"Midnight Sun"<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I don’t know about you, but I used to plead with my babysitter to let me stay up and watch "Twilight Zone".\u00c2\u00a0 At least until I saw "Eye Of The Beholder" and kept crying so long and so hard that I was still awake when my parents got home.\u00c2\u00a0 Felice lifted her upper lip forming a pig snout the other day and I had a flashback to the show and was creeped out for hours!\u00c2\u00a0 But "Eye Of The Beholder" wasn’t the only episode that left an indelible mark.\u00c2\u00a0 "Midnight Sun" creeped me out too.\u00c2\u00a0 Because of the HEAT!\u00c2\u00a0 And in the end, the darkness, the cold.<\/p>\nThe Earth is moving towards the sun.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody has left New York, driving towards the melting polar ice caps.\u00c2\u00a0 The sweat is palpable.\u00c2\u00a0 Your TV screen almost gets moist.\u00c2\u00a0 Heat is scary.\u00c2\u00a0 Especially when you feel there’s no respite.<\/p>\n
I used to tell everybody about enduring 122 degree temperatures in Sharm El Sheik.\u00c2\u00a0 I had no idea it would hit 119 in WOODLAND HILLS!<\/p>\n
No wonder my sister called to see if we were going to Malibu.\u00c2\u00a0 She lives in that godforsaken burb.\u00c2\u00a0 Hopefully she survived, she made it through, I’m almost too scared to do the research.<\/p>\n
Research.\u00c2\u00a0 Science.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’ve been following the Administration you know that facts never get in the way of their agenda.\u00c2\u00a0 Stories are spun for a religious heartland that seems to believe the Rapture is imminent.\u00c2\u00a0 For the rest of us heathens, when we open the discredited "New York Times" and see what is truly happening in this world, we freak out.<\/p>\n
But it’s all a political game.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no center.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re either with us or against us.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about winning.\u00c2\u00a0 Winning what, I’m not sure, but victory is all that counts.\u00c2\u00a0 Ain’t that America, as John Cougar Mellencamp once sang.<\/p>\n
But, suddenly, it’s no longer business as usual.<\/p>\n
I’ve been noticing the change.\u00c2\u00a0 This year Mammoth Mountain had the biggest snowfall in its history.\u00c2\u00a0 Moving around some snow by the base of Chair 1, they were able to stay open until July 4th.\u00c2\u00a0 Great, I got to go skiing the week before.\u00c2\u00a0 But when I was there June 20th thirty years ago, in a season that saw less snow, there was more of it.\u00c2\u00a0 Mammoth used to stay open until July 4th EVERY year.\u00c2\u00a0 Why is it no longer de rigueur?<\/p>\n
But who cares, right?\u00c2\u00a0 Who’s paying attention.<\/p>\n
But then you go see "An Inconvenient Truth" and it’s like that old Leonard Cohen song, "Everybody Knows".\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, everybody knows something is changing, so why in the hell don’t we DO something about it?<\/p>\n
I’d like to tell you Al Gore has been totally rehabilitated.\u00c2\u00a0 That he’s not the wooden wonk of yore.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t believe the hype, he still is.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s still the guy you’d avoid asking to the bar.\u00c2\u00a0 Not feeling bad about it, since he’s got Tipper to play board games with.\u00c2\u00a0 I think years of trying to communicate with the average American have turned him into someone who’s lost his original personality.\u00c2\u00a0 Obviously, Al is smart.\u00c2\u00a0 So why does he try to appear just folks dumb?\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn’t play.\u00c2\u00a0 We revere smart people.\u00c2\u00a0 Oops, USED to.\u00c2\u00a0 Even as recently as the Clinton era.\u00c2\u00a0 When Bill would give speeches with no notes, we’d be wowed.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, inner city youths rap instead of study and smart people have to tone their act down, so they don’t appear elitist, appear to be better than the rest of us.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, how come we revere Floyd Landis and Tiger Woods but to be a brilliant, educated man, is to garner scorn and derision?\u00c2\u00a0 Beats me.\u00c2\u00a0 Best and the brightest?\u00c2\u00a0 The friendliest and the dumbest.\u00c2\u00a0 At least in public life.<\/p>\n
Al is smart.\u00c2\u00a0 And even though the whole movie has got the feel of his inventing the Internet, it leaves your jaw hanging.<\/p>\n
I was prepared.\u00c2\u00a0 By that documentary on HBO.\u00c2\u00a0 That showed the before and after pictures in Alaska.\u00c2\u00a0 Glacier today, ocean and mountains tomorrow\/now.\u00c2\u00a0 But I didn’t know the science.\u00c2\u00a0 Al Gore puts forth the science.\u00c2\u00a0 And after seeing this movie, your whole outlook changes.<\/p>\n
We went straight from the movie theatre back to Felice’s domicile.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, we stopped for ice cream, but it was so hot you couldn’t eat the goop OUTSIDE!\u00c2\u00a0 We had to duck into a Starbucks, to eat our ice cream!<\/p>\n
And, after enduring the night, like in some bizarre Harlan Ellison novella, I ended up spending the following afternoon in front of the computer, surfing ski sites.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only was it bittersweet reliving my youth in the northeast, I noticed how there USED TO BE a ski season back there.\u00c2\u00a0 And it went into April every year.<\/p>\n
It’s kind of weird.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like living in a war movie.\u00c2\u00a0 After you realize that the enemy is out there, you can’t forget it.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re on the outlook at all times.\u00c2\u00a0 Like in today’s "Wall Street Journal", wherein on the front page it is revealed that on the 19th of this month, England recorded its highest July temperature EVER!\u00c2\u00a0 97.7 degrees.\u00c2\u00a0 In ENGLAND??<\/p>\n
Something is terribly wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 And in the defense of corporations and the so-called economy, nothing is being done.\u00c2\u00a0 The Clean Air Act has been gutted.\u00c2\u00a0 Gas-guzzling SUVs are still being mass-produced.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like we’re driving towards the cliff.<\/p>\n
Now after civilization burns up, it will be like that "Twilight Zone" episode.\u00c2\u00a0 Man may not survive, but the planet will.\u00c2\u00a0 It will get dark.\u00c2\u00a0 And the scenario will start all over again.\u00c2\u00a0 We put a man on the moon.\u00c2\u00a0 We stifled air pollution.\u00c2\u00a0 But global warming is just too big a challenge?<\/p>\n
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I didn’t think I needed to see "An Inconvenient Truth".\u00c2\u00a0 But then it was in excess of 110 degrees in the Valley and Felice’s air conditioning couldn’t break 84 and I wanted a respite from the HEAT! It’s been kind of scary in Los Angeles the past couple of days.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like that "Twilight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-7O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}