So, the other day, over my morning coffee, I figured out the root cause of all of humanity’s problems.

Politics? Nope. Religion? Nuh-uh. The increasing influence of Jupiter as it enters the fifth house through the left window in the Year of the Ox?

No, the problem is that we have far, far too much time on our hands. And we get bored easily.

Your average rabbit, for instance, has three main activities in life: eating, sleeping and making more rabbits, which occupy about 15% of its time. The other 75% is spent staring off into the distance, doing nothing. Humans seem to need something far more challenging. (Except corporate CEOs, who have also been known to spend 75% of their time staring off into the distance, doing nothing).

I came to my conclusion after reading about the latest extreme sport. For those of you who don’t know what extreme sports are, some examples:

Heli-skiing - This is where a helicopter crew throws a skier out onto a part of a mountain so inaccessible and dangerous that mountain goats have posted warning signs. You slide down a slope on two sticks you have carefully waxed to eliminate all possibility of speed control. There are only two ways to stop: A) Hit a tree and B) Hit a rock.

Bungee jumping - This is where you tie yourself to a rope and throw yourself off a high bridge, for the express purpose of turning your stomach inside out when you come to a sudden stop. I suspect that this sport was invented by a manufacturer who had to quickly find a market for a bad batch of rope that had gone all sproingy.

Snow boarding - Enthusiasts strap both feet to a single piece of board and slide down a mountain in the most awkward way possible: half sideways. Snow boarder dexterity is greatly enhanced by the fashionable clothes (dropped crotch pants, toques pulled over the eyes), and performance drugs (the stuff that Clinton didn’t inhale.)

Now the latest entry in this type of sporting activity is... extreme ironing.

The object of this, erm, ‘sport’ is to do the best ironing job on five items of clothing while, say, being suspended off the side of a mountain, floating on the water, or sitting on the roof of a moving car.

Personally, I always thought ironing was challenging enough as it is. There are all kinds of potential injuries, including: steamed face, hot flattened fingers, sudden ironing board collapse and railroad track creases down your pants.

Or so I’ve heard. My own technique for wrinkle removal is to throw my clothes in the ‘ironing basket.’ Over time, heat and pressure (as the pile gets higher) slowly changes the structure of clothing fibres in the lower layers, resulting in “petrified pants” which are now permanently wrinkle free. The average time for petrification is 20 years, which, happily, is the same length of time it takes fashion makers to bring back retro styles. I’ll continue using this method until we get the “smart” clothes we’ve been promised. By that I mean shirts that are smart enough to know better than to wrinkle in the first place.

But I digress. The other new (poisonous!) extreme sport is “scorpion (poisonous!) sitting” wherein people lock themselves in small cells with 3000 (poisonous!) scorpions for roommates. The idea is to break world records (currently 32 days) for endurance.

Actually, this is a sport in which I could compete. In my house, there are no less than 5,478 spiders, some of which look like they could be poisonous. Some of the species are quite large too, with a leg span of about four inches if you squish them properly.

This means there are webs everywhere - so many that I think that for Christmas, we will simply disguise the Christmas lights as flies and let the spiders string them up. In fact, we could hold a neighbourhood competition for extreme spider decor-

See? Humans are easily bored. We need better causes. I need a cause.

Just don’t ask me to save the scorpions. Or iron.

Some stunning -- and very depressing -- pictures from Detroit.

The last year of classes at Jane Cooper Elementary was 2006-7. After that, the cash-strapped Detroit Public Schools shut the school down.

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2008/10/open-campus.html

The Detroit public schools book repository:

http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/index.php?/projects/untitled-one/

http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/index.php?/projects/untitled-two/

http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/index.php?/projects/school-supplies/ (see prev/next at top of screen)

http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/index.php?/depository/the-story/

In these worrisome times, as the world waits anxiously to see if ... Britney Spears will get over her recent breakup with what’s-his-name, I find it useful to remember the advice of my great-grandfather. When I asked him once about to how to handle the tough patches in life, he looked at me long and hard and said: “Children should be seen and not heard.”

