My Fifteen Minutes

A few things to catch up on. In my last blog, I made a few statements that I would like to follow up on. 1) my promise to interview Obama and McCain, and 2) my promise to actually collect free oil from my local sushi restaurant.

As for the first, I left messages for Mr. McCain. His assistant has not yet called me back to schedule some time, but I am hopeful. President Obama did return my call. Here is an exerpt from our recent phone interview:

Me: Mr. President, 1st of all, congratulations on your historic election.
Obama: Thank you. It was a hard fought victory and now I need to get to the business of the American people.

Me: Speaking of that, Mr. President, you recently promised a "New Era" of Energy. How do you plan to achieve that?
Obama: I'm glad you asked about that. I hope to pass legislation that will promote clean, renewable energy sources and lower America's dependence on foreign oil. And since it's just you and I talking, mano et mano, I thought maybe you could share some of your ideas...

Me: I'd love to. But first, I have a few questions: just how much oil does the White House kitchen staff go through on a weekly basis?
Obama: Well, I'm not exactly sure. I could have my...

Me: Would you classify the oil as 100% vegetable?
Obama: Uh...

Me: What's wrong, Mr. President? Would you prefer that I gave you these questions ahead of time and allowed the use of multiple tele-prompters during our interview? Hmm?

[Muffled noise in the background] Eric, did you brush your teeth yet? You better not be on that internets again. You've got school tomorrow!

Obama: Uh, I better go. Hillary wants to brief me on North Korea.

So that was my interview with Barack Obama. Well, at least he said he was Barack Obama...

As for the 2nd item, I have officially begun collecting free oil. As long as I am willing, and they are in business, I can get approximately 10 gallons of very high quality veggie oil from my local sushi restaurant every week. It's close by, and easy to filter, so it should be minimum effort to fuel the wagon.

On another note, the Mother Nature Network (mnn.com) heard about the Merzola and will be running a short video on their site in a few weeks. They taped an interview with us and shot some "b-roll" footage (stuff like us driving past a gas station and waving, pouring oil into the Merzola, filtering oil, etc.) to mix in. The only draw back is that they did it in 1080, so you will probably see every imperfection I have in HD! We did have to apply some "powder" to my forehead because apparently the glare was out of control. Go check out MNN and see what they are all about. They are pretty new (I think they started up in January) and a good source of information. I'll post a link to the video when it goes up. Stay tuned.