click to enlarge

Why do people drop litter, especially when there are plenty of bins around? I just don’t get it. When boyf and I used to walk into Lyttelton we would pick up more bottles, cans and food wrappers than we could practically carry, dump them into the litter bins (or recycling bins if it was Tuesday) and walk on and get our coffee (in ceramic, reusable cups). The next morning we would be faced with the same thing. It was like an evil Groundhog Day.

This cartoon came from that, right down to the strange litter bin style.

 

click to enlarge

A couple of glasses of Victorian Sangiovese red wine at last night’s Melbourne Sustainability Drinks. Amazing turnout: a room full of people (but Melbourne does have a population almost as big as the whole of New Zealand). I chatted to a handful, all of whom seemed well-informed. I did wonder though, whether some of the attendees were there just to pick people up: there was a guy at the bar who must have talked to (and taken the number of?) at least 4 women in the time I saw him operating…

Melbourne does seem to be ahead of New Zealand in its move towards sustainability. There is a lot more recycling in public places (as well as kerbside), very necessary water conservation and supermarkets have taken the plastic bag reduction idea seriously, rather than paying lip service to it (In NZ, I would often see bags being given when people bought one item, even if it was one of those plastic bottles of milk that comes with the handle!)

Thanks to a tip off from my friend, Ashley, I’ve just become a fan on Facebook of Melbourne Sustainability Drinks, a group of like-minded people, interested in sustainable living, which meets up once a month in the 100 mile cafe. Sounds like my cup of tea…or Victorian wine…

Finding a rental property in Melbourne is a bit of a mission. There is a less than 1% vacancy rate here right now. In the meantime, I’m staying with my good friends, Dale and Debbie. Dale is a techno-freak and has a house full of consumer goods: 3 computers, umpteen kitchen gadgets and a massive LCD TV that has replace the plasma TV he had before. He argues that this is environmentally friendly because it uses less power, but I know he knows that those power savings will never make up for the environmental cost of production and the eventual cost of disposal.

So when I find my flat, I am going to resist the urge to get a TV at all. I can get a lot of my entertainment online. I can play DVDs on my Mac (even the 8 year old G4 titanium laptop I’m typing on right now) and I can “go out and do something less boring instead“. The movies, musuems, galleries: I love going to art galleries and a visit to a Colin McCahon exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery inspired this Sunday cartoon.

Click on image to see bigger cartoon strip.

I’m a big proponent of the slow food movement. My working day is broken by a long lunchbreak, which involves cooking up leftovers from the night before or constructing a decent sandwich to have away from my desk. Before I moved (I’ve just arrived in Melbourne), I would sit with my boyfriend and chat. If he wasn’t around, I’d either mull over the morning or what I had to do in the afternoon, or read.

It’s a far cry from when I worked in an office where long lunchbreaks were seen as an anathema to productivity. If you had any lunch at all, it was de rigueur to bolt down crummy sandwiches in front of the computer screen, preferably while still working. Good nutrition, digestion and stress reduction was for wimps.

No wonder I folded.

I was 7 when Elvis died and I wasn’t really aware of who he was, but I remember the shock that his death caused. At that time I was a fan of David Soul. I wasn’t allowed to watch “Starsky and Hutch”, but I liked his songs! Tragic, but true.

I’d love to build an eco home some day, though most of the time it is more environmentally friendly to retrofit an existing building with insulation, solar water heating, double-glazing, etc. I love the idea of a green roof, something that is taking off on the corporate level in the US (even the Ford building has one), but it did make me wonder how you maintain it.

Yes, it is amazing that grass can grow in the Arctic Circle, but there is a microclimate going on in Snowpeak and Hector was losing a lot of heat out of the roof of that building (which is why you never see snow settling on his buildings).

Great article via Creative Juices (via Boing Boing) on how JK Rowling’s failures in life lead her to work on one of the most successful children’s book series ever.

In 1999, I had what on the surface appeared to be a very successful career in the pharmaceutical industry. I had spent 7 years moving up the ranks and was earning three times what I earn now. I didn’t enjoy the work, but I had made some great friends though it, got to travel to some amazing places and could go out to flash bars and restaurants without a second thought. I was a type A personality (guess I still am), over-achiever, with a belief that I was in control of it all.

And I had never, ever failed. Well, apart from at sport and that didn’t count.

Whilst working in Clinical Research, I kidded myself that one day my cartooning hobby would pay off. Occasionally, I’d submit stuff to newspapers and magazines, but mostly my ideas remained in my head. If it hadn’t been for failure, they probably would have remained that way. Thank god for failing in 1999…

One of the things that gets me excited about the future is the advances in electric cars. The technology has been around a long time (see “Who Killed the Electric Car”, a sobering doco about how electric cars were mothballed by the automotive industry and big oil in the 90s), but the pressure of high oil prices and green demand are accelerating developments. This strip was inspired by the Tesla Roadster, a sports car which goes from 0 to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds. Fast electric sports cars won’t save the planet, but the technology will demonstrate what is possible and further reduce the stigma of electric cars. They aren’t just for delivering milk anymore.