T-Boone Pickens: Too honest about Williamsport visit! Ooops!

I, too, can wrap myself in a flag like Pickens! "Drill a well, bring a soldier home"-- and there's lots of wells, so where are all the soldiers?

TOMORROW, Friday, 30 September 2011, T. Boone Pickens will present “Powering Our Future: A Conversation with T. Boone Pickens” at 7:30 p.m. at the Community Arts Center, 220 W. Fourth Street.  Don’t miss the implications of the lecture’s title… READ ON! (Unless you just wanted to know the meeting time.)

At first, the dog that I am, I thought, “Why did he put power & our & future & conversation together as if he were going to talk with the other humans about their future (which includes them, of course)? That’s an industry policy?!”

So, I was miffed. My master told me to calm down. “Do you even know what each of those words means, dog?” he asked me. I had to tell him that, in truth, I only knew about the discourse of power.

So, then he and I had a conversation about “conversation.” He said it can be taken a lot of ways. I said, “Yeah, but isn’t Pickens lying when he’s implying that humans get to take part in a back-and-forth with him? Isn’t this just him telling them how things are going to be?”

He said that I should look more carefully at the dictionary next time– and read all the definitions… especially the legal ones, as Pickens is a learned human who deserves respect. “He just might know more than a dog about the definition for ‘conversation,'” my master quipped.

“Fine,” I said.

And you just won’t believe what I found on dictionary.com. As it turns out, Pickens truly is a learned man. Check out definition #4 and my follow-up:

con·ver·sa·tion

noun

1.

informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy.

2.

an instance of this.

3.

association or social intercourse; intimate acquaintance.

4.

criminal conversation.

5.

the ability to talk socially with others: She writes well but has no conversation.

—————————————

In case you’re wondering what “criminal conversation” is, here’s the copy-and-paste:

criminal conversation

noun. Civil Law.

adultery.

So, replacing the word with the definition of the word makes the headline of the T. Boone Pickens lecture now legally reads as follows:

“Powering Our Future: An Adultery with T. Boone Pickens”

Is he really going to talk about sleeping with corporations? (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images North America, 2009, when Pickens revealed the NATGAS Act)

Thanks, dictionary.com! Wow!

Criminal conversation, or “adultery,” is a creative and poetic way of expressing government partnership with corporations, especially when doing so is mutually exclusive of the health and safety of the species that inhabit the very land exploited by the corporation. It’s like you’re cheating on yourself, really. And it is political! Corporations now run your national energy plan, humans!

The evidence of damage is real, right here in PA, and Pickens will no doubt be dismissive of such evidence when he visits Williamsport– regardless of the public record sitting in the DEP office just a couple blocks away.

Humans have perceived a dismissive attitude from Pickens when they cite even the most obvious drawbacks to shale gas development, such as road impairment, as was cited by the local paper.

That attitude is what prevents the lecture’s title from being a conversation in the first three senses of the word.

Too bad, ’cause that would have been cool!