"I needed water, what am I going to do? God has a funny way of reminding us we’re human."

"My mouth got dry, and I had to get some water... You know, when you give a speech on a podium and the water is right there — but when you don’t, you start looking around thinking, ‘Where am I going to get the water?’ I figured I was better off just taking that water and taking the hit for it then being unable to pronounce my words. It’d been a long day at work, we’d already done an 18-minute recording in Spanish — and you know, my mouth got dry, what can I say? But I was happy overall with what we were able to deliver."

Rubio had an opportunity last night, responding to the SOTU, and he's got a new opportunity this morning. The most interesting thing — and this is our humanity showing through too — is that he needed water. That was more interesting than his speech and even more interesting than Obama's big, long speech we'd just endured. Something real happened! Spontaneity! We all identify. I love the look on his face as he glances at the camera while drinking:



I read the look to say: Oh, no! Is this going to ruin my political career?! This! A little sip of water?! Meanwhile, it's a big win for Poland Spring in the tiny bottle form. That was a hell of a product endorsement. You can't buy product placement like that.

Rubio and Rubio supporters can make taking a drink from a little water bottle into a thing. It's such an innocent and pure foible, needing a drink of water. It's a nice meme for him. Humanizing. Wholesome. Downside is: Too much plastic waste. So recycle. The best way to deal with the bottles is to refill them with tap water. And the best way to deal with a goof like that is to refill it with humor (and branding).

ADDED: You know, it was pre-recorded. They could have done another recording if they'd wanted to.

What's the most likely reason why they didn't do another recording?
	They assumed no one would notice or make a big deal out of it.
	Rubio was too tired, too unfresh, to do it another time.
	They did try again, but he was worse.
	They thought the water move was funny, humanizing, and a good meme.
pollcode.com free polls

At the Careful Composter Café...

... be green... and orange.

"Cash for Clunkers" environmental cost/benefit balance seems to have been negative.

"According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), almost 100% of a vehicle can be recycled."

Even the fluids can be reused.... Transmission and brake fluids, anti-freeze, oil, gasoline, diesel and Freon from air conditioners are harvested at scrap yards for use in other vehicles. However, still-functioning engines are the most valuable part of a scrapped car....

Many of the cars that were traded in during Cash for Clunkers were perfectly functioning cars in good condition, and excellent candidates to have their engines and other parts recycled. With the engine destroyed, many clunkers bypassed the recycling companies and went straight to junkyards to be crushed and shredded.... [The engines were] destroyed to prevent the vehicles from being resold and taking the road again.....

[Cash for Clunkers] mandated that the clunkers be crushed or shredded within 180 days, regardless of whether all the usable parts were salvaged or not... Cars that are shredded are turned into small, palm-sized pieces of metal... For each ton of metal recovered by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of shredder residue are produced, meaning about 3 to 4.5 million tons of shredder residue is sent to landfills every year....

Well, that's the perspective of the recycling industry, and it's all information that was known when the program was adopted. This isn't news, just an industry press release. That should make us skeptical, but also, if it's true, more critical of the government, since (I assume) they knew all this and did it anyway.

Recycling your turkey-frying oil in Madison, Wisconsin for the greater good of America and the world.

A City of Madison news release:

"We know that there are many people who have lots of oil left over after frying their Thanksgiving turkey," Madison recycling coordinator George Dreckmann said. "We are very excited to be able to offer them a chance to turn that old cooking oil into fuel for cars and trucks in our area."

Dreckmann — a euonym! The Oxford English Dictionary defines "dreck" — from Yiddish drek (German dreck) filth, dregs, dung — as "Rubbish, trash, worthless debris":

1922 J. Joyce Ulysses ii. 491 Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!
1947 Horizon Feb. 90 The anonymous countryside littered with heterogeneous dreck.
1965 E. Lacy Double Trouble v. 58 Drek your dolls are!.. I wouldn't stick my customers with such junk!...

