A Brita Water Filter Ad

"So drinking bottled water is like giving your car a blow job"

So I can across this on tree hugger and while it certainly is done by a company with something to gain but it's a great image. Read the whole article here.

Insect Spraying Buffer Zones

Alright so summer is about a month away officially and last night was the first time I had heard a news cast mention the bane of Manitoba's summers, the Mosquito! They are a yearly problem to one degree or another depending on how dry the spring is and how wet the winter was. So basically each years brings different volumes of mosquitos, but two things are consistant and those are at some point over the summer they will spray and people will complain.

So basically here is how the buffer zone works out I decide for what ever reason I do not want to have my property sprayed when the mosquitos get bad enough. So I register with the city of Winnipeg and when the trucks do come around nothing within a 100 meters of my house can be sprayed. No one takes the time to consult the people living within that 100 meters, they just get to suffer.

Now as a Wiccan who is very pro environment this is the area I lapse in I guess. This whole system strikes me as completely unfair, why should I have to suffer just because someone else doesn't want to close there windows, or carry there puffer with them for a few days. The spraying certainly won't kill them, after all the government orders the buffers cancelled if the mosquito population levels gets to high.

If my neighbour is outside painting something or using a solvent to clean I don't have the right to stop them. Remember fumes in both of those examples are toxic and people do have allergies to them. I have friends with both Nut and Fish allergies one of them has to close the windows and turn of the AC when the guy three doors down fires up the BBQ to cook up some fish. They don't get to tell him not too. For whatever reason when it comes to mosquito spraying it's different they have ability to stop my house from being sprayed.

It is very frustrating growing up I had a serious reaction to bug spray, I would bubble and rash up in a matter of minutes. So them spraying the area was the only chance that I really had to go outside and actively enjoy it and not be spending my time playing swat the mosquito. If I had the allergy am sure others do too.

Did anyone notice?

Yesterday was officially Earth Day, Google had a nice little logo, the papers all had there little logos announcing it. Am sure they even had the happy public interest moments on the various news shows. But that seemed to be about it, did I miss some thing along the way? I remember Earth Day being this big huge thing.

• Local Native groups would hold sunrise ceremonies at the Forks and events through out the day. The forks is a shopping mall and public parks space here in Winnipeg built around where are two rivers meet.


• They would have events at the Zoo


• Tours at the Musuem


• A ralley or two promoting some Enviromental Cause or another


• Multi page articles in the local papers showing ways people can be more environmentally friendly.

Where did it all go? I went on line and did a couple of Google searches trying to find events on Earth Day to post to our Communitas Paganus discussion list there was nearly the amount of things I was expecting. There was a event on Sunday the 27th, and another last night(As part of a two forum on Climate Change) I was stunned by the lack of build up and the lack of excitement surrounding Earth Day.

I think we have become so desensitized to the Environmental issues that people just don't care anymore. Every other month there is a new issue cropping up and a new movement or something to try and resolve it. So many people are starting to be told do this and not do that. The media doesn't know what to promote and report on any more. To make matter worse Environmentalist often get lumped together with other fringe groups. Let me give you an example from the Monday edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. The headline reads

"Thousands celebrate love of Earth, weed"

The article which took up about half a page of the paper, with several pictures and only a single column written. It was roughly about 400 words in total and of those 400 words 34 were given over to the Earth Day event. While the remainder focused on the people who gathered at the Manitoba Legislative building to light up and smoke a joint at 4:20 on April 20th. Clearly the Free Press showed their opinion that people getting away with illegally smoking pot and getting away with is more important then the Environment.

With everything going on around us? and the Environment being about the most important challenge facing how could people not pay alot more attention when Earth Day comes around.

Paper vs. DishMachine

Weird some how that jumped out on to the page without any content. Oh well a quick edit will fix it.

So this afternoon Alex and I were watching a tv show on TLC, Jon and Kate +8. Basically it is about the life of the parent and there 8 kids. They were not able to have kids regularly so they went to a fretility specialist and end up with a set of twins. So then they tried again a few years later and ended up with septumpletes (6 kids).

On the show it was saturday morning and they were busy making the traditional Pancake breakfast. I was a gast to see her serving all these kids using paper plates. Then hearing her tell one of the kids to double up the plates, made me want to scream. They made a side comment during one of the interview portions of the show that they go through 1300 paper plates in about 3 months. Of course there is little to no mention of things like recycling on the show.

So I can only assume that all those plates were going in to the landfill, it's enough to make you cry if you think about it to hard. Then I thought I about it a little more and realized if they were using regular plates, just how many loads would they be doing in the dis washer every day? How much water would they be using, how much detergent would they be dumping in to the rivers and water systems.

It's a tough call what would be worse in this case, I just don't know...