Close to 50 carrot growers have banded together for a $25 million marketing campaign to get people to consider carrots instead of junk food for those lunch-boxes.  The growers have hired an ad agency  to come up with an ad and branding campaign that will make baby carrots just as hip and  appealing (or more so) than junk food ads for children’s lunches. The new campaign sees baby carrots packaged in Doritos-like bags.  They’ll be putting catchy slogans on billboards and packs: ” Baby carrots: the  original orange doodles.”  There are even plans for a phone app powered by the sound of folks munching carrots in real time.  The campaign will also air TV spots that tout baby carrots as extreme, futuristic and even sexy.  Sexy?

And finally, there will even be special seasonal tie-ins. This Halloween will introduce us to “scarrots.”  Yikes! And as the family that gives out baby carrots instead of candy on Halloween, start saving up for the therapy your child will undoubtedly need…

Pedal power is gaining traction as thousands of bikes and elliptical machines are retrofitted to produce electricity.  Gyms are using sweat equity to help power their facilities. A Brooklyn eatery uses it to make smoothies. Female inmates at a Phoenix jail pedal to power their TV to watch soap operas. Actor Ed Begley Jr. bikes to run his toaster.

“Business is really taking off,” says Jay Whelan, CEO of The Green Revolution, a Connecticut-based company that retrofits bikes for spinning classes. Since April 2009, he has added devices to nearly 1,000 bikes at 60 gyms that convert the direct current created by pedaling into alternating current to be sent to the power grid. 

ReRev, a Florida company, has added similar devices to more than 300 elliptical trainers at 23 gyms in a dozen states since June 2008. It’s a low-cost way to get into the renewable energy game. Who  would ever have thought we’d capture energy from a workout?

Pedal power cannot run factories, but Whelan estimates a spinning class of 20 people over a year could light 72 homes for a month. A 30-minute workout on an ellipticals generates about 50 watts, enough to run a laptop for an hour or charge a cell phone six times. “We’re not going to solve global warming, but we’re trying to help in any way we can,” Whelan says.

At the Habana Outpost restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y., it takes about a minute of bike pedaling to power a blender. “You get $1 off if you pedal your own smoothie,” says Elvis Rosa, a manager. Most customers saddle up.

Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio sees such bikes as a solution for couch potatoes. In April, to get overweight inmates to exercise, he hooked one up to a TV in the women’s section of his Tent City jail in Phoenix. The 19-inch TV works only if an inmate pedals.

All the women in that section of the jail signed up for the “pedal-vision program,” he says. “Give them access to their favorite soaps and cop shows,” he says, “and they’ll pedal till the cows come home.”

For more green ideas, visit www.onethingsacramento.com

Remember vuvuzelas? Those obnoxious horns that buzzed endlessly during this year’s soccer World Cup? Well now the plastic trumpet has earned a place in the Oxford Dictionary of English. Yes, God help us, vuvuzela is among 2,000 new words and phrases added to the third edition of the dictionary, which is compiled from analysis of two billion words used in everything from novels to internet message boards.

The credit crunch features heavily in this year’s additions, with terms such as “overleveraged,” having taken on too much debt and “quantitative easing,” the introduction of new money in to the money supply by the central bank, among those included. “Staycation,” a holiday spent in one’s home country, and “bargainous,” costing less than usual, also reflect the hot topic of belt-tightening among consumers during the economic downturn.

The rise of “social media,” itself a new term, has spawned several additions, including “defriend,” removing someone from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking site, and “tweetup,” a meeting organized via posts on Twitter. Other words include:

Bromance: a close but non-sexual relationship between two men

Buzzkill: a person or thing that has a depressing or dispiriting effect

Cheeseball: lacking taste, style or originality

Chillax: calm down and relax

Frenemy: a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry

Interweb: the internet

Wardrobe malfunction: an instance of a person accidentally exposing an intimate part of their body as result of an article of clothing slipping out of position

So congratulations to all of the new words headed for the Oxford Dictionary. All of them, except for “Vuvuzela.”  I can’t go there….

The Japanese have an easy, unique way to beat the summer heat: Refrigerated underwear. Yes, they sell brand new undies from cooled vending machines. So, on the very hottest of days, you can now slip into something comfortable and cool – brilliant!  The underwear gained popularity in adult stores – surprise! - where the chilled underwear apparently sold 10 times faster than the room temperature pairs on the store shelves.  So right there, next to the Coke machines, you slide in your bill and out pops cold, clean panties in a chilled container.  The plastic dispenser looks very similar to a yogurt cup – minus the bacteria, one would hope…

This year, think about adding a little bit of extra  excitement to your kids’ back-to school anticipation by attempting to make their school year as eco-friendly as possible. Here are some easy green back to school ideas :

Take the Bus, Carpool, Bike or Walk

Taking the bus is often one of the easiest ways to make going back to school eco-friendly. School busses are timely in most cases, air conditioned, and a good way to get to know people. If your family lives close to school, walking or biking are great options. In respect to treating the environment well, biking and walking are head and shoulders above driving. Plus, that little bit of healthy exercise could really benefit today’s stagnant youth. If driving is your favorite option, carpooling with some nearby friends saves on money and carbon emissions.

Bring an Eco-Friendly Lunch

The simple solution to this challenge is, of course, to send your students off to school with sack lunches. Brown paper bags are a better option than plastic, but the best choice for the environment is a bag that won’t ever be thrown away. From Spider Man lunch boxes to bento boxes to homemade fabric lunch sacks, the options are fun and endless.  There are some great selections of environmentally-friendly lunch containers out there, including some made from old juice packs. Packaging inside a lunch sack can be eco-friendly as well if you ditch plastic sandwich and snack bags and choose small storage containers that can be washed and reused. Include some silverware (if necessary) that can be used more than once, and your family’s school lunches will be uber-green!

