“DING! On Your Mark, Get Set – Date!” (Sept. 2000)
SEVEN RAPID-FIRE DATES at eight-minute intervals may sound like an Olympic event, but it's less athletic than social. It's not the breaststroke—unless you're really fast—but SpeedDating, the latest concept on the Jewish singles scene. Designed to eliminate the discomfort of blind dates and the bar pick-up scene, while still encouraging Jewish heritage and schmoozing, I jumped in head first. (MORE…)
 
 
   
 
“Free & Clear Plan” (Jan. 2001)
With the "help" of technology, we can take the entire office to lunch—literally. Plop the laptop down at Starbucks, plug the sucker into a conveniently located e-port, set the cell next to your latte, and your coffee "break" no longer exists. People can't leave their work behind because it's strapped to them with a variety of headsets, harnesses, holsters, and "hands-free solutions." (MORE…)
  
 
   
 
“A Man for All Seasons” (Sept. 2006)
Historically , gardening has been an arduous act of manual labor: trying to eke a potato out of the dirt, coaxing onions from the tundra, or tending to the withering grapes of wrath. The homesteader, without a bountiful harvest to feed the hungry mobs, made do with week-old bread and manure tea for supper. Today, the concept of "living off the land" is a truism only for real estate agents and timber barons. We're not exactly a land-to-mouth society these days, what with horticulture now a leisure industry, Martha Stewart a billionaire, and Pottery Barn a swank place to go shopping. (MORE…)
  
       
 

"The Boiling Point" (November 2001)
TIRED OF MY Gorgonzola-shaded skin, damp socks, and enough Northwest gloom outside to make even Dracula depressed, I did what any SAD-afflicted citizen would do—visit venerable Tubs, "Seattle's Luxury Spa." (MORE…)

  
 
   
 
“Good Time Capsule” (December 1999)
Everybody seems to be putting together a millennium time capsule as a way of capturing the age—the UW's doin' it, NASA's doin' it, and they're even shoving one under Times Square. And why not? Our thousand-year period of overpopulation, deforestation, and mass consumption could only be consecrated by jamming a large Spamlike container full of junk and disposables, then entombing it under somebody else's property as landfill. (MORE…)
  
 
   
  Multi-multitasking (August 2000)
NEWS FLASH: We're driving around like lunatics. According to a recent MSNBC poll, Americans multitask over 70 percent of the time. (In fact, as I type this, I'm also enjoying a fine ham sandwich, doing yoga, and listening to NPR for more useless statistics.) To make matters worse, we're doin' it in the road. (MORE…)		  
       
 
“Mother Love” (April, 2002)
Your solar alarm clock rings, and you stumble to the bathroom and take a three-minute soak under a water-saving showerhead. After dressing in a hemp sack, you head to the breakfast table, where you make a cup of shade-grown coffee (20 percent of all proceeds go to reforesting the Brazilian rain forest) and chow a natural bran cereal with organic strawberries. In a hybrid van, you carpool to work, where your nonprofit attempts to save the planet over the Internet. It's Gardenburgers for lunch and educational outreach in the afternoon, followed by meditation, a workshop on eco-activism, P-Patch gardening, and a jog in the greenspace that you and your neighbors created through driveway easements. At night you dream about your upcoming vacation to the Great Barrier Reef, where you'll work with scientists to try and communicate with the last remaining school of giant turtles. Not. (MORE…)