Back to the press release:

"Every year thousands of gallons of old cooking oil is tossed in the landfill or flushed down the drain. Since we began our cooking oil program we have recovered over thousands [sic] of cooking oil" Dreckmann said. "Now we can recover this resource and use it to reduce our reliance on foreign oil and cut air pollution."

Cooking oil must be brought to the 1501 W. Badger Rd. or 4602 Sycamore Av....

So hundreds/thousands of citizens with their gallon jugs of used oil will get in their cars and drive to the oil collection site and then various unseen processes will be applied to convert that stuff into something useful. Is there a net benefit to the environment and to the American economy? I don't know, but think how wonderful it is that the nice people of Madison can feel good about themselves (after they went ahead and deep-fried the turkey instead of just roasting it).

Oh, Althouse, why are you so cynical?!  I'm sorry. Let me paint a different picture. The turkey-frying Madisonian hangs gallon jugs of used oil on his handlebars and bikes down South Park Street to Badger Road.

The "Dull Men's Club."

"Dull-men's groups—and the sentiment behind them—have been around for some time."

No topic is too small or large. ...

"I have a question," piped up Scott MacInness, a 75-year-old retired machinist. "We have a person living up near where I am who apparently isn't carrying a full sea bag. How do we get this person to stop throwing all their trash in the recycling tub?"

Suggestions ranged from "stand out there sometime" to "get inside the thing and when he opens it, go 'aha!' "

Mr. MacInness hopped up to refill his coffee.

"Can I ask you a question?" another man shouted to him. "Why do you carry a spoon?"

Mr. MacInness tapped his pocket and confirmed that he does indeed faithfully carry a spoon. "Because you can't stir a cup of coffee with that little brown plastic straw! It will not make the sugar mix!"

"What the hell you need sugar for?" shouted another member, igniting a conversation about the taste of black coffee.

New Age nail polish nonsense.

"SpaRitual Nail Lacquers fuse the disciplines of color therapy with numerology to deliver vibrant pigments, which have the power to nurture, ignite, soothe or seduce, and convey unique messages with numerological value and meaning. Each blend is formulated for superior shine, with a quick drying time and flawless coverage. Packaged in Italian crafted bottles from recycled glass, these sleek bottles feature a patented Plum Cap™ for non-slip grip and custom brushes for optimal application of lacquer."

(I hesitate to link, but if you want to convince yourself that text represents real commerce click here.)

"Walker proposed ending state-mandated community recycling, which was signed into law by Gov. Tommy Thompson in 1990, as well as elimination of the grants that help local governments pay for recycling."

Good! Right? If recycling is worth doing, it should be paying for itself without a state government subsidy, or, if not, let local communities decide if they want to cough up the money to do it anyway. It's time for decentralization, efficiency, realism... not fluffy-headed idealism. Saving money is the morality we need, not posing as good people by doing something if it actually makes no sense. I'm for pragmatism, not narcissism.

[George Dreckmann, Madison's recycling coordinator,] said it costs nearly $6 million to run the city's recycling programs and Madison receives about $1.1 million from a state recycling grant. He sees few other ways to replace the money other than cutting back the recycling program. One possibility, he said, might be to no longer recycle glass, which is expensive to process. 

Exactly. Do that. Why should the state waste money incentivizing something that shouldn't be done? Why should Madison folk get to stoke their feeling of self-goodness with money from non-Madison Wisconsin?

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me"... Part 3.

Awesome Printer takes up my challenge to make the snake friendlier and adopts my rewrite of "Don't Tread on Me":



And Henry (the commenter) comes up with these variations:

Warehouses full of unsaleable recyclables.

And was this not predictable?

“We’re warehousing it and warehousing it and warehousing it,” said Johnny Gold, senior vice president at the Newark Group, a company that has 13 recycling plants across the country. Mr. Gold said the industry had seen downturns before but not like this. “We never saw this coming.”...

The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.

Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too — like grocery chains and other retailers — have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.

But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.

Isn't this revisionism? I remember reading all along that recycling was not the economic benefit it was cracked up to be.

"I read online. I think it's better for the environment not to take the newspaper."

