Water on Mars

Everyone is so excited today that they've discovered fairly reasonable evidence (I won't call it "conclusive proof" until I'm drinking a glass of it) that there is water on mars. Hurrah! How wonderful! How exciting!

Do you really think it makes the slightest bit of difference?

We humans already happen to have 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water at our disposal on earth. We've managed to muck up this planet pretty good even with all that water, and so now we are all excited that we've found a couple thousand gallons maybe on mars? Do you really think we can managed to do a better job taking proper care of a desolate wasteland where the average daily temperature is ~ -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius)?

Best of luck!

Basil

British Reflections on American Advertising

I happened to be perusing news stories on BBC, and ran across this very funny commentary on American Advertising:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7453357.stm


Take the following example, where he's talking about the little disclaimer at the end of pharmaceutical advertisements:


Sometimes these are spelled out in a warm tone implying this is all a bit of a formality imposed by our fuss-budget of a government.

On other occasions they are rattled out at speeds normally only reached by horse racing commentators in the closing stages of a big race.

All-in-all a very funny article. I hope you check it out.

Cheers!
Basil