In Your Face...

For those of you who know how passionate I am about mountain-top removal and how opinionated I am about the oxymoron "clean coal," you'll be pleased to know I had ten seconds to speak my piece on the Ed Shultz show on Friday. If you don't know who Ed Shultz is and you're politically progressive, you'd probably really enjoy his radio show. In Asheville it's 880 am, and it's on every day from noon - 2:00pm. He's also a bit of a regular on CNN as a lefty guest. We found Ed last year and we've been faithful listeners. I don't always agree with him (take "clean coal" for example), but most of the time I dig his show. On Friday, he had two guests on talking about "clean coal," one was a coal industry guy and the other was from Center for American Progress. What gets me about the conversation is that no one ever talks about extraction, it's all about whether we can make coal cleaner in the burning process, but what about those mountains that have been razed to get at the coal? So I called in, and got to speak for about 30 seconds about mountain top removal. The "clean coal" advocate said he lived in KY and that it's not called mountain top removal but mountain top mining. Furthermore, he said, only 3% of coal is extracted in that fashion. I said: those people whose mountains are gone and whose communities flood every year probably don't care what the percentage is. He said, well we've actually been able to bring in lots of industry to put on the flat land (where the mountains used to be) so it's good for the community. Wow. Blowing up God's mountains to get at dirty coal, then slapping some industry on top to make it all good? Anyhow, it felt great to be able to add mountain top removal into the conversation. Thank you, Big Eddie, for taking my call...I know he's probably a secret fan of this blog.

Myles had a blast on Sunday at his friend Rye's birthday party, and we did too! Rye lives across the street from Myles' godparents, our friends Colleen and Tom, and they were at the party too with their girls. Myles got to play with Rye's trains and trucks and munch on the "cake" which was a huge rice crispy treat in the shape of a bear with frosting decor. Not much else going on since the last blog. On Friday we're headed for Sugar Mountain with a group of friends for a ski weekend. Me, I'll be in with the young'uns warming my sweet self by the fire. Forget skiing! But it will be fun to just chill with friends and let the kids entertain themselves. The flu is going around and Myles hasn't had it yet, so please please please I'm praying he won't get it and divert our plans.