DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Two updates on energy stories covered previously in this space…

Following up on a story from May about the new “methane digester” energy generator at Straus Dairy, the Chronicle covers accusations from other dairy farmers about the difficulty of getting similar projects approved:

Rather than encouraging methane-powered electrical generators as other state utilities are doing, critics say, Northern California’s largest utility is actively undermining adoption of the technology by burdening farmers with excessive expenses and endless paperwork; that, they say, makes it impossible to get a methane system online in a timely and economical fashion.

Following up on the story of Snohomish Co. energy officials transcribing tapes in which Enron employees admit to gaming the energy market, the Chronicle published a human-interest story about the crew who transcribed the Enron audio tapes:

Headphones clamped to their ears, a dozen listeners spent 45 to 50 hours a week for three months crammed into a windowless Santa Cruz office, playing and replaying over 2,000 hours of taped conversations between Enron traders.
Many of the conversations were so disjointed and full of jargon that it was like learning a foreign language.
“On any given day, with 12 people listening, you might have one three- minute phone call that ended up in the transcripts for the final testimony,” [said Carl Pechman, president of Power Economics].

Aidin Vaziri’s review of a recent Carlos Santana show made me laugh:

The Mexican-born guitar player was deep into a 20-year commercial slump when Supernatural, his celebrity-packed 1999 album, changed his fortunes. The disc won nine Grammys and shifted 25 million units.

With its follow-up, Shaman, putting a couple more platinum discs on the walls of his San Rafael home, it wasn’t so much a comeback as full-scale rehabilitation…

But Santana … seems to have missed an important lesson behind the success of those breakout albums — that people would rather hear tight, accessible pop songs packed with personality and purpose than some dude with a mustache choking the living hell out of his guitar for three hours straight.

The Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene stocks an impressive inventory. The floor-to-ceiling stacks of used paperback fiction are augmented and in fact buried by a supplemental stack of books, two feet high and two to three titles deep. They run the length of the aisles, on both sides, and the width of the store along the back wall.

Somewhere among those 300,000 paperbacks is a perspective that, if photographed, would scream “look at this! 300,000 paperbacks!” I didn’t find it, but I did find a used copy of a Hornby novel I hadn’t read yet, and for a good price too.

I sleep like a log. Logs don’t sleep, of course, but if logs were to sleep, that is the fashion in which I slumber: felled despite shouting (“timber!”), loaded onto a truck, driven across the county, dumped into the river, then inadvertently sunk to the bottom, preserved at 40°F for one hundred years, immobile. Or, alternatively, milled into a bannister. Either way, I wouldn’t wake up. I figure, if I’m going to sleep, I might as well do it right.

So it was with some surprise that I awoke at 2:00 AM for no immediately apparent reason. Until I breathed. Argh! The worst smell I’ve smelled, and let me tell you, that’s saying something. The room was filled with a putrid stench. I clawed at my own throat. One of my lungs collapsed. Well, not really.

Bad sign: the window was closed. So, if the smell didn’t come from outside…

But no. This was skunk. Not the sort of “dead skunk on the road” skunk-smell that you can identify as skunk even without seeing the black and white pelt pressed into the asphalt. A whiff of the carcass, even at 60 mph, is sufficient for reliable identification. I wasn’t getting a whiff of skunk. I was soaking in it.

Have you ever heard music so loud you couldn’t discern notes or instruments or melody? Have you ever gone momentarily blind in the parking lot after a matinee, the sun so bright your eyes clamp shut?

My nose was overloaded. I couldn’t really smell the bad smell; it was too big. But I could tell it was there. I could feel it in the air, in my eyes and throat. And around the edges of every breath was a whiff of something horrible, something dead or worse. (Dead things stop stinking, eventually.)

I stumbled into the living room. If anything, the bad smell smelled even worse. Further, into the kitchen, I followed the smell to an open window. I pressed my overworked nose against the screen. Fresh air! My nose came back to life. Oh, did my house stink then.

I don’t know what happened. I guess a skunk sprayed just outside the kitchen, and a cloud floated inside and settled in for the night.

I could still smell it at lunch today. I had to eat outside.

Voice of America: US Poll: 54% of Americans Say Iraq War a Mistake (mirror)

A poll shows a big swing in U.S. public opinion against the war in Iraq this month, with a majority of Americans now saying they believe the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.

PollingReport.com shows results to poll questions about the Iraq war.

I’ve been wondering for weeks, as the news has been generally terrible and the scandals numerous, whether public opinion would really turn around — would we ever get to the point where it’s not just the people at both coasts who know Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, for example. Maybe this is it?