" of food is all the rage in some circles. How far is it from this kind of carping to policy proposals to restrict the free movement of people and goods, freedoms that would be sacrificed on the altar of carbon control?

It may never come to that, since Americans are known to insist on driving what they want to drive and eating what they want to eat. That, and they realize -- unconsciously or not -- that such restrictions would be on their freedom of movement and consumption, not the elites that would be for such drastic measures. How many people, when it really came down to it, would give up coffee? Tea? Chocolate? A thousand other imports? Road trips? Flights to faraway places? The travel infrastructure that allows even ordinary people to see great parts the world, if they put their minds to it?

And what of the carbon emissions? That's a technical problem, to be solved by technical means.