Since We Last Communicated

I wondered why it is that people always put things like blueberries or bananas or raisins in oatmeal, and rice with beans. Never one to have a thought without a recipricol action, when Grasshopper requested a bowl of cereal for dinner, I added some turtle beans to her oatmeal and molasses. I felt smarter than her the first few bites, when she, as usual, dived after the dark chunks that are usually blueberries in her oatmeal. It took her seven or eight bites before she determined she'd been hoodwinked. GreenDaddy and I tasted the oatmeal and were surprised it took her so long: the reason people don't but beans in oatmeal, we immediately surmised, is because it brings out the grossest sides of two foods that we generally like. The thick innards of the beans, particularly, doesn't go with the mushiness of oatmeal like it goes with grains of rice. This isn't to say I won't try adding lentils to the rice, one day, if Grashooper continues demanding to eat cereal 24/7.

Green Inventions That Aren't

The frugal traveler, in the New York Times, is driving across the states. Since I've been having snark attacks lately, I began my sincere suggestion about where he should go in Houston (Menil, Artcar Museum, Cali sandwiches, folk houses, Clayburn cafeteria if he's a veggie...) with the observation that it is neither environmentally (the whole greenhouse thing) nor economically (with the rising gas prices) frugal for one man to drive an old car across the country. (Don't you think it'd be more interesting for him to take the Greyhound or one of the posh Mexican bus lines? He could have packed a portable scooter or bike to toot around on.)

Anyway, I know precisely how expensive gas is right now because my snarkish comment is a hypocritical one: GreenDaddy, BabyG and I have been guilty of a lot of car travel ourselves these past couple weekends. Which means we saw lots of new sights, but we also saw a lot of the same old sight: concrete & asphalt.

Gruesome, hot concrete. Unfriendly, scalding asphalt.

The whole starting off complaining about the frugal traveller's gas may have thrown you off track because, god knows, we need something that isn't gas to use in our cars...but corn, soy, oil, battery, electricity, fuel cell focused people seem to be on that one.

Which brings me to the green invention that isn't: more porous roads. I declare it high time for highways to be made of pastel colored clays. For city streets to be made of pressurized moss and tree leaves. Some sort of compacted organic 'waste' product. The roads would cool cities down by degrees. They would allow the water to fall back into the earth. They would be eco-modern.

Because hot asphalt isn't. It's 1978...as is the very idea we have to live in concrete jungles. It's 2007, ladies and gentleman, I am ready for some roads that feel good to walk down barefooted in August.

Do you have an idea for a green invention that isn't? Send it along to our gmail address which is greenparenting at said service.

Green Inventions That Aren't

Since I just got back from Utah, where I could actually smell life in the air as opposed to Houston where I am oppressed by the flatulent odor of hundreds of factories that never stop oozing whatever into the air, I'm wondering just where in the hell is the Sky Vac.

We have rockets, we have airplanes, we have little cameras that can be cranked down into a person's veins, we have chemicals that if released into the air or water would poison a city the size of New York. So why do we sit around marvelling at the genius of our species in air contaminated by factory and motor vehicle feces? Why isn't there a vacuum to clean up all the toxins from the air?

I admit that it would be complicated to create. How to create a large enough machine that wouldn't create as many toxins while it worked as it ate up, for instance. Or, more prosaically, how not to suck up the birds and butterflies.

Still, if there's one thing I've become more certain of as I get older, the world is continents full of really smart people. It seems we not only should be able to suck up the toxins, but that we should be able to convert them to something we need more of. Ozone, chocolate, organic blueberries, something.