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Date
Fri, 04/25/2008

Christopher Gavigan, author of Healthy Child Healthy World - our blogger for the week of 4/28:

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Christopher Gavigan is our guest blogger during the week of April 28th. If you have any questions for Christopher Gavigan, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home:

Leading medical experts and scientists team up with celebrity activists to help parents detoxify and green their households.

Nothing makes one more keenly aware of health risks lurking in the everyday world than becoming a parent. Most know the importance of using cabinet locks and child gates, but research is showing many more ways we need to be childproofing our homes. Tens of millions of American children now face chronic diseases and illnesses including cancer, autism, asthma, birth defects, ADD/ADHD, allergies, learning and developmental disabilities, as well as a host of lesser but disruptive ailments. And the growing research points to much of the increases on unseen threats wrought by exposure to chemicals in everyday products like cleaning supplies, beauty care and cosmetics, home furnishings, plastics, some foods and toys as contributing to these ailments. With that in mind, the non-profit organization Healthy Child Healthy World offers parents a definitive guide to creating a healthy, nontoxic, and environmentally sound home.

Filled with easy steps and simple solutions to improve family living without wreaking havoc on schedules or budgets, this book includes inspiring ideas for safe, eco-friendly cleaning methods, choosing healthier food, pet and garden care, nursery and home building materials, plus extensive tips for energy saving and family fun. With contributions from environmental science and public-health experts such as Dr. Phil Landrigan, Dr. Harvey Karp and Dr. Alan Greene, as well as many celebrity supporters (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Brooke Shields, Tobey Maguire, Sheryl Crow, Vanessa Williams, and Tom Hanks), Healthy Child Healthy World is the essential guidebook for parents wanting to go green.


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Fri, 04/25/2008

The Avocado of Inspiration (now with bigger pits!), by Kat Richardson:

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"Where do you get your ideas?" There's a question many writers dread. Not because they order them wholesale from a warehouse in Schenectady, as a famous SF writer once quipped, but because ideas aren't the hard part. Not really. Ideas are like breakfast cereal; there're more than I can possibly consume in a lifetime, but the real trick is finding the ones that don't go soggy and getting my procrastinating backside into a chair and my fingers on the keyboard often enough and long enough to turn them into a story-meal worth serving up.

I have eight linear feet of spiral-bound notebooks full of ideas from my high school days alone. Most of them seem to be the soggy-going kind, unfortunately--emo young wizards in alternate dimensions, Romances featuring fiery half-Irish Californios, dead detectives reincarnated as Afghan hounds... But there are sometimes bits of delicious, crunchy idea buried in the self-absorbed sog. So I keep the notebooks around, carefully stacked in a waterproof box. I don't use them very often, however.

Usually my ideas come from something I read, or heard--or misread or misheard--or some vagrant thought that broke free of its mental branch and came bouncing in on my conscious mind like a California avocado falling on an unsuspecting Mercedes. Which was the case with Bad Guy of the Month. This is what happened and it's typical of the way my avocado bounces--erm... that is, the way my mind stirs up ideas.


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