It is the day after, the day after Halloween.
I wonder how many people are still on a sugar high? How many are suffering a sugar hangover? How many are going through sugar withdrawals? Luckily for some, the Tim Hortons drive through has Tim Bits and donuts to tide one over until Christmas cake season arrives.
Since Halloween comes around every year I am a little surprised that some enterprising PhD student hasn’t written a thesis on the Halloween hangover and turned it into a best-selling book and movie. Surely there are a lot of interesting statistical aspects to the event. Who knows what strange things a nation on a sugar high, might get up to?
Personally, I am a little disappointed that once again this year, I didn’t see any witches flying through the night sky, on broomsticks. However, I believe that it is only a mater of time before someone invents something very much like a flying broomstick for people to use. So, I live in the hope, that maybe next year they will be invented for local travel.
Now, speaking of Halloween, what do you suppose happens to all those pumpkins people bought and carved for the big night? How many of them will end up in the dump? That would be a colossal waste. They could be collected and fed to livestock or they could be composted and turned into fertilizer for the soil. If they end up in the dump that is just plain wrong, yet I suspect in Yellowknife hundreds will and across the country, we are talking hundreds of thousands.
In a landfill, garbage gets covered over and there is little oxygen. So as biological materials like pumpkins rot, they produce methane gas. Methane is what is called an evil greenhouse gas. Apparently, it is 30 times more damaging to the environment then carbon dioxide and 10 to 20 per cent of the methane produced comes from garbage dumps that are euphemistically called landfills.
When I was a kid, I visited a city with a park that had been built over a garbage dump. Scattered about were some vent pipes sticking out of the ground. You could walk over to them, light a match and you got a puff of flame out of the top of the pipe. This was long before people got hysterical over global warming, but I thought to myself, “How dumb of a solution to a problem is this, venting a flammable gas into the atmosphere?” Yet, if I returned to that park, I bet it is still vented. Another example of humans throwing away a product that could be a resource.
If you compost biological matter and you do it properly by aerating it – rather than methane – carbon dioxide is produced. That makes the process less harmful than dumps. However, once again the gases should be collected and used or neutralized.
People seem to get bent out of shape over fossil fuels and pipelines, but as much or more greenhouse gases are created by the way we deal with garbage, manure and sewage.
Talking of noxious gas, I thought I would switch to a different topic and pass on some conversations I overheard at our uptown liquor store a.k.a. The Pot Shop.
One fellow leaning over the counter trying to understand the wares available says to his buddies, “Gee, at least my dealer used to let me have a joint to try the stuff before I bought a bag of weed. These packages don’t tell you anything. All we have to go by is some cockamamie name some marketing executive thought up.”
His buddy replied, “Yea and why aren’t they selling the leaves and less potent pot, this stuff is going to blow some people’s minds. They should have some mild pot for beginners.”
A woman added “All I want to know is which one smells the least. Why isn’t there some sort of rating system or better yet an odourless version.”
If the pot users are questioning the way it is being marketed and sold, you know that there are some problems and room for improvements. I’m just saying.