Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The frost is on the pumpkin...

... the long pants are on the UPS delivery guys.

Well, the shorts had a good, long run this year.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Partly cloudy with a chance of shorts

It's been unusually warm lately in New Jersey. Not freakishly warm, just enough to mean you don't need a jacket most of the time, sometimes even at night. That's kind of strange for mid October.

At the same time, I've noticed that UPS drivers are still wearing their famous brown shorts at this late date. Now, as a much referenced article in the Onion joked a few years ago, many people believe that the start of spring is heralded by the first set of bare UPS knees they see.

Conversely, perhaps autumn is ushered in by the disappearance of said knees beneath a pair of trusty brown trousers. This year, though, it doesn't seem to be happening.

I've often wondered if there's some sort of corporate policy, an annual memo, perhaps, that tells the drivers to change from long pants to short. Maybe the memo didn't go out this fall. Or, maybe there's something more sinister going on.

Not to belabor this global warming thing, but in recent years we've seen and heard much about the indications of an environment in peril. Usually it's the polar ice cap. Sometimes it's tropical sea animals showing up in northern climes. Maybe now it's the UPS guys.

Maybe they know something we don't.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Why not do it anyway?

Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize will certainly add more fuel to the global warming debate. You know, the war between the people who say it's going on and there's something we can do about it, and those who say it's all a bunch of hooey and climate change is all a part of the cycle of the earth's environment.

The thing that strikes me is that even if it is just a cycle (and I don't think that's the case), there's no harm in reducing pollution and conserving resources. No private citizen has a vested interest in having more pollution in the air. Major polluters, well, you can see that it costs them more to run clean operations than dirty, but that even seems a bit short sighted. After all, you gotta figure that your customer base will shrink a bit when you can buy shorefront property in Utah.