anthroblogia

**Sticky post until 13/08/08 - Scroll down for new posts**
In a way, it’s a story about blogs – you know how you randomly spot something in PPS or Innit, then click here then there, and end up somewhere you never expected?

It all started with a post by yinhao – through him I came to Nikkiko who was promising a link to anyone who posted a photo showing how not to use plastic bags. So, I did, and also set up a space in my sidebar for Bloggers who hate plastic bags.

Then I got a comment and an email from The Tiny Tapir: she has this online shop full of great enviro-friendly stuff, and was asking me if I wanted to review some reusable bags! Cool! My first review, and for environmentally friendly stuff summor

So, I’ve been using them for a couple of months, and here it is… Oh and you can win one, details at the bottom!

The first thing I noticed, was how small they pack up; the manufacturers say “our patent pending enclosure system enables three bags to roll up to about the size of your cup of coffee.” Actually, the ‘patent enclosure system’ is a couple of velcro straps sewn onto the top, but they work very well and the bags arrived in one A3-size envelope, delivered two days after ordering online.


Radioactive Man vs. RuMe!
Continue reading "RuMe review and giveaway competition! Get a free reusable bag!"

In American academic tradition, archaeology falls under the general discipline of anthropology. So, since Indiana Jones is American, and I taught in the American Degree Program, that kind of makes him and me colleagues!


See the resemblance? No? Try squinting hard, even closing your eyes!

OK, maybe he’s a bit more ‘athletic’ than I am… But I also went on a quest, braving danger and near death, just to look for answers to impending environmental disasters

Crawling through caves…

almost drowning in hidden water traps…

and then, when the summer equinox sun shone at 12pm through the hidden grove...
Continue reading "Indiana Julian and the Temple of Earth"

(politely though, a little courtesy never hurt anyone )

Doing a bit of blogsurfing (‘blurfing’??) on Sunday I came across a post on Yinhao’s blog, who was apparently inspired by Nikkiko who asked people to “take a picture of yourself with, something to represent, not using plastic bags?” and then we get a link on her sidebar.

Well, thanks to my wife, I have been severely trained into not using plastic bags; actually I always tried to using them too much, but she would glare at me so much when I came back with even one bag, that I made even more effort

We used to come back from the market with a bag for almost every stall we went to, and sometimes more. But we started to avoid them, and after about six months we had reduced the huge pile of plastic bags we had stored up and now have quite a good system in place. Cloth shopping bags (keep one in the car) and Tupperware for wet stuff.

Plastic bags are really useful, mainly because they are light, waterproof and durable. The problem is, these qualities also make them extremely polluting and damaging to the environment.

A plastic bag will take about 500 years to decompose – so, to get some perspective, if a Portuguese had left a plastic bag in Malacca when they first arrived in 1511 – it would have just decomposed by about now. In Singapore about 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags are used every year, so in Malaysia it must be more – imagine how many will be clogging up the land in 500 years if we carry on at this rate! And even if they are incinerated, what a waste of energy – using energy to burn something that took energy to make…

There are some arguments that paper bags consume more energy to make, transport, etc. (UK government report) but there’s a simple solution to that – reusable bags.
Continue reading "Just say ‘No’ to plastic bags"