Are cell phone users destined to become the cigarette smokers of the next generation? To me, there is little that is more annoying than someone talking on their cell phone in a public space. Although I am sure the guys with the Lt. Uhuru ear pieces think they are the essence of coolness, I find them even more annoying than regular cell phone users because at first you can't tell if you are dealing with someone who is just mentally ill and talking to themselves. As cell phones dominate the landscape, certain etiquette will hopefully take hold in which users will excuse themselves to take their calls in private. Thus they will find themselves dwelling in the realm of the smokers: pushed out of doors on to the fringes where they won't bother others with their pernicious habit. And just like smokers, as the first generation of cell phone users matures, all the health concerns will become self evident. Just as smokers began dying in droves from the ill effects of their habit, so cell phone users will discover that holding a radiating device next to their brains or genitals for hours on end will prove to have certain side effects. I look forward to the day when cell phone users will be shunned as social outcasts, unable to relinquish their habit despite the common knowledge of its evil effects.

(In response to an editorial by Don Buck in the San Joaquin County Business Journal)

What is it about self proclaimed "conservatives" that they hate big government but love big business? BJ contributor Don Buck defends oil company profits and bemoans any attempt to increase taxes on the companies or their shareholders. The underlying assumption is that somehow big business operates efficiently and at a profit while big government is nothing but a drain on the rights and wallets of the citizen-taxpayers. Yet, one of the main reasons big business is able to operate profitably, whether it's oil, agriculture or retail, is due to the massive government subsidies these large corporations receive. From tax breaks to tariffs to pork barrel projects, it is companies like Exxon and Haliburton that get the dough, thus propping up their bottom lines.

Mr. Buck defends oil company profits. There is no denying that we live in a capitalist economy and they have a god-given right to make a dollar (or two, per gallon). But they also get massive tax breaks as incentives for exploration and developing new sources of oil. They have congressmen working day and night to open up virgin wilderness to their oil rigs on the faint hope of obtaining a few weeks' supply. One might even say that big oil is currently using our military to secure our supply of oil abroad. The search goes on for new sources of oil, like junkies looking for a fix, from Russia to Iraq, from Alaska to Venezuela, all heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the addicted American citizenry consumes more than ever.

And what about the more subtle costs shouldered by the good ol' taxpayers? Take the recent tanker truck accident and resulting freeway collapse near the Bay Bridge. No doubt, the insurance companies of the trucking firm and refinery will fight tooth and nail to keep from paying the $5 million repair bill. But the taxpayers have already shelled out for not only the original infrastructure, but also for all the cops, firemen and paramedics called into action when the accident occurred. And the same is true for every fender-bender, everyday, across the nation. Then there is the oil and tire residue that pollutes our air and water, causing a whole host of problems from childhood asthma to the clouding of Lake Tahoe. Again, the taxpayer and government are called upon to clean up the mess. I can't build a fire in my fireplace, but I can drive a behemoth that gets 10 miles to the gallon.

So, let's take the big business for-profit paradigm and apply it to government: Break out the roll of quarters, because that will be a toll road out in front of your house. And the government services conveniently located downtown? Now outsourced to Bangalor, India. And all those high quality "Made in USA" products? Now made much cheaper in China. Of course, there won't be any worries about unions (except maybe the prison guards' union) or "cost of living increases" since at $3.00 a day there's not much left for union dues. The school voucher issue Mr. Buck is so concerned about will resolve itself because most children will be too busy or too tired after an 8-hour shift at the factory to go to school anyway.

Mr. Buck is quick to point out the hypocrisy of limousine-liberals that install solar panels on their 26-room mansions and send their kids to private schools. He quotes Bill Clinton who said, "The era of big government is over", while Hillary pushed her "socialist" agenda. Mr. Buck fails to point out that President Clinton then turned the White House and Legislature over to a Republican administration and a Republican controlled congress which proceeded to wipe out his existing surplus, expand the federal government and borrowed and spent our country into record deficits. 

If we are looking for hypocrisy, we need look no further than Dick Cheney's new grandson. Personally, I'd rather subsidize Al Gore's 21st century solar panels than Exxon's 19th century oil rigs in ANWR.

It is a widely publicized fact that California's San Joaquin Valley has some of the worst air quality in the state, if not in the country. From increasingly frequent "Spare The Air" days, when drivers are begged, via radio & tv PSAs, to leave their cars at home; to new laws about when you can or can't build a fire in your fireplace, or indeed even have a fireplace in your home at all. The days when you can see across the valley from Mt. Diablo to the Sierra Nevada are becoming fewer and fewer.

