ashdenizen tweets (mon - thurs)

Just got email saying 'dandelion', 'heron', 'otter', 'magpie', 'willow' and 'acorn' have been dropped from the 6000 words in Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Google 'tweets' and 'carbon footprint'. The figures are here.

(Get tweet asking: 'post less, and save the environment?')

I knew Al Gore was on twitter. Turns out he's written two tweets this year, totalling 13 words.

In TLS, Richard Dawkins sticks up for scientists: 'thunder is not the sound of God's balls banging together'.

Hertz right. Zadie S on polyvocal Obama brilliantly draws on Shaw, Shakespeare, Keats and Cary G.

New Yorker's H. Hertzberg begs us to drop what we're doing and read Zadie Smith on Obama.

Reading George Lakoff's Don't Think Of An Elephant. People think in frames, if the facts don't fit the frame, the facts bounce off and the frame remains.

'Privacy grows round him/like fur on a hibernating bear.' From Ruth Padel's Darwin - A Life in Poems more ...

ear plugs

There's no chance to link to Ian Parker's New Yorker profile for the Nov 10 issue about the new green guru and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (blogged here). The piece requires registration. But the profile - teasing and empathetic - is worth the price of the mag.

With Hot, Flat and Crowded, says Friedman, he has tried to address more than one audience, ('I'm here to speak out of two sides of my mouth.' ) In this respect, he distinguishes himself from the author of An Inconvenient Truth.

The problem with so much of the green argument previously, it spoke not even to half the country. I enormously admire Al Gore, and he's truly a hero of mine, but half the country sees him and plugs their ears, so Al Gore could not carry this thing, you know, on a national scale. more ...

power points

In today's New York Times, Al Gore offers a five-part plan to repower America by producing 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. more ...

una scomoda verità

First reaction to news that La Scala's to stage Al Gore's power-point movie is: doesn't sound very dramatic. (No love songs - except to the planet.)

Second reaction to news: what could be more dramatic?

(There's an even chance of one billion people being short of water by 2050.)

Third reaction: it's genius to do something so obvious.

The composer of the new opera Una scomoda verità, Giorgio Battistelli (above), says that artists:

'make you see things differently, make you see things in a new light. When we see a painting by Francis Bacon or a film of Sydney Pollack, we get a very precise idea of the problems of our century'. more ...

second climate-change opera

La Scala to stage Gore's Inconvenient Truth (h-t: Drudge). The Guardian has more.

The first review of the first climate-change opera here. more ...

killer stat

Viacom sues YouTube for failing to keep copyrighted material off its site. The BBC reports:

The company says the infringement also included the documentary An Inconvenient Truth which had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times".

If the figure's accurate, some if, then that's public service broadcasting.

Hat-tip: John Naughton more ...

the law makers

Here's how the food-chain works on the blogosphere:

On 29th March, a New Zealand blogger, Terence, coined the term 'Gore's Law' on his blog Long Ago and Not True Anyway. The post begins by quoting 'Godwin's Law', coined by internet lawyer Mike Godwin: 'As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.' Terence adapted 'Godwin's Law' to give us 'Gore's Law'.

Terence's blog doesn't appear to have a Technorati ranking: the lower your number, the higher you rank in the 50 million blogs. But on 6 April 'Gore's Law' was picked up by Tim Lambert at Deltoid (Technorati ranking: 28,458). The Deltoid post was then picked up on 15 April by Gristmill (ranking: 1,255) and then picked up on 16 April by The Daily Dish (ranking: 45).

Gore's Law - if you still haven't stumbled across it - is this: 'As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one.'

pic. Food Chain: by Robert E. Kennedy

more ...

more gore

Al Gore has given the slide show which became An Inconvenient Truth about 2000 times. Now he's got a new, shorter slide-show (28 mins) that he tries out for the first time here. Hat-tip: Huffington Post. more ...

the message is not to have one

There was a slight sense at the Poison + Antidote conference (see asking around and artists and activists) that here we all were, an enlightened group, who knew something important that we had to get across to a wider public. One way to do this - hence the venue - was through 'art'.

Some of that day's discussion seemed to blur the line between artists and advertisers. If the objective is a straightforward one ('cut carbon now'), then yes, bring on the ads.

That's what the We Can Solve It ad is doing. It flatters its audience by saying: look what we Americans have done before - the D-Day landings, a man on the moon, the civil rights movement. Then it challenges its audience by saying: look what we have to deal with today - the climate crisis. Now please go visit our website.

But talking this way isn't a job for artists (except voice-over artists). Advertising tries to move the conversation along to get a result. Art tries to slow the conversation down and open it out. For artists, the message is not to have one.

That might sound, as one activist put it (with a roll of her eyes) as 'fiddling while Rome burns'. But the deeper people reflect on issues, the greater their actions may be. more ...