Dealing With Headaches

This post is aimed more for American readers. My apologies to non-American readers. You can go look at Brad Pitt photos here.

Anyway, American Migraineurs…

A petition to Congress has been started by Diana Lee of Headache Blog Carnival and Somebody Heal Me fame. It’s currently up on iPeteitions.com. This is a non-profit site, so expect to be asked for a donation after you electronically sign the petition.

This petition is to ask Congress to rethink the Energy Independence & Security Act of 2007, which suggests all public places replace their lighting with CFL bulbs. (I’m really paraphrasing the Act here, so if I painted the picture of potential public lighting with too broad a brush, I apologize.) These bulbs have been proven to trigger migraines in the headache-prone.

Although the makers of CFL bulbs constantly say their bulbs do not flicker, they sure do. It’s very slight, but it is enough to make my life and the lives of many other American migraineurs miserable. I can’t have them in my house. I hate to think I’ll be trapped in my house because I can’t tolerate the lighting anywhere else. I think they’re a great idea, but needs a design overhaul to elimnate the flickering.

What About the Planet

Considering all of the crap things we humans are doing to the planet, lightbulbs are really far down the list. Cutting out human overpopulation, strengthening public transportation, curbing our ridiculous buying habits, dropping our consumption of red meat and taxing the tar out of Big Oil will should be far up on our priority list because they have far more impact ont he planet than trying to these little piddling things like ban cigarette smoking, ban trans fats and change out lightbulbs.

There is no magic bullet to climate change and the environmental crisis. Heck, in the state of Pennsylvannia, you can’t even get the citizens to agree that there IS such a thing as a climate crisis. But making everyone in the country use light bulbs that make us sick is not going to help anything exept get the 30 million or so American migraineurs really ticked off.

Thank you and good light…I mean, good night!