Jackson Hole Underground

Shocking. Stephen Colbert is quick-witted and scary-smart. So is John Perry Barlow. This match made in heaven might have worked with a calmer 20-minute interview. Alas, within its allotted six minutes and a torrent of verbiage, zilch happened.

This is typical of the Colbert Report, really. Promising intellects — Tim Robbins, Steve Wozniak and, last night, Barlow — tend to flame out as Colbert becomes too amped, killing the give-and-take.

Colbert’s style works best on the self-absorbed who forget the nature of the Colbert beast. For example, Colbert baited America-hating conservative Dinesh D’Souza with,”What are the other cultural editing notes we should take from the terrorists?” Colbert badgered D’Souza into admitting that jihadists basically have a good point.

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Lede from a recent article at NewWest.net:

“Author David James Duncan says if in the Bible, the words ‘heaven and earth’ were replaced with ‘environment,’ the book would be out of print.”

The piece sums up a compelling talk Duncan gave at the University of Montana last week. Duncan is a vigorous thinker deeply informed by Buddhism; The Brothers K is as great as any Great American Novel.

So read the article. Duncan’s talk heads a different direction that your gut expects.

I’ve pretty much stopped drinking my coffee from paper cups by hauling into Hard Drive and Pearl Street Bagels one of those stainless steel freebie belogo’d to-go mugs that roll around the floor of my car.

Were you shocked to learn that Americans trash 2.5 million plastic water bottles per hour?

Here’s a similar shocker: Starbucks alone goes through 1.9 billion paper cups per year. That’s 78,000 trees.

But I’m not here to bully. I’ll settle for a compromise. Every to-go coffee purchase also comes with what I call the “mittsfib” or MTSFIB — the McDonald’s Tort Sissy-Finger Insulator Belt. No doubt corporate lawyers came up with this ever since some poor old lady famously sued McDonald’s because her to-go coffee was apparently quite hot.

Go ahead. Use’n'toss the paper cup. But at least be tough enough to say “hold the mittsfib.”

The first women to set me straight were older women. I was hitchhiking. A convertible hauling four sunny babes pulled over. They made room for me in middle of the back seat. They had me surrounded.

Boy, did they take advantage of me. They joked about their body parts. They mentioned “periods” in a non-punctuation context. They acknowledged familiarity with the sex act. Before they were done with me, one of them farted and they all laughed. My ears glowed red. I was 15. These libertine women were perhaps as ancient as college age.

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In his Council Chronicles column on Feb. 7, Planet Jackson Hole reporter Jake Nichols provided a few bits of keen insight on the Imagine Jackson vote before the city council.

Although the column had some tongue-in-cheek innuendo and the unfortunate title “Melissa Turley’s vote cannot be bought,” the real gem was Nichols’ observation that Meridian Group developer Mike Halpin stood to gain another contract for designing the building Imagine Jackson seeks public money to construct. Halpin is chairman of the group’s board.

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