it's them, it's not me

bill maher! we were surprised to see so many empty seats, but there they were. you could have sat next to us! he jumped from topic to topic, because god knows there are plenty to choose from these days (so many, in fact, that you wonder why we even have to make jokes anymore, when they're coming pre-punchlined right out of the news), and i tried to remember the funniest lines, but they all slipped away from me as soon as he moved on.

one thing i do remember vividly is him mocking "new diseases" like restless leg syndrome ("did anyone ever suffer from this before we started seeing commercials for it on TV?") and social anxiety disorder: "we had that when i was a kid; it was called 'shyness' and the treatment was scotch-and-water." and oh man, bill maher is SO RIGHT. a couple of drinks just takes the edge RIGHT OFF that anxiety. if only it could do so without threatening the long-term functioning of vital organs, or giving you such strong urges to sleep with people you really won't want to wake up next to when you're sober.

afterward we drove my dad back to the house to meet up with the contingent who'd gone to see menopause: the musical, which they reported as highly entertaining (and i wasn't wrong: i would have been the youngest person in the audience by far), and we all said farewell to my parents who were heading back to the hotel and leaving early tomorrow morning, and then m. and k. and i went out for pizza at fellini's down the street. it was delicious!

went on to become a science advisor in the current administration

tonight i went out with a. and l. and z. and a friend of the family for thai food, and then to see an inconvenient truth. on the way to the car after dinner, i mentioned to a. that my greatest fear in re: global warming is the inevitable sociopolitical upheaval that will come with the complete collapse of the infrastructures of many of the major developed and most populous nations as a result of the massive displacement of people in the wake of huge storms and catastrophic climate change. and after seeing the movie, wow am i right to be kept awake at night about this, because i hadn't even thought seriously about the implications of a 20-foot rise in the earth's seas. but i'm thinking about it now!

on the one hand, yes, this is a movie everyone needs to see, blah blah, but honestly? everyone should KNOW this shit already. i didn't learn one new thing from al gore, not one thing i hadn't heard fifteen years ago in elementary school, and nobody was calling it a "theory" then either. that was the part that made me angriest: the stats about consensus in the scientific community, specifically that the articles about global warming in peer-reviewed journals showed 100% consensus among scientists, while HALF THE ARTICLES in the popular press said there was debate among scientists on this issue. motherfuckers.

and you know, i get that the oilmen and the car manufacturers want to make their billions of dollars, but i have trouble wrapping my mind around just how shortsighted they have to be to want to continue making their billions of dollars at the expense of, like, the planet. not even in a SENSITIVE, save-the-whales kind of way, just in the way that they have to live *somewhere* on the earth, just like the rest of us. maybe it's the word "catastrophic" they have trouble parsing? i don't even want to take their livelihoods away and leave them DESTITUTE, i'm just saying that if *i* were a billionaire who'd made my money in oil and was presented with the global warming data al gore has been trying to show people for decades, i would read the fucking writing on the wall and start making money somewhere else. because it's pretty fucking easy to make money when you already have money: just cast it in another direction this time; it'll come back, i promise.

oh, and we saw previews for who killed the electric car?, a documentary about another massive conspiracy executed by the people in business and government (those are the same people) with the money and the power (also synonymous) to make far-reaching decisions that benefit them and hurt just about everybody else. it kinda primed us for intense rage at big energy when our feature presentation began.

what's hilarious is that an inconvenient truth is essentially a ninety-minute advertising spot for keynote and apple computers and could have been subtitled al gore + his powerbook: a love story.