Oh, yes, dear readers, that's what your humble blogger said, verbatim, to the telemarketer who just called to try to sell me home delivery of the New York Times.

Did you know I was such an environmentalist?

Now, how do you think the telemarketer responded:

1. "But the New York Times has many articles about the environment! It's an excellent source of news about global warming and green household tips."

2. "You can recycle. You can share the newspaper with someone who doesn't have a computer. And many people prefer doing the crossword puzzle on paper."

3. "Oh yeah?"

How are you disposing of your fluorescent bulbs?

It's not easy.

[M]uch of the nation has no real recycling network for CFLs, despite the ubiquitous PR campaigns, rebates and giveaways encouraging people to adopt the swirly darlings of the energy-conscious movement. Recyclers and others guess that only a small fraction of CFLs sold in the United States are recycled, while the rest are put out with household trash or otherwise discarded....

Compact fluorescent bulbs each contain roughly 5 milligrams of mercury, which health professionals say is tiny in relation to the amount in a glass thermometer. Using that estimate, almost 2 tons of mercury were in the 380 million sold last year....

Kim N. Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati, said the bigger concern is the hazard that would result if the mercury from millions of bulbs escapes into the air and waterways before working up the food chain.

"I'm just amazed that the government is not paying more attention to this," Dietrich said.

Me too. It's obvious that much of those 200 tons is going to go into ordinary waste dumps every year. [CORRECTION: 2 tons.]

I hate fluorescent bulbs anyway, for aesthetic reasons. I'm willing to save energy by turning off or dimming more lights. But maybe you don't feel the aesthetic problem and you don't care about my trivial suffering. Why don't you care about the mercury?

Why bury trees?

Carbon sequestration!

But wouldn't it be much better to bury paper — like all that newspaper and office paper that we've been wasting energy recycling?

John Kerry sends "a Christmas card with a to-do list."

Why am I always picking on John Kerry? I don't know. I can't seem to help it. But maybe, just maybe, it's really something about him:

The senator from Massachusetts and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, sent out 75,000 Christmas cards with pictures of trees at each season. The Kerrys gushed over their "gratitude for the beauty of these trees and the life they represent."...

The card came in an odd-looking envelope, one of those with a return-mail flap and instructions to send it to . . . well, to a recycling company, so "it can be made into new carpet tile."...

We want a "world without waste . . . where every product either returns safely to the soil or becomes a new product."

So the card instructs: "1. Remove this panel and insert it along with the card into the envelope. 2. Expose adhesive strip and fold the flap over to seal the envelope. 3. Drop this mailer into any U.S. mailbox."

Of all the sanctimonious idiocy! Avoiding the production of the second envelope would save more than the recycling of the card. And that's not even counting the energy costs of driving paper mail all over the place.

Also, how come I didn't get a card?

Recycling in Madison.

Regular readers know of my tribulations trying to throw out the trash properly in Madison. A reader sends this link to an article about the new recycling program in Seattle, because it's got this about Madison:

In Madison, Wis., a liberal college town that embraced recycling enthusiastically when it began in 1991, a fine has never been imposed.

"Seventy percent of the population is going to walk across a bed of hot coals to recycle a bottle. They just do that. They believe in it," said George Dreckmann, Madison's recycling coordinator. More than 90 percent follow the law, and Dreckmann said it doesn't make sense economically or practically to go after the few violators.

Useful information!

You know, we're required to use special clear plastic bags that are emblazoned with the words "Madison Pride." It's not bad enough that you have to put your bottles on display to your neighbors. Good thing we drank a lot of milk this week so there are plenty of bulky milk containers to cover up all the wine and beer bottles that conveniently sink to the bottom -- otherwise the locals might think ill of us -- but then they'd probably think ill of us if we had a lot of diet soda cans -- or even soda cans, period. But we've got to buy special bags that compel us to manifest a prideful attitude about the low-level virtue of recycling. Arrgh.... Time to uncork a bottle of wine and drink a toast to the cloying self-love that swirls through my lovely little city.

