June 1, 2013

‘The East’ – movie premieres

The EastX Men star Ellen Page is co-star opposite Arbitrage actress Brit Marling in new espionage thriller The East, which was produced and co-written by 29-year-old Brit.
Speaking at the Los Angeles premiere of the movie, which also stars True Blood hunk Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen said The East, focuses on an anarchist group known for executing covert attacks on major corporations. “These issues were something I was already interested in. The ethical murkiness is very compelling because that is what life is right now, it’s hard to know how to be alive, how to make the right choices when we see the injustice in the world and the atrocities committed by corporations in the name of profit,” she said.…

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Self-Sufficiency

Slums – testbeds for new ways of living

We should not romanticise slums, but informal settlements can teach us a lot about society and the economy of resources.

Its amazing , for example, how most of us who live in cities, pay lip service to recycling – doing a bit here and there – consisting mainly of throwing bottles into the correct colored bag for the garbage disposal company to deal with.

The informal settlements of the global south could not be further removed from the financial centers where most of us spend our lives. But recycling is something that slum inhabitants do naturally, without expensive schemes.

In the slums you can find a whole new social geography … re-focus on adaptation and reuse and using scarcity as a resource to highlight the aspects that function better than the formal city around it.…

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Community

Keep your cool with warm weather cooking methods

thermometer-11029029I live in the high desert mountains of far western Texas, the summer days are hot, fortunately the evenings and nights tend to be cooler, I would like to have an outdoor kitchen, cooking during the day in the heat of summer is miserable at best, a kitchen out on the covered deck would make summer cooking so much better… until I get that outdoor kitchen set up, I found this article all about keeping your cool when cooking in the summer:

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As the mercury in the thermometer starts to climb, you may be looking for different ways to keep your home a bit cooler without an exponential increase in your electric bill. That battle starts in the kitchen.

The one thing that adds the most ambient heat is cooking.  Your choice of cooking methods can greatly increase the warmth that your air conditioner must then overcome.  And if you have no air conditioner, it can make your home humid, muggy and miserable.…

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