How taking the bus to work relates to marathons...

So, my future wife, Meredith, is running the Marine Corp Marathon at the end of the month.
The other morning while training, she was disgusted with the amount of people who drive to work and the ensuing exhaust that she was inhaling. As someone who either takes the bus/metro and/or the train to work, this gave her an idea.
She has decided (in an atypical liberal way) to place something similar to the following on the back of her shirt while running the marathon:

If I can run 26.2 miles, you can take the bus/metro to work.


Personally, if she wants to make a statement, that's fine with me. I take planes to work, so I am worse than all of those driving. But, this idea intrigues me due to the first potential opportunity for a www.villagerwithwheel.com sponsorship.
She has agreed, sorta, that if the blog pays for her shirt to be made (dry fit material with the statement screened on the back), she would be willing to have the address of the blog on the shirt also.

Clearly, any traffic obtained from this sponsorship probably wouldn't like my previous post poking fun at Al Gore. But, we could put up some hippie posts on saving the environment prior to the marathon to lure in potential tree huggers readers.


Then, right after we get them hooked, we could have OD guest blog with a stall quote (from our college frat house), similar to "stop throwing pennies at my boobs you effing jack@ss", but something much more offensive.....

But seriously, I think the sponsorship idea is money....

So You Think You've Got It Rough?

At least you don't work in an Indian chromite mine.

I'm a big fan of this National Geographic photo set of the 10 Most Polluted Place on Earth. It's reassuring to see most of these mines being worked by children. That kind of smog can really play hell on an older person's lungs.

More Energy Discussion

Energy Discussion

This is a novel idea advocated by those wacky Euros. You'll have to read through the discussion, but essentially they're using excess power from wind farms to store water in Norwegian reservoirs. Then, when they need power, they drain the water from the reservoirs and get the hydroelectric power. Can't get much cleaner than that (other than the whole building dams thing).

The Economist has been doing a lot of articles on energy lately. I think we're going to see a lot of new nuclear plants built in the next 10 or 20 years. If we could only get Keanu Reeves to tell us how he mastered cold fusion in the movie Chain Reaction.....

Nate = Buffoon, Al Gore = Sex Bomb

Re: the earlier post about stupid burning oil and replanting trees article I have two things to say:

1. Al Gore's position has never been that biofuels, electric cars, or hydrogen fuel cell powered sex toys are the one and complete answer to Global Warming. His position is that we need to shift our energy consumption to renewable fuel sources and begin an earnest, culture- and world-wide discussion about the cataclysmic wall we're probably accelerating towards.
2. Ethanol is stupid. It is the strange love-child of the corn industry (the nice people who ensure high fructose corn syrup is in everything) and environmentalists desperate to do something productive during this 8-year clusterfark (clusterbomb if you live in Basra).

Anyways, Gore is awesome. I would have his baby if it were biologically feasible (and if he would just answer one of my letters).

Al Gore can shove it...

According to this report, burning oil and replanting trees is better than using biofuels.
According to Electronic Vagrant's favorite website, biofuel is defined as "liquid or gas transportation fuel derived from biomass". Like E85 that GM advertises? As of 2006, more than half of the E85 pumps are in Minnesota. Helpful for the little over 5.1 million people who live there. Not so helpful for the rest of the 297 million people....(A little math thanks to the U.S. Census website)

So, I assume this doesn't include electricity? I don't know how it all works. But, concerning low-emission vehicles, it is actually illegal to buy "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle" in all but eight states. Is this type of car better than biofuel? Is this considered biofuel? Should we use oil to run these cars?

In summary, the government doesn't want you to buy better than hybrid vehicles. Some scientists don't want you to use biofuels.
I wonder what Al Gore's tree hugging position is....


UPDATE: Read the comments for intelligent discussion from others and more stupidity/ignorance from me.