This week’s theme may have something to do with me being on vacation in the Canary Islands. But, no matter where in the world you’re in and how cold the outside temperature happens to be, these tropical-themed pieces will liven up any wintry ensemble and make you feel like sunny days are still here.

Manimal Scrap Earrings
If you have to wear a knit hat you can still make your style shine through. These attention-grabbing earrings are made from repurposed scraps from the making of Manimal´s cute moccasins.
$40 for one, Manimal

Cheek.ie Floral Bracelet
This gorgeous cuff is hand made in Brooklyn, NY, from six layers of knotted vintage fabrics.
$48, Kaight

Embroidered Hemp Coin Purse
This cute little coin purse is made from hemp and lined with silky bamboo. It´s 100% vegan and will make you happy to reach for that spare change at the bottom of your bag.
$21.95, apple & bee

Amazon Necklace by The Andean Collection
This bright and cheerful statement necklace is made using a combination of açaí, jaboncillo and tagua discs in bright colors, that all come together with a twist.
$125, The Andean Collection

Strappy Floral Sandals
These sultry heels from H&M´s latest Conscious Collection will work well with your favorite LBD and thick black stockings through the winter.
$69.99, H&M

Lalesso Maradufu Dress
Wear this summery print dress with black tights or skinny jeans and a blazer to instantly brighten up a gray day.
$44, Lalesso

Is taxidermy too macabre for home decor?

Taxidermy, a Greek word meaning skin arranging, is something one might associate with cat obsessives or hunter-types that rely on hoofs and antlers to mount their egos. The collection of artistic taxidermy meanwhile, which was traditionally a rather Victorian pursuit, has given the practice a new pelt of cool thanks to antiquarians with a new vintage aesthetic and Lower East Side kids with a flair for the macabre.

My first run-in with a stuffed rodent happened in the West Hollywood apartment of a friend of mine whom I’ve long considered a style clarion. She’s an eco-conscious vegetarian and animal rights activist, to boot, who stopped buying leather shoes back in the early 90′s. That got me thinking: perhaps taxidermy should be considered from an eco point of view.

I reached out to Connie Reeves, an artist, florist and taxidermist in the UK who refers to herself as a Road-kill Romantic on her Twitter profile, for some insight.

“You could call it a form of upcycling, sure. Reanimating old objects and giving them a new life,” she explains. Connie is one who considers trophy taxidermy, “something that’s done to prove ownership over an animal,” a bit on the grotesque and weird side. Like the artist Polly Morgan, who works exclusively with animals that died a natural or unpreventable death, Connie also crafts her subjects from road kill remains and donated pets. She has a whole freezer full of them. “Twenty or thirty,” at last count including a Sparrowhawk that’s been in there for over three years.

“I’m just going to keep him until I’m ready.” The hawk was given to her by a friend who was very close to the bird, thus giving him flight anew must be approached delicately.

Thawing now is Connie’s next project: a baby mobile featuring a deceased seagull she was given by some friends. “Birds are my main subject that I come back to again and again,” she says. “I’m so enchanted by them and their freedom.” Her partridge Eugene (pictured below), is a personal favorite. “He and I go back a long way. He was saved by the gentleman who taught me how to taxidermy.”

Decorating with taxidermy – using a bird here and a rabbit there – goes completely against the look at the moment. It’s the anti-minimalist, using a mish-mash of patterns and objects to undecorate and celebrating a potpourri of objects as discrete and unique talking points. Taking us back to, sustainable chic or completely eek? It’s certainly reused…definitely recycled. Whether you love it or are completely repulsed by the idea of using taxidermy as décor, it’s a topic that is sure to liven up any dinner party conversation. Just wait until after the main course to show off your latest piece.

Images: James Coughlin for Diamond Tooth Taxidermy and Connie Reeves

ColumnWhy we have to stop thinking of the “foodie” movement as a trend.

Luxury continues to inspire the culinary world, and its eager diners. From $3,000 dinner reservations to a select list of the world’s 50 best restaurants, the top tier of the food chain is elevating the art of eating with price tags to match. In contrast, the general public faces rising food prices (which is even worse for the developing world).

The foodie echelon is always looking for the latest and greatest; those concerned and engaged with what they eat are often branded as pretentious fools who care too much about food. Tell your friends you’re thinking about checking out the new artisan charcuterie and you may earn an elevated eyebrow.

When did caring about food become food snobbery?

First, we have to remember not to take ourselves too seriously. Toothpaste for Dinner has a wry comic poking fun at food pretension:

We can all find a little humor in poking fun at our gustatory obsession with local-this, organic-that, but, as self-described foodies, are we aspiring to become the kind of food snobs people do poke fun at or are we just creating healthy attitudes?

