Prepare for Changes

For reasons discussed in this post, it's become obvious that I need to shut this blog down. I will still blog about sustainability over on this blog or on my new website, which is in the works.

Believe it or not, this blog has been essential to me, in its own way. The issues I've covered here are important. I hope I've provided food for thought to others. However, I need to incorporate all my resources into one place over which I exercise direct control, in order to have an effective platform.

Therefore, I will post three final links, which I hope you'll find useful. Here you go:

Stepping away from the rat race for a year.

How to create a healthy, organic holiday meal.

Vegan recipe swap -- best chocolate cake ever.

By the way, I'm on Pinterest.

Pin this! :)

Hope everyone enjoys happy holidays, and great things in the new year!!!!!

My Big Announcement! (Updated)

Much to my astonishment great joy, I've managed to reach the $5,000 goal in my Sam McRae Mystery Series campaign.

Here's the Facebook Page. Please "like" it. :)

But that's not all! Now, I'm going to seek contributions for this campaign for literacy and the Red Cross disaster relief efforts. My goal is to reach $1,000 by Dec. 21.

Do you see now why things must change in order for me to run a sustainable business? :)



UPDATE: I saw this on LinkedIn and thought I would share it (and I quote):

Fundraiser: The Friends of the Staten Island Green Charter School

On December 9 and 10, at the Barnes and Nobles at 2245 Richmond Avenue Staten Island NY 10314, we will receive a 15% donation from all purchases from individuals indicating that they support our proposed school.

Persons who cannot attend the bookfair can support us through online purchases. from 12/09/12 to 12/15/12 On Payment Page, check the box which indicates a Bookfair Order and type in our Bookfair ID 10860377 in the space provided and continue to check out

Friends of the Staten Island Green Charter School will donate 50% of total funds raised to the Emergency Children’s Help Organization (ECHO), which is providing financial assistance for children from families who are displaced from Hurricane Sandy

DC Needs More Skyscrapers

That picture tells it all, doesn't it? Well, according to Grist, it does.

Let's take a look at some of what this article says exactly:

A widely cited urban myth holds that D.C. law prohibits buildings taller than the Capitol dome. In fact, preserving views of the Capitol and Washington Monument is one of the law’s few virtues, but the height restriction is actually the result of some old-fashioned NIMBYism. Height restrictions were first approved by Congress in 1899 in response to neighbors’ complaints about construction of a 160-foot-tall apartment building. In 1910, Congress passed the Height of Buildings Act, which established that the height of a building on a commercial street cannot exceed the width of the street by more than 20 feet and cannot exceed 130 feet overall. As a result, the tallest office and apartment buildings downtown are typically not more than 12 stories.

As demand to live and work in Washington has risen in recent years, after decades of decline, academics and journalists who favor smart growth have started to examine the law’s unintended consequences. Critics include MIT economist Edward Glaeser, Slate’s Matthew Yglesias, and Ryan Avent of The Economist. The Height Act has also come under critical scrutiny in The Atlantic Cities, Greater Greater Washington, and Washington City Paper, which called for repealing the law in a 2010 cover story. On Nov. 8, D.C.’s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, requested a study of the Height Act’s costs and benefits.

The case against the law is mostly one of straightforward economics. If you limit the supply of something, including space, you will increase its price. D.C. is one of the most expensive cities in the country for housing and hotel rooms. Downtown D.C. has the second highest average rental price for office space in the U.S., after Midtown Manhattan. Consequently, residential and commercial development has been dispersed across the D.C. region, rather than being concentrated in the downtown core. Translation: The Height Act causes sprawl.

Cross the Potomac River from Washington to Arlington, Va., and you will see a mass of high-rise office and apartment towers. Some of the tenants may be looking for the commanding views of a 30th story window, but for the most part, they’re just looking for cheaper rents than they can find in D.C. proper. And if you care about minimizing car travel and greenhouse gas emissions, that’s bad.
Even though Arlington has a metro line, it is not as environmentally efficient a place to locate offices as downtown D.C. In Washington’s hub-and-spoke mass transit system, downtown is the hub and Arlington is one of many spokes. That means commuters to Arlington from other spokes in the region face a much longer journey by mass transit than by driving. The result? Wasted time, more cars on the road, and more people with an incentive to live out in the Virginia suburbs, closer to their offices.

It gets worse than Arlington. Tyson’s Corner, Va., is a massive exurban edge city of high-rise offices and shopping malls the size of football stadiums, and the Metro does not go there at all. As Yglesias writes, “[T]he existing regional transportation infrastructure already goes downtown and we should be maximizing the value of that infrastructure.”

