Nice day yesterday but a lazy one. The weather still feels more like late September than late August. A couple of days ago I harvested the first couple of the Mitoyo eggplants and Mom got them peeled, blanched and frozen. I have about four more ripening.

Matt Taibbi has a good piece in Rolling Stone. I was on my high school competitive speech team specializing on what they called "extemporaneous speaking." That meant we had half an hour to prepare a five minute speech on a question drawn from recent news headlines. I prepared by reading the major weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report) along with a host of other monthly magazines and six or eight daily newspapers taking clippings and notes on what I was reading. The difference I notice between then and now is the lack of explanation and specifics in today's media. Taibbi is right that the media has reduced our attention span. And the news is even more written (or spoken in the case of TV) to the outrageous and emotional. It is designed to push buttons and, by so doing, garner consumers. And what we have now is a man occupying high and responsible office whose attention span is less than that of a goldfish, who can't seem to stitch together a coherent sentence, and who specializes in pushing the emotional buttons of rage, far, xenophobia in its broadest sense of people as stunted as he is himself.

I do like this cartoon!!

I hadn't known that Britain had a competition to find means of "carbon capture and storage" to reduce their CO2 pollution. They are ending it after 10 years because it simply doesn't work. The power plants have to burn more fuel to make the CCS system work so the it becomes a trade-off: more declining fossil fuel or CCS. The most cost effective way to reduce carbon emissions is to simply use less fuel.