When I think foodie, I envision a person equally as interested in getting their hands dirty in a bed of their own homegrown kale as they are in throwing down a couple extra dollars at the farmers’ market to score the best chanterelles; a person concerned with real food who is willing to spend their hard-earned money to buy and enjoy it. Only equating foodies with luxury or upscale concoctions is simplistic. For sellers to elevate the prices of whole or organic food, it essentially privatizes it, taking out of the hands of the people willing to defend it and use it daily, not just for frivolous occasions. But as we have learned in the past year of the Foodie Underground column, this is fortunately not the case – despite mainstream media hype.

Despite how easy it is for mass media to focus on $3,000 dinners and $600 cookbooks, food culture isn’t changing because of shock value. It’s changing because of markets where shoppers can talk to their farmers. It’s changing because of friends who get together and see how many ingredients they can source locally for their dinner party. It’s changing because schools are starting to think about the benefits of serving organic to children. It’s changing because there’s a new media world full of food-savvy individuals who are encouraging others to contemplate their relationship to food.

With a love for what we eat, we have to stop thinking of good and creative food as a trend and start thinking about how we make it a resilient American tradition.

The underground markets featuring the DIY products of urban-dwelling bakers. The apartment windowsill herb garden turned full-blown balcony vegetable garden. It’s reveling in taste. It’s getting our hands dirty. It’s engaging with our community. It’s ensuring that everyone can be involved. And that is no trend.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: Anna Brones, Toothpaste for Dinner, Anna Brones

Though the it’s-too-late set seems to be growing, most scientists agree that when it comes to human-induced climate change, there are solutions. Most of these solutions are ambitious. Some, in fact, might be too ambitious – and perhaps too dangerous on a number of fronts.

Geoengineering is exactly what it says it is – engineering our geo. If you want to get a little more technical, here’s a definition from the National Academy of Sciences:  “Options that would involve large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry.”

This example has recently been discussed quite a bit: When the Philippines’ Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it released about 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and decreased world temperatures by an average of half a degree. That’s a big drop and the kind of climate change that, as a global population, we might be very interested in. So here’s the geoengineering news: We now have the technology to get the same job done – without a volcano – using airplanes or blimps to inject sulfur dioxide directly into the stratosphere.

But wait, there’s more. If playing Volcano God doesn’t do it for you, how about:

• Spraying massive amounts of seawater mist at low-lying clouds to reflect sunlight.
• Launching sunlight-reflecting mirrors into the Earth’s orbit.
• Seeding the ocean with iron to boost phytoplankton growth. (“Plankton release a chemical called dimethyl sulphide into the atmosphere which helps cloud droplets form. More droplets mean whiter clouds that bounce more solar energy away from Earth,” says New Scientist.)

In fact, there are all kinds of ways we can take the reins of our climate situation. Are they good ways to combat global warming? Maybe, but hey, perhaps it’s a good idea to set up some rules here.

Ever since the concept of geoengineering came on the scene, excitement around the scientific possibilities has been tempered by political and ethical (perhaps even more than practical) considerations at every turn. For example, with the potentially global impact of any effort, who gets to play? Anyone who wants to (read: has an interest and can afford to)? What would prevent the abuse of such high-impact, “planet-hacking” technologies? Say an arid country would like to wet its whistle a bit? What’s to stop it from doing a little more than praying for rain? Of course, there’s also the little problem of a hostile nation wanting to flood or dry out an adversary.

Enter the United Nations. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recently closed its 10th biennial meeting in Nagoya, Japan, with the implementation of “a de facto moratorium on geoengineering projects and experiments.”

This makes sense – making sure that geoengineering science is explored in the global light of day, with science and ethics awareness checks as research moves forward. Good intentions aside, the weaponization potential alone requires every effort to make sure the wrong people don’t get their ill-willed fingers on any climate triggers. As one astute writer at the guardian.co.uk recently put it, the current world of geoengineering “is eerily reminiscent of the race to develop nuclear weapons in the 1940s.”

But let’s look at one more angle on this debate. Are these scientifically grand and impressive approaches to global warming just easy (for rocket scientists, anyway) answers to a complicated problem? Might “the promise” of geoengineering encourage a form of laziness, giving us the illusion that we’re relieved of the burden we must ultimately carry if we’re going to better manage how we manage our world?

If we’re going to take on human-induced climate change, we’re going to have to do some heavy lifting. We’re going to have to make some fundamental changes to how we view, consume and burn energy. We’re going to have to quickly evolve our thinking regarding sustainability and obsolescence and resource usage. We going to have reinvent our relationship with the Earth and no amount of New Big Science is going to end-run this fact.

