Letters: 6/28/18

0
Wikimedia Commons

Solutions to everything in Boulder

I am an eccentric old lady ranting about everything in Boulder and offering wonderful fixes:

• Advertise big penalties for people who come to live in Boulder and they won’t come with three cars.

• Put chickens in every back yard that wants them. Roosters for hire at City Hall.

• No cars to CU freshmen. Students must have cars that park themselves anywhere elsewhere. On the moon.

• Eliminate all cigarettes, sales and smoking. Anywhere.

• Abolish climate-destructive cement; greenways for roads.

• Sniffing Police to forbid toxic perfumes, hairsprays, deodorants which create carbon.

• Bicycling encouraged, but only by cyclers who stop at stop signs.

• Bring back necking in public places.

• All groceries sold organic and no GMOs.

• Remove trees not native to Colorado because I am allergic to them.

• Three prairie dog burrows, and a great-and-beautiful wonderful, mother-in-law cottage for each yard. Do my children read this?

• No helicopters/airplanes polluting our ears, and distracting us from mitzvotim-good deeds.

• All public garage artwork cost-free by high school gifted graffiti artists.

• Discussions of raising building height forbidden forever. Just say no.

Then, Boulder will be healthy, beautiful, clean, uncrowded, and non-polluted, and sweet.

Plus, bring back Food Restaurant for the great gazpacho, and Boulder Café for its wonderful half-price cheese and chocolate fondues; and, reasonable breakfasts (how much do scrambled eggs and toast without avocado slices shaped like green tulips placed on ginger root lily pads cost?); and, put back red checked charming table cloths and multicolored drippy candles in wine bottles in Italian restaurants instead of having to eat my spaghetti with marinara sauce in pretentious non-décor with jazz, instead of sentimental Sorrento ballads!

Now I’ve said it all, or did I leave anything out? (Oh, yeah, please put prices on advertised events, so old-timers like grandma can see if I can afford to go).

Louise Love/Boulder

Three cheers for Lafayette

As someone who has lived in Lafayette for about 40 years, I have found little that’s happened in the last 10 years or so to be very pleased with and a lot to be disgruntled with; I can’t remember the last time I was properly gruntled. Channel 8 in Comcast cable is devoted entirely to the City of Lafayette, and I sometimes watch City Council meetings to help me get to sleep. So I was both pleased and proud to see (“Protestors shut down Lafayette City Council,” News, June 21, 2018) our humble little village staged a protest at a City Council meeting that included taking over the chamber and singing and dancing, forcing the meeting to adjourn. I didn’t know Lafayette had it in her. Reminded me of my wild, radical youth (actually, middle age). The issue (fossil fuel operations in the city) is almost incidental to the fact that Lafayette was able to do something like this. (I don’t mean to trivialize it; fossil fuel operations are a very important issue.) My thanks and congratulations to Willmeng, Mazza and all the others. Hang in there!

Anthony Lee/Lafayette

Danish’s roving finger

I pick up two copies of the BW each week. In addition to Jim Hightower, Dave Anderson, Joel Dyer and Tom Tomorrow’s cartoons, I look for Paul Danish’s guest columns when they appear because I never cease to be amazed at his intelligence. Last week he was even smarter than all of the scientists at NOAA (Re: “The Moving Finger writes,” Danish Plan, June 21, 2018) Golly gee. However, I usually agree with some of what he says. This week, for example, I absolutely agree that population growth is a major part of many of our more serious problems, like our Southern border this week. Maybe Paul should address the Pope.

My disagreement with Paul is not with what he says but with what he does not say. Paul does not mention that there are many other alternatives offered by environmentalists that reduce the use of carbon fuel.  Buying smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles, reducing your speed, turning down your thermostat, driving less, using alternative transportation, buying hybrids or producing only electric autos, as China is attempting to do. Many of these things Carter tried to introduce in the ’70s.

What I find worrisome in the apologists for the oil companies’ diversions is that even if there is only a very small chance that fossil fuels threaten our planet, shouldn’t we err on the side of caution for the sake of our little ones? If we leave oil in the ground rather than sell it to Asia, and if environmentalists are wrong, we can always drill later.

Gary Cox/Lafayette