From a friend in Zimbabwe, this photo. His caption:
“Sign board as one leaves Zim and arrives into Musina, South Africa…for the Zimbabwean border jumpers, sort of (they don’t use the roads)”
The sign reads (in small print): just remember, your country still needs you… come home at election time and vote for FREE. A sign of desperation for Mr. Mugabe? I should think so.
He said, “… and this song starts:”
“We were ring-around-the-rosy children
They were circles around the sun
Never give up, never slow down
Never grow old, never ever die young”
Always good advice. From Never Die Young on James Taylor’s One Man Band DVD I’m watching now.
On the heels of Al’s An Inconvenient Truth, Leo follows up with this apparently more dramatic, NY Times Critics’ Pic: The 11th Hour.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the environment, blah, blah, blah, melting ice caps. To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn’t sunk in. That’s one reason “The 11th Hour,? an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing. It may not change your life, but it may inspire you to recycle that old slogan-button your folks pinned on their dashikis back in the day: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
…
If your head isn’t lodged in the sand, much of what’s said in the movie will be agonizing and familiar. Gasping children, disappearing animals, gushing oil, billowing smoke, dying lakes, emptying forests, warming weather — the list of ills is numbingly familiar. In the movie’s eye-catching opener, the directors riffle through a veritable catalog of timely snapshots, some obvious (a smoggy skyline), others less so (a human fetus).
The full review at The Times.
I recently bought a air ticket on Expedia.com for my wife to travel to Zimbabwe for the holidays. I’ve been buying tickets online, much like the rest of the Western world, for some time now. I marvel at the simplicity of this service and the complexity of the technology which meld into one pleasant and down-right exciting experience. (My wife and I love traveling.) Prices are competitive, itineraries are plentiful, and the buying process is a snap.
So, I bought two tickets for my wife: one for the long haul to Africa, a second on SAA for the short haul flight once on the continent. Since the second ticket is on the South African airline, Expedia could understandably not issue e-tickets. But why did I have to pay such a huge shipping fee to have the tickets delivered via UPS? I could’ve ordered an iron horse from Amazon and paid less in shipping. The worst part about it was that Expedia gave me no choice, in contrast to the way the rest of their site functions. The choices were:
1) pay huge fee for shipping a paper ticket for delivery in 5-10 days, or
2) pay an even huger fee for shipping a paper ticket for delivery in 3 days.
I’m not looking for freebies, but after dropping a few thousand bucks on an across-the-world itinerary, you’d think Expedia would throw in the shipping. I know they’re not turning a profit on the shipping fees, especially since the tickets didn’t come from Johannesburg. Maybe they could take a page from LL Bean’s book: the Freeport-based company has been offering free shipping for months.
I was well aware of the fact that here in the U.S. we have some of the lowest fuel prices of anywhere in the world (despite the incessant whining of people still driving Hummers and Suburbans), but I didn’t know these particular western countries were ahead of us.
What does it matter, though? Some jerks just tapped into a newly-discovered “ultra-deep” 8 billion barrels of light crude off Brazil’s coast. Let the guzzling continue.