Buy Green School Supplies

It may sound silly, but writing utensils with a little extra pizzazz probably won’t be lost as fast. Whether that means buying special monogrammed pens or decorating one yourself, a pen with a little bit of sentimental value is less likely to be treated like it’s disposable. Also, it’s  easier than ever to find a notebook and paper made from recycled materials.  Office Depot and Staples sell recycled paper notebooks, and OfficeMax sells a 100 percent recycled printer paper.

Encourage Your School to Do More

Individuals and families can make a big impact on the environment by being more responsible consumers, but schools collect tons of waste on their own. Students and parents can talk to school officials about decreasing waste and recycling. Tell your school and friends about your green back to school ideas. Sometimes a single voice can make a big impact.

For more gree ideas, visit www.onethingsacramento.com

I’m going behind bars for “GOOD” –  PLEASE BAIL ME OUT!

Help! I don’t want to grow old in the Gray Bar Hotel! I’m going to serve as an MDA Jailbird, so I’m being Locked-Up…that’s right, I’m going behind bars to help Jerry’s Kids©.  There’s no chance that I’ll be released on good behavior (yeah, that’ll happen…) so I need your help to raise my bail by THURSDAY, AUGUST 26^th!!!!  

In order to spring me, please make a secure, on-line tax deductible donation - “jumpsuit orange” is NOT my color….  

Just go back to the main page of the Eagle Website and click on the flipper page that shows me in my black and whites – by the way, horizontal stripes are also a fashion problem….     

Not only will your funds keep me out of the slammer – I won’t last a day! – but more importantly, the money benefits individuals and families served by MDA who are affected by neuromuscular disease.

Thanks in advance for your help in raising funds for the MDA, and for keeping me out of The Joint!  

Kat

Fed up with the costs at the pump? Why not take a cue from Fred Flintsone?  While the HumanCar Imagine PS won’t have you motoring to work using your bare feet like the cartoon character, you could soon be “rowing” your car on your morning commute. The car is a four-seat vehicle powered by hand cranks that can take hills at 30 miles per hour and exceed 60 mph on flat terrain. Based in Eugene, Ore., HumanCar Inc. is preparing to start producing the human-powered car and is now accepting pre-orders.  According to  Autoblog Green, the lightweight Imagine PS (the PS stands for Power Station) is street legal and, if four people are cranking inside, can run on human power alone. The car also has electric plug-in capabilities, allowing it to be run with just one person handling the hand-crank in a rowing-like motion. According to HumanCar’s website, the chassis is adaptable, and can work with different kinds of batteries and technology in the future without requiring an entirely new vehicle. The HumanCar site says the car will cost $15,500 when it goes on sale next year.   Yaba daba doo!

For more green ideas, visit www.onethingsacramento.com 

Most young Americans starting college this year can’t write in cursive, think email is too slow, that Beethoven’s a dog and Michelangelo a computer virus. Yep, to  students who will get their bachelor’s degrees in 2014, Czechoslovakia has never existed, Fergie is a pop singer, not a duchess; Clint Eastwood is a sensitive movie director, not Dirty Harry; and John McEnroe stars in TV ads, not on the tennis court.  All this according to Beloit College’s “Mindset” list which was first compiled in 1998, for the class of 2002, by Beloit humanities professor Tom McBride.    The list was intended as a reminder to faculty at the university that references quickly become dated, but quickly evolved to become a hugely popular annual list that gives a snapshot of how things have changed, and chronicles key cultural and political events that have shaped a generation.  The list is a mirror of how rapidly perceptions can change: to the class of 2013, boxer Mike Tyson was “always a felon” but to students who graduated five years earlier, Tyson was “always a contender.” And for US students who got their bachelor’s degrees this year, Germany was never divided, professional athletes have always competed in the Olympics, there have always been reality shows on television and smoking has never been allowed on US airlines.

I feel really, really old….

 In an economic downturn, it might be tough to get your head around this: rare sheets of $100,000 bills, fabulous gold treasures dating back to the California Gold Rush era, rare coins including those tied to the first stirrings for America’s independence and federal government securities worth more than a billion dollars. All that and more was the backdrop of the country’s premier money show, the World’s Fair of Money, which brought together about 1,000 coin dealers and hundreds of collectors to Boston. Held d in a sprawling hall monitored by armed uniformed and undercover police officers, federal agents, private security contractors, and electronic surveillance equipment, the fair featured seldom-seen gold treasurers brought from the Smithsonian Institution’s vaults including America’s first $20 gold coin — valued by independent experts at $15 million today — and its last $20 coin. It also included sheets of America’s largest denomination currency, the $100,000 bill, which is said to be worth about $1.6 million today.  

Can you imagine asking for change for $100,000 at the grocery store? No, me neither….

During the summer driving season, CalRecycle is promoting a message that can help save people money, make our roads safer, and protect the environment. CalRecycle (www.calrecycle.ca.gov) is the state agency in charge of all of California’s recycling and waste reduction efforts.  It works in partnership with local government, industry and the public to reduce and manage the approximately 93 million tons of waste generated each year.  The Just Check It campaign encourages drivers to properly maintain their tires by checking their tire inflation levels once a month, inspecting the tire’s treads and rotating and balancing their tires every 5,000 to 8,000 miles.  Properly maintained tires save people money by improving gas mileage and extending the life of their tires.  They also make our roads safer by reducing tire failure and will help to reduce the 44.4 million waste tires that are generated each year in California. The Just Check It website (www.justcheckit.info) has easy to follow tips and videos on how to care for tires and other background information. Something as simple as checking your tires can make a huge difference in protecting people and the environment.

For more green informations, log onto www.onethingsacramento.com