Posts filed under ‘energy’
Super Repentance
Yesterday was perhaps the most American of days (excluding Xmas, 4th of July, and this coming Thursday, which I’m sure I don’t have to remind you is the first day of Chinese New Year). My friends and I gathered around the TV and put on the game, and treated ourselves to a feast fit for about 300 sumo wrestlers. There were ten of us.
Now, it’s not like I eat this way every day. The Superbowl is a special day, where we’re all given a free pass to binge on salty, fatty, orange-colored foods. It’s part of what makes America great. Right?
No, not right. Aside from the crippling stomach situation that resulted from my 8-course meal (consisting mainly of chips, cream, cheese, cream cheese, salt and beer), the feast left me with a soul-ache. This had a lot to do with the fact that most of the food I procured for the event wasn’t seasonal or organic (except for the salsa and some of the chips). And it had a whole lot to do with the sheer amount of food that my cohorts and I stuffed so willingly into our faces. (more…)
Tuna Test
The New York Times published an article last week about some new research that showed really really high (scary high) levels of mercury in tuna found in sushi restaurants in New York. For those of us who love sushi, tuna, and fish in general, this is bad news. My personal recommendation is just to stop eating tuna, especially bluefin tuna, because aside from being mercury-laden, it’s also over-fished.
But, if you just can’t live without it, and want to find out the maximum amount of mercury tuna that your body can handle safely, check out the Environmental Working Group’s Tuna Calculator. As a woman of child-bearing age, I am basically told not to eat any tuna at all (boo). Apparently, mercury has this nasty habit of causing brain damage in fetuses. Pretty lame.
Also, if you want some more info about the mercury-in-fish situation, Consumer Reports provides a decent overview. It even answers the question “how the heck does mercury get into fish in the first place?” (here’s a basic answer for those of you who are too lazy to click on the link:
1. coal and other fossil fuels are burned up to make power for our TVs and cuisinarts and whatnot
2. the smoke from the power plants contains mercury, and blows all over the place – including into the ocean
3. here the mercury gets absorbed by plankton and other tiny organisms at the top of the water, then fish eat those little guys, then bigger fish eat those fish
4. the mercury gets caught up in the fish’s fatty tissue and never comes out until that guy with the funny hat and the super sharp knife slices it up and puts it on a plate in front of you).
The End. Watch out for the fishies.
People Power
Isn’t this a sweet new alarm clock? I bought it for myself the other day, after the cheap plastic one I’d been using for three years self-destructed. I didn’t want to get another cheap one, because I need an alarm clock that will be with me for the long-haul, so I looked for a sturdy, metal model that could put up with my morning crankiness, as well as being repeatedly knocked off my night stand by my cats.
So this is the clock I found. I bought it at a small local appliance store and it’s nice and sturdy, which is great, but it has one more feature that I think is totally cool: it’s people-powered.
Now, many of us may look at the back of this alarm clock in confusion and perhaps mild disdain, because it’s quite old-fashioned. I, however, see it as a symbol of the future. (more…)
Story of Stuff
I highly recommend checking out this video and passing it along. It’s about 20 mins long, so you should set a little time aside to watch it, but it’s highly worthwhile and very informative.
The Power Cooking Challenge
I love to cook, and I love having good tools to cook with. Sharp knives, big shiney mixing bowls, wisks – these all make me very happy for some reason. Over the past couple of years I’ve managed to collect a few nice gadgets for my kitchen that have brought my cooking to a whole new, more delicious level, and I really don’t want to live without them. The problem? They’re electronic, meaning they’re diabolical and highly guilt-worthy.
Anyone who has ever whipped egg whites or heavy cream into frothy white peaks by hand can relate to my love for the electronic hand mixer. Hand mixers and cuisinarts and coffee grinders are the tools that separate the modern cook from the cave man (who I believe is known to have bought his coffee pre-ground). These tools hold places of honor in my kitchen, and although I certainly do not have to plug-in every time I make a meal, I am sure to bust them out at least once a week. And every time I weep the tears of a thousand lost kilowatt hours.
So, should I abandon power-cooking altogether? Fat chance. You’ll have to pry that cuisinart out of my cold, dead hands to get me to give it up. But I’m also not willing to live with the guilt.
The challenge: get a small generator that I can power myself – using solar, wind or human energy – and run my small electronics off of it. I found this online – Human Power Generator – and it looks pretty sweet, but it requires making it myself and I’m not very confident in my skills as an electrician. In fact, all I can find online, are more sites like this that instruct you in making your own generator. Why doesn’t anyone manufacture small human-powered generators for running home electronics? WHYYYY!!???
This is frustrating. Please write to me if you’ve got any leads. I’m going to keep working on this, and I’ll definitely let you know if I find anything.
My Uncle’s Farm
Over Thanksgiving I had the pleasure of spending a day upstate at my aunt and uncle’s farm near Cooperstown, NY. It’s not a commercial farm, but they’ve got a lot of cool stuff up there and I wanted to share a bit with you. (more…)
Biggest, Guiltiest Travelling Day of the Year
It’s almost time to get on the road and drive upstate to my aunt’s farm for turkey day, and I expect nothing less than a traffic nightmare and a facefull of CO2. But I can’t complain, because that would make me a big hypocrite. Yes, friends, I admit it: I have a car. (insert screeching breaks noise here)
And what’s worse, it’s an SUV (be it a small one – a Honda SUV). The thing gets about 28 miles to the gallon on the highway, and I don’t take it to work, and I share it with boyfriend and my two sisters, but still. It’s a car, and I live in New York, and I should at least have a Hybrid, right?
So, that’s another thing that brings convenience and guilt to my not-so-green life. It makes my stomach turn a bit just thinking about it, but I’ll have to get over that because I’m expected to consume about 27 lbs of turkey and other holiday fare over the next several days and nausea would hinder me severely.
Drive safe, everyone.
Corny Mistake
Oh, NYC Department of Sanitation. You’ve got such good intentions. You sweep our streets, you pick up our recycling, and you magically keep our city of 8 million sparkling clean. I really can’t say enough good things about the sanitation department.
But the other day I saw this and it kind of gave me heartburn:
Greenercise
It kind of astounds me when I see people using machines that suck energy out of the wall to work out. Why would you need electricity to get exercise? Why use a stairmaster when there are stairs all over the place? Why run on a treadmill when you can dance?
After work I often run into these drummers on the subway platform:
I know this isn’t the best picture, but can you see their arms? The guy’s got biceps bigger around than my thigh, and the chick’s arms are like pythons. Big, swamp-dwelling, small-child-swallowing pythons. You can’t get this kind of muscle on a treadmill, people. Plus, they’re making music (and money).
There are lots of good reasons for getting a gym membership – climate-control, profressional assistance, high-tech machinery, etc – and I don’t intend to make light of them. But it just seems to me that electric gym equipment is a big waste of energy.
Extreme Makeover Goes Green (once)
I was pleasantly surprised last night when I saw an ad for the next episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition, (a fine family program for cheese-loving do-it-yourselfers like me). And no, it wasn’t the spikiness of host Ty Pennington’s hairdo that got me riled up, but rather the announcement that the next episode is going to be totally green. (more…)
