DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Location, location, location: $1M for one-half acre

When offered the choice of spending a weekend with Pamela Anderson or a Porsche, nine of 10 German men chose the car.

This is not as surprising as the article’s author seems to think. I don’t know anybody who would honestly want to spend a weekend with Pamela Anderson. I wouldn’t even want to spend a weekend with the Pamera Anderson / Tommy Lee sex video, because that’s the image I already have playing in my mind every time I hear her name. I mean, this is a video that should come with a free pair of rubber gloves.

So, yeah, I’d definitely go for the Porsche. For that matter I’d probably go for a 1976 Pacer — a pink one. With a Confederate flag painted on the roof, and a horn that plays “Oh, Susanna.”

I went to the plaNetwork conference in the Presidio today. It was pretty interesting, as you’d expect if you could get a couple hundred left-leaning technology geeks in a room to talk about how to remake politics, culture, and social responsibility through creative Internet applications.

If I could sum it up into one word, the one word would be: blogging. No, wait, it’s RSS. No, wait, it’s targeted email. Well, maybe it’s not possible to boil 20 hours of conference into one word. Or even a single blog entry.

The organizers contracted with GreenHome to “green” the conference. This meant using compostable cups and forks, and providing many recycling bins throughout the conference center. These few small changes made it easy to do the right thing after lunch — although there was still some confusion about whether paper plates (bleached, ech) should go into the compost or the paper recycling. Anyway, I appreciated the effort. It would be lame to spend the morning discussing how to make the future ecologically sane and socially just if at lunchtime we’d generate 200 lbs of landfill garbage to be trucked to Alameda.

This is the last word on SUVs, I promise. For this week, I mean.

Philip Greenspun’s weblog spawned an interesting discussion on the merits of SUVs. Both sides of the debate are represented.

The original question was, Can SUVs remain fashionable when only unfashionable people drive them? Click the “comments” link below the main entry.

Bim forwarded this story about Ford’s courtroom loss in an SUV rollover case (mirror):

SAN DIEGO — A jury has ordered Ford Motor Co. to pay nearly $369 million to a woman paralyzed in a rollover accident involving a Ford Explorer, the nation’s best-selling sport utility vehicle…
The trial, which began March 15, involved a January 2002 accident on an interstate highway near Alpine, Calif., east of San Diego. The driver, Benetta Buell-Wilson, swerved to avoid a metal object and lost control of her 1997 Explorer, which rolled 4 1/2 times.

This is a precedent-setting case. It will be referenced in every SUV rollover lawsuit for the next 100 years, or until SUVs stop rolling over.

Here’s a frightening quote from Ford spokesperson Kathleen Vokes (mirror) (emphasis mine):

“We can appreciate the empathy that this jury felt for the plaintiff, but this was an extremely severe crash caused by the driver and any SUV would have rolled over under similar circumstances.”