>> How much is GOOD worth? You decide — as long as you decide 12 issues are worth more than a buck.

>> If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell? Artist Phil Toledano’s come up with a few items. Abu Ghraib Cookie Jar, anyone? (via Utne)

>> Already made a video for Home Depot’s“Save Money. Save Energy. Win Big” YouTube contest? Maybe you can enter the same video to win $10,000 from SmartPower’s Energy Smart Ad Challenge. Get your 30 second video in by Earth Day 2009.

Image via americathegiftshop.com

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>> Should I work? Or should I watch 30 Rock, cuz the first episode of the third season’s now on Hulu!

>> Should I move? Or just move into a walking house? (via ideas)

>> Should I have kids? Yes, if I wanna be less happy for 18 years straight. Writes Paul Bloom in The Atlantic:

Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with images and stories about how wonderful kids are. We think they make us happy, though they actually don’t.

The entire essay, “First Person Plural” is a fascinating read.

>> Should I go veg? It may help me better identify good restaurants. Writes Meg Favreau at Table Matters: “I have a theory that you can tell how much a restaurant thinks about its food by the quality of its veggie burger.” (via ideas) As of now I still eat fish, but I do like a good veggie burger –

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>> Man invites his 700 Facebook friends to a meetup, ends up drinking alone. “I would learn, when I asked some people who didn’t show up the next day, that ‘definitely attending’ on Facebook means ‘maybe’ and ‘maybe attending’ means “likely not.’” (via 3qd) Oddly, I’m now v. tempted to try out this experiment with my 450 “friends.”

>> Man wants fewer Facebook friends, desires new Facebook app: Fade Utility. “Untended Friends would gradually display a sepia cast on the picture, a blurring of the neglected profile—perhaps a coffee stain might appear on it or an unrelated phone number or grocery list. The individual’s status updates might fade and get smaller.”

>> Man sees connection between Facebook and steroids, though this following quote will not illuminate said connection: “Krebs sees social networks facing a decidedly human problem. They need to find a compromise between the seemingly infinite number of network connections and the limited interaction capacity of human beings. After all, a person doesn’t need to remember every person he’s ever met, unless he is Bill Clinton.”

>> Man enlists team to find out if texting conveys real emotions. “The team found not only that each participant could accurately assess their partner’s mood, but that those paired with someone who had watched Sophie’s Choice felt sadder than before the chat.” The question here is: Do Facebook status updates have the same emotional effect?

Update: Man stabs wife to death over Facebook update. (via Fimoculous) I guess that answers my last question. However, the fact that the dude was emotionally unstable, drunk and coked up prolly also played a hand here.

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October’s Fair Trade Month!

>> Submit a recipe that uses at least one fair trade ingredient for a chance to win a $100 gift basket from BuyWell Coffee.

>> London’s officially a fair trade city, making it the largest city in the world to be declared a fair trade city.

>> As of Oct. 21, Montclair, NJ is the first fair trade town in the tri-state area and eighth fair trade town in the US.

>> Change.org’s got a new fair trade blog written by Zarah, Operations Manager for the Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store.

>> Earlier: Happy Fair Trade (chocolate) month and Clicklist: Fair Trade Month edition

Image via Transfair USA

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>> Google’s put together a spooky guide to avoiding high energy prices. Slay vampires and zombies in your home! (via Lifehacker)

>> Switched to CREDO yet? If so, all CREDO outbound domestic calls are FREE for you on election day during your state’s polling hours. Sez Credo: “We hope you’ll call all your friends and urge them to get out and vote. We’re picking up the tab, so you won’t need to worry about the cost. ” That patriotic deal goes for both CREDO Mobile and CREDO Long Distance.

>> Wired recommends the good telecommuting life as a boon both for you and the company you work for: “When gasoline costs $4 a gallon, companies shouldn’t just be doing all they can to expand telecommuting — they should be scrapping their offices entirely.”

Image via Google

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>> Make your own Obama. Finger puppet, that is. (via Wosted Witch)

>> The League of Conservation Voters released its 2008 scorecard rating members of congress on their environmental votes. McCain scored 0% and Obama 18%, due to missed votes. California’s US Senators both got 100%. 14 of Cali’s US House members also got perfect 100%s, but 11 other House members got perfect 0%s.

>> From NewScientist’s Short Sharp Science blog: A phantom penis, and how to remove it.

>> From Slate: What a Boy Wants: How do you know whether an adolescent really wants a circumcision?

Photo via Lion Brand Yarn

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>> Metro’s taking seats out of train cars to make room for bikes, wheelchairs, and luggage. De-seating’s expected to commence in 30 - 60 days.