Image: ewen and donabel

As the dust (and political garbage) of the election settles, it’s time to take a breath of clean air, regroup and see the fear for what it was. Hyperbole, right? Scare tactics from The Left. Doomsday predictions if polluter-sponsored climate deniers won the day. Yes. It’s going to be fine. Just breathe.

Cough.

Okay, so it wasn’t hyberbole. What happened in last week’s elections was a serious body blow to the environmental movement and it’s going to be all we can to do to weather the anti-science storm that’s about to go down. Know this: Half of the new congressmen deny climate change. And they’re arriving in D.C. on a wave of cash supplied by some of the world’s most egregious corporate polluters. Tying ourselves to mast isn’t going to cut it. Make no mistake. These people want to turn the environmental protection clock backward.

This is why I got all excited the other day when I read a story in the Los Angeles Times saying that “faced with rising political attacks,” the non-partisan American Geophysical Union (AGU) – the world’s largest, not-for-profit, professional society of Earth and space scientists, with more than 58,000 members in over 135 countries – “plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.”

Consider the milquetoast approach to taking it to the streets that’s gone down since Al Gore did his heavy lifting back in 2006 (with his powerful documentary, An Inconvenient Truth and subsequent Nobel Peace Prize). And remember the ugliness of the media rollover on Climategate, and then its pitiful and measly coverage of the debunking of the scandal. Left vs. Right aside, the tendency of progressives to make too many assumptions and preach to their own choir has resulted in this electoral cycle’s “mandate” against climate science reality. Non-partisan scientists getting heavily proactive (if it can still be called that) seems critical right now.

So I did a little research on the piece and here’s the thing: The AGU immediately denied the story (which had already been picked up by news outlets and then the blogosphere at large) saying the report of their push-communication effort was bogus. “In contrast to what has been reported in the LA Times and elsewhere, there is no campaign by AGU against climate skeptics or congressional conservatives,” says Christine McEntee, Executive Director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union. “AGU will continue to provide accurate scientific information on Earth and space topics to inform the general public and to support sound public policy development.” What the AGU is instead doing, says its release, is “relaunching” an ask-for-info-and-we’ll-give-it-you Q & A service for journalists to coincide with the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico.

This begs the question: What’s the problem here? Haven’t we learned that laying facts on the table and then walking away from them in the hopes that they will be eagerly devoured by a truth-hungry public is just well – milquetoast? I don’t want to jump on scientific groups who, like the AGU, don’t want to be advocates involved in any “commentary” on policy, but when are our specialists going to leave their towers and hit the streets with what they know?

I mean, hey, white coats, your high-profile presence is required! Here’s what was accurately reported in the LA Times story: Now-powerful congressmen such as Darrell Issa of California, Joe L. Barton of Texas and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin have pledged to “investigate the Environmental Protection Agency‘s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions” and the Climategate scandal.

Oh, and then there’s John Shimkus of Illinois (who wants to head the Energy and Commerce Committee) on why we need not worry about climate change: “God will decide when to end the Earth, not man.”

Cough.

As near as I can tell, the LA Times story may have been triggered by the activity of John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, a scientist and climate science advocate who is involved in putting together a “climate rapid response team,” which “includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.” So far, his effort reportedly has dozens of leading scientists on board to “defend the consensus on global warming in the scientific community.”

Here’s what we need to hear more of: Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York, says “this group feels strongly that science and politics can’t be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists. We are taking the fight to them because we are, tired of taking the hits. The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed.”

Abraham wrote about his efforts in the guardian.co.uk (on the same day as the LA Times story), where he also mentioned the (later denied) AGU plan. In the piece, he points out that (wait for it…) “Scientists have not been effective communicators” as while “approximately 97 percent of the top climate scientists believe we have a problem – the general public and members of government are split on this issue.”

Perhaps prescient of the AGU’s shy stance, he adds, “It is a shame that scientists have to take personal and professional risks in order to be good citizens of the planet. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Maybe I just have some post-election blues, but before the dust truly settles here, perhaps we had better kick it up again and maybe – (cough) – we could use some more noise from the folks in white.

Image: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

The fact that Twitter changed the food cart movement is no news; foodies consume deals and specials from dining entrepreneurs like they’re candy. But the micro-blogging site hasn’t just become a guerrilla marketing tool to get the word out about tacos and tempeh, it’s becoming a source of foodie inspiration.