Being a child of the 1960s (the late 1960s), when the motto was "Think Global, Act Local", I try to do my little bit as caretaker and steward of this planet we call Earth: I ride my bicycle to work as often as is practical; I bundle my errands together to reduce the number of times I have to fire up an internal combustion engine to move a ton of steel and my 180 pounds of "wetware" around town; I'm active with local groups who are involved in cleaning up our waterways. So when my old gas powered lawn mower finally gave up the ghost, I decided to replace it with an electric mower. 

My old mower had been acquired second-hand, almost a decade ago, from my brother-in-law when he moved up to hiring a gardener. The mower was a Snapper that Steve had owned long enough that he had been forced at some point to modify it to bypass the automatic shut-off switch. It was your basic: switch on the gas, give the cord several good tugs until the engine fires up, and you are on your way. You had to manually cut off the gas to get it to stop.

I'd heard or read somewhere that these sort of small gasoline engines are a major source of air pollution. (Certainly not as big a problem as the large engines parked in everyone's driveways, but a source for concern nonetheless.) It seemed to me the environmentally friendly thing to do would be to replace it with an electric alternative. Having purchased an electric leaf blower a couple years ago, I further decided that this new lawn mower needed to be cordless. 

I blithely cast aside concerns about the possible detrimental effects of the manufacturing of lead acid batteries. I'm thinking locally here: my air quality versus the lead-laden water supply of some other community. Besides, my experience with the electric leaf blower had shown me what a pain in the ass it was dealing with the cord. Not to mention that a leaf blower is not going to accidentally run over its own power source and chop it into mulch. Plus, I had seen an ad for cordless lawn mowers in the Sierra Club magazine. I figured they wouldn't take advertising money from a product they couldn't endorse. Right?

I started with the Sierra Club magazine ad. I have a large yard and I wanted to make sure a cordless mower would do the job. What was the life of the battery? What happens to the old batteries? I wanted to speak with a knowledgeable sales rep who could answer all my questions. The ad gave a web site so I went online to check it out. It turned out to be single page with a template for ordering a free information packet and video. I didn't want an information packet. I wanted to speak to a knowledgeable human being. I didn't want a demonstration video. My video player was relegated to the "remote storage area" of my house when I bought a DVD player. The ad had an 800 number. I dialed it and was immediately connected with an actual live person. Unfortunately, her accent was decidedly Indian (or Pakistani, I have a hard time distinguishing the two) and all she could do was send me an information packet and video. 

A Google search was only slightly more helpful. It gave me lots of places to buy a mower, but precious little actual information about them. Finally, the Black & Decker web site told me at least part of what I wanted to know. It claimed their cordless mower "is ideal for up to 1/3 acre homesites". My lot is half an acre, but my house takes up a good chunk of that, minus the other non-lawn landscaping and we're well under a third of an acre of lawn. A cordless mower should be up to the task. Besides, NASA just put a solar powered probe on Mars whose battery lasted two months longer than anticipated. Somebody ought to be able to make a cordless mower capable of cutting my lawn here on Earth with only a single charge.

If I'm going to spend extra effort and money just to do the right thing, I expect the occasional pat on the back. Thus, I went looking to see if there were any rebates available for exchanging a gas-powered mower for electric. After phone calls to a couple local agencies, who led me to a county agency, who led me to a state agency (all of whom actually had live people answer their phones and all of whom were very pleasant) I was informed that indeed there were $100.00 rebates available. Unfortunately, these were funded by a grant which had expired everywhere except Bakersfield. Plus, they were only good for the cheaper "corded" mowers. I was going to have to pay full price.

I am one of those anachronisms who will gladly pay more for something if I can buy it locally knowing that my money and taxes will stay in the local economy rather that being siphoned off to some huge multi-nation corporation headquartered in Arkansas. This, despite the fact that I had recently seen a mailer from a national retailer advertising cordless mowers. So, on Saturday morning I checked out the yellow pages for a locally owned lawn mower dealer. There was only one. I grabbed my wallet, and hustled the spouse into the van. (She likes buying stuff, especially things that slice, dice, mulch or generally wreak mechanical havoc on vegetation.) 

The local Snapper dealer was sorry to inform me that Snapper did not make a cordless mower. Too bad. This would have been perfect kismet since my old mower was also a Snapper. Another customer, a good-ol' boy who looked even more out of place among the gleaming red machines than I did, had also seen the flyer about the cordless mowers offered at the national mega-retailer. We were left with no choice but to enter the lion's den. But of course, they didn't have any either, nor could they recall seeing a flyer advertising them. Nothing about cordless mowers in the computer. Sorry. S.O.L. Next.

