This post is part of Blog Action Day, a day of environmental discussion and participation by bloggers around the world.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
No, it’s our laundry. Our humble jeans, shirts and towels hanging on a $9.99 clothes horse, saving us a bit of money and helping to fight global warming.
Did you know that dryers use five to ten percent of residential electricity in the United States? That cutting the number of times you use your dryer by just one load a week reduces CO2 emissions by 200 pounds a year? Hard to know what that means in the global scheme of things but every little bit helps, right?
Dave and I were both raised in South Africa, where the hot, mostly dry climate means that the vast majority of people dry ALL their laundry outdoors in the sunshine on washing lines. Our childhood memories are of folding crisp, bone-dry towels, of chasing our siblings through lines of flapping bedsheets and of learning to hang t-shirts so that they didn’t dry all pulled at the peg marks. (more…)
For all you tech heads this side of the pond, something a little different.
Erik Hersman at White African has been blogging at TEDGlobal , a worldwide technology and design conference currently in Arusha, Tanzania. Take a look at his recent posts for an enthusiastic and interesting look at the proceedings. That and a way cool picture of Bono with Ghanaian economist and scholar George Ayittey.
I usually read White African for Erik’s great tech tips as well as news on how digital solutions are changing daily life in various African countries. I find it interesting how Africans use and adopt technology in very different ways to Europeans or North Americans. Obvious, I know, but the specifics are very interesting.
Erik is also involved with AfriGadget, an organization that highlights mostly low-tech solutions to everyday needs. Check their site for innovations that are a world away from your local Best Buy!
A frenzied air-guitar riff can be heard across the South-African blogosphere. Enough to make your mother come up to your room and tell you to shut the hell up, she can’t hear herself think so stop-that-racket-immediately!
“Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They’re cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.
… The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing …“
Bullard’s full article is flawed and myopic but it struck the chord he intended. South-African bloggers got out their picks and started chang-cha-chang-ing like crazy. I got annoyed too at the wild generalizations, the ridiculous comparison between bloggers the world over and the Virginia Tech shooter (of all people). I won’t reiterate what many have already said — read what Vincent Maher had to say for a succinct, well-crafted response — but I feel I can add this.
I am the kind of blogger Bullard belly aches about. The mommy kind who goes on about her teething offspring and the fabulous pad thai her husband whipped up on the weekend. Who posts pictures of her garden and family road trips, and goes off about politics when she is hardly qualified to do so.
I maintain a blog because I can. The Internet is open-mic night at the local coffee shop and I can get up there and strut my stuff. I don’t have to be a professional and I don’t have to be any good at it. I am not a journalist.
Tertia at So Close spent the Freedom Day long weekend in the Pediatrics unit of her local hospital first with one and then the other of her twins, both sick with a stomach bug.
Like other North-American readers, I was surprised that her kids were admitted so quickly — would never happen here in San Diego. Even though we have great medical benefits and a wonderful family doctor, it is hard to get to see or speak to him and doctors typically take a wait-see-and-keep-them-hydrated approach with tummy bugs. You tend to get stuck in phone purgatory, talking to receptionists and waiting for call backs from nurses. Either that or seeing doctors at walk-in clinics who don’t know your kid. Case in point, our recent three-week bout with Rotavirus.
Tertia has readers from all over the globe. And having lived in South Africa, Canada and the US, I can echo the comments on her blog posting.
Medical care in South Africa? Extreme disparity between the high and low ends of hospital care, and access to great family doctors and specialists if you have the cash or good medical aid. The cost of medical-aid premiums rests firmly on the shoulders of the individual in most cases.
I don’t write enough here about movies. We watch a lot of them. For those of you who haven’t visited our home, Dave and I don’t have cable or any of the new-fangled on-demand stuff. In fact we run a very low-tech casa. An old TV/DVD combo in the livingroom and a 13-inch TV/VCR combo in the guest room. (No snickering Declan.) I know, inconceivable; I have no idea who ought to be kicked off American Idol this week but I imagine I’ll go to my grave at peace with that one.
Instead, we use Netflix to watch movies, HBO series and documentaries of our choice and, except for March Madness, Tour de France and the odd must-see (yeah, I did miss The Police at the Grammys), we’re quite happy in our oblivion.
But what I wanted to talk about was the baggage. Last week Blood Diamond arrived in the mail. Set mostly in Sierra Leone, about illegal diamond smuggling to fund a rebel movement, this film cracks open African civil warfare like no other I have seen. Unlike the NPR interview I heard a few weeks back with a child soldier from that country, Blood Diamond is very graphic about the way young children are stripped from their villages and turned into drugged-out zombies with machine guns. And just for this, I recommend this movie: the ability to bring into focus an issue most turn their heads from the second they see it. Hollywood done good.
Around Christmas, I bought Tau the Sesame Street Sings box set expecting to get the very best of this famous series. Neither Dave nor I grew up with Elbow or Big Bird and we don’t have cable, so thought it best to find another way to introduce Tau to these characters.
The selection on this three-DVD set of classics seems pretty mediocre to me, but then hey, what do I know? I grew up watching* a frenetic bee and a half-blind worm. Tau seems to like them just fine.
We have a couple of friends that are pregnant who, like ourselves, are damnfurriners.
Says one of the husbands in passing the other day, “We even have one of those cots that start with a G.”
I thought that was kinda cute considering that in a year’s time he will probably know more than he cares to admit about the virtues and shortcomings of every item of baby gear on the market — not to mention exactly how to press that very awkward button just so to collapse his Graco Pack ‘n Play.
Which got me thinking on how we learn to talk about babies as new parents who were raised in another country.
Sue, some time back now, staring at the daily daycare report: What’s a binky? Daycare teacher: Binky? Sue: It says here, “Tau’s binky…” Oh … oh! Soother. Daycare teacher: What’s a soother?
This is what you get for living in Canada for twelve years and then moving to yet another country.
Sue: A binky. A soother. Mn … pacifier?
She gives me the look of sympathy, as if she knows the sleep deprivation is talking again.
Daycare teacher: Soother?! Sue to self, too polite to yell out loud: Honey … you’re lucky I didn’t drop dummy on you! You would have had NO clue!
Utne Magazine recently ran an article called Where Will the Soldiers Come From? that discusses just a few of the ways Uncle Sam hopes to boost his forces:
From time to time I read the blog of a woman called Tertia Albertyn — a mom of two toddlers who works in marketing for IBM in Cape Town. Tertia began blogging at So Close to document her painful journey through infertility and loss to the birth of her beautiful twins and life beyond. Her story was featured recently on the South African current-events show, Carte Blanche (think Sixty Minutes but slicker and edgier).
Some time back, Tertia wrote about her sister Melanie Novitzkas, a doula-in-training who started a charity so worthwhile that I wanted to tell you all about it.
As part of her training, Melanie volunteers at one of the state hospitals that provide vital medical care to uninsured South Africans. Seeing women give birth — in many cases prematurely and with awful complications — only to be discharged almost immediately with no one to care for them post partum prompted Melanie to start Bosom Buddies. This group of volunteers visits patients in the maternity unit at Melanie’s hospital to distribute care packages containing basics for both mom and baby — hand-knitted blankets, diapers, onesies and hats for the babes; sanitary pads, toiletries and homemade cookies to treat the moms. Mothers recovering from still births receive care packages minus the baby items.
"We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained."
