Plate of Shrimp

Maybe you've seen the movie Repo Man, starring a very young pre-Young Guns Emilio Estevez. There's a part in the movie when Miller, the clean-up guy, and Otto (aka Emilio) are waxing philosophy. Miller says:

lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

So, as I sat there ruminating on my plate of shrimp, I thought of some seemingly unconnected current events and wove myself a web of intrigue.

1. The EPA and Google are teaming up to allow online mappers to locate and identify major toxic waste locations. It's basically a matter of Google embedding tools which facilitate the presentation of information provided by the EPA to enable users to find toxic waste sites.

2. TXU, an electric-power company based in Dallas, has announced plans to build eleven new coal plants in Texas by 2011. In case you didn't know, Texas already dumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other state in the nation. TXU's new fleet of coal plants would more than double the company's current pollution, spewing 78 million tons of planet-heating pollution each year -- the equivalent of 11 million SUVs. The governor said that conservationists wanted to have people riding in horses and buggies. Do they still make people like that?

3. PCI-E 2.0 is launching. As a refresher, PCI Express -- a modernized sequel to the original PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) that spread to essentially every server and PC since it was introduced in the 1990s -- can transfer 2.5 gigabits per second on each wire, pin or other electrical connection called "lanes" between a computer and a plug-in device. PCI Express 2.0 doubles that rate to 5Gbps, and as with the existing PCIe, multiple lanes can be ganged together.

4. Barack Obama has announced that he's forming a Presidential Exploratory committee, which means that he's most likely going to run for President. I hope for once the Democratic party can consolidate their focus around one candidate so they can effectively retake an administration that has become obsessed with continuing to oil the machinery of capitalism with the blood of the less fortunate, while ignoring the larger environmental issues that encroach on our global community and the gaps which Americans are seeing widen between the haves and have nots. I'm hoping that his external "differences" and "lack of experience" will nurture a more tolerant and thoughtful approach to government, socio-economic roadblocks, and community. We've had enough of the old school hawkish guard who want to bring back an iteration of Ruskies and the Cold War: read Iraw Conflict.

5. Lastly, workers at O'Hare International Airport told the Federal Aviation Administration that they witnessed an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. In brief, "....a flying saucerlike object hovered low...for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon." Gsradio.net has an mp3 interview of one of the employees. Let me tell you, folks, the intro to the story is wacked, but hey...I just hope it wasn't Tom Cruise flying his OT-8 jet car.

So what does this all mean? We're going to be able to more expediently use technology to locate toxic waste sites, which should be increasing in the next 4 years, unless Mr. Obama can do anything about it unless aliens come down before then, in which case they may be shopping for pets.