Thursday, August 30, 2007, 11:39 PM
It's hard to define tell-tale signs of a civilisation on the brink of oblivion, but this certainly fits the bill.The USA is an enormous country with unimaginable resources of everything. Everything that is, apart from a wider sense of how to look after their planet, perhaps. One of the things that America has a lot of, is water - they sprinkle it with gay abandon over Californian crops, they indluge in pointless wet T-shirt competitions, with pneumatic women provocatively rubbing sponges over cars, they do films where cars speed headlong into fire hydrants and they don't just have lakes - they have Great lakes.
So it was with some concern that I bought a bottle of water in a San Francisco sandwich shop, and saw that it had been transported from Fiji over 6000 miles to San Francisco, which is actually further than the 5350 miles that I had travelled from London for my business trip. Water is a commodity, yet somehow consumers can be convinced to buy something totally banal just because it comes from an exotic location.
People who are merely thirsty get told that they are receiving a dose of something altogether more sophisticated - a healthy dose of silica, which gives an all important 'soft mouth feel'. One day, when we are deep within a severe environmental catastrophe, I am sure that there are some drinkers of Fiji Water, who will shrug, let themselves drift away from the bubbling wastescape of our planet, and cast their minds back to what really mattered to them - a soft mouth feel...
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Thursday, August 30, 2007, 11:36 PM
A business trip doesn't allow you to do much in the way of taking things in, but a little is always enough:
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Saturday, August 25, 2007, 06:39 PM
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Take a look at this, digest it and then pass it on. If the production values seem a little nauseating or the celebrity angle a little passe, then you have missed the point. To sit there guffawing at stylistics is to waste valuable time and energy that could be put into doing something nice to the environment! And that goes for you, Roger Kemp.
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Sunday, August 19, 2007, 12:25 AM
I didn't know what a TPO was before today, and now I do. A Tree Protection Order is when a council essentially forbids people from chopping down trees within its jurisdiction. Can't argue with that really, can we?And you would want to give Camden Council due congratulation for issuing a TPO on four trees in the vicinity of my property, backing onto the railway line. They're nice trees - big, green, solid things, and they prevent commuters on the 07.08 to St Pancras from seeing into my bedroom as I go about my morning preparations.
So why did Camden Council feel the need to inform me of a TPO via a registered A4 envelope stuffed with twenty sheets of unrecycled paper, printed one side only, filled with clause after meaningless clause of TPO detail, none of which matters to anyone? If I multiply that quantity of paper by the number of properties in my street that are similiarly close to these poor indifferent trees, I calculate that at least three trees somewhere in Finland or Canada perished in order to let me know that some other trees were being well looked after.
I would therefore suggest that Camden's very own tree preservation officer, Mr Roger Kemp, takes another look at his job description...
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Saturday, August 18, 2007, 10:08 PM
The designer of this cosmetics display picked a picture of a pretty girl as illustration, added a couple of mirrors, but I don't think they covered every angle. Do you?
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