When I’m feeling stressed, anxious or down and out, nothing lifts my spirits quite like images of Jessica Simpson‘s cellulite or Avril Lavigne‘s acne. Reading about LiLo‘s failed stints in rehab, Brangelina‘s domestic strife or the extent of Jennifer Aniston‘s jealous rage gives me an instant, head-spinning dose of celebrity scandal and melodrama, just enough to get through my totally-normal-in-comparison day.
Really, though, all these tabloids are nothing but mental pollution, not to mention a waste of paper. So from now on, I’m not buying any more. My dear friend Perez Hilton will always be online to help with my cravings, and if get a case of the sweats and feel like I might collapse unless I get an update on whether or not Nicole Richie is pregnant, I’ll just head straight to the doctor’s office, where there’s sure to be a copy of People magazine.
Image shoplifted while on a break from rehab over here
You mean … you stopped washing and turned off your fridge ages ago, but only gave up this sort of long-standing mind pollution today? Is this or isn’t it over the top? Is this blog written just to be self-publicizing?
Why not try two more vigorous initiatives:
(1) Stop publishing this fatuous blog, and save power. If you can order your priorities as you just did, nobody takes you seriously anyway.
(2) If you really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as you can in one go, stop breathing. You’ll have given up the largest human source of carbon dioxide in the environment; the only trouble is that neither burial (fatty acids leaching into the soil from the corpse) or cremation (combustion destroys the ozone layer) is suitably Green. Perhaps you could put the dead meat into orbit, unless you’re worried about the ecosystem of Mars.
Wake up, wake up! There’s life after Al Gore! Read your supermarket tabloids and have fun; just don’t bother sane people with your nonsenses.
When you need a magazine fix, go to the library. I borrow magazines from my library every week.
For a quick fix, also check out http://www.laineygossip.com . You will not be disappointed(it’s better than Perez, in my opinion).
While I agree with the cranky poster that today’s change is a bit fluffy, you’ve got 365 days worth, and darn it, you deserve the leeway! You’ve made some serious sacrifices (no refrigerator??? no oven???) and I admire you for this undertaking. I find this blog both entertaining and inspiring – and it’s certainly helped raise awareness in my circle of our individual footprint. Keep up the good work!
There’s nothing wrong with fluffy changes. A fluffy change is still a change. You are not ordering your changes by priority and have never professed to do so. Every little bit helps, and your choices help influence the choices of others (like me!), making an even greater impact. Keep up the great work.
And senseofbalance should take his/her own advice by powering down the computer, which would be a blessing to the rest of us.
I don’t buy magazines anymore. My local library doesn’t carry magazines, so I just read them in the bookstore. I’ve also been doing that with books I can’t find at the library.
The only mag I subscribe to now is Herbivore Magazine, because it’s almost completely online. (They do make two print issues a year that include different content than what’s online, but I chose the online-only subscription.)
Now, if only more magazines could start doing this…
Wow. Is this Green as a Thistle’s first case of a troll? Amazing. I can’t wait until Greentime is popular enough to have a troll.
Assuming senseofbalance isn’t a troll but is instead a poster with a point that’s got a problem with his/her sense of decorum, I will respond. Amy and I have likened our weekly attempts at becoming more green to our attempts at controlling our weight and fitness level through proper diet and exercise. I’ve lost 50 lbs and kept it off for over three years now, and the way I did this was relatively simple– I set goals for calorie consumption and physical activity in a day, and as decisions came up that I was aware about, I asked myself to examine the decision in light of those goals. As a result, there was no priority process to my lifestyle change. Changes happened as time went by. A number of things that should have been “big ticket items” slipped until much later because I was already getting results without having to examine them. Yeah, I find celebrity gossip to be a waste of time, but I fail to see some lack of seriousness because consuming tabloids went on this long. It’s still a good choice even if it was a long time coming.
Speaking specifically to magazines, though…we have a problem here, too. As we go scouring for new ideas and issues to keep our minds on, we end up with too many of these. A copy of Plenty here, a copy of Dwell there, our annual subscription to Foreign Policy, and we’ve got lots of paper adding up. We simply have too many magazines and keeping them from the recycling center or landfill is just becoming a hassle. Perhaps we should just subscribe to ones we want that we can get entirely online, save them to the laptops, and then take them with us when we visit the loo (where much of Greentime’s research is done).
True true, we must all be perfect, at all times, and must NEVER under any circumstance, think twice, or be… young … and still seeing things for the first time.
The troll obviously has a good handle on humanity.
not.
Didn’t I just rant about greener-than-thous?
Celebrity mags are such a guilty pleasure. Thankfully, I’m far too poor to buy them. I do subscribe to Plenty, though. And after I’m done I take it to work so it gets passed around the office. Eventually it may end up in a box for kids to cut up. At least makes me feel a little bit better about it.
I’m shocked that as a legitimate journalist you would even touch those lying, libelous rags. Ick!! I’ll read People sometimes, but at least it’s not a gossip magazine, it prints factual stories.