We adopted 4-month-old Mir just over two days ago from a rescue group that takes in cats and kittens bound for euthanasia (i.e. to meet their Kitty Maker) at overcrowded shelters.

Chekhov is PEEVED.

Remember the Yarntainer? It’s a great way to store twine, too. In this case, a takeout soup container tames the hemp twine we use to tie up boxes for recycling. (Dang Noo Joisey laws.)

But where’s Sting?

Our operators are standing by for your e-mails

The North Carolina coffee mavericks of Larry’s Beans sent over a couple of bags of its organic, fair-trade java. After grinding up the beans in our hand-cranked coffee mill, I consulted our resident coffee expert (read: the hub).

A note: You won’t find the little fair-trade dude on the packaging; Larry’s Beans, along with Just Coffee, Dean’s Beans, and Cafe Campesino, split from Transfair USA in 2004, because it felt that the fair-trade movement was being “watered down” under the “increasingly corporate-friendly” Transfair system. Now part of a co-op of fair-trade, green roasters known as Cooperative Coffee, Larry’s Beans is audited by the international Fair Trade Labeling Organization, which ensures that payments are fairly distributed to each individual farmer—you can even track the origin of each bag of coffee, as well as how much each farmers’ coop was paid, by checking the bag’s lot number against the Larry’s Beans Web site. (How about those transparency cojones, Starbucks?)

All of Larry’s Beans coffee is shade-grown and certified organic (or transitional organic); 97 percent is fair trade, while the remaining 3 percent is the company’s Kauai Blend from Hawaii, where it says there is no need for fair trade.

Costa Lil Ricky
($9.95 per lb)

A mug of Larry’s Beans Costa Lil Ricky has a full taste that’s neither sharp nor overly bitter. Its nice aroma makes for a comforting blend—the perfect partner for an afternoon’s lounging—and its light, smooth feel makes repeated cups welcome in each sitting.

The Grand Turk
($10.85 per lb)

This dark blend by Larry’s Beans carries an enticing aroma in both bean and ground form that permeates a small apartment to make an effective lure to start your morning. The end result after brewing is a tasty mug that makes for a strong wakeup call for the senses. A little goes a long way for this blend, however, as I find repeated cups in a sitting can yield a caffeine overkill.

We also dug the fact that the bags (with designs that rocked my illustration-loving socks off) were resealable—a minor, oft-overlooked detail, but one that enables the packaging to be reused, even long after the last cup of coffee has been drained.

Related articles:
1. Gorilla Coffee
2. Hub’s Guest Review: Black Gold
3. Starbucks Keeps Ethiopian Growers Humble

Taken by the hub.

Don’t worry, this was taken three years ago, after a run-in with his nemesis/now-former roommate, who slammed a door on his tail, lopping part of it off. He’s all better now. Scarred for life and two inches short of a full-length tail, but better.

I had to make nicey-nice back then—she was rather contrite, though, and paid for his vet’s bill—but, between you and me, I wish he had scratched her face.

My new guilty indulgence: Stonyfield Farm’s certified-organic vanilla chai ice cream, made with certified-fair-trade and -organic Kashmiri chai from Honest Tea. See that diffuse glow surrounding my tub of ice cream? That’s because it was made by angels.

(Part of my Green This House program.)

This is a common lure that printer manufacturers use on unsuspecting consumers—sell the hardware below market value (even if it means losing money), then rake in a continuous stream of profits through consumables such as toner and ink. In fact, the Wall Street Journal says that Hewlett-Packard makes more than two-thirds of its profits selling printer cartridges. (An average of 1.3 billion ink cartridges are sold each year, generating $30.1 billion in revenue in 2005.) Considering a color ink cartridge for my el cheapo $50 HP Deskjet costs over $20 and a black one $18, is it any wonder that cartridge-refill services are gaining in popularity, despite the obvious ire of companies such as HP and Lexmark?

My dad and I don’t have a lot in common—I’m still working on getting him to give up his SUV—but one trait solidifies our genetic bond: we’re both extremely cheap. He’s such a tightwad, in fact, that he became a stealth greenie entirely by accident, injecting off-brand ink back into his empty cartridges and saving them (and their potential replacements) from landfill purgatory, at 50 percent of the cost. Plus, it isn’t just the cartridges themselves that are an environmental polluter—printer firms have been incorporating small computer chips into their cartridges so that cartridges by other manufacturers can’t be used in a particular brand of printer. The chips also make refilling impossible because they can’t be reset, in a way almost reminiscent of “suicide seeds,” which in turn are such a repugnant idea that a special VIP section in hell has been reserved for the person who first suggested them. (The EU has banned the use of these smart chips.)

