President Bush knows how to say nuc-le-ar.

He chooses to say nuc-u-lar.

You have no idea what kind of ordeal I went through yesterday to bring you this dispatch.

Best, Jeremy Lott

Rhetorical question: Am I the worst brother in the world?

While I was falling all over myself in the Green Mountain State last week, I forgot to note here that Andrew “Drew” Lott turned 25.

Happy birthday, bro. Check’s in the mail.

A few thoughts on the SEJ conference that have absolutely nothing to do with the environment:

1. JetBlue can kiss my arse.

2. If you’re thinking of holding an event at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center, I vote for “no.”

3. Come to think of it, best to give the entire state of Vermont a pass.

4. I’d like to find the person who thought it was a good idea to install automatic toilets in airports and give him a swirly.

If you’re looking for a good old fashioned climatological smackdown, look no further than this video, made possible by the intrepid team of Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott. Through the miracle of modern, cheap technology, we managed to capture the explosive panel “And Now a Word From Our Critics…”

I’ll have more to say about this in my Monday American Spectator piece.

Here’s a bit from my American Spectator article today:

The success of Ben & Jerry’s was in the fact that a couple of hippies decided to try their hands at brass knuckled capitalism and somehow managed to get in the best licks. When they didn’t have enough for 30-second spots on late night television, they decided to buy up all the 10-second slots. And when Pillsbury strong armed a Ben & Jerry’s distributor with an ultimatum — they could sell Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, but not both — the young upstarts refused to let that be the end of it.

They looked into their legal options but found that the relevant regulators had been “Reaganized,” and decided to deal with this themselves. Ben & Jerry’s launched the “What’s the doughboy afraid of?” campaign. They took out advertisements on buses and rented banner planes that fly around sporting events. Jerry became a one-man picket at Pillsbury headquarters. They slapped a 1-800 number on every pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

“We started getting like a hundred calls a night, most of them between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m.,” he tells us. The bad press forced Pillsbury to stop trying to hobble a competitor.

And here are links to blog posts on the SEJ conference from the CEI blog: one and two and three and four and five!

Wow. Just wow.

If this interview results in one book sale, I’ll be shocked.

Reason for the light blogging: I’m writing from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Burlington, Vermont. Here for the sixteenth annual Society of Environmental Journalists Convention. Internet problems galore. Lost my nametag. Missed a tour bus. Just had a mishap in the bathroom that looked like a scene out of Liar, Liar.

So I’m not going to post much here over the next few days. I’ll do a few items for the CEI blog and two reports for the American Spectator. Will try to post links to those here but, the way things are going, I probably better not make any promises.

As I already cryptically noted, my old colleague George Neumayr is the newish editor of the Catholic World Report. A discounted six issue subscription costs only $9.95 and I hereby encourage readers — especially Catholic readers — to give it a shot.

Why? Because I think Neumayr will turn it into a fun read and maybe even a good magazine…

… and also because your humble blogger will be doing regular criticism for the Report. To wit, here is my take on Fr. Charles Curran’s autobiography, from the October issue.

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