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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (99166)	3/21/2005 9:01:56 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Good riddance to green rubbish When the humourless and stupid Earth Centre opened six years ago Tony Blair hailed it as being "greater" even than the dome. His views were echoed by Michael Meacher, then an environment minister, who went on to say that this lottery-funded eco-theme park would be a "living and breathing example of sustainability". Well it wasn't. Because last week a last-ditch attempt to save the centre failed. Which means it's gone for good, taking Pounds 36m of our money with it. The Earth Centre encapsulated everything that is so wrong-headed about this government and its frizzy-haired, baggy-breasted advisers, huddled together, oblivious to the fact that all their eye-swivellingly daft ideas and initiatives are thousands of light years away from what anyone actually wants. So when one of them mined a hitherto unimagined seam of idiocy and came up with the notion of a green theme park where people could actually watch their own excrement being converted into fertiliser and then sprayed onto the vegetable garden, which would produce food for the centre's cafe, no one said: "Hang on a minute. Are you seriously suggesting that people will pay Pounds 14 to eat someone else's shit?" This is because they don't like Alton Towers, which smacks of the Great Satan and commercial greed. ... The idiots had reckoned on half a million turning up every year, but in 2004 only 30,000 went through the turnstiles. On the day I went, the place was deserted. And it wasn't hard to see why. Because if I want to know what it's like to live in a green world, I don't need to go to Doncaster. I could just strip naked and stand outside all day, gnawing on some bark. They had a yurt, which is a tent, and the guide wondered, out loud, what it would be like to live in such a thing. Not as nice as living in my house, love. They also had a big trumpet that allowed you to hear more clearly the sounds of nature. But there weren't any because, unfortunately, while they were making the place, they'd built an access road right through one of the most important wildlife reserves in the region. So all you could hear through the eco-trumpet was the sound of various yellow ants, little ringed plovers and marbled white butterflies suffocating to death under a million tons of slurry. This, however, was only part of the hypocrisy. There was also a feature where visitors were reminded of the region's flirtation with coal, and how much damage this had done to the environment. I bet that went down well with the locals. ... When will these buffoons realise that if you open an attraction without sufficient free parking it is absolutely bound to fail? That's what did for the dome. They deliberately made it inaccessible for motorists, because "I don't have a car, and neither does anyone else I know". Unfortunately, 28m people in this country do have a car, and I should imagine they didn't take kindly to being herded into the Earth Centre's unheated cinema and reminded that they were a pack of planet-murdering bastards. It wasn't the hypocrisy, though, that annoyed me most about this terrible place, or the waste of money. It was the dour bossiness, the finger wagging and the concept that all fun in life must be balanced with guilt and rage. Their vision of a perfect world looked to me pretty much like the devil's lecture theatre. They even said that you could use the same solar-powered system as the Earth Centre at your home for "the price of a motorboat". I see. And how many people do you think would say, "No, I won't buy a 40ft Sunseeker. I shall use the money instead to buy some stupid power system that means my kettle won't work whenever it's cloudy." How many people do you think have the choice in the first place? ... What I hope most of all, though, is that the site of their latest failure is turned into a lap-dancing, paintballing racetrack. With discounts for those who turn up in a car. I reckon this could be achieved for half what the Earth Centre cost and that it really would be a shining example of sustainable business. Because it would be packed. iainmurray.org