Look, over there, a shiny object!

Mmmmm, Pretty.....

And so it goes with this nation's ability to keep focused on what's important.

Yes, gasoline prices are down. So, obviously, they will stay down forever, never to rise again.

Yes, and monkeys will fly out of my butt.

With the drop in gasoline prices, Americans and their famously long-sighted view of the world and the events to come, are dropping hybrid cars just as fast.

As this Los Angeles Times article notes, sales of hybrid vehicles are about as hot as my salsa dancing moves on "Overweight Clumsy Bald Guy Night" on Dancing with the Stars.

Not that I thought I would ever write these words, but I feel sorry for executives in Detroit.

After years of insisting that Americans only want big, gas-guzzling cars, we prove them right with something as simple and transitory as low gas prices, just as the government is forcing them to come out with more fuel efficient vehicles.

Why is saving money on gas only popular when it's wildly overpriced? Are we really that stupid?

Wait! Don't answer that. Your answer will depress me.

It seems we really are that fickle and short-sighted. Now granted, so few people are buying ANY kind of new car these days that hybrids shouldn't feel slighted.

In fact recent articles have suggested that buying a new car is a better deal than buying a used one, because so many people worried about the economy think they can't afford a new car and thus, are driving up prices in the used car market.

But the poor hybrids are suffering out of proportion to their share of the overall market it seems.

"In July, U.S. Toyota dealers didn't have enough Prius models in stock to last two days, and many were charging thousands of dollars above sticker price for the few they had.Today there are about 80 days' worth on hand, and dealers are working much harder -- even with the help of $500 factory rebates -- to move the egg-shaped gas-savers off lots," the L.A. Times reported.

Not that my beloved Hondas are doing any better: "This month, Honda is offering $2,000 in cash, financing and leasing incentives to buyers of the formerly sold-out Civic hybrid," the Times reports.

"The automakers are in the situation of needing to pacify politicians that are in the position to bail them out with expensive fuel-efficient cars," said Rebecca Lindland, auto analyst with IHS Global Insight. "But shouldn't it be more about satisfying the needs of the American consumer?"

Well yes, that would be true if the American consumer were not such an IDIOT!

Let's remember the American consumer once stood in line to buy pet rocks.

The more important thing to remember here is we need to wean ourselves off foreign oil in the same way the junkie needs to break his heroin habit. The fact that the dealer lowers the price when you're in rehab is no reason to pick up the habit again.

But some of those consumers are smart.

Consider the case of Chad Gallagher.

A lawyer in Berkeley, Chad "took advantage of a Presidents Day promotion, plus a healthy measure of dealer desperation, to buy a fully loaded Prius last month for $5,000 under sticker price.'We got the touring package, leather seats, navigation, Bluetooth, everything,' Gallagher said. 'I think they were just happy to sell the thing.'

This here is one of them there good news/bad news/good news stories.

Now when I was a little tyke in green tights, long before I had conceived of the majestic literary masterpiece that is the Thin Green Line, I had a thing about whales.

It began when I was a lad at Copper Beech Middle School in the Lakeland School District of Westchester County, NY.

There, a super-cool music teacher whose name is now sadly lost in the rusted steel trap of my mind, introduced the close-packed class (music was taught in closets even back then) to the contemporary music of Gordon Lightfoot.

What captured my imagination was a song titled "Ode to Big Blue" which was about the Blue Whale. I was hooked at the first hearing.

For a brief and moderatly embarassing time, I thought I was hooked on Gordon Lightfoot, which led to many unfortunate hours for my family while I blasted greedily purchased Gordon Lightfoot albums in an attempt to re-capture the feeling of that first listen.

After a time, I came to realize the feeling came from a sense of wonder about whales, and not from Lightfoot's monotone singing style (although I still remember all the words to "Second Cup of Coffee" and the unfortunate hit, "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.")

What followed was a period in my "tweens" and early adolesence during which I dedicated myself to whatever I could learn about whales. I learned a lot and tore photographs from articles about whales in National Geographic and glued them to incredibly heavy pieces of plywood I found around the house. These I hung on my walls using nails larger than some whale bones you might find.

(When my mother sold our house, I'm sure the hundreds of holes in the honeycombed walls of my room brought the price of the house down significantly.)

I decided I would be a marine biologist, combining my love of the ocean with my interest in cetaceans. (See, I was learning all sorts of scientific words and stuff).

Unfortunately, science turned out to require an understanding of math, a subject about which I had developed a phobia thanks to the public humiliation teaching style of a less-cool teacher in the Lakeland School District. (Her name I remember clearly, but I will spare her -- if she's still alive -- the shame with which she sought to motivate me.)

Regardless, I realized poor math skills would make my career as a scientist woefully lacking in accurate data.

Then I decided I would be an "international lawyer" dedicated to the preservation of the species in the world's courts of law, fighting the lonely fight to save creatures who would never know my name or touch. Damn noble of me don't you think?

Although I confess to being a halfway decent arguer, this ambition too fell by the wayside, probably because of how much work it threatened to require. (Noble, but lazy, the perfect description of my teen years.)

Then, having gently rejected my mother's fondest wish that I become a park ranger, I pursued her worst nightmare and became a writer, like my father, doomed to a life of flying fancies, past participles and empty bank accounts.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that throughout it all, I never lost my interest in whales, an interest which has been tickled by recent events.

The first was this article in The New York Times, which reports that conservation and protection efforts actually worked and this slow-moving cetacean is on the rebound.

"North Atlantic right whales, which can grow up to 55 feet long and weigh up to 70 tons, were the 'right' whales for 18th- and 19th-century whalers because they are rich in oil and baleen, move slowly, keep close to shore and float when they die," the Times sumarized: all terrible characteristics for a species trying to survive its initial contact with mankind. It was "right" for us, not them.

By 1900, it was estimated that as few as 100 remained, literally hunted to extinction, the dodo of the seas.

But recently, the good news came fast and furious, as the Times outlined:

• Recent changes in shipping lanes, some compulsory and others voluntary, seem to be reducing collisions between whales and vessels.


• The Bush administration agreed last year to lower speed limits for large vessels in coastal waters where right whales congregate. (Yes, Bush deserves credit. You heard it here first!)


• Fishing authorities in the United States are beginning to impose gear restrictions designed to reduce the chances whales and other marine mammals will be entangled in fishing lines. Canada is considering similar steps.


• In December, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spotted an unusually large aggregation of right whales in the Gulf of Maine. A month later, a right whale turned up in the Azores, a first since the early 20th century.


• And last year, probably for the first time since the 1600s, not one North Atlantic right whale died at human hands.

We shouldn't be surprised that it took so long. The Right Whale does everything slowly: slow swimmer, slow breeder; slow to make a comeback.

All of which is part of what so fascinated me as a kid. They are so different from us and, quite possibly, smarter than us (something which a regular reading of The Mercury's Sound Off column quickly convinces me is easily achieved).

The ratio of the size of a cetacean's brain, in relation to its spinal cord -- one way scientists measure a species' intelligence -- is actually greater than mankind's. They are evolved from creatures who went back to the sea after living on land for a time. And their slow grace underwater is a wonder to behold.

And no sound more perfectly captures the spirit of the ocean itself, than the mournful mysterious sound of whale calls underwater.

But before I could go down to the basement and dig up my old Gordon Lightfoot records, I made the mistake of reading The Mercury.

There I found this article from the Associated Press, about how the world's financial crisis had had an unexpected victim -- a program that monitored these very creatures just as their comeback so desperately needs to be documented.

The monitoring program, which tracked whales as they passed New York Harbor on their way to their New England feeding grounds, is run by Cornell University and it quite simply ran out of money.

If you want to know more, click here.

(Geek Alert!: And no, the above link does not bring you to a Web site for Star Trek IV! Fellow geeks will get this joke.)

I am realist enough to know that as we fend off a Depression, making a pitch for more public money to monitor whales is unlikely to make it to the top of the priority list.

But rather than lure me into despair, the universe conspired to provide a dollop of hope, in the most unlikely of places -- a Pottstown School Board meeting.

As it does every month, the meeting began with the winners of the writing awards reading their work, and this month's readers were from Barth Elementary School.

I did not hear them all, arriving late as usual, but I did arrive in time to hear a composition by a young man whose name I did not catch at the time and have not yet discovered. (I will however.)

