Explaining the Birds

I know what you're thinking. We haven't seen Blicky Kitty for a long, long time. The reasons for that are subtle and varied:
a) My new career in door-to-door interpretive dance has suddenly and inexplicably taken off, leaving little time for Blicky reportage,
b) Blicky took off in his Hummer, went deep undercover for many, many months, and I had no idea of his whereabouts,
c) and the fact that his disappearance coincided with me getting a track pad instead of a mouse was pure coincidence.

The real reason for his disappearance is that Blicky is starting to rethink his former ways and is starting consider to the many problems facing the environment on a global scale. He used to cough up furballs every time I mentioned my concern about dwindling frog and honey bee populations. I tried explaining to him that bees are vital to food production and that some 52 of the world's 112 leading crops -- from apples and soybeans to cocoa and almonds -- rely on pollination. There are still many questions, but researchers have identified some probable causes of colony collapse disorder (CCD), including blood-feeding parasites, bee viruses, fungi, pesticide exposure and decreased plant diversity causing poor nutrition for honeybees. He seemed to get it, but I think his primary concern was how embarrassing it would be for future generations of parents if they had to sit down and only be able to "explain the birds" to their clowder of kittens. He felt it would lead to some strange mating behavior if young people everywhere thought they were literally supposed to act like birds rather than grasp it as a metaphor for the fecundity of nature.

Your mandatory fun here:



Well I guess I just can't discuss this with Blicky. Yes these problems that face us are depressing and scary. They seem insurmountable at times, but for me doing things like buying organic food (or growing it), keeping woods instead of a lawn, writing to my congressional delegation and finding out the little ways I can help makes me feel better.

WINTERING
Sylvia Plath 1932-1963

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenants rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters ....
Sir So-and-So's gin.

This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects ....
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees...the bees
so slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

To make up the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumpsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women ....
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year ?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses ?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

Step Away From the Crazy Pinko Green Dude

I came across a great article in the NY Times the other day about people who are trying to do go beyond conserving and recycling to radically reduce their carbon footprints. It describes the lifestyle of some people who are trying to shrink their family's energy use to 10 percent of the national average by growing most of their own food, spending only $1000 a year on consumer goods, air-drying their clothes and huddling together for warmth. Many people who have made radical changes to their lifestyles are often called "energy anorexics," "dark green" or put more simply, "fruitcakes". Blicky likes to call them "no good commie pinkos".

Dave Chameides, shown above, is collecting all of the waste he generates in a year in his basement and recording it in a blog. I also found a wonderful blog in Britain where a woman chronicles her attempts to create as little waste as possible in one week.

While people who are beginning to espouse a very different kind of lifestyle are derided as mildly pathological (you don't want to make any sudden movements around a dark green environmentalist), I think it's just the logical extension of recycling. I mean recycling is a buttload of work. You have to rinse the stuff so the squirrels and mice don't throw raucous parties your storage area. Then if you live in the boonies with no trash removal, you squish all of it into your (very fuel efficient Corolla) once a month because it takes that long to clean up all the property damage your toddler has inflicted while you got the last load in. You then hope that it's the stinky plastic jugs and not the jagged cans that are jammed in around said toddler's car seat on the way there. You then have to wonder if the doddering coot with the creepy toothless smile is checking out your bum while you lean in to grab the cardboard.

It's made my life a bit simpler in recent months to see where I can eliminate bringing stuff into the house. Here are a few things that I find have actually made life easier:

• I try to make everything I can. Yogurt is a snap to make in a thermos and it saves a lot of plastic. Ditto on snacks for lunchboxes. I do a lot of homemade gingersnaps and popcorn.
  
• Alright, so the homemade pasta machine I got on Craig's list for 10 bucks is still gathering dust but just think how many cardboard boxes that I will save when it works like it did in my fantasy.
• We get our milk delivered in glass bottles.
• I try, whenever possible, to buy local eggs and drop off the old cartons there.
• Until I no longer suck at gardening, I try to buy from farm stands and farmers markets because it's easier to throw things into a canvas bag.

Blicky is even getting in on the act. He has decided to forgo some extra items that he usually buys.

