The above title is a quote from the current draft Transition Initiatives Primer, an effort I have been spending a fair bit of time on here in Portland, OR.  My interest is specifically because it does the best job that I've seen on addressing global weirding (warming), peak oil and at the same time improving both community resilience and quality of life.

I have to add that this primer is written in British and at some point I'm going to write up a translation guide.

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http://www.transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/Primer ...

My friend Randy White, founder of Bright Neighbor came over and shot this video of my back yard in early March when nothing was in bloom quite yet.

Has anyone else's raspberries already started ripening here in Portland, OR?  This is at least a month a head of schedule for these plants. I've been harvesting for a week or two already this year. I'm thinking I haven't had a hard frost here at the house since fairly late in March which is odd unto itself.

Much to my surprise, there is not a world record for mocking listed at Guinness World Record's website.   I think that the following posting from  Represenative Pete Hoekstra, might warrant being the entry point for the 1st mocking world record.

http://twitter.com/petehoekstra
"Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."
8:56 AM Jun 17th from TwitterBerry

The part I find particularly funny is he made this posting from his Blackberry (TwitterBerry is a Blackberry application).  Just imagine, you are sitting in some meeting room, either waiting for a meeting to start or bored in a meeting that ran a bit too long and you have a thought that you wanted share.   The problems are

1. you also have been living in a bubble that is Washington DC
2. the GOP has become so practiced at taking umbrage at basically anything and
3. the GOP’s ability to generate fauxrage so pronounced that your ability to accurately compare events has long since slipped your grasp.
   

Along comes the building revolution in Iran, combined with a very emotionally drawn-in community encompassing much of the twitter user base and one stray twitter post from a previously unknown represenative....  The post that launched a thousand mocks within hours now sports a website (http://hoekstraisameme.com) devoted to the best mocking replies to the honorable representative from Michigan.

If you’re curious, here is the search page to see anyone replying to @petehoekstra - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=petehoekstra