| Subject: How discreetly PC to refer to horrible body odor as |
Author:
Curmudgeon
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Date Posted: 09:30:33 03/24/07 Sat
In reply to:
larry
's message, "The Year Without Toilet Paper" on 05:42:19 03/24/07 Sat
a "sour odor [that] hovered oh-so-slightly in the air"
The poor dumb saps.
>man you got to read the hole story its 3 pages long.
>very funny.
>
>DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in
>Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth
>Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap
>vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local
>butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then
>homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under
>the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax
>candles and a fluorescent bulb.
>
>Skip to next paragraph
>Readers' Opinions
>Share Your Thoughts
>What would you be willing to sacrifice for a more
>environmentally sound life?
>
>Post a CommentRelated
>Op-Ed: Worms in the Apartment
>In an Op-Ed for The Times's City section, Colin Beavan
>discusses practicing genuinely clean living in New
>York. (March 18, 2007)
>
>Multimedia
>Graphic
>
>Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
>Michelle Conlin rides her scooter, even in the snow.
>“Rain is worse,” she said.
>A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the
>faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of
>the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered
>around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs,
>the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel
>cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette
>greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in
>their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.
>
>A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she
>would find no toilet paper there.
>
>Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works
>nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled,
>1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned
>that the couple in 9F had not used his services in
>four months. “I’ve noticed,” Joseph said later with a
>shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his
>last name. “I’ve got enough problems,” he said.)
>
>Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s
>parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical
>nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer
>at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong
>lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules
>are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date
>include eating only food (organically) grown within a
>250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for
>anything except said food; producing no trash (except
>compost, see above); using no paper; and, most
>intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
>
>Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins
>of forensic detective work and another about D-Day,
>said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread
>more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration
>to others in the process.
>
>Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact
>year was the only one of four possibilities his agent
>thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is
>showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced
>with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist
>authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed
>secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
>and he and his family are being tailed by Laura
>Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best
>friend.
>
>Why there may be a public appetite for the
>Conlin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the
>very personal, very urban face of environmentalism
>these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make
>his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan
>and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging
>from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.
>
>Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters
>(sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers
>that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet
>folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver
>couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles
>of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But
>there are hundreds of other light-footed, young
>abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that
>this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing,
>city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless,
>public diary form). They have seen “An Inconvenient
>Truth”; they would like to tell you how it makes them
>feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs
>like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are
>their Whole Earth catalogs.
>
>Andrew Kirk, an environmental history professor at the
>University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose new book,
>“Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and
>American Environmentalism,” will be published by
>University Press of Kansas in September, is reminded
>of environmentalism’s last big bubble, in the 1970s,
>long before Ronald Reagan pulled federal funding for
>alternative fuel technologies (and his speechwriters
>made fun of the spotted owl and its liberal
>protectors, a deft feat of propaganda that set the
>movement back decades). Those were the days when
>Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth writers, Mr. Kirk
>said, “focused on a brand of environmentalism that
>kept people in the picture.”
>
>“That’s the thing about this current wave of
>environmentalism,” he continued. “It’s not about, how
>do we protect some abstract pristine space? It’s what
>can real people do in their home or office or
>whatever. It’s also very urban. It’s a critical twist
>in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints,
>take only photographs. But how do you translate that
>into Manhattan?”
>
>With equals parts grace and calamity, it appears.
>Washed down with a big draught of engaging palaver.
>
>Before No Impact — this is a phrase that comes up a
>lot — Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near
>parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who
>bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still
>single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never,
>she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was
>broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned
>whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored
>him.)
>
>In this household, food was something you dialed for.
>
>“We would wake up and call ‘the man,’ ” Ms. Conlin
>said, “and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee
>in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we’d call two men, and
>get bagels from Bagel Bob’s. For lunch I’d find myself
>at Wendy’s, with a Dunkin’ Donuts chaser. Isabella
>would point to guys on bikes and cry: ‘The man! The
>man!’ ”
>
>Since November, Mr. Beavan and Isabella have been
>hewing closely, most particularly in a dietary way, to
>a 19th-century life. Mr. Beavan has a single-edge
>razor he has learned to use (it was a gift from his
>father). He has also learned to cook quite tastily
>from a limited regional menu — right now that means
>lots of apples and root vegetables, stored in the
>unplugged freezer — hashing out compromises. Spices
>are out but salt is exempt, Mr. Beavan said, because
>homemade bread “is awful without salt; salt stops the
>yeast action.” Mr. Beavan is baking his own, with
>wheat grown locally and a sour dough “mother”
>fermenting stinkily in his cupboard. He is also
>finding good sources at the nearby Union Square
>Greenmarket (like Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, which sells
>milk in reusable glass bottles). The 250-mile rule, by
>the way, reflects the longest distance a farmer can
>drive in and out of the city in one day, Mr. Beavan
>said.
>
>
>href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/garden/22impact
>.html?ex=1332216000&en=e77725051fe1a853&ei=5090&partner
>=rssuserland&emc=rss">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22
>/garden/22impact.html?ex=1332216000&en=e77725051fe1a853
>&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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