Green Barbarians

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A Survivor Leafs Out

April 27, 2010 in Green Barbarians

Rasputin the crabapple is leafing out again. This may seem like an ordinary event in the life of a tree, but every spring I am thrilled to see it.

Rasputin is a Centennial crabapple that my husband and I planted nine years ago, during our first planting season in our country home.  Centennials produce apples that are small but delicious, and we had high hopes for this little tree. Unfortunately, after its first winter in our garden, the tree was looking a bit peaked. Read the rest of this entry »

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Fifty Eight Billion Coffee Cups Go To Waste Each Year….

April 16, 2010 in Green Barbarians

After many failed attempts, I finally managed to enter my idea in a contest to make the paper cup more environmentally friendly. It’s a lucky thing for me that my problem-solving skills are better than my computer skills! Or I would never have survived this long… Check out my idea at Jovato! I’ve been hard at work the last several days, working on my entry for the “Beta Cup; Drink Sustainably” contest.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Springtime Emptying-the-Freezer Soup!

April 13, 2010 in cooking, Green Barbarians

Walt and I are gradually eating away at the stored food in our cupboards and freezer. It’s the perfect time of year for this, since taxes are due, and on a happier note, we are anticipating the advent of our first spring vegetables. This is our version of spring cleaning, making room for a new season’s worth of food from our garden. I don’t do the other kind of spring cleaning–there’s really no point in our household. Spring, after all, is mud season. Who wants to dance with the vacuum cleaner or mop when there are vegetable beds to be planted and a puppy who wants to play? Read the rest of this entry »

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Commemorating the 25th anniversary of our family’s cloth diapers

April 11, 2010 in Green Barbarians

This morning, Walt and I were pondering the impressive longevity of the cloth diapers we bought a quarter century ago, when we were expecting our first child. We purchased 80 triple-fold cloth diapers, which were a rather large investment for us at the time. We used those diapers for 3 years and 3 months on our son, who was not at all interested in potty training until after the new baby came. After a couple of months of observation, Dmitri noted that “If Addie is a baby, I’m not a baby, and I don’t need diapers,” and that was that. At 20 months of age, Addie potty-trained herself with absolutely no help from me–she would go upstairs and wrestle her diaper off by herself, and then come back down, announce that she had peed in the potty, and that she had earned her gummy bear. She was right, she had. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Perils of Penny Pinching and the Islamification of Indonesia

April 10, 2010 in Green Barbarians, Writing and Writers

Quite a few months ago, my friend Ann lent me a couple of books, one a book of the collected poems of the great modern Greek poet, C.P. Cavafy, and the other, “Into the Heart of Borneo,” by Redmond O’Hanlon. I read about halfway through the Cavafy, enjoying it most of the way, and then quit when the poems began to seem to repeat themselves. (I guess I’m not much of a poetry afficionado. My tastes run very strongly toward Robert Frost, the Greek Anthology, and not much else. And I am capable of writing doggerel, and not much else.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Applied primatology: Behavioral Economics, Dan Ariely

April 7, 2010 in Green Barbarians, Writing and Writers

I’ve been on a real binge of watching TED videos, and yesterday I watched one of Dan Ariely, who is a behavioral economist (in fact, I think he invented the field).  I read several papers of his while researching “Green Barbarians.” Ariely is the researcher who figured out that if you give people two choices of a commodity such as a magazine, or two choices of “Which of these photos of young men is more attractive?” they choose whichever option they prefer, but if you give them three choices, one of which is really terrible, and not really an option, they tend to choose the viable option that is the most similar to the really messed up option. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hands-on, Flighty Conservatives, and advice from Temple Grandin

April 6, 2010 in artwork, Writing and Writers

I’ve just finished reading Temple Grandin’s “Animals Make Us Human.” Her take on human behavior is fascinating and incredibly valuable, because human behavior does not come naturally to her. She has been teaching design classes to college students for many years, and has noticed some profound changes in their proficiency:
“I have been teaching my livestock-handling-facility design class for eighteen years. Since around 2000, the percentage of students having difficulty with the drawings has increased. I think this is due to lack of hands-on experience with drawing in grade school. Last semester I told my students to buy a compass to draw circles with. One girl came up to me after class and said, “Dr. Grandin, I bough a compass and I’m having trouble with my homework.” She couldn’t figure out how to draw different sizes of circles. When I looked at what she was doing, I found out she had bought a Boy Scout compass and was tracing a ircle around its circumference. It’s not just students, either. I review drawings from plants around the world and I find the same errors in plans done by draftsmen. Older draftsmen who learned to draw by hand and then switched to the computer do fine. But younger ones who learned to make scale drawings on the computer make basic mistakes like not knowing where the center of a circle is.” (Page 23, “Animals Make Us Human.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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A Rant about Lysol Liquid Soap

March 22, 2010 in Green Barbarians

Last night I saw a television ad for “Lysol” brand liquid handsoap, which featured an animated “closeup” of the “germs” living on the pump button of a bottle of liquid soap. The argument was that because germs live on the button, they constitute a danger which can be ameliorated by buying the Lysol brand “hands-free” liquid soap dispenser.

For GOD’S SAKE! How wimpy and nervous can we get??? It’s a bottle of soap! You pump out soap and then wash your hands, thus removing transitory bacteria from your hands. And how gullible can we get? Doesn’t anyone understand the one-way arrow of time? If we get our hands dirty and then wash them, they’re clean.

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