I’ll admit that nothing beats sitting down to peruse a well crafted cookbook with decadent photos and well worded recipes – the kind of book that makes you recommit yourself to becoming a better cook – but there’s also time for the short and sweet.

Look at the success of Eat Tweet, probably the world’s first cookbook to be inspired by 140 characters or less. Eat Tweet‘s author, Maureen Evans, maintains her Twitter page where she posts condensed recipes. What can you do in the kitchen that you can’t do on Twitter? Nothing it turns out; with recipes for macaroons, fennel pie, pomegranate sashimi and beyond, Evans proves that you don’t need a culinary encyclopedia to keep things fresh.

As I write this, I hear my mother’s voice in the back of my head, “but why would people want to get their recipes from Twitter?” You’re right mom, there really isn’t a replacement for traditional food inspiration – I used to spend hours going through our bookshelf of cookbooks that featured food from around the world and I credit those moments to why I’m currently a food lover – and I still believe there’s no better tool for determining what you’re going to make for dinner than a trip to farmers’ market, but there’s something to be said for the online community of foodies that are using Twitter to not only get the word out about their own food blogs, but also find creative inspiration for new concoctions.

Just take a moment to look all of the tweets tagged with #foodie. Within three minutes of opening the search in a new browser tab, there were 10 new tweets.

There are the instructional tweets:

exceptionalfood: A smooth shiny egg shell is a sign of old age. Fresh eggs have a chalky rough shell. #chef #recipe #kitchen #foodie

The quirky:

TheAmateurChef: Is it wrong that I like peanut butter on bacon sandwiches…?#foodie

The insightful:

tarla80: After eating #chocolate you feel godlike, as though you can conquer enemies, lead armies, entice lovers. -Emily Luchetti #foodie #quote

And the humorous:

WarrenCaterson: ”the perfect wine glass is one that has wine in…” quote from @whopaysthepiper #wine #foodie

Or if you’re dependent on visual stimulation, there’s always the #foodporn hashtag. Here’s to socially networked food inspiration.

Have any recipes that you’ve gotten via Twitter, or any foodies you follow who are particularly in the know? Share them in the comments below!

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground. Each week, Anna will be taking a look at something new and different that’s taking place in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to culinary avant garde.

Image: NineteenFortyOne

One of my favorite Charles Darwin quotes is from The Descent of Man: ”Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Sadly, it appears that lately there are a lot of confident people out there when it comes to knowing what’s real in this universe and what’s not. And science and scientists have taken a bit of a beating. With media darlings like “Climategate” and mismanaged flu outbreaks on one side, and the rise of religious extremism on the other, I’m sometimes frightened that science is being edged out, marginalized by all those folks who seem much more certain than I of the ways of the world. Is it true? Are we really getting medieval on ourselves?

Sometimes, perhaps just for comfort’s sake, I find it’s a good idea to check in with the base and make sure we’re all pretty much on the same page. To that, Scientific American just posted what seem like some encouraging numbers from a web survey that “suggests that the scientifically literate public still trusts its experts.”

To conduct the survey, SA joined forces with its “sister publication,” Nature, to poll online readers and got a huge response – more than 21,000 people. The publications acknowledge it was “a supportive and science-literate crowd,” with nearly 20 percent identifying themselves as PhDs. Nevertheless, the survey points to some interesting trends and some wide variations of viewpoints within the community.

Happily, these variations are not apparent regarding the big question of “Who do you believe about stuff?” When asked how much scientists were trusted “to provide accurate information about important issues in society” versus others groups, such as politicians, religious leaders and friends and family, scientists came out way ahead (four out of five stars as opposed to religious leaders getting only about one and a half stars). What’s interesting, though, is that respondents trust scientists on certain subjects like evolution (that’s for you, Charles) and the origin of the universe, but much less so on issues like flu pandemics, depression drugs, pesticides, genetically modified crops and vitamin supplements. It’s almost as if respondents sniffed out the potential for profits and the possibility of scientists being, how shall we say, less than straightforward.

Another interesting line of questions regards one of our fave topics, climate change denial, particularly among us gringos. “Numerous polls show a decline in the percentage of Americans who believe humans affect climate,” says SA, “but our survey suggests the nation is not among the worst deniers.”

Turns out we’re happily behind France, Japan and Australia on this dubious list. But there’s good news here too as “among those respondents who have changed their opinions in the past year, three times more said they are more certain than less certain that humans are changing the climate.”

One heartening, and particularly timely area of inquiry, indicates that respondents still feel, despite the global econominic situation, that putting cash into science is a good ROI (return on investment) strategy. In fact, 72 percent of respondents think that “investment in basic science is one of the best ways to stimulate jobs and the economy.”

