{"id":214,"date":"2007-04-11T14:43:05","date_gmt":"2007-04-11T21:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/?p=214"},"modified":"2015-03-30T20:25:53","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T03:25:53","slug":"earth-in-the-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/?p=214","title":{"rendered":"Earth in the Balance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not to worry. The pugs will return. In the mean time, please take a moment to be enlightened by the following public-service announcement:<\/p>\n<p>Every so often, a movie comes along that really makes you think about the effect we human beings have on the planet. No, I&#8217;m not referring to An Inconvenient Truth. I know a lot of you are saying, &#8220;Ooh, Al Gore! He should have been president instead of Monkey Boy and even though his wife is a real buzzkill, we just love him.&#8221; These are all valid points but just hear me out.<\/p>\n<p>The movie I&#8217;m talking about is Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Monday night&#8217;s bartender brought the video to work with him and played it all the customers. I must say that I was impressed. I was also drunk. That and watching the film with the sound turned off inspired me to read a plot synopsis from IMDB in order to fill in the gaps.<\/p>\n<p>This research confirmed what I began to suspect after my third drink: this was the most important environmental movie ever made.<\/p>\n<p>In the film, a malevolent behemoth piggybacks to earth on a meteorite and starts devouring pollution (hey, it could happen). Now then, reverse logic might dictate that a creature living on a diet of Japanese industrial waste would shit bonsai and cherry blossoms. Not so in this case. Instead, Hedorah (the Smog Monster) spends his after-meal time spewing flatulence more noxious than an old Chevy Impala with a dead rat in the oil pan.<\/p>\n<p>Something must be done. But if you&#8217;re familiar with movies of this genre, you already know that the Japanese military is about as effective against giant monsters as it was against the Enola Gay. Therefore, it&#8217;s up to Godzilla (n\u00e9e Gojira) to save the world. Needless to say, Big G tears Ol&#8217; Smoggy a new one. The movie ends with people realizing that their polluting ways have brought calamity upon themselves and humanity better clean up its act pronto.<\/p>\n<p>The movie was released in 1971. Think about what the planet would be like if we had heeded its message then. For one thing, we wouldn&#8217;t have to endure some political has been who thinks enough of his message to drone on about for almost two hours but not enough to put on a rubber suit and start laying down the smack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not to worry. The pugs will return. In the mean time, please take a moment to be enlightened by the following public-service announcement: Every so often, a movie comes along that really makes you think about the effect we human beings have on the planet. No, I&#8217;m not referring to An Inconvenient Truth. I know &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/?p=214\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Earth in the Balance<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions\/215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}