A Year Later…

Well.  It’s been a year, and what a year it’s been.  Apologies for the hiatus — an opportunity for a break presented itself and I took it.  But here we are again, Earth Day and all that jazz.  2011 promises to be the same song, next verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.  A year after everyone has forgotten about the BP spill in the Gulf, we have another well blowout.  This time in Bradford Co.  Another pasture ruined.  Another stream contaminated. At Camp Bittersweet, there are two new pads and a total of 11 new bores.  There was even a big spill.  A soul can become numb to it all after a while.  Nothing to see here.  Move along, move along.

2011 also puts us on the verge of the silly season known as the Presidential election.  The Left is still pining for alternative fuels — eggspecially that super clean natural gas; and the Right is busy pretending to be aghast at The Donald for his great love of Eminent Domain.  One thing is for sure — when both sides of the political aisle look across the fruited plain and see nothing but “domestic energy” and “energy independence” and enough shale gas to supply “us” for a hundred million billion years, they don’t see the American citizens who own the surface above all that gas. They see no barriers to harvesting every last cubic inch of it.  But the gas does not rise to the surface on it’s own.  It has to be taken. And it will be taken right after the right to control that property is taken from the citizens who live there.  ”That gas is OUR gas”, say the Elitists who are too educated, intelligent, and sophisticated to live in the Sacrifice zone,  ”and WE will take it.”  I get a little nervous when politicians use collectivist language.  It gives the impression they don’t recognize the right to own property.  I get even more nervous when the rank and file voter parrots it.

Speaking of parroting… I have a bit of an allergy to marketing and spin.  Nothing gets my histamine going like all those talking points from Energy In Depth and other industry PR firms. They are so tired and stale that if I hear them one more time — especially if repeated by reasonably well-educated people who ought to possess the critical thinking skills to see through a slick marketing campaign — I just might scream.  Screaming does no good whatsoever, but ridicule surely does!

Buzzword Bingo got its start by similarly frustrated cubical-rats who got really tired of silly business-speak.  You know, the “lean forward and action an out-of-the-box win-win solution to message new product” type stuff.  It is gibberish but managers really like it and everyone else has to play along. The cube-rats turned business meetings into a bingo game.  (There’s even an App for that.)  Playing Buzzword Bingo is easy! Just set up bingo cards and mark the square when the buzzword gets used.  Seems to me this is a perfect response to the double-speak gibberish the Industry spokes-peeps and apologists try to lay on us.  (You know the routine — you’re standing by a torrent of frack fluid rushing down into Towanda Creek and the spokesdude says, “Uh yeah, it’s under control.  There’s no impact.” Wut? Bingo!)

So go try it — go make up some bingo cards with all of your favorite vocabulary words, buzzwords, lies, excuses, and abuses and see how little time it takes to fill up a card at your next community meeting. It’ll make you smile that the stupidity is so predictable. I promise.

Meanwhile, I can’t make any promises about keeping up this blog. The list of cartoons to draw is long and there are endless sources of new inspiration, but the stress that comes from following the news needs to be balanced with other things.  So we’ll see. I remain buoyed by your readership and will be ever thankful that you stop by as often as you do.