Take a break from our regularly scheduled programming...

I'm recovering from a very fun evening of whiteboard pictionary. Which may or may not be ecologically sound. Substitute disposable paper for dry erase markers. Either way it was a lot of fun. Almost everyone who came to my little shindig carpooled, proving that you can have a lot of fun in a resource smart way. Yay! (sorry gimme rhyme had to take it). I ended up going to work, after guiltily admitting that I did a little Post Holiday shopping and bought a new pair of sunglasses since my last ones broke over the weekend.

However, perhaps I should have spent more time on the internet. I was reading GigaOm and he pointed me to an interesting website called The Story of Stuff a Flash movie with Annie Leonard that in an bullet style presentation talks about the lifestyle of stuff. It's actually pretty engaging since it's full of some really mind boggling facts. For instance?

• 1% of what we buy is trashed within 6 months! That means we throw away tons of good stuff!


• Consume twice as much as we did 50 years ago!


• We get bombarded by 3000 advertisements a day!


• The average American produces 4.5 pounds of garbage a day.

A lot of what Annie Leonard talks about is covered in the book Stuff that I wrote about earlier but cannot find the post.

So if you have a few minutes this holiday week this is definitely worth spending 20 minutes checking out. If you have some more time, you might also check out BBC's documentary "Century of the Self" that talks about the history of creation of public relations that explains much of our shopping desires: