So Bad It's Good For You

China’s air is so polluted that some people don’t leave their homes for weeks, or months, at a time.

A picture of a sunny day in Beijing looks like the legendary London fog, only the Chinese are dealing with acid-laced death thick enough to chew instead of suspended droplets of harmless water. One makes you wet, the other burns your eyes, restricts your airway, plugs up your lungs and makes you dead.

But this is a good thing, according to Chinese officials. It might be unhealthy pollution caused by a country willing to work its people to death in order to please those of us living in the richest 10% of the world with the fruits of cheaply-produced sweatshop labor, yet it also serves as a safety net against potential enemies and spies.

It’s like a cloaking device, hiding the bustling cities of Beijing and Shanghai from the prying eyes of all the evil non-Communist countries that might otherwise learn the ancient Chinese secret of how to use caustic chemicals to turn recyclable cardboard into faux-meat dumplings to sell to unsuspecting pedestrians from sidewalk food carts. The citizenry of China shouldn’t fear air pollution, they should run outside and embrace it – but only in ten minutes intervals followed by a full body scrub and sinus flush.

And over in France, the smog in Paris is so bad you can’t see the horizon, let alone the intricate details of the Eiffel Tower from only a mile away. Google it right now and whatever picture you’re seeing of the Paris skyline will look like it was taken by someone who smeared flan all over his camera lens. Actually, that’s probably a better use for flan than eating it. Nasty stuff…

And, while the French aren’t quite as enthusiastic about their pollutants as the Chinese are about theirs, they do at the very least have the good sense to blame it not on themselves and their slack environmental laws but, instead, on Mother Nature herself. It seems that uncharacteristically warm days and cold nights are causing the air at ground level to remain dormant, which means Paris has been left eyeballs deep in its own smog rather than watching the city’s pollutants rise into the upper atmosphere and become someone else’s problem.

Here in the United States, we need to do a better job with these kinds of phony-balony PR tactics employed by our European and Asian friends. We too easily feel the weight of responsibility for our environmental abuses. That doesn’t mean we stop abusing the environment. We just feel really bad about it when we’re done. Heck, if we feel really guilty we might even do something symbolic.

Wipe out 95% of the West Coast sequoia forests? 

Launch a campaign to get elementary school kids around the country to plant thousands of mass-produced, sickly pine sapplings.

Poison our lakes and oceans with trash and microscopic bits of degraded plastic? 

Launch a national PR campaign to discourage people from buying bottled water.

Instead of this kind of bleeding-heart, Johnny-come-lately do-goodery, what we really need to do is shift blame to implausible causes while lauding the fictional benefits of the devastation we have created.

Take the recent poisoning of watersheds in West Virginia and North Carolina, for example. Sure, what those companies did was disgracefully awful and preventable, but why not turn those frowns upside down with some positive spin? Maybe they have compromised the natural water resources for thousands of people and destroyed immeasurable quantities and varieties of wildlife, but those poisons might also be targeting the dreaded Asian jumping silver carp.

See? It isn’t so hard once you put a little thought to it.

© 2014 Mark Feggeler

Don't Trust That Cookie!

"New and rewarding opportunities will soon develop for you."

That fortune came out of a cookie during a meal at one of our local Chinese buffets. If you haven't yet eaten at a Chinese buffet in rural North Carolina, it's an interesting experience.

As a child in New York, I recall being deathly afraid of the exotic selections served at the Chinese restaurant to which my parents would take us every now and then. It was a special treat for them. It usually turned into a night of "I'm Still Hungry" for me. My solution was to order wonton soup and egg rolls, the Happy Meal of Asian cuisine, then scarf down cookies and ice cream when we got home.

My sons have adopted a similar tactic. Their meal at the Chinese buffet includes wonton soup (broth only), "chicken on a stick," and that classic Chinese dish known to most of us as fried mozzarella sticks. I learned years ago that China is the real birthplace of pasta, but I had no idea Farm Rich was based in Hong Kong.

Anyway, back to the fortune cookie.

I had just launched this blog, and was seriously considering an attempt at writing the novel I had always dreamed of writing, so the fortune seemed timely. For several days, it helped inspire in me the notion of becoming a successful writer, maybe even achieving the ultimate goal of making enough money to be a full-time writer and quit the day job.

Time, however, can be cruel to dreams. As dust settled over the rectangular scrap of paper resting atop the laptop on my desk, it seemed as though I had foolishly allowed myself to be suckered in. No riches presented themselves. No books -- magnificently conceived and self-edited -- came flying from my fingertips. The abominable cookie lied!

Or did it? Maybe I misunderstood.

Yup, I'm pretty sure I did. Search for the verb in the fortune and you'll see what I mean.

"Develop."

New and rewarding opportunities will soon "develop" for you. They won't be handed across like a present, or awarded like a diploma. Just as when you plant a new flowerbed, the development begins the moment the plants are in the ground, but the flowerbed itself doesn't mature for another few years, if ever.

So that's where I am. I'm in the development stage, which began right around the time I ate that cookie. The blog is going strong, the first draft of the novel is nearly complete, and I've been able to experiment with self-publishing thanks to the blog. I'd have to say things are developing nicely.

Pretty smart cookie!




© 2011 Mark Feggeler

I Heart Slovenia

I am continually amazed, surprised, flabbergasted, and flummoxed by the attention this little blog receives. While I am fully aware it is not a break-out success with thousands of loyal followers, I'm still shocked when more than two people actually give a poop about what I have to say.

Just last week, the blog passed 5,000 hits. That doesn't mean 5,000 visitors. It simply means the blog's 63 Facebook fans, who receive an email every time I throw a post out here, have been kind enough to return many times. Some of you also forward links to your friends and family. (By the way, if you have forwarded my blog to other people -- Thank you!)

What makes managing the blog especially interesting is seeing where the hits come from. Last October I removed the Feedjit tracking tool that identified individual visitors because (a) it was a major distraction and (b) it had a bit of a Big Brotherish feel to it. But Blogger still provides basic statistical information so I can identify the most popular posts and tell what parts of the world you readers represent.

As of this moment, 96.3% of all hits to Ramblings of a Very Pale Man have come from within the United States of America. Where in the U.S., exactly? I don't know, but I can hazard a good guess that the meat of them are from New York (where I was born and raised) and North Carolina (where I've lived for 20+ years).

But that means 3.7% of the hits come from other countries, and not necessarily the most obvious places. It can be interesting to see which posts attract visitors from what countries.

For instance, somebody in Russia loves the "72 O'Clock" post from September 2010. Every now and then a Muscovite still finds his way to that post. I don't understand the attraction, since it isn't even one of my favorite writings, but I do appreciate the continuing interest.

And the most recent post -- "Backpack Revolution!" -- was the first to draw interest from visitors in South Korea, Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, among other countries. Couldn't have something to do with the use of the word "revolution" in the title, could it?

Regardless of the reason, and in spite of the small percentage they represent, I am tickled so many foreign visitors have found their way to the blog. In order of number of hits, these visitors represent the following countries:

Russia
Canada
Denmark
Slovenia
Germany
Poland
United Kingdom
Sweden
France
China
India
Netherlands
Australia
South Korea
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
Brazil
Iraq
Pakistan
Taiwan
Vietnam

The best part is learning about places I'd never heard of before. When Slovenia suddenly popped up last month, I had to research it on Wikipedia just to figure out where in the world it is.

Just think about it. One of the two million people living in the third-most forested country in Europe -- possibly in the bustling metropolis of Ljubljana along the Sava River, or the quaint mountain village of Slovenj Gradec with its 15th century religious frescos -- has returned to the blog 15 times in the last 30 days.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, thanks for dropping in!



© 2011 Mark Feggeler