Green Options

Discover what really happens with your recyclables. It’s time for another round of That’s Just Weird.

In India, the Hindu political group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha will soon market cow urine soda as a health elixir. From our friends at ZapRoot.

Scientists in Florida have come up with a strange way to stop crocodiles from crawling into cities and towns.

Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is testing a program to strap magnets onto the heads of crocodiles that wander into developed areas, saying the magnet could “break the homing cycle” and prevent them from returning.

What better way to start making art out of your supposedly useless junk than to learn from our forefathers (and mothers)? Our wasteful generation, so used to disposing of whatever we are bored with or whose intended purpose has been fully utilized, is just now learning to maximize the resources we possess. Our grandparents, of course, had been recycling long before polar bears started shopping for floaties. Of course, they turned their Oats and Barley boxes into lampshades out of necessity, not green sensibilities.

The wonderful think about folk art is its utter versatility. You can use anything you own, broken or intact. You can super glue some broken plate pieces, old car keys, a car battery, ten randomly bent paper clips, and a torn washcloth together to make a diorama of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Some of you may have the unfortunate affliction that causes everything in your house to break. This problem, commonly known as “Children” can turn everything you own, expensive or priceless, into useless junk. Of course, these debris can be collected and welded together into art that can awe your friends and strike fear into your progeny!

There has been a resurgence of this sort of behavior as of late. All around the world people are taking household items and squishing them together in a global mosaic of junk art. With them leading the way we can all test the limits of our creativity, ingenuity, and the patience of our significant others. (I will warn you now, ask before you start rummaging through their junk drawers. Sometimes a screw driver or Indian penny has more sentimental and/or monetary value than you realize.)

As a species, we must look pretty silly in a number of ways. Here are fifteen weird things we do from a squirrel’s point of view, along with some daily ways that we can be a little more like the other animals.

15. We spend as much effort packaging our food as finding and eating it. So much of our food these days comes pre-packaged that we don’t think twice about it. In order

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