A tree-hugging double-header

At work, we're being more or less strongarmed into learning about building buildings along "green" guidelines. Which, in principle, is fine for this aging liberal. Although for a shop that's mostly programmers and CAD drafters, certification as a "green" builder is really just lipstick on the proverbial chicken. So, as you might expect, this latest putsch is ad majoram gloriam the Glad-hander in Chief.

But despite the cynicism, I'm actually putting my back into the wheel for this, on three counts:

1. It allows me to annoy the Alpha-Secretary, asking why we don't "walk the walk" with organic shade-grown free-trade coffee, or unbleached napkins/paper plates, or recycle more than just cans (which wouldn't be done if yours truly didn't take care of it), etc.
   
2. It's a chance to show up the intellectual prima-donna(s) of the office with a better score on the certification exam.
3. It's easier than Real School. And--for a change--the firm pays for it.
   

So in the spirit of sustainablility, thinking outside the proverbial box, and the guerilla mentality that this so often requires, here's a link to greywater treatment for the average homeowner (as opposed to the terminally dollar-goggled contractors my parent firm typically deals with).

And, with complete lack of segue, I've sworn off soft drinks for good. I never made time to corroborate the accounts of Coca-Cola's terrorist--in the fullest sense of the term--tactics in union-busting for their South American bottling plants. This barbarity, on the other hand, was enough to push me back to water, tea, coffee, wine and the occasional shortlisted beer. Coke's only been around for--what?--like a hundred years or something? Yet somebody still feels the need to test it on animals? To the point of cutting open chimpanzees' faces to study nerve impulses? WTF?!??!?!

I suppose that I can at last count my allergy to NutraSweet a blessing: I at least haven't directly subsidized this bull$#!+ in just under two decades. And it's not just the fluffy tree-hugger in me that freaks out at these monstrosities, mind you. The sheer gratuitous, asinine stupidity of it galls me as much, if not more. D'you mean to tell me that corporations have NOTHING better on which to squander their gelt than funding (ahem) "studies" of fruit juices treating artificially induced erectile disfunction in rabbits?!?!?!?! (No, seriously. I am not making this up. Read to the end of the article.)

“It’s very easy to characterize scientific research like this in a bad light,” said Dr. John A. DeSimone, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who had been working under the Coca-Cola grant. “To do medical research, you sometimes need an animal model.”

Well, excuse the @#$%% out of my simple layperson's understanding, but this is hardly a "medical" matter. This is NOT a cure for cancer, AIDS, diabetes, heart disease, et. al. If anything, these products are inducing medical problems, not solving them. You just have to boggle at the Wal-Mart prices for which consciences are bartered. And Dr. DeSimone's is unmistakeably one of them. Characterize it in a "bad light"? As if there's any "good light" for this. Oh, please...

That's enough ranting for one evening. Those links have been cooling their proverbial heels in my GMail account for nearly two weeks, so I wanted to pass the first along as fodder for thought, and rant about the second.