Sustainability

One evening, as a child, I failed to finish the food on my dinner plate so my parents took away my brand new Nintendo 64 and said, "waste not, want not." After asking them, "What the Christmas Story expletive does that mean?" I bravely declared a hunger strike and demanded they return my gaming console. The strike lasted about a minute as my mother quickly uncovered my birthday cake and hovered it over the trash. "Please no, for the love of Pete!", I cried. "You wouldn't throw away a perfectly good birthday cake would you?" Without skipping a beat, my mother's face turned to ice and she tilted her hand ever so slightly as she said, "Make a wish!" The candles blew out from the wind of the fall. My hunger strike ended with my head in the garbage can, the silver lining...I didn't have to share my cake with anyone that year. My wish came true.



To this day I don't know why I asked for an Earth shaped cake, but coincidentally it ties in perfectly to the theme of this weeks blog. Anyways it looked like this...before it got dropped.

What I learned that day applies more now than ever. As the world comes to an end at the end of this year it is important that we try and use up every last energy and food resource we have. For that clearly is the correct interpretation of waste not want not! Just like they did on Easter Island. That island was immortalized by the many magnificent stone heads they left us. They must have known the island was facing imminent doom so they quickly ate up all the food and enjoyed themselves for the last little bit f time they had. As we discussed with Steven Yates, we have a lot of oil left so why don't we use it for something cool? If we really concentrate I believe we could pool our last resources in 2012 and leave a truly spectacular mark that would let every future spaceship traveler who flies through our solar system know that this island earth had people with massive heads. I'm thinking big...moon head big! It's already got a rough outline, probably done by ancient Martians, so all we would need to do is go up there with some really big guns and finish the job!

Now moving on, we were going to talk about global warming during this episode but we solved it with Kyles invention of solar panels on the water...which I was wrong to say wouldn't work. If you google water solar panels you will see them. They look like a school of giant squids lost their contact lenses. Do squids have schools? Well if they do that would be nuts! The other thing that is nuts is that I watched this half hour lecture by Al Gore about global warming without falling asleep, which is our cut clip of the week.


I think he has a lot of good points here, unfortunately all I see when I look at him is my mother, dangling that chocolate cake over the trash in front of me, but unlike my non fabricated childhood story, maybe in this case a world wide carbon fuel hunger strike is just what we need in order to cool off our mother. That's a rather large transition, one that will cause years of growing pains, I'm sure. The cool part is seeing all the developing technology along the way, like hydrogen fueled cars! I am an optimist. I believe we can have our cake and eat it too, we just need to respect mother or she'll overheat and scorch us all to bits, like the candles on my cake. Make a wish!

For more professor blastoff extras go to professorblastoff.com and check out aaronburrellcomedy.com

listen to episode #37 Sustainability