I'm sad to report that Plenty magazine has gone out of production. My disappointment has a second layer, because I'd pitched them several times, but the magazine covered the green movement well, and anyone who's a partisan is a bit poorer.

The anecdote comes from Newsweek, via gristmill.com.

Of course talk radio is dominated by boneheads, but a guy I heard on WEEI sports talk last week — by no means a troglodyte and almost eloquent in a townie kind of way— is still holding space in my head.

His topic was Question 3 on the Mass. ballot, which would (will) ban dog racing in the state. My position is, there is no intellectually or morally justified position in support of that moldering business, and I regret I can cast only one vote to put it out of the dogs' misery.

This is a three-minute-plus teaser for a "Frontline" inquiry into global climate change politics. The show looks good, and I'll definitely be tuning in. But even if you're not excited by the prospect, check out the video anyway. It begins with the Talking Heads song "Burning Down the House," which, in this context, appears to have been written as the climate-change anthem: "Watch out, you might get what your after..." and "We might be in for nasty weather..." and, of course, "Burning down the house." Brilliant.

The people at Good magazine have a good name, if you get what I mean. Some people might think you're saying that the magazine is good, when you're only meaning to say that the name of the magazine is Good. Especially when it's the first word of a headline, as it is above. Good thinking, no? No wait...

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

I'm not above using Wikipedia as a source, but I've never written, or rewritten, an entry, and always try to remember that though it is an awesome compilation of information, it can be manipulated, at least in the short term, and should never be trusted as a sole resource.

It is from that perspective that I pass along word, via ecogeek, of green.wikia.com, introduced yesterday by Jimmy Wales, the guy behind Wikipedia and many other little wikis.

Numbers have no meaning until we attach it: 365 days, the 747, 1-20-09. So far, I wouldn't say 350 has been tagged, but the environmental writer — and, increasingly, activist — Bill McKibben and some compatriots intend to change that.

I heard two very helpful presentations at BE'08 whose common element was the dynamic Solitaire Townsend, a Brit who cofounded Futerra, a green PR agency in London, and has developed enough of a reputation that NESEA invited her to America so she could speak at its show.

I've been wanting for a while to get in a mention of "It's Not Easy Being Green," an 8-episode show shot in Cornwall, England in 2005 and 2006 that I've been watching. It is the made-for-TV attempt by the Strawbridge family to revive a 300-year-old farm via technology and self-sufficiency.