DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The most famous image from the island of Naxos, in the Greek Islands, depicts an empty marble gate backlit by the setting sun. Every postcard rack in town — there are a lot of them — contains multiple versions of the image.

Naturally this inspires every tourist on the island to line up at the gate at sunset to try to capture the image themselves. OK, I admit it, I went there too. Call me a lemming.

The funny thing is, it’s just not that great a picture. The gate is invariably lost to shadow, and the sun is reduced to an orange dot in the distance. But seeing the crowd made the trip worthwhile — jockeying for position, snapping away madly. I didn’t see any pictures like this in the postcard rack.

Any idea how much energy it takes to pump water from the bottom of a 150-foot deep hole in the ground? Yeah, me neither, but it’s probably a lot. We could see the impact on our electric bill when we began irrigating last Spring.

Now that we’re on the time-of-use plan, it’s important to conserve power between noon and 6pm on weekdays. I’m not going to be sitting around those afternoons working an abacus by candlelight, I can assure you — I’ll be bathed in the radiation of two LCDs, a G4, a powerbook, my office stereo, etc. But there’s no point running the well pump then, given that there’s a 1200-gallon storage tank, full, just uphill of the house. The day we use 1200 gallons of water between noon and 6pm is the day the UPS driver accidentally crashes his truck into the storage tank.

So I called our water-treatment-system maintenance guy to inquire about putting a timer on the well pump. I explained the situation briefly: the pump can run 18 hours a day if it needs to, but we want to cut the power between noon and 6pm on weekdays.

“Oh, you need a PumpMan,” suggested the treatment guy.

“OK,” I replied. “There’s already a PumpSaver on there, actually two of them. Would the PumpMan replace them?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to call him. Try Charlie over at Jaeger.”

“Err, what?”

“You’ll have to call a PumpMan.”

“OH,” I exclaimed, “I need to call a pump man.” At which point the water-treatment guy was probably thinking, what is this idiot smoking? I thought he had been suggesting a specific model of pump timing device, e.g. the “PumpMan 2000, single-phase brushless rotary submersible motor timer with digital readout!” But in fact he was referring my call to somebody else. He doesn’t do pumps.

I’ve been accumulating “tech trash” for years: floppy disks, CD-ROMs, inkjet cartridges, etc. As I tossed my discards into a box in the garage, I had a vague plan of someday finding a way to recycle them. Today I found the way: a company called GreenDisk, whose reassuring motto is “Save the Planet [and some money]”.

GreenDisk’s “Personal Recycling” program provides a way for people to put all that old media and associated trash to good use — as new media (and associated packaging/trash). GreenDisk resells unused floppies (collected from software manufacturers’ unsold stock), and manufactures jewel boxes from post-consumer plastic waste. This is a great solution.

My first shipment to GreenDisk contained:

• 300 floppy disks
• 100 CD-ROMs
• 4 SyQuest cartridges (remember those?!)
• 30 cassette tapes (demo tapes from my first band in San Francisco) (Arista never did call back, damnit)
• a half-dozen inkjet cartridges
• about 40 of those anti-static Mylar electronics bags that, I swear, will outlast the cockroaches

The only tech trash I have that didn’t go into this box: three AOL CDs, which will be sent to NoMoreAOLcds.com, because dumping one million rejected CD-ROMs on AOL’s front door will be really funny.

GreenDisk charges a small processing fee. I was happy to pay it. This 21 lb box of magnetic-coated junk cost me $5 to be reused and recycled. Shipping (USPS Media Mail! I had to laugh) cost another $8 or so.

Why pay to ship all this to a recycler? Because if I were to throw this stuff in the trash, it would still exist, leaching chemicals into the county landfill, long after I’m gone. That is not the sort of legacy I want to leave.

By the way, if you live in the area, feel free to bring me your old media (videotapes, cassettes, floppies, CDs, DVDs, cases and jewel boxes) and printer cartridges. I’ll box ‘em up and recycle them.

The “Center for American Progress” has published a document called State of the Union Response to point out over 20 misrepresentations in Bush’s speech. Did Bush lie, or is this politics-as-usual? You be the judge.

The State of the Union speech was a slickly spun piece of PR. I wish the opposition could have had someone stand up afterwards to offer a televised rebuttal. Sure, it’s understandable that Bush’s speech was basically an advertisement for the current administration. In my opinion, the American president should be held — and should hold him or herself — to a higher standard.

I didn’t intend to repeat Wes Clark’s campaign slogan there (“A Higher Standard of Leadership”)… this is really how I feel. No president should be allowed to twist the truth like Bush has. Here’s just one example: Bush said, “Jobs are on the rise.” That depends on your perspective. Since Bush took office, 2.3 million jobs have been lost, according to Calvin Woodward of the AP. So Bush’s speech makes a great soundbite, and his claim would hold up in court once the Bush points out that he was referring to exactly one month of the last 36, but the message people heard has little to do with reality.

Over the holidays we drove through the neighborhood of the Anheuser-Busch brewery headquarters in St. Louis. A-B, as natives call it, puts on an impressive display of light — some 750,000 tiny white bulbs strung through the trees along the block. It’s beautiful.

I learned that the stringing begins in October; the crew works three months to hang the lights.

I was thinking, if it takes three months to hang the lights, it probably takes three more to pull them down — which means they’ve got guys out there 50% of the time, dealing with Christmas lights. It seems extravagant, by which I mean “crazy.”

In fact A-B is not that crazy. They don’t pay their union electricians to spend three months carefully taking the lights down after the holidays. Rather, they pay the electricians to spend about a week: a few days cutting the strands into little pieces, and a few more sweeping up the mess. And next October the brewery will buy another 750,000 Christmas lights.

This astounds me, that a company with such a good reputation in the community can be so wasteful and disrespective of the environment. While it’s true that the light display earns great reviews, I suspect if the folks around town knew all those lights would end up in the landfill on January 1, they’d feel a bit less inclined toward romance and a bit more irked at the misprioritization of flash over common sense. I am, anyway.

Admiring A-B’s Christmas lights is like admiring a smokestack. “Oh, look, that cloud of toxins is so pretty, how about a little smooch?” Gad.