A change is gonna come…
You’ve been hearing that your whole life, probably. But now the change is here…
Of course, it’s been happening for a while. We’ve heard increasingly dire warnings since the 1960s and even before.
But it was easier to say, oh sure, that’s tomorrow . That’s for those folks in the future to worry about. For sure, they’ll have the technology to cope. For sure…
Well, kids… the future is here and it don’t look like it’s gonna be pretty.
And you can blame all those people in the past… who — like a lot of folks today — just didn’t want to hear about it…
A Bird Hung in the Sky
previous versions
Friday, October 28, 2005
lyrics
A Bird Hung in the Sky
A bird hung in the sky
dipped and whirled and then it spun
A bird hung in the sky
dipped and whirled and then it spun
It flew between the clouds
and dove right into the sun
I stood upon a hill
looked up into the sky
I stood upon a hill
looked up into the sky
The sky turned black
as the sun burnt into my eyes
Don’t the city sure look strange
cars scattered all around
The city sure looks strange
cars scattered all around
Don’t the people look funny
lying there dead on the ground
(C) 1975, 2007, TK Major
PS… It’s actually kind of a nice day here in the smoggiest urban area of the United States… except, I guess, for the smog. It was stinkin’ hot yesterday but today there’s a nice breeze coming in off the ocean. Of course, that ain’t gonna help the poor SOB’s out in the inland empire or even OC. But if you can overlook the brown haze stacked up on the horizon like multiple blankets of steel wool you could almost fool yourself into thinking it was a nice day. (Check out the layering in the picture above — it’s like a merde parfait… so to speak.) See those long ugly things out in the harbor? Those are a source of a huge amount of pollution — they’re oil tankers and container ships and they pump brown, heavy particulate matter across the harbor area 24/7, never turning off their engines completely, pumping out poisons that put the area at the top of the asthma risk index — and harming anyone with lungs. Long Beach used to have the cleanest air, on average, of all of Southern California. But, in the name of trade — that is to say importing cheap, shoddy goods from offshore businesses owned by multinational corporations — we’ve had these poison-spewing behemoths shoved down our throats.
UPDATE: Silly me! I forgot we had a brush fire raging in the hills to the east. Not that the tankers and container ships don’t deserve all the hell anyone can give ’em. They do. But they’re not the only culprit this time…
This is actually a new fire, near Griffith Park, in LA. At 2:57 this afternoon…
A few minutes ago, 6:17 pm
L.A. as seen from the good ol’ LBC, about 30 miles to the south… don’t worry about us… one good thing about this city is that there’s precious little brush to catch fire…
The Los Angeles Times has a good photo slide show on the fire here.