But regular readers want to know: How did the test chair work? Well, the chair was gone, but I've got to allow for the possibility that some ordinary citizen came by and decided to pick up the chairs, a la Holly Woodlawn in "Trash." (Note: any esoteric allusion to beer bottles is quite unintended.)

Life in Madison: trash, string.

One of the distinctive features of life in Madison is the difficulty of following the trash collection rules. A thick booklet is mailed to us annually to let us know just what we are allowed to put out for the collectors and how we need to separate and package it. Sometimes you put something out, and you even try to follow the rules, but the trash collector doesn't pick it up. He doesn't leave a note identifying the rule you've failed to comply with, and you have to guess, try putting it out a different way next week, and hope the trash has become acceptable and collectible. I wore myself out on Saturday cutting down a lot of cardboard boxes. I'd had six pieces of furniture delivered, and they were quite elaborately cartoned. Recycling of corrugated cardboard is mandatory -- except for pizza boxes, for which recycling is forbidden. So I worked quite hard getting the boxes cut down and taped in a pile. But I've had my cardboard snubbed by trash collectors in the past, and I knew there was some rule about how small the piles had to be. When I dragged the four big piles out the curb this morning, I figured I was probably wasting my time and dreaded the recutting and taping that lay ahead. How happy I was when I returned home today and saw that the merciful trashman had picked up the oversized cardboard!



And about that tape. I wanted to tie up the cardboard with string. With string, you can make a slip knot and use it to tighten down the layers of cardboard. It's much better than tape. When I was doing the boxes on Saturday, I realized I was out of string and drove over to Target to buy some. Where do they put the string? Is it over on the housewares side of the store with the woman-oriented products? It's an ordinary household item like a sponge or a hanger isn't it? Or is it way the hell on the other side of the store, past the masses of clothing, with the home repair items, on the male-oriented side of the big store? Maybe over here with the wrapping materials? Here's packaging tape, so where is the string? I pick up the red telephone and ask about string. They say it's back in Automotive, near the back wall of the store. Okay. Automotive? What's automotive about string? I go back and find some odd things like rope and natural jute twine packaged for the crafts market. No normal string, such as you'd use to tie up cardboard. I find a stockboy and explain what I'm looking for. He says those things back in Automotive are really all they have, that Target is phasing out string. Phasing out string? How can you phase out string? It's a standard item. Well, he says, consolingly, maybe come back around March and they should have some kite string.



UPDATE: A reader writes:

Thank you for your post on Madison trash. I lived there in the early 90s. After we moved in, we had a prodigious number of cardboard boxes to break down. After several rebuffed efforts to recycle them curbside, I called the recyclers to ask what I had to do to get my boxes picked up. Elaborate rules were laid out. I asked what I would do if I were disabled, thinking that surely in Madison someone would have thought about those of us who cannot dice corrugated cardboard into precise squares. They suggested I ask a friend to help. I reminded them that I had boxes because I had just moved in. Because I had just moved in, I had no friends. No luck. Rules are rules.

Though he was new to town, he displayed some Madison-savvy by going with the what-about-the-disabled angle. I love when one liberal cause is played against another. Accommodating the disabled has just got to trump recycling!



ANOTHER UPDATE: I'm getting email about the difficulty of finding string at Target. And a propos of string, a reader sends this link.

Early morning.

Did you see that the first post today has a 4:33 a.m. timestamp? And yesterday's was 5:02? My two-hour 8 a.m. class has completely transformed my biorhythms, apparently. I was already a morning person, but this is a bit eerie. At least the NYT is already here at that hour. The Wall Street Journal is heard thudding onto the front sidewalk some time later. I don't subscribe to the WSJ, but for months someone else's subscription has been delivered to me. Why doesn't that person notice and call them? You may say that I ought to call, that I have an ethical obligation to call, and I agree. I called after three days of misdeliveries. I had to go through several touch-tone menu levels and then wait on hold for quite a while. Finally, I got through to a human being, and I patiently explained the problem and was told it would be fixed. Am I supposed to do that again? Frankly, I think the WSJ has an ethical obligation to come help me with my recycling!