His essay was about how important it is to protect Humpback Whales and laid out all the reasons, not the least of which is how little we know about them.

I realized another generation is picking up the torch and this time, might succeed in becoming a scientist, an expert rather than just an enthusiast.

I wonder if he would be interested in my Gordon Lightfoot collection....

UPDATE:

This is the essay written by the Barth student, Carlos Fuentes-Brown, seen at left reading his essay:

My favorite animal is a humpback whale. A humpback whale can weigh roughly
30,000 pounds. It can have gray or blue gray skin. It eats krill and small fish and it can
eat 1000 pounds of food a day. The humpback whale is a large mammal that can grow
50 feet long. The humpback whale can be found in all oceans, but is an endangered
animal. It can sing songs that can be heard far away. Sometimes a pod of them sing and
can be heard far away. Humpback whales are the best animal.


Carlos Fuentes-Brown

Now I know The Thin Green Line should be writing about more serious things, things like Obama's stimulus package and the green initiatives it contains.


And we'll get to it, we promise. Our army of financial analysts is going over the figures as you read this.


But in the meantime, let's face it; sometimes, you just can't resist the low-hanging fruit and by that I mean a story about toilet paper.


Infantile? Yes.


Sophomoric? You bet.


But we here at The Thin Green Line have the raw guts to stand up and say what needs to be said about soft and puffy toilet paper. It stinks! (And we mean before you use it, not after, although, well, it stinks then too.)





Hey, take it easy, don't get your knickers in a twist, even the staid grey lady, The New York Times, had fun with this article. After all, some newsroom jokester succumbed to temptation as well and put Mr. Whipple in the headline. We would never sink so low.


All joking aside, this is a pretty sad commentary on us, that a nation that likes to brag its people are the toughest on the global block, is populated with such pampered milksops that we need ultra soft TP to clean our bums.


Here's the straight poop, toilet paper, more than anything else, can most easily be made from recycled paper. In Europe, this kind of TP makes up 20 percent of the market, although it should be more at least they're trying people.


Here in the U.S.? That percentage of the market is a paltry 2 percent. That's pathetic folks and makes us flush with indignation.


The reason this is important is it takes trees to make TP soft. "Millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada," just for a few moments passing comfort for our sensitive nether regions.


Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year, that's 23 opportunities a year to help create a market for all that paper we're starting to recycle. And folks, those jobs will stay here in the U.S.


According to the Times, "25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests."


Do we really want to destroy something so valuable, and trash our planet for something so trivial? Talk about not giving a crap!


Marcal, a brand easily found on the shelves of your local grocer, makes all its TP from recycled fiber, although it doesn't make as much noise about it as it probably should.


And if you're really hung up on having "premium" toilet paper, you can always buy some from places like Seventh Generation that charge more.


But there's hope in despair. As the economy tanks, sales of "premium" toilet paper are down.


And let's think about that phrase for a moment people. "Premium toilet paper" should be considered a premium oxymoron.


Why in the world do we need something to be "premium" when we immediately flush it down the toilet never to be used (or enjoyed) again? Doing so, in my opinion, makes someone a real ass.


OK, we're done with the puns now.


Sorry to be so cheeky.


Ooops, OK, now we're really done.

With 16 years under my belt, I can definitely say that being married is better than not being married.

There are, of course, trade-offs, but on the whole, it's a definite plus.

Now, there's something new to add to the "plus" column -- nothing less than saving the world, at least that's what this Reuters article claims.

Apparently, "staying married is better for the planet because divorce leads the newly single to live more wasteful lifestyles," at least in the opinion of the Australian lawmaker quoted in the story.

"When couples separate, they needed more rooms, more electricity and more water. This increased their carbon footprint," Sen. Steve Fielding told a senate hearing.

"Such a 'resource-inefficient lifestyle' means it would be better for the planet if couples stayed married, he said."

I can't say I've ever heard of the mid-life crisis guy with the new hair plugs, new red sports car and new vapid trophy wife ever referred to as living a "resource-inefficient lifestyle," but Sen. Fielding calls 'em as he sees 'em.

At least there's finally something those on the far left and the far right can agree on. Marriage? Good for everybody.

By the way, this Fielding fellow? He leads Australia's "Family First" Party and he grew up in a family of 16 children and has been married for 22 years, so he knows a thing or two about his subject matter.

