During this holiday season my mind goes back to some of the toys of my youth. Some of them hit of the market only for a brief time but the TV marketing campaigns remain burned in my memory. Here are a few examples (although, truth to tell, I'm not sure if these are real memories, or a dream. Oh I love being in my 50s):

Whack the Guinea Pig
The Lonely Nipple
Caiman Incubator
Asparagus Castle
Big Bucket o' Lard
Seizure the Fighting Busboy
Rockem Sockem Rapid Rodents
Mildly Amusing Putty
Find Jimmy Hoffa (actually, I was "too old" for this "Ages 5 and Over" board game when it came out, but I played it with my nephew under the guise being the token adult. But I really enjoyed it the way any 5 or 6 year old would)
Potato Village
The Mummified Skate From the Sea of Cortez
Pillow of Sweat (this one had a particularly catchy ad theme song. Maybe I'll sing it out loud at the next OlyBlog gathering I attend)

I loved this and had to repost it.

Kids are people too.

Now this one is interesting in a scary, Dr. Strangelove kind of way:

This scientist has spent his lifetime developing weapons science. Despite his likely familiarity with nuclear winter as a definitive treatment for global warming, this guy, Dr. Lowell Wood has instead suggested that global warming could be fought by spraying burnt sulfur particulates into the atmosphere. The guy works at Livermore, so you have to think he’s a scientific heavyweight. He may be on the Dr. Mengele side of the spectrum with his weapons science history, but still a serious scientific thinker.

Now it seems to me that sulfur is part of the acid rain problem and that maybe spraying a lot of into the atmosphere could cause unforeseen problems, but hey, I am still trying to sort out atoms and molecules.

Read more?     Ok.

Some of us worry a lot, maybe too much about global warming.

So here's a picture of the Upsala Glacier in Argentina.

Top view is about 1928, bottom view is about yesterday.

Are glaciers good? Should we care about these views or should we see if there are any fish in that lake? Could there be coal under yonder mountains that we can dig up and set afire?

Well, as it turns out, glaciers are good if the planet is heading in a dangerous warming direction. They reflect more solar heat by reflecting it back into space instead of absorbing more of it like ground and water, so if you like a stable and somewhat predictable environment with fewer Class 5 hurricanes, droughts, and floods, then glaciers are good. Maybe that dynamic is part of the explanation of why the planet ever comes out of ice ages. If you cover enough of the planet with ice, the planet reflects a lot of solar radiation and oddly enough, starts warming up.

Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (probably the album of the year, in the running for best album of the 21st century)
Todd Snider - The Devil You Know
Girl Talk - Night Ripper
Cat Power - The Greatest
Rhymefest - Blue Collar
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury
Bob Dylan - Modern Times
Joanna Newsom - Ys
Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go

That's it. I'm sure there are other good ones, but those are the ones I liked. If you only get to listen to one, choose Ghostface. It's good, instant classic.

And I wasn't making my list of who should get lumps of coal in their stockings. I was thinking about the complex cycle of carbon on the small blue planet.

All life on this planet, as I understand it, is carbon-based. The trees, phytoplankton, the great blue whale, and probably even Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia.

So we are all animate lumps of coal. And we do our thing here on a small blue planet through an amazingly complex chemical exchange of carbon.

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