Okay, truthfully, I never asked great-grandad that, mainly because I was about four when I knew him. However, if I had asked I’m sure he would have answered the same way yours did: “Why, when I was your age, I had to walk to school in 28 feet of snow. Naked.”

His point was, of course, that no matter how bad you have it, somebody else has it worse. For instance, take the case of some apartment dwellers in Istanbul, Turkey, who were relieved to hear that their neighbours were finally moving out. Their neighbours being a bunch of cows, that is.

Apparently one tenant, Fatma Kocaman, had been keeping cows on the first and third floor of the building for several years, and has only just now started thinning the herd.

“It’s been terrible,” said one resident. “They were such party animals, mooing and chewing all night long,” he said, adding that their favourite alcoholic drink seemed to be the Brown Cow.

“It will be such a relief to have the elevators back,” said another resident. “Anytime any of them wanted a milkshake, they’d all pile in and run it up and down real fast. Even worse, they played nothing but moosic on the elevator speakers.”

Asked by reporters where they were going now that they’ve been kicked out, their spokescow, Moostafa said, “Fortunately, my boyfriend has a place. Indeed, you might say we’ve been saved by the bull.”

Now consider the strange case of one Alan Todd, 63, of North Yorkshire, England. For the past few decades the man has been terrified of alarm bells because he suffers heart stoppages and temporary brain death every time one wakes him up. That’s right: when his alarm clock tocked, his ticker locked.

Now, setting aside the inconvenience of waking up dead every morning, consider the strain that must have put on his family. For example, how do you go about answering early morning phone calls and taking messages? “Sorry, no, he died when the phone rang, can he call you back later?”

Fortunately, doctors have finally been able to help this poor man by installing a pacemaker that restarts his heart instantly. This was a great relief to his children, who worried that the condition might be hereditary, and thought they might need... a change of heart.

As bad as that must have been, at least that fellow could report to hospital with a condition that allowed doctors to keep a straight face. In Australia, an emergency room study revealed that at least thirteen men and boys came in with “clothing related injuries” over two years. The injuries were in the nether region, the males having zipped a little too close to the, ahem, nether bits.

[We now pause politely to allow all male readers the chance to wince and cross their legs in sympathy.]

Doctors aren’t sure why there were so many injuries, except that it might be because Australia is hot, and sometimes men don’t wear underwear. However, I don’t believe this because as everyone knows, Scotland is cold, and the men there don’t wear underwear under their kilts either.

Another type of clothing injury included fractures suffered from falls in that tricky stage of putting on pants, where one leg is in, and the other is searching for the hole. Which just goes to prove that Australians are normal people: because they put their pants on one leg at time, just like you and me.

The strangest injuries of all though, have to be the “finger dislocations” caused by putting on or removing socks improperly. So to all those readers who wrote in a few weeks ago to tell me about there being no such thing as proper sock procedures and especially left and right socks, I have this to say: Pthththb.

And to all those people who think they have a tough life, I also say this: zip it.

Just do it slowly, okay?

Today's green entry was inspired by a stop at my local grocery store.

Receipt overkillI was in need of some chocolate and so I purchased a four-pack of chocolate bars on the way home from work - one to eat that evening, and the rest to tuck away for other chocolate emergencies. I bought one item ... and came away with a receipt that was nearly a foot long!

Now, I don't know about elsewhere, but here in Canada, grocery stores have long been in the habit of listing every single item on your receipt for a while now - something that has annoyed me for some time. By this I mean that if you buy five jars of spaghetti sauce, your receipt will have spaghetti sauce printed on it five separate times, rather than something like "Spaghetti sauce, 5@$1.99", which is how it used to be done.

I'm not sure when the change happened, or why - perhaps it was thought to make receipts easier to read or maybe it came into effect when bar code scanning was implemented. Either way, it makes for long receipts.

