but i still like to smoke...(occasionally)...

I'm still working on this triumphant return...for now, trivial details.

And I wanted to get this out there before the other 4 active 'bloggers' I know all write about the same thing...but I'm kind of feeling like as soon as I finish this, I'll go check the said blogs annnd find I might as well have copied and pasted.

Anyhow, I just had the pleasure of seeing An Inconvenient Truth, a semi-documentary film of Al Gore's 'crusade' against global warming. I thought it was really well done, really good in fact, and would certainly recommend it. It's not without it's slow moments, but for a society that just dropped $9.7 million to watch The Rock coach football for an hour and a half, it's not like a lull in the picture is all that foreign.


One of the things I found most entertaining was a segment in which Gore discusses the misconception of scientists being confused, or in two minds, about whether or not the warming was natural and cyclical, or whether we were having a direct impact upon it. He spoke about two studies, one of which surveyed something like 920 articles of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles and none of them were of the opinion that global warming was merely cyclical. A second study which took into account something like 600 artciles from popular press material found that (something like) 53% opined that the current warming was simply natural and human beings were playing minimal part.

In reality, the studies didn't thrill me so much as scare me. But I was entertained by the real dichotomy made between what most of us read, and what you really have to search for to read. iiiinteresting. Really this has been a key player in what I think about ever since I tried to pass Margaret Atwood off as a scholarly source in a politics paper...diiid not go so well but I still think the citation was relevant.

Anyhow. Back to American History, or as I like to call it, The Understanding of Unpleasantness. Juuust kidding. It's actually a fascinating course, and I love the American ideal more and more every day.