DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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.

It started with the whales.

It was January 1. We met with friends for dinner, and to join in their New Year’s traditions.

The first tradition is from Germany. Called Bleigiessen, it involves melting a small lump of lead over a flame, and then pouring the liquid metal into a bowl of water, where it solidifies upon contact and forms a shape that can be interpreted as a symbol of what the new year will bring.

My Bleigiessen lump, like all of them, was basically indistinct, although there was a protrusion that looked like nothing so much as a whale. I kept this opinion to myself until I could find out what whale might indicate in the Bleigiessen tradition… if whale meant something bad, like “your savings account will develop a blow-hole,” I’d be inclined to quietly change my initial interpretation.

Shortly afterwards we shuffled a deck of Native American Medicine cards, and each drew a card which (as with the Bleigiessen) would be a symbol of what we could expect for the coming year. My card showed a whale.

Had we done Tarot or tea-leaves or shadow puppets on the wall, I’d have seen whale, whale, whale. The message was clear. But what did it mean?

I read several pages about the whale card in the Medicine Cards guidebook. One recurring theme was whalesong. I took it this way: 2004 will be a year of music.

Over this past weekend my wife and I completed Tony Robbins’ new-year exercise. It was a lot of work — about eight hours’ worth. But at the end we had four goals apiece… goals to achieve this year at any cost. Goals we’ll look back on a year from now and be ecstatic to have achieved. Goals to help us “design a compelling life.” Goals to prevent that year-end “boy am I ready for next year” syndrome.

Two of my goals are about music. I’ll tell you one: I’m going to get my drums back onstage this year. I will find a band and start gigging again. It’s been too long. Just ask your neighborhood whale.

For my wife’s part, she’ll be jumping out of an airplane.

No, she didn’t decide to jump out of an airplane after I said I’d start playing my drums again.

Max is on a liquid diet. Kudos, I say. And even: solidarity!

I’ve done one-day juice fasts in the past. Today I did another one. I’d been thinking about doing it again anyway, maybe even one Sunday a month, as a gesture of appreciation to the body that’s gotten me through the past 35+ years. Bottoms up, eh?

It is an expensive habit. Granted, we went to the most expensive store in town, a store I’ve heard called Whole Paycheck in two states. Still, the grocery bill was over $30. I could have bought steaks for that. Not that they’d have done too well in the juicer.