Big deal you say? Scale it up. StatsCan says that in 2006, there were 12,437,470 private households in Canada. Let's assume each household buys groceries on average once every two weeks. That's 323,374,220 receipts per year. Let's also assume that the average receipt is 18 inches long, and that we are wasting 5 inches of paper per receipt (about 30%) simply by not grouping items together.

That's 44 million yards (or about 41 million metres) of wasted receipt paper, per year. In one country, in one retail sector.

This is just one example of the profligate waste we've grown so accustomed to that we don't even see it anymore.

So what can you do? Go to your grocery store's website right now, and email their feedback address.

Ask them to figure out how much money they'd save - in paper, ink, and equipment wear and tear - if they made this one simple change to their receipt printing. And then remind them they'd save a lot more, also gain rather a lot of green cred, (and thus customers), if they did a proper, full receipt redesign.

Every once and a while, researchers will announce a discovery that so dumbfounds you, you just want to smack your forehead and say: “Why didn’t I think to get a job that pays me big bucks to announce things that everyone already knew?”

For example, one of the most recent dispatches from “The Department of Blindingly Obvious Scientific Results” is the discovery that teenagers sleep in on weekends because... they don’t get enough sleep during the week.

The study, conducted in Denver, Colorado, also proved one very important theory: that researchers don’t actually have teenagers of their own at home. Otherwise, they could easily provide answers to what I know will be the questions in their next study: that is, WHY don’t teenagers get enough sleep during the week. I will bet money that they’ll discover that:

1. Teenagers stay up too late talking to friends on the phone.
2. Teenagers stay up too late talking to friends on the Internet.
3. Teenagers stay up too late talking to friends at the mall.
4. Their teachers are really rude and keep waking them up in class.

Okay, you laugh, but in doing so you miss the really, really important discovery of this study: in order to get these results, a group of adults somehow managed to get more than 700 teenagers to say something other than “mmph.” If we could duplicate their technique, it would change family dynamics around the world.

Meanwhile, scientists based in New Hampshire and Montreal have learned that when babies babble, they are actually trying to learn how to talk. Apparently, before now, researchers believed that baby babbling was just mouth exercise. (Known in scientific circles by the technical term, “flapping your gums.”)

The study authors came to their conclusion by observing that babbling babies opened the right side of their mouth more than their left. Your right side is controlled by your left brain hemisphere, which is in charge of speech, ergo, their conclusion. My question is, how do you open the right side of your mouth more than the left? Also: Just what the heck does ergo mean, anyway?

What this new theory proves is that researchers don’t actually have any babies at home either. Now I think it’s highly significant that scientists don’t seem to have either babies or teenagers. This means we have no hard data on whether there’s a connection between having babies and having teenagers and so we can’t prevent another outbreak.

Possibly the best study of all though, was the one released from the University of California, that said that dogs are actually smarter than we thought.

First, there is the shocking news that dogs can probably count. Having been owned by two Brittany Spaniels at one time, I can verify these results. Early in their puppyhood, Rusty and Taffy established a mid-morning snack that involved not one, but two biscuits. Each. If I gave out only one apiece, they would look at me adoringly with their big brown eyes before dragging me off to the kitchen by the ankles for a refill.

The other finding was that dogs may actually be trying to convey different emotions when they bark. Imagine! As luck would have it, the Japanese toy maker Takara has just unveiled a gadget that translates dog barks into one of six human emotions. I obtained one of these gadgets and went out to interview the neighbourhood dogs. The translations:

Bow wow? - (Confused) Hey, where’s my biscuit?

BARKSNARLSNAP!! - (Angry) Who said you could walk on the grass?!!

Zzzzzzzzzzz - (Sleepy) [I didn’t ask this dog any more questions. You know what they say about letting sleeping dogs lie.]

WOOFWOOFWOOF! - (Happy) Let’s-play-fetch-let’s-play-fetch-let’s-play-fetch

Ruff. Sniffle. Ruff. - (Sad) Bummer. I just had a bath.

Bwahahahahahaha! - (Laughter) Didn’t all those humans reading that column look funny trying to open just the left side of their mouth?