With the February 17 digital TV deadline fast approaching, many of you are probably planning the haul of your dinosaur boob tube out to the curb for the Sunset Scavengers. But as any enviro-conscious San Franciscan knows, you're never quite throwing anything "away." Unfortunately the mass amount of analog TVs that will hit the trash dumps in the coming weeks contain toxic chemicals like lead, cadmium, and beryllium that will seep into the groundwater and plastic that will never biodegrade.
But apparently just because your're a lazy, TV-watching, potato chip-scarfing pig, doesn't mean you have to make the world a pig sty as well.
Enter the Take Back My TV campaign (website here). The Electronics TakeBack Coalition has been lobbying TV manufacturers to take back and recycle their chemical-leaching TVs. So far, Samsung, Sony, and LG have nationwide programs to take back their TVs for free.
Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba started a take-back program in January in California, but the closest collection site is in Menlo Park (see the map here for the location). Also, it warrants mentioning that one can obtain a converter box to convert digital signas to analog -- and then you won't have toss your TV at all. For a free $40 coupon from the government toward a converter, visit this Web site.
Another good bet for all brands is to take them to an e-recycler. According to the Web site, many recyclers merely export the TVs to developping countries so it can poison the ground water elsewhere. So the site includes a list of recyclers near us who will accept any brand of TV, and have promised not to export and responsibly recycle the waste (for complete list see here, for a list of local spots, click "more").
| This gorilla's mother not only raised him, but continues to dress him. |
Google seemed like the easiest place to start looking for an appropriate name. I googled several combinations of words including "abandonment" and "African word" and "unwanted" and "baby." Nothing significant came up except for this haiku. When I tried "African" and "orphan," I discovered a song called "Baayo" about a child with a dead mother. Although that isn't the case here, since the gorilla's mother, Monifa, is only emotionally dead and not physically dead, I still think Baayo, which apparently means orphan, sounds pretty good.
Next up, the second best source for information: Wikipedia. Consulting Wikipedia's page of South African slang, I found words for "shit" and "mother" which add up to Kak Mallie. I think that would hold the mother responsible in a way that Baayo does not, and it also has a nice ring to it.
If we wanted to dabble in a bit of symbolism, we could relate the name back to the idea of a white elephant, which means something unwanted. Using Google and Wikipedia to find African words for white elephant, I came up with this: Umlungu Loxdonta. That's a little cumbersome. But, then again, motherhood would have been cumbersome, too. Isn't that right, Monifa?
sexual contact occurs. Unroll it all the way down. ...)
make us uncomfortable.Thanks in part to a recent SF Weekly
column detailing the latest exploits of longtime con man Paul Noe II, a federal
judge recently announced he would advise federal, state, and municipal
prosecutors to investigate a suspicious statewide "foreclosure assistance"
operation that targeted defaulted homeowners in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
"I am referring these matters to the State
Bar of the State of California, to the State Bar of the State of Nevada, to the
United States Attorney in the Central District of California, and to the
district attorney of Los Angeles and San Bernadino and Orange Counties, so that
they can make an investigation of this matter, and do what is required under
the law of the State of California," U.S. District Judge Manuel Real
said during a Jan. 13 hearing.
Real had just heard allegations that Mitchell
Roth, a longtime attorney of Noe's, had filed multiple lawsuits on behalf of
clients, then failed to show up in court to prosecute the cases. The filings
were submitted on behalf of customers of a Noe front company called United
First, Inc. whose business model involved convincing desperate homeowners that
they might have grounds for a so-called "missing title" lawsuit.
These suits would supposedly be based on the legal theory that banks had lost
track of buildings' titles when mortgages were bundled into securities, and
thus had no right to foreclose. Whatever the merits of the theory -- and
there's no evidence that either Roth or Noe had established whether their
clients had any legal standing before collecting their fees -- attorneys have
charged that Mitchell has been simply filing lawsuits en masse, abandoning them, and allowing judges to throw cases out of court.
Attorneys for banks had been confused by Roth's
mass filings, and apparent mass abandonments, until they Googled Roth's name.
They found the SF Weekly story detailing United First's unusual
business strategy, and the lawsuits made a perverse sort of sense: Roth and Noe
were apparently capitalizing on the homeowners' hopes that they might
somehow keep their homes, and then abandoning them in court.