So don't just stay together "for the children" folks, do it for us all.

They say idle hands are the devil's workshop, but apparently idling diesel engines are Global Warming's workshop.

Which, presumably, is why a new state law makes it illegal for trucks and buses to idle in the same place for more than five minutes, without turning off their engines.

At least that's what it says in this article from the Reading Eagle, (who says we're scared of our competition? We're just scared period.) sent to us by our most loyal reader, Thomas Mounce of Birdsboro.

According to the article: "Each year, idling trucks in Pennsylvania spewed more than 32,000 tons of nitrogen oxide and 210,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which are greenhouse gases blamed for global warming."

The idea, apparently, is to keep them from spewing when they're not moving.

Truckers argue that they need to idle their trucks to prevent them from freezing up in cold temperatures, and to run their air conditioning when they're sleeping in warm temperatures.

Ever understanding, the Commonwealth has given long-haul truckers one year to find an alternative power source. One already exists however. Many truck stops are now equipped by a company called "IdleAire," as seen on Modern Marvels as well as mention in the aforementioned article.

These connections provide phone, Internet and electrical connections as well as air conditioning for the idled trucker. (Sounds like a good investment to make if any of us had any money.)

As for school buses, they have to shut their engines off when they're parked at school waiting for the little ones, thus sparing our children the dreaded walk of death, increasing their chances of developing asthma while they look for their ride home.

Of course, while this is all well and good, there's little the law does for this...

Because try as we might, we can't seem to outlaw traffic jams.

Which is not to say this law does not at least make a dent.

And, according to this Associated Press story, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer (see? We really have no fear of competition!), we need all the dents we can get.

The story tells us that the fun folks over at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, those merry pranksters who first alerted us to the dangers of a warmer Earth, have another warning for us, a warmer warning actually.

To put a finer point on it, we're warmer than we thought we were already and the likelihood of the ever-warmer temperatures causing more severe weather just keep getting higher and higher.

"Now, researchers say, 'increases in drought, heat waves and floods are projected in many regions and would have adverse impacts, including increased water stress, wildfire frequency and flood risks starting at less than [1.8 degrees] of additional warming above 1990 levels.'"

"Indeed, 'it is now more likely than not that human activity has contributed to observed increases in heat waves, intense precipitation events, and the intensity of tropical cyclones,' concluded the researchers, led by Joel B. Smith of Stratus Consulting Inc., in Boulder, Colo."

Boy those guys really know how to snuff out a good time don't they?

But apparently, we haven't let a little cold dose of reality in the face stop us.

After all, "The new report, in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes a week after Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that humans are now adding carbon to the atmosphere even faster than in the 1990s," AP reported.

"Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9 percent per year in the 1990s, Field said."

Boy, we sure know how to throw a party don't we?

No one can accuse us of having idle hands.

As a reporter at a local newspaper, I sometimes describe my job to people as "filling in the space around the photos."

In my world, "art," as photos are called, is king.

Pitch any story to any editor and the first question most often asked is "is there any art with it?"

So when Liz Brooking, the marketing and communications director at the Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale, Chester County, sent me this photo and asked if I thought there would be any interest in promoting it, I was an easy sell.

That's because the name of this presentation is "The Power of Photography."

If you doubt it, ask yourself what you remember about the protests in Tianamen Square, the thousands and thousands of words written and spoken about it, or the iconic image of the lone protester standing in front of a tank, refusing to give way.

The presentation at Stroud takes place on Wednesday, March 11 and is free and open to the public.

The feature red presenter will be photographer and Chester County native Bob Caputo.

According to Brooking, Caputo's "photography is stunning and adventures well worth hearing about. It is our hope that an education series will introduce new audiences to the wonderful watershed education programs we offer to both children and adults."

A Chester County resident, Caputo is also a world traveler, adventurer, and twenty-eight year veteran photographer for National Geographic magazine. Caputo will present images from his travels and share his insights and perspective on an innovative education program he helped Stroud educators produce called Mountaintop to Tap. Seating is limited. The event is free—and open to the public.$20 Raffle for a signed Bob Caputo print; proceeds to benefit Stroud Water Research Center.

To learn more about the Stroud Water Research Center, click here.

For directions, click here.