Chris Hardie's Blog

In yesterday's Palladium-Item, editorial board member and local blogger Matthew Hisrich proposed that eating locally, and other kinds of localized consumption behaviors, might be ineffective, or even bad for us:
[W]here does this drive for relocalizing come from? Perhaps it has to do with a vague sense of ethical rightness more than anything scientifically verifiable. University [...]

It's not April first yet, so I couldn't really stop my jaw from dropping to the ground on this one: The Richmond-Wayne County Chamber of Commerce and the City of Richmond will be holding a press conference tomorrow afternoon to promote buying local - to be held at the mall, which is predominantly [...]

I may have nightmares about it, but this is just amazing:

I have tried and dismissed a number of personal organizational systems over time, but none of them has lasted as long or served me as well as my current system: my life and all of its to-do lists are managed on the back of used envelopes.
Before I tell you more about how it works, let [...]

Life's too short. E-mail messages I tend to delete without reading (other than obvious spam):

Messages with a blank subject line
Messages with a blank body, with only a mysterious attachment that's supposed to explain everything when I open it
Pretty much anything from Network Solutions / Verisign
Anything that asks me to forward it to 11 of [...]

From the "I hope it doesn't happen but wouldn't be surprised if it did" department, I have some predictions and scenarios to throw out there about stuff that could happen sometime in the rest of 2008. I suppose this is mostly just a mental exercise for me, but maybe it'll spark some interesting comments/responses:

The [...]

The 2007 Wayne County Alternative Gift Fair, held at the new Reid Hospital today, has just concluded. It was a great opportunity to get gifts for family and friends in the form of donations to local non-profit organizations, and at least for me, a great alternative to a day at the mall buying stuff. [...]

I've blogged before about turning points in awareness of the issues that we face with regard to "the environment" and the energy crisis. Today I received a postcard in the mail with a photo of a man holding a gasoline pump nozzle up to his head, in an image that unavoidably evokes a suicide [...]

I've generally been content not having a physical phone line at home and using my cell phone instead. I'm not much of a phone person anyway, my back yard looked a lot nicer when Verizon cut down the unsightly cable, and it's certainly a cost savings. But sometimes, I still long to have [...]

Recently, the Summersault staff was eating together at the Golden Corral here in Richmond. They were out of the feed buckets that you just strap onto your head and tilt up, so we ended up having a conversation. We noted that they have pine nuts on their all-you-can-eat salad bar in large quantities.
Pine [...]