xtcian

singing in the dead of night

6/24/04

Okay, I blew that one up real big so that you can see how INSANE the packaging is on this product. Now, I realize I can get pretty riled up by environmental issues, and my sense of humor about chlorofluorocarbons is probably a little less acute than your average redneck grillin' Beefmaster Franks on his FlameMaster 4000, but GIVE ME A FRIGGING BREAK!

That SD card is the same size that fits in your Palm Pilot or your digital camera, i.e., roughly the size of a man's thumbnail. And the packaging, consisting of 80 lb cardboard stock and dual-bond plastic SO STRONG that it takes a BOXCUTTER to get through it, is BIGGER THAN a SMALL TELEVISION.

Oil to make that plastic, trees felled to provide the cardboard backing... couldn't they have made a nice game of Boggle™ with those materials? They stopped making the "long box" containers for CDs – finally – but replaced it with this?

Determined to wash the bad taste of mercury and dioxin out of my mouth, I went around to the back of the farmhouse to see why our bathroom fan wasn't working – and of course, it's because a family of blackbirds has moved into the vent.

The vent itself is about 12 feet off the ground, so I leaped off a windowsill and grabbed this picture by thrusting the camera in the hole, then falling backwards onto a shrub that stabbed me forty-seven times. But even though it's a little blurry, you can see the little baby blackbird with its mouth wide open, and that made me feel a lot better about the world.

(click image for bigger)