My Secret Hobby

Something that every graduate has to look forward to after their illustrious college days is the return home.  Whether it be a week, or a year, or until you are 35...Upon my return home I was confronted with the daunting task of sifting through my shit that my parents had not discarded, but did not want to keep.  Boxes full of memories, like my very first report cards which told me that I was a much better student in kindergarten.  Among these boxes I found all of my old National Geographics.  You see, I am was and will always be a nerd.  I started collecting these around 5th grade until I was equipt with a book shelf worth of magazines, ranging from The 70's to the 90's.At that tender age, it was really more about the pictures for me.  You see, as a child I was turned onto the popular Zoobooks subcription.  Each month you'd get little pieces on different animals that you could collect.  This, in turn, stimulated a fascination for animals, and pictures of animals.Now as I sifted through these relics of my past hobby I naturally gravitated toward the idea of actually reading them.  Here is the great part friends...  In The May 1977 issue of National Georgraphic, amid a very interesting article on the Celts, some pictures of naked Malaysian natives, and the digestive prowess of the flat worm I found this ad.



Or http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e369/Noonsun/ngsead.jpg

My hasty scan doesn't quite do it justice because there is a very compelling text to the left of the shadowed woman that reads:

"The sun, the earth's greatest known energy resource, is today one sensible solution to ever-increasing hot water heating costs.

Grumman has harnessed the sun's energy for immediate delivery to you. Today, by installing a Sunstream Solar Domestic Hot Water System, you could save over 50% of your domestic hot water heating costs.

Where else could you make an investment that not only may immediately add value to your home, but also assure you of greater dividends as the cost of energy rises?

So, get the Solar Domestic Hot Water System built by Grumman, the company with a reputation for product reliability...and remember if just 10% of U.S. homes used this system, it would result in an annual savings of over 400 million gallons of fuel oil or over 53 billion cubic feet of natural gas."

Ahem...Wow, don't we look like idiots... So I looked it up, and did you know that the development of solar technologies started in...drum roll please....the 1860's. That's right, I meant 18 and not 19. Apparently back then we had a little coal scare where we thought that we might start to run out of coal (sound vaguely familiar), but then we found petroleum and quickly forgot about our lovely renewable alternatives.

I really should have read these when I was younger, but there were no global problems in my head other than D.A.R.E. and saving the whales and rainforest. Even these were very distant as I was mostly focused on how Barbie and Ken would now interact if they owned a Barbie Corvette instead of the Jeep.