>> Metro may have to cut services due to lease-back deals it made involving AIG back when the financial company was doing okay:

AIG provided $1 billion in loans to finance the transactions. The company, in return for fees paid by the transit agency, also guaranteed that the lease payments to investors would be made on time.

But now AIG’s financial troubles have

triggered a clause in the lease-back agreements that require the MTA to either find a new firm to guarantee the deals or reimburse investors for their down payments and lost tax benefits, a scenario that could cost the transit agency between $100 million and $300 million….

Under a worst-case scenario, [Metro treasurer Terry] Matsumoto said, the bill could rise to $1.8 billion, more than half the MTA’s annual budget for this year. “There is no practical way we could ever pay that back,” he said.

Metro seems to be scrambling to find a way out of the mess.

>> Unrelatedly, my lettuce is slowly growing, but my squirrel Nutta’s already started nibbling on the baby greens!

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On Monday, I went to a volunteer training session for Heal the Bay I’d signed up for a while back. When I got there, I discovered that Heal the Bay founder Dorothy Green had died due to melanoma earlier that day, at the age of 79.

Since then, I’ve found out how extremely passionate and active she was regarding water issues, right up until the time of her death.

>> “You’d better hurry. Because, you know, I’m dying.” That’s what Dorothy told Judith Lewis of LA Weekly , who met with Dorothy shortly before her death to talk water policy in California. Writes Judith: “Green insists that were it not for irrational pressure on the water supply due to mismanagement, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

Read the article to see the many similarities between farm subsidies at the federal level and water subsidies at the state level. “According to the Environmental Working Group, 10 percent of the farms get 67 percent of the state’s water. And 80 percent of the state’s entire water supply is used for crops — mostly low-value, irrigation-intensive crops like cotton.”

“California’s farming communities are the most poverty-stricken in the state,” Green said. “The profits, the benefits, go to Stewart Resnick. He’s the biggest farmer in the state — he owns Paramount Farms — and he lives in Beverly Hills.”

There’s some more sanguine stuff near the end of the article, so I highly recommend reading the whole thing — then maybe even picking up Dorothy’s 2007 book, Managing Water: Avoiding Crisis in California, afterwards.

>> Just 5 days before her death, Dorothy wrote an op-ed in the LA Times titled “A heartfelt plea for a sensible water policy,” urging for a reform of the state Water Resources Control Board, which “has the authority — legal and regulatory — to manage the state’s water resources” but hasn’t been exercising this authority.

>> Mark Gold, Heal the Bay’s president, wrote a touching eulogy in Spouting Off: “I first met Dorothy when I was a grad student at UCLA. In 1986, she came to speak in a class taught by Stephanie Pincetl in Urban Planning. I was so moved by her talk about the new environmental group Heal the Bay that I went up to her after class and asked to volunteer. That was the first time I ever volunteered for an environmental group.”

>> In addition to Heal the Bay, Dorothy also founded the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council and California Water Impact Network. In lieu of flowers and gifts, Dorothy’s family asks for donations to any of these three organizations.

>> Learn how you can volunteer with Heal the Bay.

Photo via Heal the Bay

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>> What’s in bottled water? “Disinfection byproducts, fertilizer residue, and pain medication,” according to Environmental Working Group’s report, which also found that “Several Sam’s Choice samples purchased in California exceeded legal limits for bottled water contaminants in that state.”

>> Earlier: 10 reasons to ditch the bottled water habit!

>> Apparently more people are doing that — and Pepsi’s suffering for it. PepsiCo’s “quarterly earnings were down 10 percent in part because of declines in sales of soda and bottled water in the United States.”

>> What Obama actually said to Joe the Plumber. Both video and text!

>> Home Depot’s running a “Save Money. Save Energy. Win Big” YouTube contest. The winner gets a $5,000 Home Depot gift card and up to $2,000 for installed insulation or radiant barrier products from The Home Depot.

Photo by transguyjay

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>> Clorox’s eco-friendly line Green Works is already outselling established green brands like Seventh Generation and Method. Earlier: Clorox’s new dish liquid avoids the carcinogen in many green products.

>> Apple gets greener with a new line of Macs free of PVC internal cables and internal components containing brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Says Greenpeace: “these new Mac models mark a significant improvement in toxic chemical phase-out for Apple, progress that is in line with the company’s pledge to phase-out all PVC and BFRs in its entire product line by the end of 2008.”

>> Perhaps the best argument for not watching too much porn comes from Jessa Crispin in The Smart Set:

Most single, sexually active women I know have had an evening with someone who obviously watched porn and took notes, thinking that was the ideal performance. Those men’s porn stashes should be taken away, yes.

Read the whole article for an insightful review of 2 new books: Pornography and The Porning of America. (via 3qd)

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