So after this weekends Kinetic festivities and my own automotive troubles, I feel it's appropriate to take note, again, of the hard facts facing humanity.

Things are going to be different. The price of gasoline is not going to reverse its trend this year, or the next. The rate of CO2 saturation in the atmosphere is also not going to turn itself around for some time, even under ideal circumstances. Things will change.

And we'll deal with it. That's the main thing to keep in perspective. The world will not end. Humanity will not be extinguished. Our particular configuration of civilizations cannot persist indefinitely, but it's not as though we're doomed as a species.

Rocks from space could come close to wiping us out -- real mass-extinction events do happen -- but even in that kind of case it seems highly unlikely to me that humanity (let alone life) would go into the wings.

It's important to resist apoclyptic thinking. This is something that's wired into us as people, a weakness for believing the end is nigh. It's an idea that pops up throughout history, and it's never correct. Which is not to say that terrible tragic things don't happen, but that the rapture never comes, and even sweeping watershed changes take time.

And even better is remembering that dealing with it can be fun. Like these biodiesel cats in Colorado who cut a deal w/New Belgium Brewery:

Bad news. My truck is going to die.

Well, that's melodramatic. I learned today that the clatter I have at certain acceleration points is not a timing issue, but rather a piston bearing on its way out. Now, the truck can run on three (even two) cylinders, and there's no reason to think the bearing will go out any time soon. But it's an unknown. Could be tomorrow. Could be six months.

That means it's probably ok to take to town, but no running the 101 to San Fran. The risk/cost of blowing the engine out in the middle of nowhere is too high to run.

So what's next? Well, next week I'll roll south in a one-way rental. After that I might try and use a new connection to get some air travel in coming back up in June. But I'd been planning on driving this summer, piling up wedding trip and family visit, etc. That's no one-day stop-gap rental.

I see a few options:

• Replace the engine, giving me a relatively bullet-proof Moamar II, but costing a pretty penny.
• Sell the pickup for a couple hundred and get another used car. Pretty much a wash with the above unless there's a sweet deal to be had.
• Live without a long-distance-capable automobile: keep the pickup clattering along in the HC, use other methods (carpool, bus, plane, rental) to make longer trips.
• Buy a new car.

In the back of my mind I've been sort of planning towards the last and final option, but was thinking sometime in '09/'10, not right now. I don't feel excited about taking on a big new debt right now, and I have a feeling that when it comes to automotive technology the longer I can wait the better my options are.

Yarwood asked for it, so here's my response to this week's big legal/political news out of California:

The California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage Thursday in a broadly worded decision that would invalidate virtually any law that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation.

The 4-3 ruling declared that the state Constitution protects a fundamental "right to marry" that extends equally to same-sex couples. It tossed a highly emotional issue into the election year while opening the way for tens of thousands of gay people to wed in California, starting as early as mid-June.

Groovy.

What I like about this is that the decision is broader than just gay marriage. It's gay anything. It's taking the moral high-ground of saying, "you can't stop people from doing X just because they're homosexuals." That's the right way to go, in my opinion.

This is going to move the ball forward and probably lead to more states doing likewise, which will lead to an inevitable showdown over whether homophobic states will be obliged to recognize marriages imported from more progressive climbs, and of course over how the federal hydra should react.

Personally, I think that the question over the magic word "marriage" may be a sticky wicket, and I'd be in favor of some kind of national normalization of the financial and legal aspects -- which is historically what it's all about, let's not forget -- and a decoupling of the State from the religious, spiritual or moral dimension of things. Any couple of consenting adults aught to be able to make this kind of union, and I think it's right and good that we encourage this as a society by recognizing special rights, providing tax incentives, etc. Beyond that, the government shouldn't have much to say about it.

That's all.