I just saw the stupidest thing ever, on Google's home page.

It's called "Earth Hour".

I'll let the geniuses at Google explain:

"Earth Hour invites one billion people in more than 2800 cities representing 83 countries to turn off their lights for one hour – tonight, Saturday, March 28 from 8:30pm to 9:30pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Paris, Sydney, London, Cairo, New York, Los Angeles and Cape Town, will join together to demonstrate their commitment to energy conservation and sustainability."

Beautiful. So taking us back to the literal dark ages - without electric lighting - is supposed to demonstrate a commitment to "sustainability".

Sustainability of what, I wonder. Of stupidity? Of ignorance? Of political propaganda posturing as science? Of the cancer of fascism and communism?

There is no need for energy conservation on planet Earth. Decades ago, human beings learned to harness the energy that is released by splitting atomic nucleii, the same process that powers the Sun. We don't have no steenkin' energy problem - we have a means of creating virtually unlimited energy! James P Hogan wrote a great piece about this long ago, titled "Know Nukes".

We do have a steenkin' envirofascist problem, and it has infected all of the world's biggest companies now.

And they want us to switch of our lights. Sit in the dark. Or maybe use candles? Oh no, won't that cause CO2 emmission? Better sit in the dark.

And maybe crawl back into a cave too. If it was good enough for homo erectus, it's good enough for us!

Yet another illustration of Packwood's Law ("Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from evil").

                                       

Got me an iPod Touch 2G recently. That's an iPhone without the phone, the camera, and the integrated microphone.

Been playing with it a bit and I must admit it's more revolutionary than I expected it to be, from what I'd read about it.

For starters, it is eminently usable for even complex tasks with just one hand. That in itself is a giant leap for mankind - or cyborgkind.

My trusted Nokia N800 developed a serious screen malfunction, just about 6 months after purchase. It started with a few vertical stripes down the left edge of the screen, and soon progressed to full fledged mayhem on the screen.

In the few months that it worked fine, I'd already become quite dependent on the N800, and am sorely disappointed about the screen crapping out so early in its operating life. I see that a lot of people who bought their N800s from Amazon had similar screen issues.

The N800 is within its warranty period, so I'm going to ship it back to Nokia for repair. Meanwhile I'm now the happy owner of a Nokia N810, which is even cooler than the N800, thanks to its smaller size and its slide-out keyboard.