Write A Book In A Year

Write A Book In A Year

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Why people think Americans are stupid

This makes me so sad... of course, these are all Texans. That explains a lot.

What's influencing your mind?

How many advertisements have you watched today?

New Year's Resolutions for the Good of All of Us

from 100 Ways to Save the Environment at SEQL - Sustainable Environment for Quality of Life
In Your Home – Conserve Energy

1. Clean or replace air filters on your air conditioning unit at least once a month.
2. If you have central air conditioning, do not close vents in unused rooms.
3. Lower the thermostat on your water heater to 120.
4. Wrap your water heater in an insulated blanket.
5. Turn down or shut off your water heater when you will be away for extended periods.
6. Turn off unneeded lights even when leaving a room for a short time.
7. Set your refrigerator temperature at 36 to 38 and your freezer at 0 to 5 .
8. When using an oven, minimize door opening while it is in use; it reduces oven temperature by 25 to 30 every time you open the door.
9. Clean the lint filter in your dryer after every load so that it uses less energy.
10. Unplug seldom used appliances.
11. Use a microwave whenever you can instead of a conventional oven or stove.
12. Wash clothes with warm or cold water instead of hot.
13. Reverse your indoor ceiling fans for summer and winter operations as recommended.
14. Turn off lights, computers and other appliances when not in use.
15. Purchase appliances and office equipment with the Energy Star Label; old refridgerators, for example, use up to 50 more electricity than newer models.
16. Only use electric appliances when you need them.
17. Use compact fluorescent light bulbs to save money and energy.
18. Keep your thermostat at 68 in winter and 78 in summer.
19. Keep your thermostat higher in summer and lower in winter when you are away.
20. Insulate your home as best as you can.
21. Install weather stripping around all doors and windows.
22. Shut off electrical equipment in the evening when you leave work.
23. Plant trees to shade your home.
24. Shade outside air conditioning units by trees or other means.
25. Replace old windows with energy efficient ones.
26. Use cold water instead of warm or hot water when possible.
27. Connect your outdoor lights to a timer.
28. Buy green electricity--electricity produced by low--or even zero-pollution facilities (NC Greenpower for North Carolina - http://www.ncgreenpower.org/).

In Your Home – Reduce Toxicity

1. Eliminate mercury from your home by purchasing items without mercury, and dispose of items containing mercury at an appropriate drop-off facility when necessary (e.g. old thermometers).
2. Learn about alternatives to household cleaning items that do not use hazardous chemicals.
3. Buy the right amount of paint for the job.
4. Review labels of household cleaners you use. Consider alternatives like baking soda, scouring pads, water or a little more elbow grease.
5. When no good alternatives exist to a toxic item, find the least amount required for an effective, sanitary result.
6. If you have an older home, have paint in your home tested for lead. If you have lead-based paint, cover it with wall paper or other material instead of sanding it or burning it off.
7. Use traps instead of rat and mouse poisons and insect killers.
8. Have your home tested for radon.
9. Use cedar chips or aromatic herbs instead of mothballs.

In Your Yard

1. Avoid using leaf blowers and other dust-producing equipment.
2. Use an electric lawnmower instead of a gas-powered one.
3. Leave grass clippings on the yard-they decompose and return nutrients to the soil.
4. Use recycled wood chips as mulch to keep weeds down, retain moisture and prevent erosion.
5. Use only the required amount of fertilizer.
6. Minimize pesticide use.
7. Create a wildlife habitat in your yard.
8. Water grass early in the morning.
9. Rent or borrow items like ladders, chain saws, party decorations and others that are seldom used.
10. Take actions that use non hazardous components (e.g., to ward off pests, plant marigolds in a garden instead of using pesticide).
11. Put leaves in a compost heap instead of burning them or throwing them away. Yard debris too large for your compost bin should be taken to a yard-debris recycler.

In Your Office

1. Copy and print on both sides of paper.
2. Reuse items like envelopes, folders and paper clips.
3. Use mailer sheets for interoffice mail instead of an envelope.
4. Set up a bulletin board for memos instead of sending a copy to each employee.
5. Use e-mail instead of paper correspondence.
6. Use recycled paper.
7. Use discarded paper for scrap paper.
8. Encourage your school and/or company to print documents with soy-based inks, which are less toxic.
9. Use a ceramic coffee mug instead of a disposable cup.

Ways To Protect Our Air

1. Ask your employer to consider flexible work schedules or telecommuting.
2. Recycle printer cartridges.
3. Shut off electrical equipment in the evening when you leave work.
4. Report smoking vehicles to your local air agency.
5. Don't use your wood stove or fireplace when air quality is poor.
6. Avoid slow-burning, smoldering fires. They produce the largest amount of pollution.
   Burn seasoned wood - it burns cleaner than green wood.
7. Use solar power for home and water heating.
8. Use low-VOC or water-based paints, stains, finishes and paint strippers.
9. Purchase radial tires and keep them properly inflated for your vehicle.
10. Paint with brushes or rollers instead of using spray paints to minimize harmful emissions.
11. Ignite charcoal barbecues with an electric probe or other alternative to lighter fluid.
12. If you use a wood stove, use one sold after 1990. They are required to meet federal emissions standards and are more efficient and cleaner burning.
13. Walk or ride your bike instead of driving, whenever possible.
14. Join a carpool or vanpool to get to work.

