Regruntled.com

I have a flyer from the grocery store offering “Earth Day Specials” and “Earth Day Savings”. I don’t recall seeing this before. Home Depot says “Go Green Think Orange & Save”. Maybe since Easter fell in March this year, Earth Day is the only marketing gimmick left for April.

All of which got me curious about green consumerism in general. At one end of the spectrum is the view that the quality of consumption matters, and green consumption is better than non-green consumption. At the other end is the view that it is the quantity of consumption that matters, and there is no way to consume our way out of our environmental problems. There is even an intermediate view that green consumption is a sort of “gateway drug” on the way to less consumption.

See:

• Greed in the Name of Green
• The Lazy Environmentalist

Here is a blog about little sculptures made out of ordinary items like paper clips.

If Jesus did sudoku, he would have done them in Aramaic.

The koleas, or Pacific golden plovers, are getting ready to migrate. They have their new black feathers, and they’re bulking up for the long flight to Alaska.

Yo quiero Pachelbel!

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them… And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The first problem with this sound bite is that Obama is psychologizing the voters in Pennsylvania. He’s saying that he understands their motivations better than they do themselves. Which may well be true, but it’s a hell of a thing to say out loud.

But let’s look deeper. What does the sound bite say about Obama? It says that Obama thinks that providing jobs is a legitimate function of government. Not so surprising, coming from a liberal Democrat. Obama thinks that cultural or religious or values issues are somehow less authentic, that they are secondary or substitute issues that people wouldn’t even bother with if they weren’t so bitter about the government not giving them jobs.

I don’t know about this. I suspect that there are a lot of people in Middle America with secure jobs that get just as worked up about values issues as unemployed people do. In any event, the voters decide which issues are important, not the candidates. The voters will decide whether arrogant psychologizing is worse than telling tall tales about dodging sniper fire.

Code monkey is a derogatory or self-deprecating term for programmer, I suppose by analogy to grease monkey for mechanic. The popular song is by Jonathan Coulton, and inspired a lot of videos. The end result is like a Dilbert comic, except that it’s aimed at a different demographic.

See also:

• MP3 and lyrics
• More video versions

This is apparently a spoof of the Algorithm March, from the Japanese children’s TV show Pythagora Switch. Some things are so weird it’s hard to tell whether the spoof is funnier than the original.

• Algorithm march videos
• Incredible machines from Pythagora Switch