Environmental Talk

“Oh ….”

I was reading the Letters to the Editor section of the morning paper and was shocked to find yet another potential victim of global warming.

We all know that temperatures have gone up a whopping full degree Celsius over the past 100 years and we’ve lost a couple of species over that time. We’ve lost a number of rock music icons over the same period, also.

If you extrapolate those figures over the next hundred years, you’d expect another one degree temperature rise, a handful of species extinctions and a few more lead singers to overdose.

None of which explains why the news is constantly full of stories projecting massive rises in sea levels, articles about pestilence and disease of Biblical proportions, and “statistics” that forecast a 50-75% species extinction rate.

An unidentified source (which is either me or the voices in my head) said Rolling Stone is planning a green issue that will blame global warming for the death of Freddy Mercury.

It’s very possible I was asleep when they covered extrapolation in my college math class, but I don’t remember reading about how a gently upward sloping line suddenly goes exponentially vertical … “all else being equal.”

So you can imagine how concerned I was to learn that a common, everyday species is threatened with extinction. I was both surprised and impressed that an average citizen would take the time to write to the paper about it in the same way I’m surprised and impressed when the evening news has a feature about a kid who set up forty thousand dominoes in the shape of a hamburger to call attention to the obesity epidemic.

Anyhoo … here’s the powerful warning editorial sent into the Democrat & Chronicle by Dick Gretzinger:

‘Zero’ is on the Endangered List
More often than not when telephone numbers, street addresses, etc., are quoted in radio and TV ads, the letter “O” is substituted for the number zero. Perhaps it is laziness — it’s one syllable versus two. With the use of computers it is obvious that numbers and letters are not interchangeable — in fact, there would be serious problems if one were substituted for the other. This is not limited to radio and TV — in daily conversations many people use the letter “O” in place of zero and when corrected, don’t seem to understand the difference because it has become so commonplace to use the letter “O” in all number statements.
DICK GRETZINGER

I think you’ll agree, we must take decisive action now.

If this trend is allowed to continue, our children will pay the price for our “laziness” and refusal to act. An entire generation will grow up believing that SpaghettiOs have zero taste because of our inability to tell the difference between letters and numbers.

Campbell’s Soup Company has further blurred the line by adding numbers to their alphabet soup. There can be no explanation other than they are trying to hide something by their refusal to refer to it as Campbell’s alpha-numeric soup.

Our very future as a species is at risk. Think of the ramifications of a whole generation of teenage girls maturing into womanhood not realizing there’s a difference between the achieving the Big “O” and a big zero.

If this is already the case in your situation, it’s not climate change’s fault — you just need to find a new boyfriend.

So, won’t you please join Mr. Getzinger and other Dicks in saving the zero?

Send your tax-deductible* contribution to me at:
I Want to be a Zero Hero
P.O. Box 00-OO
New York, NY 10017-1OO3

Make the check payable to “Mark Jabo” (that’s J-A-B-the letter “O”) and please, start with a “1″ and add as many zeros as you’d like after it.

Not to pressure you, but the number of zeros after the “1″ should reflect your commitment to save the planet.

Please, act now, before it’s t00 late ….

*- Contributions are only tax-deductible to the extent you are able to include it on your return and not get caught. Always consult with your accountant about deductions and countries that don’t have an extradition treaty.

global warming, climate change, species extinction, Cambell’s Soup, SpagehettiOs, Freddie Mercury, Rolling Stone,