Tuesday, December 26, 2006

A Cold Reminder of Global Warming

It's starting to happen people.

"Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

"As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

"Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented."

But when all the islands are gone where will the plutocrats go to abuse people working for $2 a day?

[Source: The Independent (UK) via Americablog.com]

Why Are There No Boxing Day Songs?

I mean, there are songs for Christmas Eve and songs for Christmas. There are songs for Hanukkah and even one for Kwanzaa (Shirley Q. Liquor's "The 12 Days of Kwanzaa"). There are songs for just about everything but none for Boxing Day.

We (well, I) here at the Pop Culture Institute are going to add the writing of a Boxing Day song to our (well, my) To-Do List.

Just don't get your hopes up; my To-Do list is about eight years long.

Oh, and happy Kwanzaa; it starts today.