Category What’s on Your Mind?

Do They Throw Things Away They Might Need Someday?

In 1982, I went to work with my friend Dave hauling trash, using a 1950s International truck, a classic old 1-ton, open-bed pickup. Somehow Dave became our estimator, despite being A. legally blind and B. pathologically reluctant to wear his glasses. This made for some interesting if unremunerative estimates, and we often wound up working entire days or more for forty dollars. One revolting job we took on involved cleaning

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Conspiracy Therapy

I’ll tell you right now, Doc, I’m not the crazy one. Like I was saying at the end of our last session, there’s a hidden hand behind every world-changing event on this planet. The only reason most people don’t know this is because they don’t want you to know. We’re all slaves to a hidden agenda, a conspiracy, and they’re not going to stop until they’re in control of a

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Our Green Heritage: Heirlooms & Hothouses

Winter is a dangerous time of year for a gardener. The catalogs feature rediscovered heirloom seeds with gorgeous sounding names: Dragon’s Tongue beans, Crimson Curtain and Banana Leg tomatoes, Painted Serpent cucumbers, King of the North peppers. They sound like legends and poetry. The herbs sound like characters from old fairy tales with names like feverfew, sneezewort, wormwood, and heartsease. I want them all. It’s easy to order those seed

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Ten Reasons to Participate in Your Local Storytelling Community

Storytelling will always be there for our pleasure and edification. It’s an immediate, shared, and unforgettable experience. Here are ten reasons to participate in your local storytelling community. Verbal storytelling is a slowly dying art. It’s like handwriting and mail correspondence. It used to be a way of spreading history and teaching lessons, building memory, and defining reality through various means, which could be passed from generation to generation. The beauty of

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Hemp Is the Future of Paper

Despite the prevalence of digital information exchange, paper is still widely used in North America, for anything from wedding invitations to ballot mail-ins to arts & crafts. According to the Forest Ethics organization, paper consumption in North America has declined, but global paper consumption has increased. However, despite the decrease in consumption, North America still consumes more paper per capita than anywhere else (see Figure 1 below). Because the need

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Ten Reasons Why You Should Hang Out with Count Dracula

I spent some time with Dracula Sunday night at a local art center. He was so dashing and such an elegant gentleman in his fabulous cape. Then, with a wickedly sexy smile, he started teasing me by calling me “Buffy” and “Slayer” as terms of endearment. I was immediately mesmerized by his exotic charm and became moonstruck. I am now intensely compelled to explain why you should hang out with

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