Don’t Ask, Don’t Spill

The BP oil slick has brought us horrible pictures of wildlife covered in oil and now BP will forever stand for “brown pelicans” in my mind. It reminded me of an old pelican I always watched for when I lived in Florida. He had dark dusty feathers and would roost on the pole next to my boat dock, scouting the water for food. Part of the joy of living near nature is you start to connect with the animals around you. That old pelican had a certain sleepy dignity I respected. Water skiers or loud noises did not easily spook him. If he were annoyed he would just take a little hop to another pole and settle down for more contemplation. He conserved his energy for the important business of diving for fish.

While I lived on the Gulf I was often alarmed by the variables of water quality within just a few miles. A lot of the problem was industrial runoff and some may have even been military. The Navy base had lots of important demolition training to do. I also saw recreational and commercial boaters who didn’t follow obvious rules about spilling gas and oil. The tourists often left garbage floating wherever they anchored to fish or swim. Everyone knew the strict rules and the Coast Guard and Marine Patrols did what they could to encourage responsible behavior and environmental safety but they couldn’t be everywhere. A couple of times we were visited by a strange “red tide” or unknown bacterial events that left lots of people with lung infections, flu like symptoms and dead fish floating in alarming quantities.

There were EPA investigators in the area but I never heard any real explanations. I had a dock on a lagoon within a short ride to the open waters. I needed a power lift to keep the boat up and out of the briny corrosive water of the lagoon. It was not water you would ever want to swim in, I was warned by old timers, but plenty of clear water, with happy dolphins was nearby. I was stopped sometimes for safety inspections and fortunately had all the right papers, fire extinguishers and life jackets. The boat cops were looking for evidence of drinking, and sober, responsible boaters were rarely inconvenienced for more than fifteen minutes by the officers. A lot of boaters resented the intrusion and those officers had an impossible task dealing with angry often drunken boaters. Too few officers and too many people with an attitude.

We had a routine trip we liked to take to an unpopulated island that had a pristine white beach and was only accessible by boat. We would anchor off shore and enjoy a private beach for an hour or two. If you had any food on your boat seagulls would follow, hoping for a handout. Kids threw their crackers up in the air to watch the birds dive for crumbs. In waters near the shore a family of dolphins often followed our boat looking for food. Despite big fines levied against tour boat operators allowing tourists to feed cigar minnows to the dolphins, this behavior is still a concern. The dolphins beg for food and when no one is looking people will try to feed them or brazenly jump in the water to swim with them.

We want our relationship with the natural world but we show too little respect for the rules that will sustain a healthy environment. If so many lack the will to follow the simple rules that apply to the daily life of the Gulf, it is no surprise that we would allow unsafe off-shore drilling and then turn away from serious oversight of corporate power mongers who continually ignore their violations. How many fishing boats will be idle and how many families will lose their lifestyle because of this?

We may have reached the point of no return. We want our freedom, less government and demand fewer taxes. We want it all and yet we don’t want to pay the price to provide a responsible future for our grandchildren. How many destroyed family businesses, dead pelicans and poisoned dolphins will we have to see before we start taking these challenges seriously?

Better oversight requires better government. Better government requires better voters; voters who aren’t acting like petulant children every time we face a difficult task.

Living Outside The Box

In a recent attempt at frugality I cut my cable TV service to the minimum. Call me, "Mr. Basic Cable." No box, no remote, no DVR. Now it is just the plain old cable coming out of the wall into my set providing a limited number of channels. Even when I had more channels than I could count I found myself only watching a handful. If we could just pick our favorites, and only pay for those, then cable would be providing a more elegant a la carte system. But cable systems don't want that. They'd rather sell the higher profit "packages" they create. Even if they wanted to provide buyer choice, we'd be forced to have some sort of box (or a computer) to select our favorites. A box that would lead to all sorts of up-selling. When I called to cancel my expanded service they instantly offered some services I had paid extra for (DVR) for free. The box is their gateway to higher profits so they don't really like it when you can live without the box.

But (and there is always a really BIG but) human nature being what it is, now that I have returned that box, I am overspending on other items I could live without. As I'm about to walk away from a purchase I hear that little voice saying: "Go ahead, buy it. Look how much you are saving on cable." It is like starving yourself all week long and then pigging out on the weekend. You could eat a lot more wisely every day and be ingesting the same amount of calories for the week.

Ignoring the futility of trying to save money, I am still glad I cut back for other reasons. First of all, I am no longer tethered to the insidious DVR memory vault. Mortgaging my future free time because a pile of TV shows is waiting means I was constantly behind on another chore. Not a positive life choice. How free can you be if you if you have to set aside so much time. I've also noticed that the repetition of less than excellent shows has become increasingly relentless on almost all channels. If low budgets create higher profits then the incentive to offer more low budget material is always going to dominate the schedules.

The more channels and options I had the more I was stuck watching mediocre programming because it was always there waiting for me to choose the least objectionable show. And it was all so easy to record and store. Not having shows stack up in a never ending and never empty que means I now have to watch my favorite show as it airs or hope to catch it later on the Internet. The bonus: Finding shows online running with much shorter commercial breaks. A half hour show is often just 22 minutes and a 60 minute show is sometimes as little as 47 minutes. That is cool.

Having no cable box also means I can't order any Pay Per View movies or special events. Not a significant yearly savings but still no temptation to sit through movies that will eventually be online and cheaper through Netflix. That is another discovery that matters. Netflix is cheap and Hulu is free and both provide easy access to some of my favorites.

Netflix allows unlimited online viewing of many box sets of TV series as well as a wide selection of films. Hooking my laptop up to the TV and using the TV as an external monitor is all I needed to do. No special equipment required. And the quality (downloaded through a minimal wifi connection) is often better than the picture I get on some of my basic cable channels coming out of the wall. Go figure.

Sure, there are fewer options but those things I can't see, I'm learning I can live without.