Burnin’

Have you read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s essay on energy in Vanity Fair? It’s well worth your time if you have yet to see it.

Here’s a quick look at the essential argument:

Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.

And yet, there is ample reason to be hopeful.

We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind; indeed, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone produce enough harnessable wind to meet all of the nation’s electricity demand. As for solar, according to a study in Scientific American, photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation’s electricity needs.

All I know is I want to be part of this clean energy boom. Entrepreneurs will solve what government won’t. Am I right?

Did you know I was a Scottish-born pioneer and dramatist from the 19th century?

Wikipedia knows.

Entering Fort Lauderdale

The back of my 32 year-old thighs
no longer command
top dollar
from the gentlemenly class.

Now I work
behind a bar
in a Bam Bam outfit
and men still look.

I let them eye my dance
with cash and whiskey.
Some still offer me money
to go home with them.

I say, “I’m not a whore, asshole.”
But I go home with them sometimes.
I take their money too.
It’s a free country.

Matthew Creamer of Ad Age is contemplating the future of news and wondering if it’s an aggregated cluster fuck.

With the expensive pursuit of professional content failing to jibe with profitability, media entrepreneurship looks to be reduced to a meta role of repackaging what’s already out there.

Welcome to the era of the aggregator.

For reporters, editors and publishers this is an unwelcome welcoming, at best.

Creamer shares some of the collective doubt hanging on his peers like stale smoke.

If aggregating is becoming the best way to make money from content, who’s going to undertake the costly business of creating that content?

Great question. And without original reporting, there won’t be much for the aggregators to aggregate.

Newseum, “the interactive museum of news,” which opens today in Washington, DC, kindly displays front pages from hundreds of newspapers around the country, at the museum and online (only about 80 front pages are displayed at the museum).

In person, the gallery — featuring a spectacular view of the U.S. Capitol — provides the perfect setting for visitors contemplating the relationship between press and democracy. Online, the overview of front pages is accompanied each weekday by an analysis, comparing and contrasting coverage of national, international and local news by examining headlines, design, photographs and the placement of stories.

The Newseum is located at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, N.W., Washington, DC. Admission is $20 for adults, $18 for seniors, $13 for kids aged seven to 12 and free for kids under six.

[via GETV]