I was a casualty in the War on Christmas.

'Twas last night at the checkout counter at Whole Foods. As is our wont — or Meade's wont, anyway — we'd brought back Whole Foods shopping bags for refilling. One of the bags — probably reused 3 or 4 times — a handle had torn lose.

I said, "Foiled in our effort at recycling." Then — because I'm always looking for the positive side of things and noticing the red-and-green image of a string of Christmas lights on the new bag — "At least the new one is a Christmas bag."

The cashier said: "Holiday bag."

"I don’t care who you are; it’s not right to put a human person’s ashes in a Wal-Mart bag."

When you get cremated remains, they're in a plastic bag inside whatever outer container you ordered — perhaps the standard cardboard box, perhaps some urn that you imagined was what urns are supposed to look like. How you feel when you receive that package will depend on a lot of things, but seeing the plastic bag — especially if you chose the ancient-bronze-looking Vessel of Somber Respect — is probably going to hurt. So then what if you pull the bag out and see that it's the cut off bottom of a bag that you recognize as a Wal-Mart bag?

If you're this lady in Ohio, you call the local TV station and let them put you in front of a camera to enact your grief. And you name the funeral home on television and to the Kentucky attorney general’s office and the Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors. The woman's ex-husband, father of the 17-year-old boy who died of a heart condition, also appears on camera, just to say what the funeral home did was "not malicious."

What if your family member had died, and you discovered the ground-up bones they gave you — they aren't really "ashes" — are in a Wal-Mart bag? Fragile souls should close that container back up and forget about it. Cover memories of the bag with memories of the dead person. Look at your best photographs. Remember life.

For less fragile souls: Find the humor. A remark about the value of recycling or what the dead one thought of Wal-Mart — for example: "He was always trying to get me to shop at Wal-Mart and I said I wanted a more posh shopping experience, and now, I can hear him laughing at me for wanting a more posh urn experience. Laughing at me from the grave. I mean from the goddamned Wal-Mart bag. No, not damned. He's not damned. He's gone to the Big Box Store in the Sky."

ADDED: Inevitable movie reference:

Reading Elmore Leonard.

I paid some attention when Elmore Leonard died, but the truth is that I'd never read any Elmore Leonard books. I toyed with the idea of ordering an Elmore Leonard book, but I hadn't pulled the trigger. But then I was tearing everything out of the bookcases in the room where we just redid the floors. My agenda is to get all our books onto the existing bookshelves, a process that's involved filling 8 shopping bags with books to be taken to Half Price Books for recycling.

And what the hell? I find an Elmore Leonard book. See:



Of all the Elmore Leonard books that somebody — not me — might have left in the house, I find "Bandits." This solves the problem of which Elmore Leonard book to order. I start reading "Bandits." I get about 15 pages in and I'm onto his game. Not saying it's not a good game. It is. Not putting down people who enjoy reading this kind of thing. I'm just saying it's not my kind of thing to read. If I had to write a novel — and I'm always getting ideas about novels that could be written — I'd get a bang out of writing like this. It's an easy way to fill out a lot of pages, even as you make your target readers feel that it's all very fast moving. I am not one of those target readers. For me, it's slow going.

What he's doing is: He has a story. Something that happened in the past. We're hearing 2 guys talk about whatever 2 guys would be talking about while doing whatever it is they're doing. In this case — in the case of "Bandits" — what they're doing is preparing a corpse for burial. So there's this whole sideline routine, telling us about some area of human expertise, which you could find out about in a couple minutes reading Wikipedia or stumbling onto an episode of "How It's Made." And as these guys talk, it slips out, every half page or so, some little dribble of information about whatever that thing was that happened in the past. You're supposed to care. What the hell happened? Who was this dead guy and who was that lady he was with and so forth. I'm just not the kind of person who cares.

