Stuff

George Carlin's classic comedy routine, "A Place for My Stuff" (5:09) is satire at its best--outrageously funny while saying something serious about our behavior.

• "The Story of Stuff" is also a video satire, by Annie Leonard--"a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns . . . . [that] exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues."
  
  
• NPR commentator Daniel Schorr offers this short commentary (2:05) on Princess Diana and Mother Teresa ("Saint of the Gutter, Saint of the Media")--both of whom died the same week. What do you see as the connection between this commentary and the points made by Carlin and Thoreau?

Musings

• Describe what you see as the most important connection between any two (or all three) of these pieces.
  
  
• Use of these pieces as the basis for a story of your own life--something about you personally or someone or something you have personally experienced.
  
  
• Here is a short excerpt by the 19th-century essayist, Henry David Thoreau (from Walden). Describe why it belongs in this section.
  
  Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? . . . I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviae; at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them, -- dragging his trap. . . . I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what shall I do with my furniture?" -- My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody's barn.