Eric,

You are making me laugh on an otherwise depressing day.
Depression I would give anything to know nothing of.
All the rest is just so much stuff that I can pretty much take or leave.
Then, you never know when the irrelevant will become critical.
I know a lot about Bluegill, Crappie & Perch fishing... but that may be
irrelevant here.

Plastic slate is most notable, for me at least, that in Germany it is banned
because the environmental concern is that building products, I assume in
particular for cheap and disposable construction, will inevitably end up in a
landfill.

If our heritage structures deserve conservation, then I think consideration
of their long-term impact (100-200 yrs) on the environment needs to be taken
into consideration. Unfortunate, though, that owners & "uninformed"
contractors think in the short term. Then again, playing with Iraq may create
a great vacuum of timely irrelevance.

Heritage translated into instant real-time economic gain through tourism
seems to me to be a factor in the use of faux materials and the short term
thinking of get it up and going, creating revenue right now today. Having
been brought up with the promise that the world will end suddenly, and that I
might not even notice the event, I find myself often desperate to save things
against the flow. I think Henry Ford was into saving all sorts of things for
somewhat the same quasi-religious reason, though predating the culture of the
BOMB. His having encouraged Thomas Edison's son Charles to capture his
father's last breath in a test tube is curious enough. I think these guys
were as whacked as T. Leary... another subject I may know more than I need
of.

No need to worry, I'm going out to shoot pheasant on a BP hunt in the
hedgerows and fields of PA. Fancy chickens beware!

Thanks,
][<en

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