• His Halloween costume will be made by hand this year instead of insisting on a hand beaded one made in Thailand.
• He is giving up 2 of his 20 daily venti chai lattes,
• He is going to use acorns instead of plastic cutlery to pelt at hippie pinko's
• He's will only get one $389 cat bed for his guest room, rather than the matching pair
• He's resigned to turning the Hummer off now when it's in the driveway instead of hooking it up directly to the oil derrick in our backyard, although he'll miss the outdoor heating over the winter.

Proof that going green will make you hotter, younger and richer.

We in the green community (Kermit, Yoda and I) tend to think of Americans as lagging behind more enlightened nations when it comes to environmental issues. Our list of debacles and snafus goes on and on: the failure to sign the Kyoto treaty, air quality legislation leading to mbta contamination, electing he-who-shall-not-be-named to the oval office... But perhaps we're going about it the wrong way, because it's a well-known fact that we'll go for anything that makes us hotter, younger or richer.

This Italian, Buddhist, investment banker guy I used to date had the habit of spouting bogus statistics to back up random discussions we'd be having. I started to catch on when he said things like 96% of all people think going clubbing is way more fun than movies in NYC. I recently realized you could apply the same kind of bogus marketing techniques to going green so I determined to perform a little experiment on Blicky. I told him that 95% of former-models-turned-green-activists would prefer to adopt an environmentally conscious cat.

It did the trick! In just one week Blicky has stopped polishing his Hummer with whale fat and he's been using a fishing pole instead of just throwing DDT into the river. We've also been receiving returned mail that Blicky's been sending Amber Valetta, spokesperson for Oceana, a foundation set up to protect the world's oceans. So, as a result of this experiment we can conclude that convincing people that environmentalism makes them hotter, richer and thinner is 98% percent effective.

The above picture was taken from a women's fitness magazine which kindly asked Blicky to take part.

Was is for an article about:

a. How to get your dream abs and make your friends like you more with these ten easy moves?

b. How three friends went from being old and morbidly obese, to being hot, young and rich fitness instructors?

or

c. One of 31 tips on how to green your routine, recommending that you find planet-loving pals or get tips on green networking sites like gengreen? 

Seeing environmental issues flashing on the pages of pop media, with cutesie word play and images of the uber-hot is hard to get used to, but maybe that's the way it has to work in our culture. I have to admit, the recommendations for greener living actually seemed quite well-conceived. If everyone made just small changes maybe it would have a huge impact in a country our size. It would definitely be 75% effective in making our future seem less bleak.

Beware the Hypermiling Feline...

Well, I was just so appalled after reading that Melanie at Bean Sprouts doesn't love her dog enough to give him bottled water that I ran out and bought Blicky a Hummer. We chose the H3 Alpha. Now I was surprised to find that they were even still available. Apparently the liberal media is still convincing people to consume less gas.

So I was finally able to find one and it only cost 40,000 USD. But you get so much! It is 73 inches tall and 6000 pounds. You can haul 1500 pounds of groceries in it and when you peel out of the parking lot, you can go from 0 to 60 mph in 8 seconds. I think it's the perfect vehicle for your pet -- especially if he has a defense contract and needs to haul around some heavy and dangerous raw materials. 

It is such an environmentally friendly car too. According to their Web site it's 85% recyclable. That means if gas goes too high or polar bears take up residence in your garage, you can just drive it to the recycling side of your local dump. The only little snag is that gas is a bit on the pricey side: 13 mpg. But that's OK. We've come up with a new solution: hypermiling. Blicky averages an impressive 20 miles per gallon now, but he often comes home with small animals, various assortments of shrubbery and slower-moving humans stuck in the front grill of the H3 and his kittens all have whiplash and contusions from his whipping around corners.

We prefer a more measured approach:

Were starting to use a bike when possible (tough with car seats).

We try to plan driving carefully and get errands done all on the same day.

We've seen a small increase in our mileage by coasting in neutral at times, accelerating slowly and not braking too often.

We buy local produce either at farm stands and farmers markets or (as we're attempting this year) growing our own.

We're even thinking or buying a more fuel efficient car for our pet next time.

Have any other tips (serious or otherwise) for saving gas? Feel free to email BlickyKitty@comcast.net or leave a comment.