This could be it...

It looks like Blogger wants to force me into the new, much-cussed version. Will it work? It looks like we'll find out shortly. In the meantime, it's been a great 5+ years.

Posts have been slowing down for some time. In part it's from being upstaged - my pet issue, nuclear power, is promoted more effectively than I could do it by Instapundit (which is a very good thing - sic 'em, Glenn!).

Incidentally, where did that 'No Watermelons Allowed' name come from?

There I was, impatient to start blogging and I was faced with a prompt for a name. I must have picked a dozen in a row that were taken. Now what?

Well, years ago I was an engineer in the nuclear power industry. I was raised during a time of ascendancy of environmental groups, so I shared their concerns, including those of nuclear power.

Yet my job experiences gave me confidence in the technology and the industry, so I became suspicious of other environmental claims. I found that there was another side, it wasn't malignant, and that it usually made a lot more sense.

Really now, how did environmentalism become a partisan issue? Don't we all want clean air, clean water, a sustainable biosystem, etc.? Never mind "global warming" - who wants to waste power or use up finite resources needlessly? How could an issue with such universal appeal ever become partisan? How screwed up is your approach when you can't sell conservation to conservatives?

Because lefties won't have it any other way. Given a choice between bipartisan progress or doing things their way, these nominal "progressives" oppose progress every time. They seize issues to promote lefty politics to the detriment of the original issue, like a virus turning an innocent cell into a source of further disease. They own the big environmental organizations lock stock and barrel. Accordingly, the late Warren Brookes called these phonies "watermelons" - green on the outside, but red on the inside.

So true environmentalists must take back their institutions from the left, or else create and defend new ones to marginalize the old. No Watermelons Allowed!

Hence the name. It's still weird, but at least it's unique, and without it I might still be sitting at that prompt thinking...