Thursday, February 15, 2007

12 and a half minutes to go

I was called up by the local news station to talk about Global Warming on the "Sunrise" show. I said sure - thinking (naively) that I'd have some 10 minutes to explain some things.

This was not the case.

In fact, upon receiving further detail, I learned that I was to give Kern County the top 5 tips that everyone can do to (quote) STOP GLOBAL WARMING. I was also given 5 minutes to do this in. This told me that people were perhaps less informed about Global Warming than I had hoped... Tips to "STOP" global warming? Oh sure - no problem, if we all do this RIGHT NOW the trend will reverse itself.

Then, after sending the news team some graphics and information, they replied with much enthusiasm that they were very excited to run this segment, and that it could be 3 minutes long! And I'm thinking... 3 minutes??? THREE??? I'm not going to get ANYTHING across clearly in 3 minutes.

So, this morning I showed up at the news station and the anchor, who was to be interviewing me, came over and chatted with me about what we would go over. He informed me we would be getting 2.5 minutes. Since by then my hopes of this being an educational/informative piece were already dashed, AND since I am still in the midst of a sinus cold, I resigned myself to just trying to inform people that they should use less energy.

Sadly... even this did not come across as clearly as I had hoped.

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