Fri 20 Nov 2009
Eco Links: Cut the Cord Edition
Posted by Tyler under Eco-Links
[4] Comments
Well, it’s nearly official: My TV is for sale on Craigslist. This is kind of a big deal for me. To be honest, I haven’t watched much TV at all in years and, in fact, I don’t really enjoy it much when I do. But until now, I couldn’t bring myself to just get rid of the damn thing once and for all.
Though I truly need it for nothing, letting it go feels like the day my mom finally took my baby blanket away – cold, quiet and scary – much how I envision the end of the world will be. My TV is a psychological baby blanket. Thoughts are running through my head: What will I do without it? What if there’s something I want to see? How will I watch movies?
These question are all easily and logically answered with a little perspective: I’ll do other, way more interesting things! I’ll watch it on the internet! I’ll use my laptop!
I didn’t want to answer them, though. I wanted an excuse to keep my baby blanket around because that’s what made me comfortable. However, in order to grow, it’s so important to step outside of that comfort zone.
What seems like an itty bitty change can still take a lot of courage when you’re dealing with an ingrained habit, and courage isn’t something you get before you take a leap, it’s what comes afterwords.
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A very wise wolf once told me, “Buy on a whimper, sell on a howl.” I had no idea what he meant until I ran into an article titled Stock Market Correlations With Moon Cycles. Now it all makes sense. Could market peaks correlate with full moons? Could valleys correlate with new moons? Some would like you to believe it. Don’t take this too seriously, though. There have been all kinds of funny stock market correlations studied over the years and this is just another fun one to read about. However, we have spent centuries studying how the moon cycles affect human behavior. I wouldn’t mind it if this theory got a little more attention.
Pop culture can be awfully interesting, especially old advertisements. Check out this oil ad from 1962 that was published in a magazine touting the product’s wonders – Oil: Enough Energy to Melt Glaciers. It was published by Humble Oil, which later merged with another company to form Exxon. As the author points out, the irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Grin and bear it, folks, grin and bear it.
How much house do you need? It’s an age old question that has been answered over and over again with a resoundingly firm “more.” That is, until now. Over at Get Rich Slowly, April points out that the average new home size is finally shrinking for a change. She reports on ways to find your “Goldilocks Home,” or the house that is just right for you. The advice is to go through each room in your current house and decide if it feels too big or too small for its function, measure it’s actual size, and then adjust accordingly. Add them all up at the end, and there’s your warm bowl of porridge.
You should be glad to know that Hal, the murderous computer from Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odessey, has been successfully rehabilitated and reintroduced to society as Earth’s savior as reported by Eco Geek with this headline – Fastest Computer in the World Focused on Climate Change. Apparently his new street name is Jaguar XT5 and he’s spending his new found free time “creat[ing] models and simulations for predicting regional climate change, studying enzymes for developing better ethanol and writing algorithms for fast nuclear reactors that would produce less waste.” Glad to see you’ve changed your ways, Hal, but we’ll never forget your disturbing past.
Finally, just for fun, here’s an article from Treehugger about the benefits of trading in your weed whacker for a team of goats.
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If you’ve got some energy left, be sure to take a look at some of the carnivals that Frugally Green participated in this week:
My Trader’s Journal hosted the Carnival of Financial Planning
The Eco Salon organized the Carnival of the Green
The Amateur Financier put together the Carnival of Twenty Something Finances
Gather Little by Little curated the Carnival of Money Hackers.
One Family’s Blog curated the Road to Financial Independence Carnival.
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Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen
Dead TV Image by rickremington
Related posts:
- Eco-Links: Survey Results Edition
- Eco-Links: No Impact Week Edition
- Eco Links: Eat Less Meat Edition
- Eco-Links: New Computer Edition
- Eco Links: Black Friday Edition
How about a trade? We need a TV so your dad can watch his stock market shows and you can have your baby blanket back. I’ve had it stored all these years.
First, what are these carnivals? I’ve been reading PF blogs for ages now and I still have no idea what these “carnivals” are all about.
Yesterday was the no TV portion of our No Impact week and dude, I didn’t participate. I watched about an hour’s worth and let my husband watch away while I got ready for bed, etc. I am totally hooked to my PBS cooking shows, and my husband has a really hard time functioning without TV. I’ve finally gotten him to stop using it as background noise while he’s on the computer (sometimes, he’ll watch a soccer game–with sound–on the computer while the TV is blaring!), but when I mentioned a week-long TV fast in April, he refused. Ah, married life.
Did I mention that we live in a less than 500 square feet studio apartment? Yeah.
I’ve found that I’m just sick of the damned noise and all the violence. We don’t have cable and it seems like the only thing that’s on are variation of CSI and Law & Order, all violent, all the time.
I would like to note that I haven’t had enough coffee yet and didn’t edit the above comment. Please excuse the nearly-English-but-not-quite bits.
Mom (#1),
That’s a tempting offer, but I don’t think I want to trade one baby blanket for another. Why don’t you take the TV and keep the blanket, too?
ConsciouslyFrugal,
A carnival is just a traveling series of posts that different blogs host each week.
Writers (like me and you) submit a post from the previous week to the carnival and whoever is hosting selects the best (or most relevant) ones to assemble into a post highlighting those authors and their articles.
Readers follow the carnival from blog to blog each week and discover new writers that each host features.
Make sense?
In other news, my “No Impact Week” has been a disaster. So much so that I quit taking the surveys because they were depressing me. Maybe next week I’ll lay out all my shame.
At least the TV is gone!