Ways to Use Less Water

1. Check and fix any water leaks.
2. Install water-saving devices on your faucets and toilets.
3. Don't wash dishes with the water running continuously.
4. Wash and dry only full loads of laundry and dishes.
5. Follow your community's water use restrictions or guidelines.
6. Install a low-flow shower head.
7. Replace old toilets with new ones that use a lot less water.
8. Turn off washing machine's water supply to prevent leaks.

Ways to Protect Our Water

1. Revegetate or mulch disturbed soil as soon as possible.
2. Never dump anything down a storm drain.
3. Have your septic tank pumped and system inspected regularly.
4. Check your car for oil or other leaks, and recycle motor oil.
5. Take your car to a car wash instead of washing it in the driveway.
6. Learn about your watershed.

Create Less Trash

1. Buy items in bulk from loose bins when possible to reduce the packaging wasted.
2. Avoid products with several layers of packaging when only one is sufficient. About 33 of what we throw away is packaging.
3. Buy products that you can reuse.
4. Maintain and repair durable products instead of buying new ones.
5. Check reports for products that are easily repaired and have low breakdown rates.
6. Reuse items like bags and containers when possible.
7. Use cloth napkins instead of paper ones.
8. Use reusable plates and utensils instead of disposable ones.
9. Use reusable containers to store food instead of aluminum foil and cling wrap.
10. Shop with a canvas bag instead of using paper and plastic bags.
11. Buy rechargeable batteries for devices used frequently.
12. Reuse packaging cartons and shipping materials. Old newspapers make great packaging material.
13. Compost your vegetable scraps.
14. Buy used furniture - there is a surplus of it, and it is much cheaper than new furniture.

Words of wisdom: Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde from Lady Windermere's Fan

Here's something from Salon .com that we all ought to be aware of:

Selling (out) girls' self-esteem by Tracy Clark-Flory

Just a couple of weeks ago, we wrote about Dove's latest attempt at selling self-esteem. In the TV spot, an impressionable young girl is bombarded with images of half-naked models, a girl bingeing and purging and women being nipped and tucked. The spot concludes with this warning: "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does."

It's a powerful plea to parents and important enough that it's possible to overlook the fact that Dove is, of course, part of the beauty industry. But here comes a pesky little detail that is not so easily reconciled: Unilever, the multinational corporation in charge of the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, is also responsible for Axe and its line of "turns nice girls naughty" body sprays and deodorants. Holy hypocrisy!

In other words, the same company publicly decrying the way advertisers corrupt and degrade girls' self-esteem is trumpeting the ability to turn girls into sluts with a spray of Axe. The same company that offers girls lessons on the Dove Web site about how to be media savvy and reject harmful advertising is also in charge of a Web site for Axe's fictional girl band, the "Bom Chicka Wah Wahs" -- which quotes one band member as saying, "I'm a classically trained ballerina but I've discovered that tutus and pirouettes are no match for lingerie and pole dancing."

Unilever's all about boosting young girls' self-esteem, but only until they reach ripe readiness for showering with strangers, pole dancing and jumping men in supermarkets! The good news is that the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has started a letter-writing campaign asking that Unilever "ax the Axe campaign," reports the New York Times. The campaign has resulted in more than 1,800 complaints sent to Unilever's chief executive, Patrick Cescau.

The lesson here: Parents, take serious note of the latest Dove TV spot and tell your daughters (and, good God, your sons) that, as with taking candy from strangers, when it comes to trusting advertisers, just don't do it! As for the surely sleepless and mirrorless people at Unilever: How did y'all score on the Campaign for Real Beauty's quiz revealing one's impact on others' self-esteem?

For myself, I'd boycott Unilever, but I don't use their products anyway. For those of you who do want to boycott companies like this I recommend Tom's of Maine and Seventh Generation products instead!

The Ghosts of Familial Past

A dear friend is heading to his hometown this weekend to face his relatives at a funeral. Knowing what he will be facing in the jungle of his birth family, has made me think about my own birth family today. It's funny how family can have so much power over us, even once we are grown and need them so little. How the ties that bind us are forged in sorrow and guilt more often than in love or joy.

I don't know all the particulars of your birth family or its attendant crazies, but I know how bizarre mine is. I have one randomly employed redneck brother and his twin sister, a multiple times divorcee who lives to shop at Saks; one libertarian entrepreneur brother and his twin sister, a graphic artist with a conservative corporate-type husband; then there's my father who is a bigoted homophobic hard-line Republican, but who now incapacitated and fairly senile; and let's not forget my manically depressed drama-queen mother who thinks she is Peter Pan and doesn't want to grow up. Anyone who met all of us separately would conclude that we could not possibly be related. In fact, I'm still wondering how I got here. How did this family spawn me: a "rabid feminist liberal hippie bitch"? (That is just one of my dad's nicer descriptions for me . . . no kidding.)

