valentine's day is tomorrow,

the day of chocolate. I just wanted to take another second of your time to mention the global impact of products that we consume. However! This is not all gloom and doom. I try not to be. I have a wonderful sunny disposition, I think.

Kidding aside, there's a reason you can purchase pounds and pounds of chocolate for a few dollars. It's because the cost of making this bargain chocolate is externalised, often in the form of child labour and other awful things.

Luckily, there's a wonderful little label that says "fair trade" that helps you discern whether or not bad things are involved in the production of your chocolate. Yeah, it's more expensive, but I like to think of it as a more "honest" price. Chocolate, like coffee and other foreign commodities, is expensive. That's why it's a decadent treat. Also luckily, the whole "green" thing is quite trendy. That means that you can find tasty fair trade/organic chocolate in a bunch of different varieties at a bunch of different places.

So yeah, be responsible chocolate purchasers this holiday!

environmental week!

hey guys, so just giving an update on last week's meeting!


We're pretty certain that ASB will grant us a full week dedicated to environmental awareness, and we'll be putting in a formal request for the use of the quad for lunchtime activities shortly. They won't be until April, but we wanted to figure it all out as soon as possible. By this Friday, we were hoping that everyone who took responsibility for one of the days of the week will give the entire club a brief presentation on their ideas for the activity (related to their theme, of course). The themes are as follows:


Meatless Monday — encouraging the incorporation of less meats and more sustainably farmed produce into our diets as a way of being conscious consumers (Lauren)
Trashy Tuesday — all about recycling and reducing waste (Jiem and Aliyah, I believe)
Water Conservation Wednesday — pretty much like it sounds, conserving that water, wooo (Katra)
Thrifty Thursday — encouraging reusing as well as the consumption of already used clothing as an alternative to new (Lorelay)
Save the World On Fridays — about the club, our mission, and helping out in small ways! (Nicola)

Of course, each person who took responsibility for the activities is likely to interpret these in slightly different ways. I just wanted to give the basic idea. Feel free to seek out club members that you saw volunteer for the theme days and offer to help and/or bounce ideas off of them. No one wants to or would be able to do it alone!

As an added note, we will also be selling water bottles at lunch all week and I'm sure a sign-up will circulate as we get closer to April.

Thanks everyone, and don't forget about your pitches on Friday!

Conserve energy!

This showed up on my Facebook ticket thing and it caught my eye. This could be a fun art project--do you think we could get away with putting this up?

thank you Katra!

All right, so I just wanted to take a second and thank our wonderful and fabulous member Katra for a couple recent contributions to the club.

Firstly, a friend mentioned today that she used to bring her lunch items in disposable packaging, but after the urging of our good friend Katra converted to tupperware. Three cheers for reducing waste! And I'm assuming that it was done very politely and pleasantly.

Secondly, Katra was responsible for ordering our new stainless steel water bottles, and we thank her for that contribution as well. They're still in Mr. Steussy's room as far as I know, so get them while they're hot! I know we'll be setting up and organising lunch sales soon.

Thirdly, we now have a new little poster that mentions the water bottles and the STWF t-shirts that Katra designed. Jimmy got clearance with ASB to post them wherever, so you should be seeing them multiply in the next few days.

I just thought it'd be nice to give a blog-five to a member that helped out a lot recently. Keep up the good work, everyone, and we'll see you on Friday!

Andy Rooney on Water Bottles

"What people will remember about Andy Rooney are things like this: He’d open a can of mixed nuts on 60 Minutes and separate the various nuts by type, and then he’d count how many of each nut were in the can. What made this so interesting (at least to me) was not the metaphor this act represented; what was interesting was that there was no metaphor at all. It wasn’t a veiled sociological commentary or a criticism of advertising or a meditation on consumerism. It wasn’t about anything, except the contents of the can. This, I suspect, is why Rooney’s seemingly banal essays were so infuriating to a certain kind of person: We have come to assume that whenever a media personality talks about something basic, he or she is actually trying to explain something complex. The idea that someone on television would just sit at his desk and complain about mixed nuts and have it only be about the ostensive subject — without a larger meaning and without a defined purpose — seemed facile and ridiculous. But isn’t it equally ridiculous to assume trivial thoughts are only worth considering when we pretend they represent something else? As a self-defined atheist, Rooney would have never pretended that filtering peanuts could help us understand the nature of existence; he was wholly resigned to the fact that we couldn’t even understand the nature of peanuts."


-Chuck Klosterman


Andy Rooney 1919-2011