Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”
Topic: Humor
5:21 pm EST, Feb 26, 2007
Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.
Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).
In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.
The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.
Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.
Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.
Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.
“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk to walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.
In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.
RE: A Meditation On the Speed Limit - Google Video
Topic: Humor
12:25 am EST, Mar 1, 2006
Decius wrote: Bunch of jackass college students get on I285 in Atlanta and actually do the speed limit. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
That statement is a bit ironic really. The common myth of speed limits is that they are set with public safety concerns in mind. Yet four people obeying the speed limit enraged some other drivers to the point that they dipped onto the shoulders, one even clipping a parked vehicle and coming close to causing a bad accident.
I wonder who would have been faulted if it had been on the bad side. Would the law see the four law abiding drivers as "contributing factors?" Based on bizzaro world principles of lawsuits, my guess is yes.
I have seen police cruisers do this occasionally, weave back and forth across lanes of traffic with their lights going to "pace" the flow of traffic in Nashville. There was no particular reason I could see other than flow control. I think I even experienced this once coming out of Atlanta, but that was for tending to a wreck up ahead.
Welcome to "Am I Blue or not?", a game where you get to rate just how Blue a particular color really is. Each color is rated by our visitors on the scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being "not blue at all", and 10 "really, really blue".
I often scan through the wire service photos on Yahoo News, and over the years I started noticing a really strange trend. Many of the photos follow the same form: a picture of a person in the foreground, and on the background, a GIANT HEAD. Now, that's a clever picture once or twice, but it was happening so often that it really caught my attention. Was it always the same photographer? No, it turns out, it's not. So my best guess at this point is that one of the photo editors just has a GIANT HEAD fetish of some kind.
For no particularly good reason, I spent a year collecting them. Here, then, are the big heads of 2004.
