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It’s funny the places a lightbulb can go on over your head. Like a huge hardware store lightbulb display where you suddenly realize government is so dumb it’s dangerous. Why else would our houses be full of mercury-bomb compact fluorescent bulbs?
What, you cry? Aren’t they on the way out? Yes. And maybe you think I need to get out more (or less) because I was only recently stocking up after we ran out of pallid, nasty CFLs that would save the planet if they didn’t burn out so fast and weren’t so toxic if you break one you have to send the kids to Mozambique. (Health Canada says don’t even start cleaning for 15 minutes, and don’t vacuum because it spreads the poison and “may contaminate the vacuum.” The U.S. EPA adds to shut down the heating/AC, use sticky tape and wet wipes, seal up the debris and cleaning materials, GET THEM OUT OF YOUR HOUSE and leave the room vacant with open windows for hours. Too bad if it’s winter or you have a small apartment.)
So why did the government tell us all to use them four years ago, and hand them out “free,” instead of just pricing energy at a level that made incandescents unattractive and letting us choose? As we evidently have with LEDs anyway. See, with just a few last-forever CFLs still flickering and one lonely spare, the rest safely (I assume) disposed of by the hazardous household waste volunteers, I wandered baffled as a clod into a range of attractive options in a commercial establishment. How strange.
LED Christmas lights I knew and approved. They don’t set your tree ablaze and give a seasonally appropriate eldritch light (a word Lovecraft uses more than “gambrel roof,” “eldritch” means supernatural, otherworldly or uncanny.) But I hadn’t realized they’d gone mainstream.
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