Soylent Crisp is PEOPLE!!!

Remember that tinge of disgust you felt awhile back when I wondered about the OBviously absurd notion of using aborted fetuses (fetii?) to power your car?

Does that feeling change at the idea of burning full-term babies to heat your home?

This post may well give Al Gore a Gorgasm.

I finally gave in and picked up one of the big green (non-biodegradable, mind you) plastic bins for recycling from City Hall. It is bin number 666. Some people play Devil's Advocate; apparently, I play Devil's Recycler.

The instruction sheet they gave me reveals recycling to be a complicated and cryptic process. Instead of just listing ALL the materials they will pick up, the paper breaks them up into Several Groupings, and Each Grouping Is Numbered. It doesn't say anything about us having to seperate the materials. I guess whoever wrote the instructions just thought they Ought To Be Numbered.

I'm going to seperate them anyway, just in case. Besides, it will give me a way to get rid of more plastic grocery bags, which by the way Do Not Appear to be On The List.

You have to wash out glass and plastic containers, which begs the question -- which future would you impose on the planet - one with too much trash, or one without enough water? I wonder if it would wash them out good enough if I put them outside in the front yard until it rains.

Forget that; some things are too cheap and white trashy even for me.

So why, after decades of griping about granola-munching, caribou-loving tree-huggers, am I beginning to recycle NOW? Am I going to grow my hair long, wear beads, smell like pachouli, and insist that there are no absolutes, because I really really DIG Mother Earth, man?

Hell no. I don't give a flip about the planet. As long as it outlasts me, I'll be happy.

But what about our children, you ask?

"We" don't have any children. YOU might have a child or some childrens, but they are not "Our" children; they are yours. And whatever future you want to give them, the responsibility to pay for it lies in YOU, not in US.

Okay, we know what is NOT the reason, so what IS the reason?

Simple. It's the noblest motive of all -- to save me money. By burning the paper content, I've already reduced my trash from two bags a week to one bag every two weeks. That's cut my trash-bag costs by 75%. Chucking my tin cans, milk jugs, laundry detergent bottles, spaghetti sauce jars and the like into the recycle bin instead of the trash can may reduce my trash bag costs another 75% or maybe more.

But they're NOT getting my soda cans. Not as long as I can get paid to recycle them elsewhere.

Rise Of The Soapmaker!

Or, "Is That A Sliver Of Soap In Your Sock, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?"

My regular minions will remember I am constantly looking for ways to save money by reducing waste and finding new uses for used "disposable" items.

(On that note, did you know you can wash and hang-dry a paper towel an average of three times? But before I digress too far . . .)

With that in mind, slivers of soap have long vexxed me. I tried the Lisa Simpson Method -- smashing them together until they looked like a special effect from the movie Leviathan -- but they would never stick together long enough to wash oneself.

So I gathered up an old sock and put the soap pieces in it, tied up the end, then hung the thing on the shower caddy. My thinking there was to use the apparatus like one would a loofah or a bath scrubby. But it would never put out enough bubbles. Lawrence Welk would suffer an aneurysm waiting on bubbles from that thing. Plus, untying the knot every time I wanted to add a new sliver of soap was a pain in the ass.

Bored a couple of days ago, I found myself leafing through one of my mother's housewife magazines -- Woman's World.

There was a page on urawaza, the Japanese concept of secret tricks to save money, waste, or time.

One of the hints therein was "Turn soap pieces into new soap."

Basically, you throw the slivers into a saucepan, cover with water, and leave them to soak/soften overnight. You might want to crumble them up into really small pieces first (maybe a cheese grater?) or they'll likely turn out chunky and looking like novelty plastic vomit like my first effort.

The next morning, bring it to a boil and stir in two tablespoons of olive oil (I substituted canola oil.).

Pour the mixture into greased muffin tins and let them harden.

If the thought of putting into your saucepan something you have rubbed in your nether regions makes you go "Ewww!" you can pick up an old pan and muffin tins at a yard sale or flea market for, like, a quarter or 50 cents and use those only for soap recycling.

I made the equivalent of about four bars of soap this morning. I don't know if the boiling put more air bubbles in them or what, but they seem to have about double the volume than the size of the ingredients would suggest. (And no, that doesn't mean they shout really loudly.)

And the substance seems to be slipperier than white-market soap, perhaps because of the canola oil. But other than that, it seems pretty similar to normal soap.

I don't know how much money it saved me, when you factor in the water, canola oil, and the energy to boil it, but every cent saved is a cent Queen Borg Barack Obama's economy doesn't get. You also have to factor in the space the soap doesn't take up in your garbage anymore, so that's a plus. If I had a wood heating stove or radiator heater I could boil the concoction on, it would be almost costless.