In the city itself, high rents for housing and offices are not the Height Act’s only drawback. It may even be to blame for downtown D.C.’s notoriously mediocre and uninspiring architecture. And a 2009 M.I.T. master’s thesis, reported in Washington City Paper, found that the law “puts a damper on the kind of commercial vitality that comes with residential density.” By nightfall, its restaurants and stores are mostly closed, due to lack of demand.

So why would D.C. want to keep the height restrictions around? In a word: nostalgia.

Okay. Have you noticed they mention the Metro line, but never discuss how crappy it is. And it's gotten worse since I posted that!!!

Plus the traffic, the roads, the drivers ... well, don't get me started ...



PS: Make your bike sound like a horse. Oooo-kay. :)

Has Climate Change Killed Thanksgiving?

According to this article, climate change is affecting the availability of the food traditionally eaten on Thanksgiving. Talk about sensationalist headlines.

I'll quote the article, in its ridiculous entirety:

Put this on your list of things to be thankful for on Thursday: the fact that Thanksgiving is happening at all. It’s not a given. As Mother Jones writes, “If the globe continues to warm, that Turkey Day spread could end up looking quite paltry.” The situation, the magazine reports, could get pretty dire pretty quickly.

• NO turkey: Like all meat, turkey’s been made more expensive by this summer’s nasty drought. Also, rising temperatures are driving the wild turkeys towards Canada, where they don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving. (Well, OK, they celebrate a Thanksgiving.)

• NO mashed potatoes: If substituting baked bananas for baked potatoes sounded bad, just think about substituting mashed bananas for mashed potatoes. (Potential upside: Bananas make kick-ass ice cream, and we’ll all be sweating in November, anyway.)

• NO CRANBERRY SAUCE: Cranberries need to freeze over winter. Even the ones that make the stuff that comes from the can.

• NOOOOO PUUUUUMPKIN PIEEEEEEEE: When the weather gets weird, pumpkin crops get unreliable.

America is faced with an important choice: Fix the climate, or cancel Thanksgiving. I think we know which one is the right option.

Here are my weird Thanksgiving holiday thoughts. :)

Aren't we awesome?

PS: Liz Phair is awesome. :)

Crowdfunding is Awesome!

Part of building a long-lasting and sound economy is understanding how sharing can help to promote sustainability. Crowdsourcing is one of the ways this can be achieved. However, many people don't know about it and don't realize the power of the sharing economy in strengthening our society.

To give people a better understanding of the rise of the sharing economy, TriplePundit and Shareable have teamed up to co-produce an article series on it. And they are crowdsourcing the costs of doing the journalistic work through this Indiegogo campaign. I have contributed to this campaign, and I hope you will consider doing so, too.

Now ... as an author, I believe I must build my own brand, in order to succeed. Later, I realized something so horrible crazy weird, I had to take a shower and blog here before I posted anything here. :)

Die Fuhrer

Please, pretty please "like" my Sam McRae Mystery Series Facebook Page.

And please consider contributing to the Sam McRae Mystery Series Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign.

Or consider contributing to my Indiegogo literacy and Sandy disaster relief campaign.

Thank you!

PS: “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” -- Lao Tzu



Now do you understand? :)

Lady Gaga is Awesome

The awesome Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga is awesome, because she's giving back by donating $1 million to New York and the Red Cross for Hurricane Sandy relief.

I'd like to acknowledge Planet Forward as my source for this story.

I'd also like to mention that Gene Weingarten once wrote something about Lady Gaga.

Isn't that weird ironic interesting?

My Office Cleaning Project, Part Whatever

If there's one thing I've learned from taking a sustainable approach to living and working it's that I can't expect everything to be perfect. There are some miracles things that are hard to get that I can have if I work hard enough and believe in myself.

When I started this blog, it was with the intention of examining claims of sustainability and determining how substantiated they were. However, as time has gone by, this blog has become part of my platform, in the sense that I've become more aware of how I need to live and work more sustainably.

Toward that end, during the power outage that Sandy caused, I used the time to start reorganizing my files. And, as you can see, my desk is much cleaner now! :)

PS: Please like the Sam McRae Mystery Series.

Thirty-seven days to go to raise $5,000. Please contribute to my Indiegogo campaign. Thanks! :)

I'm keeping this short, because I was at a book signing all afternoon and I can barely type this post. :)