Being the klutz that I am, I suspected that DIYing this would render me a walking ink stain, so my little stingy (and hippie) heart leaped when I found out that Walgreens refills your empties. I had my black-ink cartridge pumped back full of ink for a little over $9—half of what HP was going to charge me. Walgreens offers a 100-percent satisfaction guarantee. And if you bring in the little cartridge baggie for reuse the next time you go in, you get 10 free digital photos. (The baggie was further slipped into a cardboard mailer, but I returned it to the guy at the counter for him to reuse.)

Although stories about mixed results abound, after a couple of test prints, I couldn’t tell the difference in quality, but then again, I’m not a stickler.

Other refill-station options include CartridgeWorld and OfficeMax, and if you prefer a more hands-on approach, a Google search will stand you in good stead.

Unless you really have to impress someone with your printouts (I can only think of outgoing docs and the like), use the draft mode on your printer preferences and save yourself some ink and/or toner by making your cartridges last twice or even three times as long. Double-sided printing will also cut down on paper waste, while providing a nice chunk of change over time that you can put to better use. Like catnip.

My sister-in-law, knowing my yen for knitting, once very thoughtfully presented me with a yarntainer, which I love because it keeps any skein of yarn clean, tangle-free, and more important, cat-free, as I knit—I can toss it on the couch, or in the footwell of someone’s car without firing up any additional synapses. Here’s my knockoff version—all you require is a used 32oz. yogurt container, a sharp point for poking a hole in the middle of the lid, and an eyelet of sufficient diameter to snap into said hole. (The raw edges of the plastic will otherwise catch at the yarn.) I happened to find this particular eyelet on the floor while I was cleaning up one day; a scrapbooking or paper-arts friend might have an extra eyelet or two for you.

And there you have it. You find a second use for something disposable (“reuse” is, of course, a step up from “recycle”) and you get to stash $7 to $12 extra dollars in your knitting fund.

A couple of shots I took at the farmers’ market at Union Square today.

Dead Staghorn corals in Belize’s Barrier Reef. Photo by the Canary Project

The mission of The Canary Project is to photograph landscapes around the world that are exhibiting dramatic transformation due to global warming and to use these photographs to persuade as many people as possible that global warming is already underway and of immediate concern.

To compile a persuasive body of images, we will be photographing at least 16 landscapes throughout the world. These images will show that global warming: (1) is affecting the world in a variety of ways (melting, sea-level rise, drought, extreme weather events, dying habitats, etc.); (2) is affecting every place on earth.

In addition to providing visual evidence of the changing climate, we also hope to address something more fundamental that possibly lies behind apathy towards the issue in the U.S.: people’s sense of remove from the forces of nature.

[via Green LA Girl]

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, wrote an eloquent discourse in the Los Angeles Times about why we’re “more afraid of gay marriage and terrorism” than the much deadlier threat of global warming.

1. Global warming lacks a mustache

No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to—what they know and want, what they are doing and planning—has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.

That’s why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn’t. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.

2. Global warming doesn’t gives us moral outrage

When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action.

Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.

3. Global warming won’t signal the end of humanity today

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That’s what brains did for several hundred million years — and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain’s most stunning innovations, and we wouldn’t have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

We haven’t quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we’ve only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.

4. Global warming is happening too gradually

The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser.

Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly. The density of Los Angeles traffic has increased dramatically in the last few decades, and citizens have tolerated it with only the obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on a single day last summer, Angelenos would have shut down the city, called in the National Guard and lynched every politician they could get their hands on.

And the debates and misinformation campaigns continue to rage and blaze. Even Tony Long, the copy chief of Wired and one of my personal heroes, says that ideology isn’t the point. “The health of the planet—our only planet—that’s the point,” he says. “What can we conclude? How about this: Even if it’s not 100 percent certain that we’re rushing headlong toward some kind of ecological tipping point—even if there’s room for argument—why argue at all? Look. Something is happening out there. What matters here is the planet, not whose economic system prevails.”

If some people can’t see that, then they’re thicker than I thought. And I already have a dismally, precipitously low opinion of global-warming naysayers and devil-may-care narcissists who have far too much money on their hands and far too little social and moral responsibility. In a word: chumps.