Oil is limited. Knowledge is infinite

I spend a lot of time roaming the TV dial, sampling TV shows in six second increments. As a vidiot, I'm a hunter and NOT a gatherer. We have a cable provider who has designated a channel (I don't know which one) as a sort of TV guide station and we also have those complex remotes (with everything except a Swiss army knife) so that I can push buttons and read program summaries with little effort. Except the summaries never tell me that the character, let's say "Bob", on CSI: Secaucus, used to be "Joe" on Law and Side Order, that show about the kid working his way through law school at Mickey D's.

This stuff is important, at least to me. I've recently started to watch NCIS (yeah, I know it's been on awhile-I like to let the writers and the actors work out the bugs on the shows, first before I get involved) and realized, eventually, one of the folks in that show used to be a character in a wheelchair on a TV show set in the future whose actual point and plot were obscure to me but that starred Jessica Alba (hence, my disinterest in the plot) when she had dark hair, on another network. The drop down window on the TV remote said NOTHING about any of this. As for the episode of NCIS? No clue. Jessica Alba wasn't in it. And neither was Jessica Biel (I think).

Because either my thumb was sore or because the batteries in the remote were spent, I ended up the other day on CSPAN (the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network) which, along with CSPAN2 (now that's a catchy name, doncha think?) and ALL the home shopping stations I tend to hop over without getting any on me (how does anyone buy jewelry from a TV?). Because the person on CSPAN was Eric Schmitt and without hitting the cable remote, which wouldn't have helped, I knew he was the Chairman of Google (the most successful noun and verb word in any language in the history of language) I stuck around. Today's title is inspired by his remarks and underscores his point (I think) that the pen, and the ideas it captures, is more powerful than the sword and the drilling rig.

He was speaking as a member of the New America Foundation on Transition and Government but one of the things he was talking about stopped me in my surfing, the Google 2030 Energy Plan. Do you remember the gas prices of this past summer? Okay, let's start slower: do you remember last summer? Good. And going to the beach, or the the lake or to grandma's house and the cost of gas and an arm and a leg and a firstborn? Ahh, yes, it all comes back now, doesn't it? It looked like the Hummer was an endangered species (the vehicle, perv) and we wondered when regular would hit five bucks a gallon (here in CT-it went past that on The Other Coast) and T. Boone Pickens seemed like a Wildcatter Jeremiah, didn't he?

Now, at under two bucks a gallon for gasoline, we cannot believe our own good fortune. If we only had jobs to drive to, the commute would be far less expensive than six months ago. And if the credit crunch continues, we'll soon be living out of our cars, and they'll be cheaper to keep running at night, especially on those cold winter nights in the Northeast. Talk about taking lemons and making lemonade, eh?

But back on the TV, as Schmidt spoke, I started to nose around on the New America Foundation site--very heady stuff. Don't have the time or money to take a weekend vacation? Go to the Big Ideas for a New America section and pick a topic. If you don't see another perspective or another point of view and approach to what you've been reading and hearing for months and years within the first five paragraphs of anything you click on, I'll eat a bug (insert bug joke here). Every time I need to get charged up again about this proposition we call the United States and need to believe, again, that we are, together, smarter than each of us separately, this is where I head.

I'd have never found any of it without CSPAN. All this time, I thought CSPAN was just about Brian Lamb. How can I make amends? How about this for an idea to goose the ratings for Booknotes, Brian? It involves the two Jessica's, some Barry White albums and the Kama Sutra (there's those Google guys and gals again!), either paperback or hard cover.
-bill kenny