USA convert to LPG?

||| Seriously, all this international shipping is homogenising the ||| world, which might have its advantages, but is a shame in other ||| ways. || || It's a case of strawberries, when i was a nipper you could only get || them in summer. Now it's strawberry season all year round. Keep || starwerriries for summer i say!

Yup, I remember that! The day that strawberries were in the grocer's (not Tesco!) was a major landmark in the year. And the arrival of new potatoes. Oh hang on - they were flown in from Jersey. And Egypt. Seems like we've been doing this a while - only now it's not just a few items, it's everything. We had some mangetout peas a while ago - flown in from Zimbabwe, I think. If driving a 4x4 is an environmental crime, that must be a hanging offence. All those jet emissions pumped into the upper atmosphere so I can have a rather tasteless bit of greenery on my plate, when you can grow better in your own garden.

What *is* the world coming to?

IIRC polytunnels have extended the time strawberries can be grown in this country through until Autumn.

One of those "what is the world coming to" moments happened to me today when shopping for strawberries. I was surprised to find some weeks ago that something in the supermarket had been especially bred for taste, in this case strawberries, marked as "bred for taste". They were indeed very nice, much better than normal. Since then, they've been replaced with strawberries labelled as "especially bred for fragrance"!! Bloody fragrance! Who cares what they taste like (and they weren't that nice), as long as they smell nice?

|| I can just see the prehistoric times headline now 'GLOBAL WARMING || HITS ALL TIME HIGH AS ICE AGE MELTS'

Indeed. They must have printed headline that a few times over the course of the last few million years. The Earth has been going through a heating/cooling cycle since time began. I have seen nothing in the media to convince me that the current situation is anything but part of the normal pattern

|| BTW, I'm only kidding, i do care about the pollution & environment || we live in, but it needs to be taken sensibly, not knee jerk.

Agreed.

On or around Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:23:28 +0100, "Richard Brookman" enlightened us thusly:

speed. normally it takes thousands of years to get as much warming as we've had in about 100. Or so I understand it, anyway. The actual amount of warming is not out of the ordinary - the planet has at times been warmer than it is now, as well as colder.

There are 2 aspects of the pace of warming that are worrisome: 1) it might be that because it's faster it's going further, and 2) The plants and animals take time to react to changes and if the change happens too fast they won't adapt. Take trees for example - typically, a given tree species grows in places with a given temperature and humidity. If the conditions move further north, say, then the trees will die. however, it takes decades for trees to establish fully.

I can understand the rational of many people, who most often have no depth of scientific qualification at all and who usually also have a life style aspiration they need to justify, who simply dismiss those 'crazy tree hugging greenies' as mere fools, on the basis of the somewhat faux wisdom that the world has undergone many traumatic climate changes over the aeons. There is one set of scientific facts that have been constantly and far too quietly repeated in answer to these shallow assertions and that is the nature of the exponential carbon build up. The study of isotopes has revealed beyond any argument that the carbons concerned are man made and not from such sources as volcanic and other natural activities, furthermore from core samples taken at hundreds of diverse locations across the planet we also know that the speed of carbon build up is clearly linked to a rate of climate change that is unprecedented, to our considerable knowledge, within the last several hundred million years. Why these salient facts are constantly ignored by some is miracle of wilful ignorance that must keep the oil moguls laughing incredulously all the way to their banks.

Bullshit baffles brains.

On or around Sun, 30 Jul 2006 16:19:52 +0100, snipped-for-privacy@movingvision.co.uk enlightened us thusly:

like I said. It's the speed of the change that is different.

In message , Austin Shackles writes

And I entirely agree with you. You write a lot of sense. The hypnotic powers of the aplomb of confident self assertion unfortunately work both ways. There's them that talk bollocks and then there's the others ;-))

It's ones duty to always refute bollocks were ever one encounters it.

Because bullshit baffles brains

And a damned fine time to release a movie

In message , Derek writes

Thanks for the link Derek. The fragmentation of TV and Film distribution platforms and the consequent shattering of long relied upon business models within the industry that will come to full fruition with the impending arrival of 'Super Broadband' and 'Super Digital Compression' technology, removes power and censorship from those allegedly democratically elected politicians and their big business controllers. It's the only way to open the eyes of a largely cap doffing public and if that means warts and all. So be it.

Time for the light of publicity to be shone into the corners that our political masters would rather be kept dark . This movie could well be the first documentary I will actually pay to see on the big screen rather than as with Michael Moores sterling efforts buying on tape/dvd but I fear that general release is unlikely across the bigger chains. Still without a Villa to lend out I don't think my view will be noticed. Derek

On or around Mon, 31 Jul 2006 21:10:45 GMT, "Derek" enlightened us thusly:

interestingly, turny-blur and arnie have just made an agreement to do summat about carbon emissions. blur predictably declined to actually criticise the shrub, but arnie wasn't so circumspect, and made comments to the effect that the leadership on environmental issues wasn't good.

In message , Austin Shackles writes

This the same Arnie who initiated the civilian version of the mega gas guzzling Humvee?