It’s that Chapstick time of year. Millions of people, young and old, male and female, run to the local market to buy themselves some good ol’ Chapstick, the waxy lip balm for dried up, scary looking lips.
But ever since I used the product in elementary school, I felt like the more I used it, the more I needed it, as if my lips started to depend on the salutory effects of the balm. Soon I *needed* the stuff. Since then, I’ve believed that Chapstick should really be re-classified as a drug. So many people just use the stuff indiscriminately and constantly between the months of November to November that I’m always surprised they don’t think twice about it. Don’t believe me? I did find this.

I read the other day in the Utne Reader that the average American produces something on the order of 4.5 pounds of garbage per day. That is truly an incredible number. If the average person weighs in at about 150 pounds, that means that each week we are individually disposing of about 23% of our own weight in garbage. And that would mean that each year, we dispose of 12 times our weight in garbage.
Utne is about to relaunch its Web site to go along with its rebranding and redesign efforts. It will look like this. It’s not bad but they should lose that garbage-colored yellow background.