I have always felt that drinking coffee is a great way to have the important conversations. One of my customers told me how he lends out An Inconvenient Truth from his doctors surgery and I thought that the least I could do was the same. I have now decided to fill our back wall with socially conscious DVDs. See the list below for what we have so far. Click on the titles for a Preview.
An Inconvenient Truth
Who Killed the Electric Car
The End of Suburbia
Love Actually
Gandhi
The Awful Truth (Donated by a Customer)
Supersize Me
Follow our free dvds page to see the above list grow.
Personally I failed most of my tests and handed in very few assignments. According to the system I am a bit of a failure, but I think that it is school that fails the majority of children. If we all just tried to find out what our passion or purpose was and simply go after that we would all be successes in our own way. If you feel the same way check out www.nomoretests.com. If you don’t feel the same way check out the site anyway and dare to be convinced otherwise. They have an awesome list of ‘101 Things To Do Instead of Standardised Testing‘.
Update: Please read the second comment to this post. Very inspiring words.
…mellow. If it’s brown flush it down. I have always wanted to do this. And with the Brisbane water crisis now is a great time to start. I never thought that Rachel would go for the idea, but I was so excited when she started doing it first. If everyone can agree in the house then this is a great idea. Not to be imposed on guests though, I would think. They can just go outside on the lemon tree.
We have also started doing the bucket in the shower thing and I am simply horrified at how quickly that it fills up. Easily 2 buckets a day. We put it on the plants. Another great idea that one of our customers does is to use the shower water in the toilet. They just turn the tap off to the Tank part of the toilet, and after a brown flush, you just manually fill the tank up again with one of the buckets from the shower. Their son came up with the idea I think. He is 12.
I do a bit of web design on the side. Has been a hobby come very small business as I do most of my work for map magazine which I am a big fan of. I do hope you read it. So I have some skills which I gained because I have some ideas that I would like to do one day, but in the meantime as I learn I have been blessed to be able to contribute to positive media(map magazine) and most recently solving Climate Change.
Climate.net.au needed a bit of an update to their site. I was excited to be able to do this for free as I really love the approach that they are taking with The Climate Change Despair & Empowerment Roadshow. Granted that I have not had the chance to attend the show myself, but my understanding is that they are trying to help people move from Despair to Empowerment as fast as possible. This is very important as often we are overwhelmed by all the climate crisis talk. It is easy to fall into despair and get stuck there. We need to be empowering each other to make the changes that are needed.
I am very proud to have been given the opportunity to contribute to this project. Check out the site to find out when the roadshow might be coming your way.
For a few years now I have been wanting to hold one of these workshops (see attachment). Just before the war on Iraq, I and a few friends tried to walk from Brisbane to Canberra to stop the war on Iraq from starting. I think it was after about 21 days that we found ourselves somewhere past Coffs Harbour that we decided to come home. This question was one of my reasons for turning around, like many of my other reasons which were about questioning our approach to things like preventing war.
If you think about it, except for the rare examples like map magazine, most of our main stream media, and our so called alternative (don’t get me started) media, only educate us on war. Even when trying to turn us towards peace the conversation is about war. Instead of defining peace, war is defined yet again. If 5 years ago I said, “Don’t buy a petrol burning, environmentally damaging car.”, the answer would have to have been “Why not, it is the only thing they are selling.” And such is the loop we are in with the attainment of world peace. Held up in contrast to war, wouldn’t peace pretty much sell itself. Fear is still considered the only motivator.
Further, I have experienced that if you want to achieve anything, you have to know what you want to achieve and be willing to do what it takes to get there. You also need to be able to measure your success along the way, and you can only do that relative to what you are trying to achieve.
Originally the ‘what is peace’ workshop was held on just one night. It has been expanded to be a 10 week workshop because when we asked what peace was, it turned out that we didn’t know very much either about the things we were suggesting made up what peace was. So the first night is ‘what is peace’ then the second night might be ‘what is kindness’ and so on.
The workshops are every Monday night at 6:30pm from the 3rd of September 07. Numbers are limited to 8 places of which I have 2 left. It is free and at Urban Grind. If you are interested please contact me.
I first heard about Edward Burtynsky from the TED website. There is an awesome talk that he gives followed by his 3 wishes that TED are going to try and grant. If you want to see the best synopsis of what this movie is going to be about just watch Burtynsky’s talk at TED.
I don’t quite have the intellect to describe just what/who Edward is, but I think you will agree that he is more than just a photographer. Photography is just one of the tools he uses to change the world. I think that his images can change you, or at least make you stop and think. You can find info about the film here.
Men and Women like Edward are exactly the kinds of people that you find at TED. They didn’t just come up with one great idea, they have a whole life time of thoughts, education, experience, yearning that led them to where they are. They live and breathe this stuff. It is very inspiring. TED
