Recycling is such a racket, at least in my current experience.

I try to do the green thing.  Actually, where I live in Roseville, recycling is built-in to the waste pick-up service, so we can just throw our plastic, aluminum and glass in with the rest of our trash, and rest assured that these materials will be sorted out and properly recycled.  But what about that deposit I paid at the register? Lost, at least to me.  I have no doubt Roseville is collecting a tidy sum for all this stuff, and well they should, I guess.  Those funds surely make their way into the budget somewhere; at the very least I would hope they reduce the cost we pay for garbage pickup.

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There’s an interesting confluence of events happening right now: we are getting a regular dose of new Star Wars, in the form of the Clone Wars TV series¹, as well as a new Star Trek film (to be released in May). This has brought out some of the wags on both sides of the aisle, each fan of one particular franchise disparaging the other.

Now, let’s get one thing out of the way right now: each series has its share of turkeys. I’ll admit I’ve never seen the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, but it’s a notoriously bad thing. Then there’s Star Trek V, which has a few redeeming qualities… very few. And let’s not even discuss “Spock’s Brain”. But every show from every genre has its clunkers, its phoned-in acting and cartoon plots.

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This is not intended to become a heavy or whiny political blog (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but I will offer this: one side of the debate last night represented style, the other substance. I’ll leave it as an excersise for the reader to decide which is which.

The debate did serve as a minor test of my household’s decision to go without TV service. So far, for about a year now, we’ve relied on nothing but DVDs and video on the computer, (be it video from network websites, YouTube, or iTunes) and it’s worked really well. We only have a few primtetime shows that we follow, and we don’t think network news is worth a darn. For a panicked moment we were unable to find a full video feed of the debate. The Washington Post had our back, but it was looking like we were going to be left waiting until the next day for a second there. This was a fate we wanted to avoid, since to us the debate seemed like the new episode of Heroes or Grey’s; you don’t want to read the shocking highlights on Yahoo! News before you have a chance to enjoy the narrative in its original form. Spoiler avoidance for a political debate: who knew?