With the recent admissions by the oil industries that oil supplies did in fact peak around 2002 and the gloomy outlook of increasing fuel prices as supplies decline how many people are wondering quite what we have done and how many are just madly fiddling away while Rome (ie the fuel) is burning? As was predicted by an astute man in the seventies, our nonchalant consumption of fossil fuels placed on a 10,000 year graph will look rather like a slim penis in the middle of the vast timeframe to either side. Is it nature’s way of telling us we’ve been a load of dickheads?
Okay, so there are other power sources and some 80% of the cars on show at the Birmingham Car Show this year were electric but so far nobody has any clue how we could fuel an airplane other than with fossil fuels. That means the same is even more true for a space rocket. It may be millions of years in the future but when our sun goes nova we have to leave this planet or mankind becomes one big fry-up. If by that time there is still no other way to fuel a rocket ship what will those last humans think of us as they watch the sun explode? There are plenty of poor excuses of course … you’re thinking about them right now … but isn’t it incredible that it took us until the fossil fuel supply peaked to even begin to take the problem seriously and recognise the danger of having based our lives on a non-replaceable fuel supply. To say that the last 50 odd years of the so-called developed nations has been governed by short-sighted selfishness is putting in mildly and even now people are saying, “They’ll come up with something” or “xxxx fuel is the answer” when what they really mean is, “I don’t really care because I’ll be dead by the time it gets really tough.” That is assuming we have any idea how much or how little time we have until it gets tough … and when the tough gets going there’ll be nowhere to go.
You might want to take a look at Greenpeace here
If you don’t know about the peaking of oil supplies then take a look at this.
There is also Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers here.
Or an in-depth review of George Monbiot’s book Heat here.
None of it is easy reading but it’s better than being an ostrich.
On Thursday we looked at the five day weather forecast and Saturday was going to be sunny intervals with no rain whilst Friday was going to be overcast. Let’s go on Saturday, we decided. Well, here it is and we sit here on Saturday looking out of the window at the pouring rain having had a lovely sunny day yesterday wondering how it is the Metereological Office staff keep their jobs and why weather reports are not listed under Fantasy & Fiction. Best guess is that they have a pack of cards with weather symbols on and just flick a few down for the coming five days and then when each day arrives they do what we all do and look out the window first thing in the morning. Then they quickly change today’s weather forecast to whatever looks most likely for the day. When I was twelve years old our geography teacher explained cold fronts, weather patterns, wind speeds and then exclaimed that all this shows why weather reporting is so accurate. He was most upset at the howl of laughter that went up from thirty young kids yet all these years later we still go by these predictions that are so often wrong … must be to do with the wrong type of leaves or something 
Much has been made of the great progress made by mankind. There we were banging our flints together to get a tiny spark to light a fire and then within a short time, geologically speaking, we’re setting up the barbecue and smoking out the neighbours! But has it all really been progress? You know, it wasn’t so long ago you’d go into the nice warm bank to draw your money out while now you stand outside in the rain. Once upon a time you had a nice check-in person at the airport to sort everything out and now, unless you want to queue forever, you check yourself in. Once upon a time at the supermarket your goods were scanned and totalled up for you but now you use the so-called “fast lane” and scan and pack your own groceries etc rather than queue at the checkout. Even the Inland Revenue have got in on the act and many self-employed business people now calculate their own tax.
At Artists UK, rather than try to buck the trend, we have decided to offer a similar new service in which we invite our customers to paint a picture, arrange their own printing of it, mount it, frame it and dispatch it to themselves (after they have paid us, of course). Looking at all the progress that has been made by supermarkets, banks, airports and the Inland Revenue we feel sure that this new scheme will be a surefire hit
“Hi, my name is Hiro Nakamura and I have a BIG problem. It is my birthday soon and my American friends want to know how many candles for my cake. It might not sound difficult but I can bend space and time. Space is no problem. I just move around to different places. But when I bend time it stops for everyone else but me or I go back in time six months and end up six months older when I get back to where I was. I’ve been doing this for many years now so I don’t know how old I am or even when my birthday really is! I hope someone buys me a calculator for my birthday, then I might be able to figure out how old I actually am and when my birthday is!”
Of course, if you haven’t been watching the incredible series ‘Heroes’ then none of the above will make much sense and we apologise for this but we don’t usually expect people not resident in our solar system to be reading our Blog
We were buying authentic Epson ink cartridges for our office printers via Amazon Marketplace sellers. Then we got two cartridges that stopped working even when they showed up as still half full. We emailed Epson about it. They weren’t amazingly friendly but did agree we could send them in for testing and refund if they were not more than 90 days from purchase (how generous!). So we did. What we didn’t expect was an email from Epson telling us they were not genuine Epson cartridges but fake Epson cartridges with non-Epson ink in them. We emailed Amazon about it but have still had no reply. Epson won’t tell us what action they’ve taken either. Whichever of the Marketplace sellers we bought from who supplied these is obviously a criminal taking advantage of these wonderfully overpriced Epson consumables. So what do you do? Buy list price genuine Epson ink cartridges from Epson just to be sure, which probably involves remortgaging property to afford the bill or buy compatibles that are vastly cheaper and which, after a few replacements, pay for a new printer from the savings. This of course does leave you with the “oh god, what am I doing to the environment” blues. Maybe we should all sue Epson for causing such emotional suffering in the first place. Or should we all go back to pen and paper and stuff these daft printers that jam, squeak, splurge and drink ink faster than a Mancurian can down beer? If the planet is going down the pan maybe we should go right back to writing on stone tablets since they’ll still be there when all our books have been eaten by cockroaches, our CDs all rusted and our film records decayed. In those circumstances the only good point is that Epson won’t be around to laugh about it and nor will their printers.
Lily Maid of Astolat by artist