When I was growing up my mother kept telling me how lucky we were, what a great family this was, and how happy we were. I think she was really doing all she could to convince herself. The wierd thing is I believed it as a kid. But then as kids we live in fantasy land, we make our own realities. And since most my childhood was spent with my nose in a book (any book, all the books I could find) I was happy. Fairytales were my favorites. You know those stories where the royal coach shows up to take the cinderella-child away, because she's really the princess? I was certain through most of my childhood that any day now the royal messenger would knock on the front door and take me home to the castle where I really belonged. I was sure these weren't my real parents, I was taken away from some castle in rural Ruritania and abandoned by the evil vizier or abducted and carried off by gypsies. My real family would find me, I was sure of it.

Funny thing is I don't think my parents were particularly abusive or anything to us kids. Oh, my dad had a belt we all feared and my mom wielded a mean hairbrush, so discipline in my family was corporal. But on the other hand I don't remember bruises, and to be honest most kids in my generation expected to be "spanked"--it was the traditional child-rearing tool. What I did hate was the fighting between my mom and dad. We kids were pretty certain that sooner or later one of them would do major damage to the other. Though that never happened, my parents, now well into their eighties still regularly threaten to kill each other. It may be only some warped kind of dramatic affection, but it scared the hell out of us kids.

Dad was an amorphous figure who was most always "on the road." When he was home, he was generally asleep in an easy chair front of some ball game on the TV, usually with beer in hand, and god forbid anyone changed the channel. The man could be snoring like a buzz saw, but would wake at any sound of channel clicking to smack the one responsible and insist he had been watching that show (even with his eyes closed). Mom, a medical secretary, worked very full days, leaving before we went to school and, though she returned home before us, was generally asleep on the couch when we came in and would stay there drifting in and out of sleep until we woke her for dinner. Odd, but most of my memories of my childhood involve one or both of my parents being asleep a lot. Granted they worked hard, or at least they regularly told me that they did. In fact a good chunk of my childhood was spent feeling guilty (having been told repeatedly) about how hard my parents had to work to feed and clothe the five of us and that no amount of chore doing could ever make up for what they had to spend on me.

Bedtime for us kids was always 8 pm, even in the summer, even when the sun was still out. For me that was no hardship, I read books. My youngest siblings would come crawl in bed with me and I'd read to them, or if the parents insisted on lights out I'd make up stories for them--usually with them in the starring roles. We spent a lot of time in make-believe as kids. Sometimes though, the noises from downstairs woke us all out of both sleep and our make-believe worlds.

Sometimes I still have nightmares about all the knock-down, drag-out, plate-throwing, screaming matches my parents had whenever my dad was actually home. When the noise started, we kids would creep down to sit on the stair landing just out of sight and listen to the fight and the name calling. As if by being there, witnesses, we could mitigate the violence. I learned to cuss early on from the things my parents said to each other. For me it was like watching a train wreck--you couldn't stand to look and you couldn't stand to look away. For each of my siblings it was different, I think. I clearly remember holding my youngest sister, on my lap while she cried--always softly so they wouldn't hear us--and telling her that it would be okay, that mom and dad were just playing. As the baby she was the sensitive one, and I always thought of her as mine to protect. She took it hardest when they fought. She always felt every pain anyone else felt. She was only 3 or 4 (that would make me 8 or 9) when we moved to the south side of town, where I remember the fighting really beginning. Or maybe I was just old enough notice by then. Dad was home more in those years, traveling a more local route rather than being out of town so much. The others had their own ways of dealing. One brother was the family clown, always redirecting anger with slapstick humor. My middle brother retreated and denied, middle sister pouted and demanded attention. I just lived in a fog built of books and stories.

As families go mine is by no means the worst. Emotional chaos yes, but there are lots of kids who are physically and sexually abused by their families. Yesterday in the news there was a story about a local woman who, having been abused by the father of her children, drowned her 2 daughters and sent a letter to their father that said the girls were at peace and couldn't be hurt anymore. By a standard like that my childhood was a walk in a park.

The funny thing about families is that no matter how wierd, no matter how dysfunctional, no matter what emotional or physical pain we endure--most of us survive. Sometimes we survive to become the people we are, even the decent parents that we are, despite our childhoods. Every parent sets an example for their child, even if it is a negative one. So now, as I think about the grandchild I have and the one soon to be born, I can't help but think that the really neat people my grown children have become and the really cool parents they are and will be, is in part due to me, and in part due to my dad. A dad with whom I have a strange love/hate relationship, but from whom I think I learned some valuable lessons. . . primarily on how not to treat your kids. In the fire the steel is tempered.