Search Results for: label/Selfish Hippie

I’ve been getting a little off-track lately with crusades and Canadians and stories of solar-powered stegosaurs, so let’s get back to the basics. Here’s a random smattering of tips and tricks to help you live out the code of the Selfish Hippie: save money while saving the world.

What a Crock!
For Christmas last year, I asked for a crock pot for purely lazy reasons. After a few somewhat disgusting stews, I’ve had some good times making some delicious meals that take about a half an hour of work and that make so much I can live off the leftovers for up to two weeks. Imagine my delight, then, when I read about how good crock pots are for your energy bill. Bingo! So, as long as you can avoid any mishaps like burning pork shoulder and making your whole apartment smell like roast pig (yes, it does happen), then the crock pot can be your favorite method of cooking like it is mine.

Toothbrush Tricks
According to my dentist, old toothbrushes should be changed for new ones every 2 months. According to about.com, it’s 3 months. Either way, that’s 4-6 toothbrushes per year. So the first tip, while it’s not necessarily hippie, is to stock up when prices are down. For example, I caught a toothbrush sale a month ago where they were 50 cents apiece. Needless to say, I won’t need to buy another toothbrush for a few years. Now that you’re stocked up, let me lay some hippie speak on you: after you’re done using that toothbrush on the hard to reach places in your mouth, toss it in the dishwasher to clean it and then use it for those hard to reach places in the home. Window tracks, tile grout, and many other things that you can blackmail a child/roommate/girlfriend into cleaning are prime candidates for the toothbrush trick. If you’re not into cleaning, they’re also great for all sorts of craft and woodworking projects. Be creative.

Water Worriers vs. Water Warriors
Water can be a major sinkhole on your bills. Luckily, there are all kinds of ways to use less water, do less work, and save more time and money. If you’re not down with the whole “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down,” mentality for bathroom energy efficiency, here’s a few other tips on how to save water. (And no, you don’t have to buy into the doom-and-gloom apocalyptic shpeal at the beginning of that article, but you can still profit from their tricks.)

Free Money Reminder
In case you missed my song and dance about this new site called Revolution Money Exchange, check out that previous post. Basically, this site is like PayPal but without credit cards. Instead, you send money directly from your checking account to another. They are completely secure and legitimate, and it’s actually run by one of the guys from AOL (but it’s not total rubbish like AOL). And, even cooler, extended until May 15, they’re giving away $25 just for signing up. If you click on the green button on the right and sign up as my referral, I’ll get a $10 referral bonus, which I’ll then split with you. So basically, you’re coming away with $30 for doing almost nothing. I already spent most of mine on booze and women, then wasted the rest of it. Oh, and the service they provide is pretty cool, so it’d be worth using even if they didn’t pay you to.

Do you feel like you’re becoming a selfish hippie? Have some tricks or tips you’d like to share with the community? Leave them in the comments, or e-mail me at [email protected]. Until then, keep saving money while saving the world.

We could learn something from the dinosaurs. Well, something besides how best to eat a human in two bites.

I was in the Natural History Museum in Mesa, AZ, not far from Phoenix, and I saw something peculiar. Actually, I saw more than one peculiar thing, but I’m not even going to get started on feathered dinosaurs. No, the peculiar thing I saw was a description of a stegosaurus that said the plates on their back were thought to soak up heat in the cold seasons and give off heat in the warm seasons to help regulate the body temperature. And even though this idea is apparently heavily debated in the scientific community, it got me thinking.

If the dinosaurs were using solar energy, couldn’t we be using it, too?

Ever since I got a solar-powered calculator for school many years ago, I’ve always wondered why we couldn’t use the same technology to power our cars or our houses or our world. Since then, I’ve realized some of that may be flights of fancy: after all, if you are working outside and some clouds come in, with a calculator all you would lose is the ability to do big-numbered math problems, but with a solar-powered car, when the solar power goes away you may be stuck out in the middle of Middle America, with no civilization within a thousand miles.

But the idea is still sound. I still don’t understand why people are getting government funding for these “biofuels” like ethanol when we could spend a few extra bucks today to make a fleet of electric cars, then another few bucks to cover every rooftop in any sunny city with solar panels so that we could have power to charge those electric cars. Heck, we could even just cover a bunch of the desert with solar panels. That exact idea was suggested on an episode of the West Wing a few years back. The only major problem was manufacturing enough solar panels. Bust out a good tax incentive and I’m sure we’d see plenty of innovation and rapid manufacturing.

The main point behind all of this business is that I don’t get why we’re freaking out about saving the world and conserving energy when we’ve got a sun that’s crazy hot and that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, constantly providing enough energy to power the country, or the world. Let the government go a little bit deeper into debt today and we’ll be reaping the rewards in cashmoney savings for years.

Do we really want to be looked at as stupider than the dinosaurs or Transformers? Let’s take a cue from the solar-powered stegosaurus, start thinking large scheme and long term, and keep saving money while saving the world.

PS Happy Earth Day, everybody.

“Katie,” he says, so softly it almost comes out as a whisper, but just loudly enough to wake her. And just as he vanishes, her eyes open wide, taking in all the incredible sight of a living, breathing person disappearing into thin air.

And so ends the series “Journeyman,” which was not as cheesy as I made it sound but which ran for a whole 13 episodes before the hacks at NBC pulled the plug on yet another great, promising new show.

I understand that TV is a business, that stations need advertisers to pay for the shows on the air, and that if there aren’t enough viewers and aren’t good enough ratings, advertisers won’t pay high enough prices to support the show continuing to run. I get it. I’m a capitalist, after all (though I’m also a selfish hippie, and no, those two things don’t contradict each other). What I don’t understand is that if TV stations are so cash-strapped that they can’t even give a promising show that had a healthy supply of buzz about it, why are they still staging gimmicks like giving guest appearances to washed up spastics like Britney Spears or useless sex video stars like Paris Hilton?

Okay, sure, two guest appearances by these “celebrities” probably aren’t costing the networks much because Brit and Paris want to somehow remove the stains from their tarnished dignity and image. Still, it’s not the specific costs that matter as much as the poor decisions that lead to actually giving these people money to make a sitcom less funny. Let’s like if I paid some illiterate sixth grader a couple bucks to write a post on here about the housing bubble and the Dow Jones; sure, it’d be funny for about two seconds as we all laughed at the kid for being an idiot, but it definitely would not be worth my $2.

So to extend the metaphor, if we hadn’t given all of the sixth-grade man-children with the single digit IQs huge chunks of cash, perhaps we would still be enjoying high-end television programming and we wouldn’t have such brain-meltingly bad shows like “The Hills,” “Laguna Beach,” or pretty much anything on Bravo.

With that in mind, here’s a few shows that have been pulled off the air in recent years that, had the network execs been slightly less idiotic, perhaps could have and definitely should have been saved.

• Journeyman – A fantastic show about a man who suddenly finds that he time travels, but also finds it wreaks havoc on his personal and professional life as he can’t control when or where he goes. Reminiscent of my favorite book last year, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” by Audrey Niffenegger.

• Smith – Ray Liotta was excellent in this heist drama that looked, sounded and felt like it was a major motion picture playing one week at a time. I guess it cost a lot of money to create that look and feel, because this one only lasted three episodes.

• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – Okay sure, Aaron Sorkin got lost in his own head a little bit with this hourlong dramedy about the inner workings of a sketch comedy show, but it was still better than 90% of TV.

…and my all time favorite show ever in the world…

• Sports Night – Before Sorkin focused on the pretentious inner workings of a sketch comedy show, he did a two season run focused on the inner workings of a Sportscenter-esque show. This program was clever in some parts and downright hilarious in all others, but it also had more heart and emotion than most hourlong dramas, all packed into a half hour and paced within an inch of its life. If you want a life-changing experience from your television, pick up the DVDs.

What shows were your favorites that have gotten trashed before they had a chance to shine?