Theater/Travel

Just got back from Portland and seeing The Seafarer at Artists' Repertory Theatre -- pretty exciting play.

I am gearing up for a two-month trip to Cincinnati Playhouse to do a play of me own: The Foreigner, by Larry Shue. I am GUNNING to get there...luckily, Fleet Fuel Testing has been cool with this prolonged absence from the start. I'll continue to work by computer, phone and snail mail from Cincinnati. I've never been there. Sometimes I'm startled by the sheer size and diversity of this country. Really, how can one entity expect to govern it all? We are so different, our land is so different. When the constitution was written, we hadn't even acquired much of the territory that now makes up the US. We weren't commonly mixing races. We weren't so many. How can those old words still stand? But they do...

Which brings me to the airing-out of some guilt here: I fly on commercial airlines frequently. I wish that I planned better, that I had the fortitude and patience to work a 3-5 day train ride into my schedule. That's another big change I'm going to make. Auto or Train only. And it's funny: I dont' even like flying anymore. I necessarily had to travel through Kennedy airport several times right after 9/11. I fell prey to the hysteria. It was SO tense. And then, on top of that, my father mentioned in some casual conversation that smoke, flames and loud noises are indications of major trouble mid-flight. Which forever destroyed my peace of mind. And now we see just how threatening geese are above the Hudson river. My little body shouldn't be flitting around thousands of miles up in the air anyway. 'Sunnatural, I say, 'sunnatural!

But on to renewable news: I remembered reading about solar paint in one of my grandfather's science magazines awhile back (I can't remember which one). Here's a little article that I found at New Scientist online. It's dated March 2008. At that point, the companies involved were postulating that a commercial version would be available in 2.5 years...which means that in some cases, expensive solar panels may not be necessary (its application would be probably be with very large buildings). I originally thought that conventional photovoltaic cells would somehow be involved in solar paint...this article sets me straight. Googling around, I find that people have been talking about this for several years. This makes me think that the technology is still a quite ways off from being affordable and practical for most companies (the article above even admits that dye-based solar cells are less efficient than their traditional PV counterparts). But if it does happen, and an effective, productive solar cell can be worked into a paintable liquid -- the possibilities seem limitless. And in any case, it's an imaginative, exciting idea.

--Nellamity