There is it seems no limit to the craven way the media accepts celebrity claims to have gone eco.

Chain-smoking New York designer and stylist Patricia Field (Sex and the City, Ugly Betty) has teamed up with Diet Coke to create a limited edition shopping bag design – “made entirely of recycled plastic bottles.”

Says one particularly moronic tabloid: “Patricia Fields shows you can be a fashionista and a green goddess at the same time with this must-have shopper bag” (Now Magazine).

The idea of Diet Coke as a fit partner for an eco-initiative is as repellent as the drink itself.  And there is something particularly shameless about a snobbish stylist and fashion designer (two of the most wasteful occupations on the planet) putting herself forward as a savior of the environment.
>>Keep reading “Pass the sick-bag”

Some time back, I did a review of LaMar’s Simple Solar Homestead, a great (and inexpensive) ebook created by LaMar, the great thing about LaMar, is he is actually LIVING this lifestyle, not just spouting theory.

>>Keep reading “LaMar’s Simple Solar Homesteading videos”

Dobreski or is it Vrcakovski? Off-Grid.Net readers have finally helped us unmask the culprits behind the  Magniwork magnetic generator scam.

The fraudsters have been swindling gullible buyers with a $50 DIY guide to building a magnetic power generator which claims to produce free energy. Physicists and energy experts have dismissed the product as nonsense.

The brains behind the operation is a shady East European scientist and entrepreneur known as Igor Dobreski. His main accomplice and web-master is a slightly more engaging but still dishonest character called Vojdan Vrcakovski.
>>Keep reading “Magniwork scammers unmasked”

Click to buy There is too much information around about how to go green.  Many are left wondering who to trust and just how they can individually make a difference.

Every day we make hundreds of small choices that can influence our future and the planet’s.
>>Keep reading “Whole Green Catalog”

Reading, learning, it’s what I enjoy doing. Before the internet, I would go to the three local libraries in my hometown, I would check out as many books as each on would allow, take them all home, read-read-read until I had gotten through all of them, then I return the books to their respective homes and start all over again. I tended to read non-fiction, I preferred them over fiction most of the time. With the exception of a few notable authors such as Stephen King, Jean M. Auel, and such…

With the advent of the internet and ebooks, I mostly read what I can get in digital format, including audiobooks. So these last couple of books I’ve read, I have held in my hand, turned pages, it was quite old-school for me. J I love it. Now, on to the book review.
>>Keep reading “Tough Times Survival Guide vol 1 – book review”

Sticking to his guns – Richardson After a  25 year battle, a couple is being allowed to stay in their cosy earth-sheltered and grass-roofed single room in the ritzy Gloucestershire countryside.

Not far from the country retreats of Rock stars and Hedge fund billionaires, the Richardson’s wooden, 12-sided circular house is half-buried beneath trees on a hillside near the remote Saltbox in Camp.

Lovingly developed over more than two decades by carpenter Richard Richardson, The Retreat is an antidote to the modern rat race.

Mr Richardson, 58, his wife Grit, 36, and their sons Robin, four, and John, three, live without TV or PC.
>>Keep reading “Victory in 25 year permit battle”

Flintoff & daughter – homespun  wisdom

There are not many books about learning to sew that set up the problem with a few chapters on the world’s religions plus a visit to Prince Charles’s Savile Row tailor.  But John-Paul Flintoff’s personal memoir, Through the Eye of a Needle: The true story of a man who went searching for Meaning and ended up making his Y-fronts, (currently available in the US via Amazon UK)  is about learning to sew in a Post-Modern way, and so it is stuffed full of influences from Christianity and  Zen Buddhism to personal shoppers and Indian call-centers.

Flintoff’s starting point is the vanity of our current clothes purchasing habits plus the way that we have all been disempowered by Western consumer society, so we no longer know how to

do any of the things that got our grandparents through the last Depression.

He finds a copy of “Make do and Mend: Keeping Family and Home Afloat on War Rations,” a collection of war-time DIY pamphlets. This immediately inspires him to mend his wife’s hand-made and very expensive bra, as well as some socks and jeans of his own.    His stitching looks like the work of a blind man, but no matter
>>Keep reading “Man Maketh the Clothes”

What in the wide world of sports do Freegans do all day while the rest of us are working?

They live for free, don’t earn money, so presumably once their basic needs are satisfied they sit around with their pals by day, and party by night, right?

Not so, says Mark Boyle from Bristol UK (pictured), self-styled chief of the tiny Freeconomist movement.

Here he outlines his typical 168 hours week – (our comments in brackets after each item):
>>Keep reading “A Freegan week (sounds like hell)”

A bee-keeper living in a cave in Sussex, UK, has been ordered to leave by his local council on the grounds he does not have a fire exit.

In a case of Health-and-Safety-gone-mad, Hilaire Purbrick (pictured), 45, has been told he must leave the seven-foot cave in Whitehawk Hill  he has inhabited for the past 16 years. Mr. Purbrick’s troubles started when he first came to national attention in 2003 after he calmed a swarm of angry bees using a feathery sex toy. His selfless act led the council to focus on his unconventional lifestyle.

He and four neighbours have lived and dined off the land with no ill effects, but after having the dwelling checked by the fire brigade, Brighton and Hove City Council decided it did not have enough exits and sought an injunction banning him from entering it.
>>Keep reading “Let him bee!”