This week we have been thinking about made up words. Sometimes normal words just won’t do. Here is our summary of made up words:
Quadpod - like a tripod but with four legs, so yes, maybe you could call it a stool, but it doesn’t sound as good.
When I was growing up most years (when it was on) we would go to Glastonbury. Ah so cool, soo cool. But, no!
Not when you’re growing up in Tring, the rainbow warrior t-shirt-down-to-your-knees look is not one celebrated by those (in same peer group) whose own style is comprised more of those classic common denominators: Ellesse pumps and some Addidas trackies.
When my friend’s brother was younger, he had a cat called Scallywag, a tom cat. One holiday, they were driving round a roundabout in Birmingham (not sure if that was the final destination of their holiday – I shall resist all other comments) and Scallywag made a bid for freedom through the slightly open back window. Despite driving round the roundabout for the next few hours and combing the surrounding area, Scallywag was not to be found. The dejected family were about to carry on their way, when suddenly the cat was spotted! Elated, they grabbed the moggy and shut it firmly in the car.
Ah the summer has started - no, it’s not the torrential rain that’s told me that, it’s Big Brother back on our screens! Rachel announced to me yesterday that she wouldn’t be watching this year, and is going to read intellectual books and possibly learn to knit or something worthy like that instead. Me however, I have no such pretensions and having managed to clear my anti-Big Brother watching housemates out on Wednesday night, settled down to watch the latest bunch of housemates begin their incarceration.
Here’s a lovely recycling story from all the way over in Brazil, sent to us by Tom.
In 1971, Jaime Lerner became mayor of Curitiba, the capital of the southeastern state of Brazil. He was by profession an architect. Quite typical for the region, the urban population had mushroomed from 120,000 people in 1942 to over a million when Jaime became mayor. By 1997, the population had reached 2.3 million. Again, quite typically, the majority of these people lived in “favelas,” the shanty towns made out of cardboard and corrugated metal.
One of Jaime Lerner’s first big headaches was garbage. The town garbage collection trucks could not even get into the favelas because there were no streets suitable for them. As a consequence, the garbage just piled up, rodents got into it and all kinds of diseases broke out. A mountain sized mess!
Because they did not have the money to apply “normal” solutions, such as bulldozing the area to build streets, Lerner’s team invented another way. Large metallic bins were placed on the streets at the edge of the favelas. The bins had big labels on them which said: glass, paper, plastics, biodegradable material and so on. They were also color coded for those who couldn’t read. Anyone who brought down a garbage bag full of presorted garbage was given a bus token. For the biodegradable materials they were given a plastic chit exchangeable for a food parcel of seasonal fresh fruit and vegetables. A school-based garbage collection program also supplied the poorer students with notebooks. Soon the neighborhoods were picked clean by tens of thousands of kids, who learned quickly to distinguish even different types of plastic. The parents use the tokens to take the bus downtown, where the jobs are.”
Today we have a tour going round BedZED (the Laundry’s home) of extremely intelligent 10 year olds. They all look very earnest and slightly worried. I’ve been thinking about how serious everything seems when you are little and how all my earliest memories are based on very-serious-at-the-time-but-now-ridiculous-embarrassing-incidents. (more…)
STOP PRESS:
Paper recyclers have withdrawn their support for the “Recycle Now Week” campaign that is to start tomorrow, accusing the campaign of failing to support “sustainable recycling”.
See the whole article here …