Environ-mental

Do you remember Flip a Cup? No, not the drinking game. The drinking caffeine environmental initiative!

If yes, skip the following paragraph in square brackets.

[If no, read me! Flip a Cup was an environmentally savvy program at Nipissing involving Tim Hortons and bright lime green travel mugs. If you wanted to be environmentally friendly (and who doesn't want to be, especially when it's convenient?), you could pick up one of said attractive mugs, order your hot Tim Hortons beverage, then return the cup to designated bins around the campus. The travel mugs were washed and reused continuously.]

Great concept, right? I thought so. Except it had its flaw. A fatal flaw, if you will. People just took the mugs home with them ... mug after mug. Just pick one up, get your coffee, take the mug home. This method still would have worked if the students had brought the mugs back and reused them. But alas, it was not to be.

I have to say I was quite disappointed when this initiative failed. So, I have decided to give you a couple environmental tips for both those of us who bring travel mugs and those of us who don't.

1. If you bring a travel mug, the Tims on campus only charge you for a medium when you get a coffee refill. Great, eh? On days when I know I'm going to need coffee, I bring the biggest travel mug I have and just order "coffee, one milk, one sugar" and they fill it right up to the brim for the price of a medium, when it would actually be a lot more like a XXL (which I don't think is even an option for non-travel-mug customers). So using your travel mug will save you money!

2. I also want to give the Tims on campus special recognition. In my experience, if you take a travel mug to the Tims chains in town, they use a regular cup to measure your coffee, then have to throw the cup out anyway. They may not do this at all places, but they definitely do it at some, and to me that just entirely defeats the purpose and intent of most travel mug users. So props to NipU's Tims peeps.

3. Now, I know double cupping can be necessary sometimes. It makes sense; you don't want to burn your hands and the Tims cups don't exactly have handles you can hold onto. So if you have to double cup your drink, or even if you don't, I just want to make more people aware that Tims cups are actually recyclable. Yep! RECYCLABLE! Isn't that exciting?! So double cup, single cup, iced cap cup--none of them have to be thrown in the trash! I find not many people are aware of this and would prefer to recycle if they were aware of the option.

Well, I'm off to grab a "coffee, one milk, one sugar" on my way to class. Happy Caffeine!

[Photo by and of author; no license infringement]

I am becoming an alien

After writing the midterm for my honours seminar this afternoon, I have opted to write a post today in a form of celebratory writing. Based on the comment by Anonymous in the post below, I have decided to tell a little tale ... a tale involving English, movies, and gruesome images. Prepare yourself.

Last semester, my honours seminar was about apartheid literature from South Africa. As part of the class, we actually watched two movies, which was neato! One of those movies was District 9. For those of you who have not seen it, I now give a selective brief summary. Aliens come to earth above the Townships in South Africa (Township = designated area for coloured people during apartheid. Apartheid = split between whites and coloureds that we hopefully now all recognize was horrible). Well! This dude named Wikus is put in charge of moving all the aliens into District 9 from the makeshift huts they currently inhabit. Of course this is intertwined with a love plot and a father-in-law who wants to destroy Wikus, but that is beside the point. Wikus becomes contaminated by alien fluids. *Cue dramatic music* He slowly starts to change after this, into AN ALIEN! Of course a lot of dramatic things happen after this, including capture, explosions, cool weapons, and suits that look like the Transformers; there are racial undertones and symbolic statements about apartheid, etc.

At the same time in my own life, for an unknown reason (which is still undetermined, but

may be resolved after a specialist appointment next Monday), two of my fingernails were slowly detaching themselves from their nail beds. Yep, I am telling you this embarrassing life story for the sake of entertainment. Enjoy. Now, in District 9, one of the first indicators that Wikus is becoming an alien is that his fingernails fall off. That's right, I was becoming an alien. It was just one event in a series of ironies called my life. Talk about getting involved with your class! But, needless to say, it was quite disturbing. Teachers out there: Text-to-self connection. So, of course I told the class, and my fellow students and professor gave me possible causes, all of which had been disproved by doctors. If you hear of some crazy person who slowly became an alien, it was probably me. It'll make a good party story for you! Or even just library talk. Maybe there will be a plaque, dedicating the library to me instead of the other option, something catchy with Alien in the title . . .

(As a clarification, said condition is not contagious, and has been improving. One fingernail is now fully returned to normal, and the other appears to be on the same path. Do not fear me, earthlings, I am not actually an alien and cannot infect you with a foreign parasite).