~ KATRINA REDUX

Everybody at the office has been talking about the bullet we dodged today. There was a picture of New Orleans on the front page of the Sentinel with a bunch of the panels that make up the roof of the football stadium... looks like the superdome is leaking but it isn't blowing completely away.

What's interesting is the flatness of affect that comes from knowing that the hurricane is not coming towards us... the way four of them did last year. Just knowing that the lights are on back in my little hovel in Orlando makes me very unexcited and even indifferent to the current nightmare being enacted in south Louisana. Don't get me wrong. I feel their pain (like the good hypocrite I am), but it ain't coming after my ass... so who cares?

What the storm represents to me now is just a festering pain in my behindery. I'm sure that the evil gas moguls will use this opportunity to jack up the price of regular to $3 a gallon. Sure as death.

I tell you what I dream of: somewhere there must be some mad chemist who is working on the miracle process that transforms water into high test. I know, I know. Lead into Gold! Lead into Gold! But listen... every shift in the main paradigms has come as a surprise that has been a long time coming. I'd like to think that somewhere there is a laboratory which is working on some way... some heretofore unnoticed process to make energy cheap again. We've had a cheap ride on fossil fuels for the last... what? Hundred years? Seventy five? I'm not sure. But energy ain't cheap any more, and we need it to be. What we need is somebody to come up with the fabled dilithium crystals that run the starship Enterprise. You know, unlimited energy means unlimited growth. The crystals of the last paradigm were petrochemical. What is around to replace it? And why aren't we working our asses off developing that technology? I'm not talking bullshit schemes to turn cow methane into geodesic dome houses full of Mother Earth hippies. I'm talking about something that will replace gas.

We used to run the world on steam which was acquired by heating water with coal. Before that we heated water by burning wood. Then we ran out of wood. And gasoline just about replaced coal with the advent of the internal combustion engine. What's next? Some new magic box with a fusion supeconductor electricity maker that will fuel the electric car of the future? I don't know. But I do know that we need to get off of our asses and get seriously looking for a real alternative to the gasoline driven paradigm.

This dog just won't hunt any more. We need SuperDog!

Bob