Compact Fluorescent Lamp Dies: Man Regains Sight

Burndtree, squinting Marpole resident and blogging whiner, seemingly has regained his eye-sight in an unscheduled household chore involving a failing compact fluorescent lamp in his living-room torchiere.

"I dug out the spare CFL in its dusty bag. It's been a few years. Happened to read the packet." explained Burndtree.

"Besides the fact the CFL contains toxic mercury, the packet recommends the 13-watt CFL in place of those 60-watt incandescents I used to burn there. Then I read the lumens: how bright each would be. My eyes just about popped from my head. 850 from my good ol' fashioned incandescent. Only 800 from this...thing! No wonder the place has seemed so gloomy. For years. No amount of positive thinking on my part ever was gonna lighten up the place..."

Burndtree continued cracking jokes until the reporter threatened to leave.

Burndtree got to the point: "Screwed in a 60-watt incandescent. Had to squint, 'coz it was so bright. I can read my scribbles now. I can see!"

1200 Limos...Now There's a Number

So...the Copenhagen Summit's one for the history books, is it? Should really edit that line, insert here that So. Adding a question mark, naturally.

Same regarding their zero-hour agreement of sorts before parting ways. About as binding as Kyoto was. Sooo? I am forcing a smile, really.

1200 limos — oooh, there's a number!

Usually these summits, as they call them, produce at the end a group photo, grinners and growlers wearing something colourful, like a holiday snap. Media photo-op and a souvenir: as much for them as us, watching them — some of us even waiting on them. The eye-popper of 1200 limos will be how I'll remember that august gathering. That most recent august et cetera. 1200 limos. Cyclist-and-Public-Transit friendly Copenhagen hadn't enough limos of her own for ferrying the august et cetera about their august work: limos had to be got in from Sweden and Germany; I imagine driven in, or onboard fragrant diesel transports.

And the lake of jet fuel: who could not see that? Globe-trekkin' jetsetters, their entourage, and accompanying media, they gotta burn that jet fuel. Perhaps an exaggeration, there. Perhaps not a lake. Perhaps I'm imagining just a bit too imaginatively, there. Just as I've been imagining too, too long now that all this getting-together could be managed best via this teleconferencing I've heard has made massive techno-leaps since soup-tin and string. Most greenly, these summiteers could summit, via the blessed phone. And no need at all then for a promised forest in carbon offsets every time they yearn for another get-together someplace exotic.

But they do love their buzzwords, eh? As much as they clearly love to talk. And meet, evidently. Canada, too. We have our own career summiteers. And entourage. And hypocrisy.

They're as a group mildly entertaining. They're hardly guides. I believe I shall now go stomp down some soup tins: that always puts me in a lighter mood.

Wonderin'

I'm in a wondering mood. Wondering, first off, if I still remember how to write stuff such as this. Wondering if this moment, and anything I might manage doing over on Protag, will be a fading memory Monday morn: I might catch myself staring in the bathroom mirror, like someone back from vacation, and only the sunburn reminds it really happened.

Wondering about the seafood tanks at Superstore this morning, too. Live tilapia, nosing into the current bubbling from the aerator. Among them, a tiny not-tilapia: a whiskered catfish, sleek and agile as a torpedo, and more like a specimen you might purchase for the aquarium than dinner.

"Prob'ly not from around here," said the old gent, who had stopped by to eyeball rainbow trout in the next tank.

Old gent then recounted fond days of his youth, in Alberta, in the Rocky Mountains near Montana, and pulling out trout by the dozen. We both remarked about the price stuck on the tank edge: that two-pound trout, about twelve dollars.

Neil Young, along with the Shocking Pinks, Wonderin', just on the radio, started me wanderin'. Work's been...work. I'll leave it at that. It's been a long busy season.