Caltech's graduating class marched across the stage at Friday's commencement ceremony bedecked in more than 12,000 plastic bottles.
And it wasn't a prank.More than 500 graduates of a school known for elaborate ruses — such as changing the Hollywood sign to read "Caltech" — donned garments made entirely of fabric spun from molten plastic pellets instead of the traditional polyester caps and gowns.
Graduation planners around the country are greening their ceremonies, cutting back on printed materials and balloons filled with non-renewable helium and choosing compostable dinnerware, biodegradable water bottles and campus-grown floral displays.But to graduates such as Catherine Beni, who at 20 years old is the youngest ever to receive a doctorate from Caltech, the eco-friendly regalia was more an "interesting factoid" than something to brag about."It feels exactly the same as the polyester gowns," the Riverside native said. "Maybe on a hotter day, I would notice the difference. And because it's my PhD, I would have preferred a nicer gown that I would want to keep, but maybe for others, this'll be extremely useful because it would all otherwise go to waste."The environmental movement is growing at schools, which are adding sustainability courses to their schedules and commissioning eco-friendly lecture halls, but skeptics say greening graduation garb might be more a marketing gimmick.Jostens Inc., a maker of academic products, recently introduced a gown made from wood-based fiber that decomposes in soil. Critics said graduates were likely to rewrap them in the plastic cover before throwing them out, preventing the fiber from biodegrading. The company's outfits now come in packaging that it says breaks down in landfills.At Caltech, school officials set up special recycling bins around campus for the gowns. The outfits, which were produced by Salem, Va.-based Oak Hall Cap and Gown, are to be reworked into new fabric, perhaps for next year's graduation.Oak Hall, which has been making cap and gowns for more than a century, introduced the GreenWeaver line of eco-friendly garb in late 2009 and has seen orders nearly triple in the last year. With about 23 post-consumer bottles worked into each outfit, more than 7 million bottles otherwise destined for landfills have instead gone into GreenWeaver products, the company said.The gowns are more expensive to produce because the technology is still new and the manufactured volumes are small, said Joseph D'Angelo, Oak Hall's president. However, each cap-and-gown set cost $27 for Caltech undergraduates, $35 for master's students and $71 for doctoral graduates — about $2 less than the old polyester prices.Nearly 30 colleges and universities in California use GreenWeaver, said D'Angelo, who on Friday was at the University of Washington in Seattle, where graduating students are planning to wear his company's gowns this weekend.The regalia comes in recycled-plastic bags and is shipped in recycled-cardboard cartons. Oak Hall experimented with fabrics made from bamboo and wood pulp before deciding on the GreenWeaver material, which it said was softer and more breathable than traditional gowns — while looking no different."A cap and gown is the most recognizable symbol for achievement that we know," D'Angelo said. "All of us are becoming more sensitive to our environment, but this helps make people more aware that they should be recycling."http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-green-grad-20110611,0,6067090.story
I found the following story on the NPR iPad App:
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136460594/midnight-in-paris-woody-allens-best-in-a-decade?sc=ipad&f=1008
NPR - May 20, 2011
Woody Allen isn't religious, but he has a rabbinical side, and over the past decade his films have become more and more like Talmudic parables for atheists. On the surface, these movies are streamlined, even breezy, and they often have voice-over narration to get the pesky exposition out of the way fast. Philosophically, Allen has settled on resignation, a cosmic shrug: There's no God, no justice, people are inconstant, life is meaningless — so where do you wanna eat?
I have a problem, though, buying into the worldview of someone whose world is a closed ecosystem. There's no evidence that Allen lets any contemporary culture penetrate his hard, defensive shell. Music stopped in the '40s, if not earlier, ditto literature, ditto film — with a pass for select European directors. He seems locked in a daydream of the past.
The good news is that Allen has made the lure of nostalgia the theme of his supernatural comedy Midnight in Paris, which might be why this is his best, most emotionally pure film in over a decade. It's a romantic fantasy that's also a sly act of self-criticism.
The time-traveling hero, Gil, played by Owen Wilson, is a successful Hollywood screenwriter on holiday in Paris with his brisk, upwardly mobile fiancee, Inez, played by Rachel McAdams. Gil considers himself a hack and, to Inez's horror, wants to write novels instead of movies. How he wishes he could be a writer in Paris — better yet, Paris in the '20s, alongside Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and all those other giants living high yet creating enduring works of art.
You can almost hear the familiar Woody Allen cadences in the film, yet Owen Wilson isn't the usual East Coast intellectual Allen hero, and he makes the lines his own. Apart from Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo, this is the finest lead performance in an Allen film that wasn't by Allen — and finer than many of Allen's, too. You sense the vein of wistfulness under his stoner cool, the longing for definition behind his spaciness. It's a thrilling moment when he sits forlornly on some steps in the rain at midnight, a vintage automobile rumbles by, the champagne-swilling occupants invite him in, and he's suddenly back in the '20s.
How? No explanation. Allen just breezes past all that, the way he did in Purple Rose and, before that, in his great 1970s short story, "The Kugelmass Episode," happily eliminating the sci-fi wheels and pulleys that tend to suck up so much screen time. Gil is just there — counseling Scott about Zelda, drinking with Hemingway, showing parts of his novel to Gertrude Stein, and falling in love with a woman named Adriana, played by a stunningly beautiful Marion Cotillard. Adriana bonds with Gil over his love of the past — except the past she loves is the 1890s and not her vulgar present. His '20s ideal woman hates the '20s — a bitter irony.
Allen doesn't do anything interesting with Scott and Zelda — my guess is he's too in awe of them. But his Hemingway, played with forthright manly-manliness by Corey Stoll, is a riot; and as Gertrude Stein, Kathy Bates proves that in an absurd context, playing it straight can make you funnier than a thousand clowns.
Midnight in Paris is a doodle, but it's easy and graceful, and its ambivalent view of nostalgia has all kinds of resonance. As I watched, I felt a different sort of nostalgia: not for the Parisian '20s but for the days in which Allen regularly turned out freewheeling, pitch-perfect tall tales in print and onscreen. The movie is so good it takes you back to those days, which were the days, my friend. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]
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ScienceDaily (May 11, 2011) — Marine species facing threats from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico far exceed those under legal protection in the United States, a new paper in the journal BioScience finds. University of New Hampshire professor Fred Short and others found 39 additional marine species beyond the 14 protected by federal law that are at an elevated risk of extinction. These species, which range from whale sharks to seagrass, should receive priority for protection and restoration efforts, the authors advocate.....http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110511134221.htm
