Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

In theory, having a day set aside to focus on environmental issues isn’t a bad thing. I think I would have enjoyed its 1970 form. It often seems, however, that celebrating Earth Day is a bit like giving your assistant a bouquet on Secretary’s Day in lieu of a living wage and health insurance. Indeed, when you Google ”Earth Day sale” or “Earth day products”, it starts to look like deducting the cost of the flowers from your assistant’s paycheck. How much water did it take to make that T-shirt? Are you going to recycle that card when you’re finished displaying it on your refrigerator (which, incidentally, is set a bit colder than necessary and contains way too much meat)?

Where the analogy breaks down, however, is that as much as we talk about saving the Earth, environmentalism is really about saving ourselves. It’s about maintaining a habitable environment. Of course, as the work of the Goldman Environmental Prize winners highlights, it is the poor who suffer the worst consequences of environmental degradation first, which makes it even more difficult to convince the wealthy, who are responsible for most of the harmful consumption, to change their habits.

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It’s hard to believe that April Fool’s Day was Gmail’s fifth birthday. It has become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to remember the days when invites were a hot item, let alone the days before it existed (I do, however, even remember the days prior to Google search dominance, but that’s another post entirely).

At the time, I was living in Japan. I requested an invite from a Livejournal friend not because I particularly wanted to try the new email system but, rather, because I knew that you could sell or barter invites, and I was hoping to get some of my own. Indeed, I ended up getting a Nietzsche book (I can’t for the life of me remember which one) and some postcards—not a bad haul considering that I invested nothing. I ended up actually using Gmail because the way it grouped conversations proved highly useful, especially for following mailing-list conversations. 

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My April Fool’s Day post didn’t make quite the splash I was hoping for today; I guess the humor was a bit too obscure. Google, as usual, had a marvelous entry with its Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, and even Starbucks got into the act with a device I wish were real.

Did anyone else see or play an impressive prank today? (Since it’s also national poetry month, comments that show attention to rhyme, meter, alliteration, or any other poetic device will be awarded bonus points.)

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