I knew that Black & Decker made a cordless mower. Maybe Sears would have one. Nope. Don't stock 'em. Got plenty with cords. No cordless. Two hours of crisscrossing town and we were still mowerless. One last try to the other branch of the Home Despot way out north. Nope. None there either. Back home, beaten, but not defeated. There is still the Internet.

The Black & Decker web site directed me to three retailers who could sell me a cordless mower over the net. The first was a company I'd never heard of but apparently is big into gardening supplies. They were out of stock of the mowers. The second was the aforementioned Arkansas megalith. They were out of stock as well. The third was the web site of the same retailer whose stores I have visited just hours before. They did have Black & Decker cordless mowers in stock.

I whipped out the credit card, gulped about the $65 shipping charge and bought the damn thing. Now, all I had to do was wait. This was on Friday, June 10th. We were having a party on the 18th. I was hopeful the new mower might arrive by then, but had a contingency plan to borrow a neighbor's, just in case. On Thursday, the 16th, I arrived home in the afternoon to find a yellow and brown UPS sticker on my front door. They had left the package around on the side of the house. There it was, a large orange and black box, looking a little worse for wear. Obviously, there was no way the UPS driver was going to schlep this thing back to the warehouse once he or she had brought it this far. 

I immediately set about opening the box, which is starting to come apart anyway. I roll the mower out and unfold the handle. One of the bolts, which secure the handle in place, is missing. I peer inside the box. There's the plastic handle, but no bolt in sight. Damn, it could easily have fallen out through one of the hand holes. I disassemble the box and there is the bolt, wedged beneath a flap. However, in working itself loose, it has chewed up the threads and now will not allow me to tighten the mower's handle into place. After several minutes of attempts with wrenches I decide I can probably get another bolt without too much trouble. I assemble the bag attachment for catching the trimmings. The stitching is already pulling loose on one side. It's not going to hold through a single mow. Well, it's standard on all their mowers, so I should be able to get a new one as easily as the bolt. I wheel the mower over to an outlet. The multi-lingual directions say it needs to charge for 24 hours before mowing. They also say there is a little catch on the charger unit, which holds it into place on the mower. No little catch on this charger. The light comes on, but the slightest tug on the cord and the charger disconnects. Looks like I'll be using my neighbor's mower after all.

I go in the house and dial the 800 number I'm supposed to call if I have a problem. It's one of those cutesy numbers that's part letters spelling out "how-to". Why can't they just put the damn numbers, without getting cute about it? But that's another story. After navigating the push-button options I am connected with a young lady who informs me that I need to call a different number. The push-button options at this number sound suspiciously exactly like the ones on the other 800 number, but again I eventually find myself speaking with another pleasant young lady. I detail the litany of my problems. Not to worry, she says, she'll have them ship me a new bolt, grass catcher and charger post haste. I make my standard joke about "no good deed going unpunished". But at least it got here quick enough. She asks me when I ordered the mower. I tell her, June 10th, and she says that according to her computer the cordless mowers are out of stock everywhere and on back order through the end of July. I must have gotten the last one. No wonder the box looked a little beat up. And no wonder I couldn't find one in a city of over a quarter million people.

To make a long story even longer, the replacement parts showed up a couple of weeks later. Everything fits and works just fine. I can mow the front, back and levee with one charge and still have power to spare. But here's the thing: if these mowers are in such high demand as to have a two month backorder, why are there not more companies making them, and making more of them? It's like the Toyota Prius hybrid automobile. The demand for these cars has increased 1000% in the last few years, yet you're lucky to find one for sale on a dealer's lot. Meanwhile the American car manufacturers seem to be more interested in building 500 horse power concept machines. Isn't capitalism supposed to be market driven? If so, why is it easier to buy a $300,000 sports car or an air polluting gas mower, than it is to buy a $25,000 fuel efficient automobile or an air-saving gas-less mower? Obviously, there are buyers for all these things, just as there are buyers for plug-in air-fresheners with built in electric fans, manufactured in Chinese sweatshops. But do we really need them? We do need clean air and water. What will it take before we redirect our capital and resources toward building a healthy and sustainable future, rather than our current short-term get-rich-quick schemes? I fear it will take something with the magnitude of the last year's Christmas tsunami, only with devastating effect on the G-8, rather than the third world. In the meantime, I'll just heed the words of the philosopher Voltaire, and "tend my own garden". With my new cordless electric lawn mower. Made in the U.S. of A. (With foreign parts.)

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