Yesterday was the annual Noyer Bash here at BSU. For those of you who don't know, it's a food/inflatables/bands fest held outside of the Noyer Complex on campus. Violence Against Robots was the second to last act on the bandstand. My bandmates would agree that our performance was satisfactory. Not our best (of the two that we've done) but certainly not terrible considering the circumstances. The sound system, for one thing, left something to be desired. There was a lot of feeding back and a lot of not so great equipment putting out not quite so much power. And, getting to the title of the post, it rained during our last song, "Mountains". I was afraid someone was going to stop playing but none of us did. It was beautiful. It wasn't any kind of serious rain, and as my mother pointed out this afternoon it wasn't terribly smart to continue playing in the rain, but I'm ok with how things went.
That's about all I've got to post.
Thanks to everyone who came out and supported us! It really means a lot. I'm glad we're able to make music that people enjoy. Fantastics.
Seeya!
4.19.2009
4.17.2009
It Might Be Easier Than You Think To Be Green.
I found a neat article in Reader's Digest with some answers to some common questions about livin' "green". I haven't looked into its true validity very deeply but I at least trust Reader's Digest for some funny jokes...
http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/going-green-the-readers-digest-version/article122140.html
http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/going-green-the-readers-digest-version/article122140.html
4.10.2009
An Inconvenient Day?
Pardon the title. I know it's been overused to the point of fossil fuel but it just seemed so appropriate. Not only does today's weather leave something to be desired, but I watched about 45 minutes of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, today and it put me in a pretty inconvenient mood.
Maybe I'm overreacting (which is very possible), but what I drew from the movie was this: We're screwed. He wasn't trying very hard to shed any positive light on the situation. I'm not saying anything about climate change is very positive but he could have at least mentioned what people are already trying to do to mend things a little. Maybe he does and I just didn't see that part. I don't know. What I do know is a lot of the things he said and showed were pretty darn scary. Things like, within the next 50 years, half of Florida is going to be underwater and 100 million people are going to be displaced in China and India alone. He talked about the glaciers and how they're melting at a much more rapid rate than I'm sure any of us thought. He also hinted that if Greenland were to completely melt, scientists theorize that it would take Europe less than 10 years to fall into a good solid ice age.
All that stuff really makes you wonder what the heck we're doing smoking cigarettes, driving cars around town, keeping our houses at 65 degrees, and even flying in airplanes. If the world is going to hell in a hand basket as fast as Al Gore says it is, we need to change a lot of things and we need to change a lot of things fast. It's almost discouraging to think about what it would take to slow any of this down. And the worst part is what's happening right now, regardless of what we do, will continue to happen past our lifetimes. It takes anywhere from 50-200 years for some of the carbon and whatever in the atmosphere to dissipate or whatever it does. So any efforts now are only clearing a path for our children and their children. Not that I'm at all opposed to that, but sometimes I can't help the human instinct in me that wants to know what I can do to survive right now.
After all of this a few, possibly quite controversial, questions came into my head: What makes us different from any other race on earth? Will our time come and go just like other species'? We are made of dust and to dust we will return, so is all of this effort just us choosing to leave the life support on for another day? If you think about it, ever since man built a shelter for himself he started surviving in conditions that other animals would have just died in. After the lean-to came refrigeration and heating which, along with numerous other innovations, have allowed us to basically live anywhere we want. And now a species of the genus homo, that should only be living near water around the equator, has stretched the earth to its limit and is now paying for it. And is this how God planned it? Did He know this was going to happen? What's next?
Maybe I'm overreacting (which is very possible), but what I drew from the movie was this: We're screwed. He wasn't trying very hard to shed any positive light on the situation. I'm not saying anything about climate change is very positive but he could have at least mentioned what people are already trying to do to mend things a little. Maybe he does and I just didn't see that part. I don't know. What I do know is a lot of the things he said and showed were pretty darn scary. Things like, within the next 50 years, half of Florida is going to be underwater and 100 million people are going to be displaced in China and India alone. He talked about the glaciers and how they're melting at a much more rapid rate than I'm sure any of us thought. He also hinted that if Greenland were to completely melt, scientists theorize that it would take Europe less than 10 years to fall into a good solid ice age.
All that stuff really makes you wonder what the heck we're doing smoking cigarettes, driving cars around town, keeping our houses at 65 degrees, and even flying in airplanes. If the world is going to hell in a hand basket as fast as Al Gore says it is, we need to change a lot of things and we need to change a lot of things fast. It's almost discouraging to think about what it would take to slow any of this down. And the worst part is what's happening right now, regardless of what we do, will continue to happen past our lifetimes. It takes anywhere from 50-200 years for some of the carbon and whatever in the atmosphere to dissipate or whatever it does. So any efforts now are only clearing a path for our children and their children. Not that I'm at all opposed to that, but sometimes I can't help the human instinct in me that wants to know what I can do to survive right now.
After all of this a few, possibly quite controversial, questions came into my head: What makes us different from any other race on earth? Will our time come and go just like other species'? We are made of dust and to dust we will return, so is all of this effort just us choosing to leave the life support on for another day? If you think about it, ever since man built a shelter for himself he started surviving in conditions that other animals would have just died in. After the lean-to came refrigeration and heating which, along with numerous other innovations, have allowed us to basically live anywhere we want. And now a species of the genus homo, that should only be living near water around the equator, has stretched the earth to its limit and is now paying for it. And is this how God planned it? Did He know this was going to happen? What's next?
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