A writer who wanted to take the trouble to write out descriptions of this and that might show us some event unfolding so we picture it, seemingly as it happened. But here, the thing already happened, and 2 guys are talking, while they're doing this other thing, which is an ordinary thing that's somewhat interesting to hear details about, preparing a corpse for burial. That's a great formula for having fun writing, and I know many readers find that fun to read. But I'm thinking: There's some damned thing that already happened, that could be told in a few sentences, and I'm supposed to hang out in this blather and catch the bits of the story as they float by. What's my motivation?

"We don’t cook at home, but, yes, we have separate trash for composting stuff."

Says Mayor Bloomberg, who's proposing food-waste composting for NYC, quoted in a NY Post article titled "It’s a heap of trouble: Vermin fear over Mike's compost bid."

We don’t cook at home... that's rich.

"What happens to the 40% of food produced but never eaten in the U.S. each year..."

"... the mounds of perfect fruit passed over by grocery store shoppers, the tons of meat and milk left to expire?"

"I needed water, what am I going to do? God has a funny way of reminding us we’re human."

"My mouth got dry, and I had to get some water... You know, when you give a speech on a podium and the water is right there — but when you don’t, you start looking around thinking, ‘Where am I going to get the water?’ I figured I was better off just taking that water and taking the hit for it then being unable to pronounce my words. It’d been a long day at work, we’d already done an 18-minute recording in Spanish — and you know, my mouth got dry, what can I say? But I was happy overall with what we were able to deliver."

Rubio had an opportunity last night, responding to the SOTU, and he's got a new opportunity this morning. The most interesting thing — and this is our humanity showing through too — is that he needed water. That was more interesting than his speech and even more interesting than Obama's big, long speech we'd just endured. Something real happened! Spontaneity! We all identify. I love the look on his face as he glances at the camera while drinking:



I read the look to say: Oh, no! Is this going to ruin my political career?! This! A little sip of water?! Meanwhile, it's a big win for Poland Spring in the tiny bottle form. That was a hell of a product endorsement. You can't buy product placement like that.

Rubio and Rubio supporters can make taking a drink from a little water bottle into a thing. It's such an innocent and pure foible, needing a drink of water. It's a nice meme for him. Humanizing. Wholesome. Downside is: Too much plastic waste. So recycle. The best way to deal with the bottles is to refill them with tap water. And the best way to deal with a goof like that is to refill it with humor (and branding).

ADDED: You know, it was pre-recorded. They could have done another recording if they'd wanted to.

What's the most likely reason why they didn't do another recording?
	They assumed no one would notice or make a big deal out of it.
	Rubio was too tired, too unfresh, to do it another time.
	They did try again, but he was worse.
	They thought the water move was funny, humanizing, and a good meme.
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At the Careful Composter Café...

... be green... and orange.

"Cash for Clunkers" environmental cost/benefit balance seems to have been negative.

"According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), almost 100% of a vehicle can be recycled."

Even the fluids can be reused.... Transmission and brake fluids, anti-freeze, oil, gasoline, diesel and Freon from air conditioners are harvested at scrap yards for use in other vehicles. However, still-functioning engines are the most valuable part of a scrapped car....

Many of the cars that were traded in during Cash for Clunkers were perfectly functioning cars in good condition, and excellent candidates to have their engines and other parts recycled. With the engine destroyed, many clunkers bypassed the recycling companies and went straight to junkyards to be crushed and shredded.... [The engines were] destroyed to prevent the vehicles from being resold and taking the road again.....

[Cash for Clunkers] mandated that the clunkers be crushed or shredded within 180 days, regardless of whether all the usable parts were salvaged or not... Cars that are shredded are turned into small, palm-sized pieces of metal... For each ton of metal recovered by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of shredder residue are produced, meaning about 3 to 4.5 million tons of shredder residue is sent to landfills every year....

Well, that's the perspective of the recycling industry, and it's all information that was known when the program was adopted. This isn't news, just an industry press release. That should make us skeptical, but also, if it's true, more critical of the government, since (I assume) they knew all this and did it anyway.