Thursday, December 6, 2007

Sweet charity

Yesterday I was told about Nick's Flick Picks, a site kept by one of the lovely profs here, so I skipped over to take a look. I don't know how I had never heard of this, but Nick's site brought the truly lazy green site Blackle to my attention. Blackle is a black-background Google, essentially, but run by Heap Media with the search powered by Google. The idea is to conserve energy by using a black screen rather than a blazing white one (same principle as turning down the brightness on your screen to save battery power).

It is, unfortunately, very hard to read for a long time. So if that doesn't float your boat, you can always go to the laziest way to fight hunger at The Hunger Site, where one click (limited to one a day) donates 1.1 cups of food. You can also save the rainforest at its companion site The Rainforest Site, save animals, donate books and mammograms, etc. It's really expanded. This may feel pathetic, but if I add up all the cups of food I've donated since college, it's quite a lot of food. And I probably have my own tiny patch of land in the rainforest somewhere.

I also have a sneaking fondness for those sponsor-an-animal sites, where you buy a penguin in Argentina for a year and they name it after you, send you photos, etc. Sponsoring a panda is really expensive, but a penguin is a nice, affordable gift.

2 comments:

jenny said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
jenny said...

(oops--accidentally clicked the wrong button--)

Great sites, Heidi! My own favorite slacker charity site is freerice.com, though it's not quite as lazy as clicking -- you've gotta dust up on your SAT vocab skills if you want to feed the world!