April 25, 2006 - Hybrid. Hi Ed.

Earth Day is celebrated each year on April 22nd. We all love Wikipedia, but if you want to explore the limits of collaborative knowledge, check out the talk page on Wikipedia for Earth Day. Some people, it seems, want to point out on the Earth Day Wiki page that the first Earth Day was held on Vladimir Lenin’s 100th birthday. Others think that this fact is not important.

Ed had always heard that Santa Barbara had something to do with the first Earth Day. The Community Environmental Council (CEC) makes that claim on their website:

The story goes that Earth Day was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson after a trip he took to Santa Barbara right after that horrific oil spill off our coast in 1969. He was so outraged by what he saw that he went back to Washington and passed a bill designating April 22 as a national day to celebrate the earth.

The Wikipedia page is constantly changing, and as of yesterday, it devoted over 100 words to discussing the Lenin birthday thing. But Santa Barbara was not mentioned at all. The dedicated staff of edhat.com, always looking out for our town, went online to add the CEC claim. Who knows if the Wiki editors-at-large will keep it there?

On Sunday (April 23rd), the CEC and the rest of Santa Barbara celebrated Earth Day at the Sunken Gardens. It would have been Roy Orbinson’s 70th birthday, but it’s unlikely that this had anything to do with the choice of the day. Also on Sunday, a couple of blocks of downtown State Street were closed off for a car show - probably a coincidence as well.

But there were also plenty of cars at Earth Day – all kinds of alternative energy and hybrid vehicles that don’t have all the problems associated with fossil fuel. Of course, in the spirit of Wikipedia objectivity, we must point out that no energy comes without some environmental consequence. Electric vehicles, for instance, rely upon electricity. And electricity is often produced by damming rivers and turning turbines that burn fossil fuel.

Yesterday, the dedicated staff of Edhat.com parked our green (colored) car at the intersection of Mission and State and counted the number of hybrid cars that went through the intersection. It was warm. We opened up the sunroof to let in the fresh air. We counted 500 cars in all. Seven of them were hybrids (mostly Prius).

Speaking of Prius ... it might be time to starting thinking about getting one of those 55MPG vehicles. Forget about the environmental reasons; with gas selling for over $3.00/gallon, you can save about $200/month just by not filling up so often! And (still) speaking of Prius, Edhat advertiser, the Waldorf School, is auctioning one off. A $50 raffle ticket is all you might need to get yourself behind the wheel.

In yesterday’s contest, SB Real Estate, Crazy Legs, Juan Coffee, Lyuba, Kikibeth, LB7997, and Raffo each guessed lucky 7. The 7 winners were assigned individual tennis balls that were thrown one at a time into the back yard. The Edhat dog successfully retrieved each ball, but SB Real Estate’s ball was retrieved in the shortest amount of time. SB RE wins an Edhat t-shirt. With so much luck flowing his/her way, maybe SB RE should buy one of those raffle tickets.

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