That would be the No Fun League, not the football guys. I keep saying that the Environmentalists and the Crowd of No – no, you can’t do this and you can’t do that or this other thing. All in the name of using No energy and Lloyd Alter over at TreeHugger is certainly one of them; the operative word is “sniff” (as in “seriously, you like doing that”? Well here, he decides to go on a rant, on all things, LG’s vacuum cleaner stunt. Simply a well known climber strapped a couple to her back and climbed a glass skyscraper in Seoul. His complaint:
The Set Up:
TreeHugger used to have a Waste of Energy Department where we would show silly electric things that could be done manually with no trouble at all, from an electric martini shaker to the Garlic Express. It’s time to bring back the WED as we watch Sierra Blair-Coyle , who can climb anything in the world with her bare hands, instead use two cordless LG vacuum cleaners connected to rubber suction cups to climb up the side of a 460 foot high office building in Seoul.
And The Rant:
This is disturbing in so many ways. Now every Alain Robert wannabe can climb buildings without his mad skilz because it has been mechanized– just tie a couple of vacuums to your back and you are off. It’s like ATVs vs hiking, or snowmobiles vs cross-country skis; rock climbing was so simple: find a rock. Climb it, using nothing but your own fingers and toes (and a safety line I hope). But it seems that there is no sport that can’t be improved by a dose of mechanization and a dollop of fossil fuels.
Not exactly a rousing support of technology that has made life a whole lot easier for millions. But then again, he proves the point that environmentalists hate anything that uses energy in ways that they don’t approve of – and that “fossil fuels” bit shows his real reality of disdain for the rest of us that went “hey, that looks pretty cool; can I try?” (not that TMEW would EVAH let me do it).
My response was, well, I tried for pithy (pity?) in skewering this apparent hatred of the politically correct unapproved:
“Now every Alain Robert wannabe can climb buildings without his mad skilz because it has been mechanized”
Isn’t that the point of technology – making the difficult and time consuming easier? BTW, how’d you ever get your Guttenburg manual hand press to interface to the Internet?
