photo credit: neys

Sometimes my local paper will run a large photo, along with a brief caption. They leave off the important stuff like the actual details of the story.

Today they ran a picture from the L.A. Times with the caption:

“A Los Angeles municipal worker empties a bale of plastic balls Monday into the Invanhoe reservoir in Los Angeles. The Department of Water and Power released about 400,000 black plastic 4-inch balls as the first installment of about 3 million balls, which are expected to form a floating cover over seven acres of the reservoir. The idea is to protect drinking water from sunlight, which can fuel the formation of harmful substances.”

Of course, the photo shows a guy dumping large black plastic balls into the reservoir as they form a small island downstream. My point? I don’t get it! Our drinking supply has been exposed to sunlight for billions of years. Why is it suddenly causing “the formation of harmful substances?” What harmful substances? Now, I’m pretty sure if I went and dumped 400,000 black plastic balls into the nearest river, there would be hell to pay. Plastic breaks down under UV radiation, and we all know that decomposing plastic is not part of our normal daily requirements of vitamins, minerals, and trace elements. What gives?

Yes, most freelance writers enjoy getting paid to write. I just landed a writing gig for “Bright Hub,” a website that features science and technology articles for the common people. (My words, not theirs.) We write about our subjects from the heart, with passion and honesty. If I am writing about a technology product and find that it sucks, I’ll say so. This is so much better than those other “writing opportunities” where you get paid to write nothing but positive endorsements.

So now I can add another website to the list of sites I write content for! My first article isn’t earth shaking, but it’s a start. My specialty on this website (for now) is going to be Desktop Publishing, something I have been doing since the early days when Okidata came out with a “color printer” that was actually a dot-matrix printer with color banded ribbons. Those were the days. To read my article, visit: HERE

Don’t worry - I won’t be using my blog to hype every article I write. I just wanted to share my excitement.