“do not go gentle into that good night / rage rage against the dying of the light”

black, white and everything in between

in fine fettle, despite the mettle

warp and woof: the fabric of [fill in the blank]

the term greenwashing was heard first in 1990, according to wikipedia. it was added to the OED in 1999.

a decade later, going green is all the rage. the forces of Al Gore, celebrity, and corporate buy-in have collided and actions and words of all kinds are raining down on us — many of them full of contradictions. L.A. launched the country’s first municipally owned wind farm that eats birds. China has outlawed plastic bags nationwide … and the rain in Beijing.

so what’s the net effect of all this? is GE really reducing its carbon footprint or just really good at spinning?

grist, treehugger, and greenbiz report truth behind advertising. but who’s quantifying each action and netting the impact of opening 10 new factories in shanghai against turning off the lights if you’re the last to leave headquarters in times square at night?

it’s a complex issue, because it requires numbers and calculations not to mention eco-accounting rules. and it worries me that no one will do that analysis and we’ll never know if we’re greenwashing or not.

Tikkun olam: (literally, “world repair”) has come to connote social action and the pursuit of social justice…

The first man, Adam, was intended to restore the divine sparks through mystical exercises, but his sin interfered. As a result, good and evil remained thoroughly mixed in the created world, and human souls (previously contained within Adam’s) also became imprisoned within the shards.

The “repair,” that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts. The goal of such repair, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence—and causing all things return to a world before disaster within the Godhead and before human sin, thus ending history.

picked up from the always excellent h-h, definition from myjewishlearning.com

pyrex poetry:  a hard, heat-resistant type of literature, in which special intensity is given to the expression of tempered feelings and ideas

Newly coined medical phrases from the British Medical Journal’s Christmas 2007 issue, as reported by Thomas H. Maugh II of the LAT:

• Hasselhoff: an emergency room patient with a bizarre explanation for his injury
• Ringo: a member of a team who is expendable
• disco biscuit: Ecstasy
• testiculation: “the holding forth with expressive hand gestures by a consultant on a subject in which he or she has little knowledge”

scalpel, please!