open letter to banking institutions

Dear Banks -

I own an early 60's ranch house. My wife and I each drive a functioning car. I have a credit card because I have to rent cars on a fairly regular basis. And every month I have to send you a check for each one of these things.

That is fine, I understand that.

But, please, for me, and for the rest of America. I have two small favors to ask of you.

1. Please make sure your websites work. Especially if you're going to continually refer me to it and charge me every time I talk to an actual person. I have to keep talking to that person because your website keeps not working. I am already paying you money. I don't want to give you any more of it.

2. Please stop changing your name every other month. I now pay my mortgage to whom I used to pay my car bill. That car bill is now paid to the same bank as my other car, but to different divisions of that same bank. I am confused and I'm starting to really dislike you. All of you. Although I'm starting to think there's only one of you. Like Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Except they were cool.

Monkeys Rule.

Well, THAT went better than anticipated. Over half of the shirts are gone already, and I'm having more X-Larges printed up quickly, since I've already sold out of them. My question to you this evening: Where have all the "Large" people gone? Mediums? Almost sold out. XL? Gone. Large? Sold two of them. Weird. Anyway, I've already broken even, so I'll try to put any proceeds into printing a new design in a month or two and then paying off a bit more of The Morning.

Also, I misposted a couple tour dates for this coming weekend. I'm about to change them on the tour page, but really quickly, here's the schedule for March 8-11. Nebraska, get ready. Andy's setting up shop.

3/8 - Nebraska Christian College, Omaha,NE
(2:30 pm - speaking)
3/9 - Grace Chapel, Lincoln, NE
3/10 - The Foundry, Omaha, NE
3/11 - Kingsway Christian, Omaha, NE

In other news, I took the morning off today and took the family to the zoo. We got a membership for Christmas, and it's only about three miles away, so we can swing by for free anytime. That's pretty cool, I'm not going to lie. We saw elephants, giraffes, and the loudest monkeys on the planet. Monkeys rule.

Does anybody have a Digi002 ProTools interface they could sell me on the cheap?

Ladies and Gentlemen,the T-shirts have arrived...

And here they are in all their glory...



That's right for a measly $15, plus shipping ($2), you can be wearing one of these bad boys. In case you need a closer look at the inspired logo you could be sporting...



It's a very small batch, so I'm just going to do the shipping in the living room. That also means it is very unlikely these shirts will be for sale later on. I've finally found some folks who will affordably do small runs of shirts for me, so I can try to have a new design out every few months. I think that will make it more fun. Feel free to send suggestions.

Also, because I'll be shipping them out of the living room, I'll be using Paypal. Once stock gets low on a size I'll put the number left up on the site. I'll also be looking for a better way to do this. But for now, this just seems like a lot of fun. So here we go.

If you want to look like this...



just click on this...

Size	MediumLargeX-Large

the cost of water

Many thanks to Aaron Sands, who posted this article on his blog recently. This is from the San Francisco Chronicle. The original can be found HERE. Makes you think, huh?

The real cost of bottled water
Jared Blumenfeld, Susan Leal

Sunday, February 18, 2007

San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents enjoy some of the nation's highest quality drinking water, with pristine Sierra snowmelt from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir as our primary source. Every year, our water is tested more than 100,000 times to ensure that it meets or exceeds every standard for safe drinking water. And yet we still buy bottled water. Why?

Maybe it's because we think bottled water is cleaner and somehow better, but that's not true. The federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water.

The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words such as "pure" to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic and chlorine. Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is. But even that doesn't dampen the demand.

Clearly, the popularity of bottled water is the result of huge marketing efforts. The global consumption of bottled water reached 41 billion gallons in 2004, up 57 percent in just five years. Even in areas where tap water is clean and safe to drink, such as in San Francisco, demand for bottled water is increasing -- producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy. So what is the real cost of bottled water?

Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy our demand for the chic and exotic. These are truly the Hummers of our bottled-water generation. As further proof that the bottle is worth more than the water in it, starting in 2007, the state of California will give 5 cents for recycling a small water bottle and 10 cents for a large one.

Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute. In contrast, San Francisco tap water is distributed through an existing zero-carbon infrastructure: plumbing and gravity. Our water generates clean energy on its way to our tap -- powering our streetcars, fire stations, the airport and schools.

More than 1 billion plastic water bottles end up in the California's trash each year, taking up valuable landfill space, leaking toxic additives, such as phthalates, into the groundwater and taking 1,000 years to biodegrade. That means bottled water may be harming our future water supply.

The rapid growth in the bottled water industry means that water extraction is concentrated in communities where bottling plants are located. This can have a huge strain on the surrounding eco-system. Near Mount Shasta, the world's largest food company, Nestle, is proposing to extract billions of gallons of spring water, which could have devastating impacts on the McCloud River.

So it is clear that bottled water directly adds to environmental degradation, global warming and a large amount of unnecessary waste and litter. All this for a product that is often inferior to San Francisco's tap water. Luckily, there are better, less expensive alternatives:

-- In the office, use a water dispenser that taps into tap water. The only difference your company will notice is that you're saving a lot of money.

-- At home and in your car, switch to a stainless steel water bottle and use it for the rest of your life knowing that you are drinking some of the nation's best water and making the planet a better place.