Hippy Green

My wife has a haircut and I have time to kill.  Seeking respite from my version of city life I head for the nearest patch of grass to read.  I already know that this non-native ‘grass’ is a lousy excuse for the nature I crave, a highly manicured, chemical induced illusion.  The lack of diversity is obvious, a monoculture in every sense, but what is not apparent is the real discomfort of this small patch of urban landscape.  I have not sat here for more than 10 minutes before I give up, the pain is too great to bear.  Each blade of grass is tiny spear burning into my flesh; it feels as though I am on a fire ant nest but I know no life, short of the one allowed to live, exists here.  There is no humus, there are no ants, just painful, artificial turf.

I saw this over at 365 Days of Trash.  While this animation speaks for itself it also has an ‘away’ as in ‘thrown away’ and that is off screen.  In real life there is no ‘away’ - its just ‘thrown over there where hopefully I can’t see it’.  I think the video would speak more if it showed the rate a volume was filled by our unnecessary trash.  Anyway, enjoy and remember that drinking tap water produces zero bottles/second.  Cities spend millions on making safe and enjoyable, go enjoy it.

post script - I’m too dumb to figure out how to embed the player so you’ll have to deal with a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZbTXDkrD1o

post post script: anyone know how to do it?  tinyMCE keeps removing the code on me…

As you will soon learn I am not a big backer of all things electric being the solution to our problems.  I think a solar water heater is a more elegant roof top addition than a solar panel for instance.  Along that same design principle I love this hot tub that just showed up on Makezine.  The DutchTub runs a coil of water around a fire; the water is heated from the fire and subsequently rises.  This draws cold water in from the bottom and pumps hot water out of the top of the tube.  This may not appear all that green of a device to you - I mean there’s no battery, no molecules being split, there’s no mention ‘eco’ anywhere in the mix.  Its just a normal hot tub for normal people and that’s why I like it so much.  If you’re worried about the carbon from the fire then you could use any other heat source you like.  I would also like to point out that batteries aren’t exactly eco-friendly especially after their pathetically short lifespan.  Unrelated to this post but part of my dislike of the ‘turn anything into electricity and its green’ mantra in the green world.

http://www.dutchtub.com/

This isn’t meant to be a long or informative post, just want to remind the world that I’m still here and active again.  I’ll be sharing my green thoughts with you but my interests aren’t in the bleeding edge green energy technology.  I hope you like my additions to hippygreen.

A cow can only provide one hanger steak!  A busy restaurant could easily go through 50 a week and these steaks only weigh ~1 lb.  That’s a lot of cow not being used by that restaurant.  If you are a meat eater I encourage you to try new parts of your favorite animal - you might be surprised by how tasty it is.  People are especially disgusted by the thought of organ meats like liver, tongue, and kidney.  I, however, find they are a delicious way to be eco-friendly.  Here are a couple of my recent favorite recipes:

http://www.whatgeekseat.com/wordpress/2007/01/29/pork-cheeks-and-polenta/

http://world.std.com/~kcl/Rtonguechickpeas.html