IdyllopusPress Presents

Tag: consumerism

  • Watch "The Story of Stuff"

    Head over to Youtube and watch every chapter of “The Story of Stuff”–the Intro, Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption, Disposal and Another Way. Or view the film at The Story of Stuff website.

  • H.o.p. asks, "What are they doing advertising things that hurt the earth at a place that’s supposed to help the earth?"

    From when he was knee-high, I’ve been telling H.o.p. about ads. What ads want from you. What they want to sell you. I tell him about the relationship between ads and some of the websites he visits. Like Neopets. I ever remind him that those sites want something from him, which is all the time…

  • The Price of Today’s Medicine Bag

    I wasted my time reading about bags this morning, because I get the Review-a-Day from Powells.com and today’s review was fashion writer Lynn Yaeger, of the Village Voice, on three different books on handbag style. She writes: Forty years ago — even 30 — there was no such thing as a “hot” bag. You had…

  • Fast Food Hell

    “Find Furby at BK! You can collect all 100 FURBY toys!” That’s what it reads on the little blue box which today’s Furby came in. H.o.p. had been hoping instead for a King Kong at Burger King. Instead the Furby arrived with the meal. “Did you tell them I’m a boy?” H.o.p. asked. Burger King…

  • Reading about diamonds

    There’s an area called Popular at Technorati. I rarely drop by there. When I remember it exists, I check out a few blogs to see what’s up, like crossing a virtual ocean to the far side where I bang my head with mysterious invisible hammers until I’m appropriately stupefied and return home full of wonder…

  • It is not "real life" – it is what we’ve been educated to believe is "real life"

    I don’t often post human-interest type stories like this one below, from CNN, but aside from my wanting to note that had this been an anti-war demonstration gone wrong, in which case I think a lot of people would have ended up in jail (I don’t believe any arrests happened), I wanted to hear some…

  • Pot pies, Patriot Act, and the myth of TV dinners

    See the above pic? It’s from some Raleigh North Carolina exhibit, dated 1952 and it is testament to two things. First, it testifies to the fact that people were already eating TV dinners before they came in foil trays. Second, collapsible TV trays existed before foil-packed TV dinners. Had the picture been taken a year…

  • What does the corporate monster look like?

    “What does the corporate monster look like?” H.o.p. says and hands me a piece of paper from his 3 inch high stack and a pen. “Draw it for me?” H.o.p. has recently discovered Neopets and he wants a Neopet toy and of course at the Neopet website they have all the toys and where you…

  • The Ultra Macho Freedom Tower

    Get a grip on it. The Freedom Tower. A sacred subject. Right? No. The Freedom Tower. Honors those who perished there and the whatever for which the new urban warriors fought daily. Right? Wrong.

  • The best advice you'll ever get for cutting in half a roll of paper towels

    I can think of nothing to blog while I’m deep in mangling the look of my site on the side. I’m that kind of dedicated sort of person. But I came across this over at Cupie’s and had to share. You too can make your own baby wipes. Think of the money saved. And all…

  • Behind the scenes with Paris Hilton

    Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I had to take a tad bit of a fun break. If you haven’t already seen it, the Paris Hilton hamburger commercial is here. I was thinking these people had to be spoofing themselves with the ad until I watched their “Behind the Scenes with Paris” clip (no relation to the above).…