Poll a Relative Success

I'd like to thank those who participated in the recent poll. It is interesting to see what people really consider important. I believe we gained a little more understanding of what makes us tick. I hope to have another poll soon. If you have any suggestions let me know and I will try to incorporate your ideas.

Take Quarterly Poll

Lights-out Los Angeles: Are you in?

Saturday, October 20, 2007 is the date of the Lights Out Los Angeles. This is a city and county wide effort to reduce our carbon footprint for just one hour. This effort is supported by a myriad of organizations ranging from Southern California Edison to big name retailers like Gap Inc. to Rainforest Action Network.
Sydney, Australia home to 2.2 million residents turned off the lights for 1 hour and reduced 25 tons of carbondioxide which is equivalent to taking 49,000 cars off the road for 60 minutes. Los Angeles is joining San Francisco's effort and it is estimated that the combined effort will remove ten times more carbon emissions as Sydney's. KPCC's Pat Morrison interviewed Lights Out America director of operations Brian Scott (listen to interview) who provided insight into the purposes behind this effort.........read FULL STORY

Blackwater: Shadow Army

Local law enforcement beware. There is a new threat to your employment and it isn't coming from street thugs and criminals where you work. This new threat is the the privatization of law enforcement.....read FULL STORY

What would you have done?

Just yesterday I found myself in a moral dilemma that I thought I could share and hopefully create a moment for introspect. Think for a moment about what you would do and please post a comment. Here it comes.

I am a delivery driver by trade and so a big brown truck is my vehicle of choice. On Wednesday my truck was switched with another driver’s truck and so I used it all day. This driver, a woman, happens to be a smoker and in the morning I came across a half empty pack of cigarettes. I know cigarettes to be bad for the health and a cause for much suffering in the world due to the powerful addictive properties of nicotine. While knowing this I put the pack into my shirt pocket and continued to work because the pack was left in an inconvenient place.

My first thought as a Latter-day Saint was to take the pack and smash it under my foot and then to throw it in the trash. I wanted to render the cigarettes useless and leave them in a place where no one would find them. My second thought was that these cigarettes, as destructive and addictive as they are, were not my property and that I had no right to destroy them or take them. I thought of the times that I had left items of roughly the same monetary value in my truck and come back the next day to discover that they had been stolen.

Even though my things were only worth $4-$5.00 they were of great use to me. Does an act as simple as forgetting to remove an item from my truck before going home give others license to do whatever they pleased with my things? Did I want to be one of those thieves that I so deplored?

In the late afternoon I met up with this driver to exchange packages that were mistakenly loaded into our trucks. I saw that she looked tired and a little frazzled so I said, “Man, it looks like you need a smoke.” and I handed over the pack to her. She laughed and happily took her cigarettes back. I finished our exchange and I left.

I felt relieved to be rid of those cigarettes and of the responsibility of disposing of them. I feel pretty good about my decision to give back what rightfully belonged to another and so far have not lost any sleep over it. I wonder though…..what would you have done? Please let me know the reasoning behind your decision.

What in the world does "fecund" mean?

In my many journeyings through the internet (to my wife's chagrin) I felt the need to find an alternative meaning for the word "fertile". I opened up my thesaurus and found the word "fecund". Merriam-Webster defines it this way:

Pronunciation: 'fe-k&nd, 'fE-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin fecundus -- more at FEMININE
1 : fruitful in offspring or vegetation : PROLIFIC
2 : intellectually productive or inventive to a marked degree fecund imagination
synonym see FERTILE

I thought that this unusual word would be the perfect describer for this unusual blog. I hope I can do it justice in the weeks and months to come.