Videos hosted by Michael Erlewine

I live in Michigan where we are surrounded by 84% of all the fresh water in North America and 21% of all the fresh water in the entire world. As if to counteract that, the entire lower peninsula of Michigan sits on the largest salt deposit on Earth, 30,000 trillion tons. So we have a lot of water here and it is a renewable resource.

Some years ago I had the opportunity to take a number of trips into the Florida Everglades and, as a naturalist, totally loved it. But one thing that worried me down there was how shallow the groundwater in Florida is and how easily polluted. For some reason the pollution there sticks in my mind as the archetype for the following mini-rant.

The analogy is that our mind, at least our mental "surface" water, is also easily polluted. As a kid I grew up with five-and-ten-cent stores all around. There were also expensive things, of course, but all of the little stuff was priced low. Those days are gone. Everything today is offered at a premium price, as if it were the keystone or missing ingredient, the pearl of great price. The obvious result is that now it is much more expensive just to live. There are no five-and-ten-cent stores and even the dollar-stores that replaced them often have things that cost more than a dollar.

This pushing-the-price envelope on every item is bad enough, but what is equally disturbing is the advertising pollution that has run rampant. It is as near as your Internet browser where popups and every other way of distracting us from our browsing has taken over. I see it also is true of the subscription movie services. The lower-level services have popups and sometimes even crawlers across the bottom of the screen while we are trying to watch a movie that we paid money for. And now I have seen my first ad in the middle of a movie, "Avatar." How invasive is that?

I won't even comment much on network TV, where the ads have gotten so long that I can hit the kitchen and come back with some kind of a snack (almost a meal) before they resume programming. I refuse to watch ad-TV any longer.

You know I could go on and on here, pointing out how invasive advertising media has become. If we worry about the destruction of our environment and wild areas, which we should worry about, the invasion of our mind and mental space is as bad, if not worse. It also has consequences.

There are almost no virgin stands of programming left that have not been embroidered in some way. Even HBO is succumbing to fringe invasion. And let's not even talk about news anchors and talking heads. They all look like they are made out of plastic and doll's hair.

Someone is being paid and encouraged to infringe on our entertainment space in every possible way, until what? Until we stick our head out of the window and scream "I'm not taking it anymore!" or something like that.

And as far as the politicians are concerned, I hate to even mention the dregs in Congress; how on earth do they stay in office? What's wrong with us for not systematically removing them, each and every one, like the fat ticks that they are?

It seems that every magazine, newspaper, TV program, subscription service, not to mention the Internet, email, Twitter, and what-have-you is being methodically degraded by an army of ants that work 24x7 to invade and destroy whatever little peace-of-mind that we used to enjoy. It is global and it is total.

It is like a virus that has no cure, a one-way curse that is eating our life like maggots eat a corpse, until there is nothing whatsoever left. And we do just about nothing to change it. We barely vote!

I won't go on, because you know exactly what I am pointing at here. I pray that this is just a passing phase, the idea that everything, literally everything, is now fair game to reduce in value and size. How about all the products that successively appear in smaller and smaller sizes, to save a dime? Pretty soon candy bars will come with a magnifying glass so that we can see what we are buying, not that I eat candy of any kind. Those days are gone.

I will stop now. Thanks for listening and please help us find a way to stop all of this. It's time to fire the bastards in Washington, imprison the Wall-Street smart-asses, clean house with the media, and take back a certain degree of our dignity and peace of mind.

Talk about environmental pollution. When it comes to the invasion of our mental peace-of-mind, we don't have much environment left to pollute.

End of mini-rant.

[Photo taken yesterday.]