Music Post
This is not so much a music post as my opinions about two pretty awesome songs. Both tie into Panik and/or Timo Sonnenschein. That's how my brain works.
Click to view"Both ends of the ozone burning/Funny how the world keeps turning"
This is horrible, considering I'm a fan of Timo Sonnenschein, but this is a perfect rendering of my feelings on environmentalism. I just don't care. The environment may be fucked but I'm much more concerned with the homeless freezing to death on the streets (which happened not too far from my work and home this past week) than I am about Knut drowning from global warming melting the glaciers, leaving him without an ice floe to stand on.
I don't want the animals to die. I love the average seagull more than I like most people but I do think we need to worry about what's happening to the people around us who are struggling to live in the world we've created more than the animals living in the dwindling wild. Here's something awful and completely essential to understanding the survival of non-human animals: the most populous bird on earth is the chicken. Can you guess why? It's because they are bred, raised, and cultured by people for consumption. They live short lives and yet they are in no danger of extinction. At the same time as we are murdering them, we are ensuring the birth of the next generation of chickens.
Environmentalists typically go about saving endangered species the wrong way and because of that I can't agree with them. They desire sanctuaries for endangered species when what they need done is to incorporate the animals into human society and make them valuable on a daily basis. The other thing that annoys me is acting like civilization and animals can't mix, like nature and humans are two separate things. The two most populous forms of animals are those that feed off of human society and those that are fed by it. Believe me, there are some animals that are in no danger of going extinct in my area and those are seagulls, squirrels, possums, and raccoons. I have seen the carcasses of all these creatures, so I can't say they don't die by human hands, but I've also seen all of them benefiting from living in cities. French fries could almost be considered an essential part of a seagull's native diet.
I love that Timo cares so much about the environment but the world will keep turning regardless of whether there is one more plastic bottle floating in the ocean and one more styrofoam cup littering the highways or not. Nothing you or I do in our daily lives will make that much of a difference. I work at a place that regularly produces metric tons of styrofoam, paper, and plastic waste. We go through gallons of cooking oil and grease that has to be put into special waste containers. I make my money by allowing this practice to continue.
We do use glass and metal, and reusable plastic containers but people prefer using styrofoam and plastic because they can take the containers with them. They choose to use these containers. Do I feel bad? Um, no. I don't let my carbon footprint bother me because next month I'm going to be helping run a homeless shelter that is also going to be wasting styrofoam and plastic. Why? Because the little old ladies at the church don't want us using their nice porcelain. Because they're awesome Christians like that.
The thing is, whether I quit my job and find a more environmentally friendly one, there would be someone taking my place and customers who would be easily outpacing me in their lack of concern for where that styrofoam cake cup is going to end up.
This song is pretty fucking hot and also vaguely Christmas-y. Something about the first half of the chorus (This is not the end/This not the beginning- which sounds way more like "be-gen" than beginning) reminds me of some Christmas song, fuck if I know which. (Do I cuss a lot? My boss today told me I did. Huh.)
I can no longer listen to Linkin Park without thinking of Panik. In my mind, they are intrinsically linked in a one-way route. That is, I listen to Linkin Park, I think of Panik/Nevada Tan. I listen to Panik, I think about...Panik. Or how Franky has a lisp and how that's kind of hot. Whichever. The cool part about this song is that Mike Shinoda has recorded a little greeting ("Hi, this is Mike Shinoda and you're listening to whatever") and you get to hear his voice and that's pretty cool.
Fwhut? I don't even know. I was listening to Linkin Park way before I even spoke German so why it's not the other way around is beyond me. I've been wondering why there was never any Linkin Park/Panik crossovers, then I remembered the Panik fandom before I got into it and went, that's why. No one would want to do it, even after Mike Shinoda freaking posted a link to Was Würdest Du Tun?. Still, it's a great song.