Posts Tagged ‘microplastics’
Too Good
If you are even a vague fan of actor/comedian Martin Short, I highly recommend the documentary, “Marty, Life is Short,” now streaming on Netflix. What a wealth of home movies they had to work with for this chronicle of his life and career. And what a treasured variety of other successful, hilarious actors and comedians he has maintained a friendship with throughout so many years of home movie-making.
At the risk of revealing a spoiler, there is a gem of a scene that I find priceless and worth the viewing, even if you hesitate to sit through a review of someone’s life. Martin, as his character, Ed Grimley, and Tom Hanks, performing as the character, Forest Gump, reenact a moment from the movie, “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.”
It doesn’t get any better than that. I must say.
I wasn’t up to anything funny yesterday. Wielding a string trimmer, I did a 2-battery shift in the woods, clearing trails.
While trying to watch videos on YouTube, I was forced to wait through an ad for an aftermarket attachment for string trimmers that replaces the plastic line with sections of twisted metal wire. Everything about it radiated “gimmick,” but it did trigger a lightbulb moment where I suddenly became aware of how much microplastic debris we must be creating with our trimmer use.
The ad came across as being “too good to be true” and left me wishing I could see how long the metal lasts and what they look like after hours of use. I’m always interested in reducing our use of plastic, especially in this case, where the spinning plastic line is getting constantly vaporized into microscopic shrapnel.
I hate falling for these kinds of product pitches, but I will admit to being in the target audience they are attempting to seduce.
If anyone reading has seen or used a replacement cutting head of twisted steel cables for string trimmers, I’d love to learn from your experience, good or bad.
.
.
One Thing
Or another. I was thinking about writing “The Thing” for the title of this post in a riff off the idiom, “Here’s the thing.” My software indicated I’d already used that title once before on Relative Something. I try not to reuse titles if possible. Seriously, though, I was thinking, “Here’s the thing…”
Did you know Alec Baldwin hosted a public radio show and podcast interview series by the title, “Here’s the Thing?” I didn’t.
Makes sense though. That’s a great title. I tried a couple other pairs of words and found I’d already used them, too.
I prefer the pattern of holding my titles to two words, but after more than ten years of blogging, it gets hard to come up with a unique pair.
Whether it’s one thing or another, here’s the thing… I never expected that one day, I would live in Wisconsin.
Maybe I should have titled this post, “Never Expected.”
There are innumerable things I never expected to experience in my lifetime. I never expected I would witness stupidity being proudly espoused as publicly as is common in this day and age.
I never expected the burgeoning of private military companies into global powerhouses offering services to nation-states.
I never expected that I would be alive during a years-long global pandemic that would cause the amount of death COVID-19 has, even though I had read books and watched movies about similar biohazardous calamities.
I never expected private companies would create space crafts with reusable propulsion modules that make pinpoint landings on floating platforms in the ocean, especially modules with video capture abilities allowing public viewing of the feat from multiple angles.
I never expected to find out microplastics are everywhere, including inside both animals and humans.
I didn’t expect that so many things imagined for science fiction stories would become realities, ala Star Trek communicators and today’s smartphones. I never imagined that mobile phones would be able to rival cameras to the level of making professional-quality movies.
I remember thinking touch screens would never work. Folding screens? Not possible.
I don’t want to think of how many other things I deem not possible will become reality in my lifetime.
During my technical career in industry, I was on a development team that designed a custom machine for making coated optical discs that the customer boasted would be able to fit an entire volume of encyclopedia for viewing on a computer screen. Even as I worked on the electronics and vacuum chambers of the machine that would make this possible, I struggled to fathom the enormity of digitizing all the information in those books.
I never expected to come to the realization about how much human suffering results from religious conflict when simply loving others solves conflicts, heals wounded souls, and sows peace for all.
I never expected so many of you to read the words I write.
Here’s the thing, overcoming depression opens a world of possibilities.
This I know: It’s always one thing or another, whether you expect it or not.
.
.
Relative Something 