At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

Have I ever told you how my parents love to talk about polar bears? Oh, yeah, I have. Almost every time I talk to them on the phone, they are bringing up some story about polar bears swimming 60 miles to find food, or polar bears cannibalizing each other, or whatever. Anyways, when I arrived [...]

Via the LATimes: A Vatican keen to show its green side has added pollution to the realm of “new sins” that today’s Catholics must confront and avoid. [...] Girotti’s discussion of “new sins” (though many were not exactly new) was also an attempt to appeal to the modern Catholic and show the relevance of church [...]

Bay Area surfers were so frustrated with the government’s response following the Cosco Busan spill that they took it upon themselves to organize volunteers and clean up their favorite breaks: Aghast at what he saw as the government-run cleanup’s slow pace, Rosas teamed up with two Silicon Valley friends, Byron Cleary and Kathleen Egan. All [...]

My brain has literally been turning into mush since I’ve left LSE. I was once again craving the classroom environment, so I signed up for the Environmental and Natural Resource Economics course at the USDA Graduate School last spring. If you’re living in the DC area, I highly recommend taking a class or two there. [...]

Facebook in 40 years – will we still have Facebook profiles when we’re 65? MySpace for the proletariat, Facebook for the bourgeoise? If I have both, does that make me an equal opportunity class enemy? Are there really no Republicans left in California? Foreign Nationals Hired For 2 California GOP Posts (this really is a [...]

Here’s an interesting, and somewhat timely, AP article on the “thriving” wildlife population in the radiation soaked area surrounding the former Chernobyl nuclear (uh, “nucular”?) plant: Two decades after an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant sent clouds of radioactive particles drifting over the fields near her home, Maria Urupa says the [...]

This article wouldn’t be out of place in The Onion, but sadly it’s true: Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards took on the oil companies Thursday while campaigning in Menlo Park, with the help of a San Jose teenager who says his friends can barely afford to fill up their SUVs and a Hummer. Edwards called [...]

Quite a brilliant question to ask someone after they’ve had a few drinks, although to be fair I would have given a smart-ass response sans alcohol. They said, “How are you working to save the earth?” (Although I remember it as “What are you doing for Earth Day?”) and I said, “Drive my SUV.” For [...]

Yeah, that’s right. This bloated website, which is like an SUV on the information superhighway due to my habit of uploading ungodly amounts of images, is officially “carbon neutral.” Apparently, Dreamhost, the wonderful SoCal based company that hosts this website, is now purchasing offsets for the 2725 tons of CO2 they emit every year. This [...]

Apparently, Climate Change is to Gen Y what nuclear war was to the Cold War kids (and no, I’m not referring to the band) back in the 50s and 60s. So says the Washington Post in a recent article, “Climate Change Scenarios Scare, and Motivate, Kids.” Parents say they’re searching for “productive” outlets for their [...]