The survey looks into a number of other interesting areas as well, including science and politics, “techno fears” and “suspicion over the flu.” The SA post also has some nifty graphics for you at-a-glance folks.

I do realize that SA is asking the choir (albeit one with a diverse voice) for answers here, but sometimes, when the din of dumb gets loud enough, it helps to turn around, face the home crowd and ask, “You still with us?” A resounding “Yes!” is nice to hear.

Image: Jordan Cole

The weather this summer in the Bay Area has been nothing short of awful. And with me being what my friend calls a “High Priest of Ra,” it’s been posited that my missing a sacrifice or committing some other ungodly affront has resulted in this madness. We’re talking stretches of frigid weeks in July, a sunless, cold anti-summer, followed by sudden August temperature spikes reaching 104 degrees and literally melting the candles in my apartment. 104? I mean, this is San Francisco. Are you kidding me? Dear Lord, could it really be my fault? Do the weather gods care about us humans and what we do here on earth?

Evidently they do care. A lot. Human-induced global warming and our fossil fuel mission/vision of burn ‘em if we got ‘em has someone or something pissed off. Big.

We’ve all had the conversations that start with “How many hurricanes was it this year?” or “The summers have never been like this before!” or “When I was a kid we’d have snow days where we couldn’t even leave the house! What happened to those?”

Invariably, these openers are followed by, “Yeah, right, and there’s no global warming.” Indeed, for general weather phenomena like these, science has been emerging that shows connections between human activity and broad brush climatic change.

But take the conversation a step further to speak about a certain climatic event – the Russian heat wave, say, or Pakistan flooding – and it becomes more challenging to point to a particular culprit. While we all seem to instinctively know there’s a connection between specific weather events and what we’re up to on the ground, the science hasn’t been there to make absolute links, as in “that flood came from that weather pattern which came from those countries burning this much fossil fuel back in these years.” Capiche?

Scientists are beginning to capiche.

Earlier this month, white coats from all over the world gathered in Broomfield, Colorado, at a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and International Group on Attribution of Climate-Related Events (ACE) workshop series on the “science, application, and communication of climate attribution information.” As defined by the NOAA, climate attribution is “a scientific process for establishing the principal causes or physical explanation for observed climate conditions and phenomena.” This includes attribution for variations “for which great public interest exists because they produce profound societal impacts.”

In other words, what’s behind the mega-weather headlines.

Not too long ago, our ability to address such questions would have been dismissed, says an article in New Scientist. “Many scientists at the time [a decade ago] said that you can never blame an individual weather event on climate change,” says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford.

But attempts to assign blame for such events goes back to 2004, when Allen and others “showed to a high level of confidence that human greenhouse gas emissions had at least doubled the risk of the European heatwave of 2003.” Their research approach required them to “run thousands of simulations of the climate as it is and as it would have been without human influences, then compare the number of times a given event occurs in each scenario.” Today, technological adavances will enable to such analyses to be much more accurate.

One of the worlshop’s attendees, Dr. Claudia Tebaldi, of Stanford’s Carnegie Institution, says that research already has been able to attribute causes of  trends in continental scale temperatures, large area-averaged precipitation trends, ocean temperature trends, long-term changes in atmospheric humidity and more to, well, us.

“Using sophisticated computer modeling and high quality observations,” she writes, “we are able to say with great confidence that in these changing aspects of our climate system, the fingerprint of human causes is already evident.”

Now the the goal is use new methods to get even more specific regarding particular events and their causes. And while forecasting is of primary importance, right now there’s a lot of buzz around the legal implications of pointing accurate fingers. For example, can one country sue another for activity that can be proven to be responsible for something as devastating as a flood, heat wave or famine?

In 2005, Katrina victims filed a lawsuit against some oil companies, saying their activity in the Gulf contributed to the power of the hurricane. The case was recently dismissed due to a legal glitch, but you get the idea. Big implications here.

Connecting weather events with their causes is going to be a huge undertaking in upcoming years. As climate changes have increasingly profound effects on the lives of millions, people are going to want to know the whys and whos and hows and, hopefully, how to predict and prevent catastrophes going forward. And leaving it up to the gods just ain’t going to cut it. (Sorry, oh dear and powerful Ra. Can I have some more summer please? Just a little? What do you want? A dead goat?)

Image: crowt59

Once, for a short period of time, I had The Man by the balls. And when I say “The Man,” I mean The Man – a corporate giant who keeps us down, corners us and our pocketbooks, gives us no choice, frustrates us at every turn and manufactures, along with his product, that helpless feeling in our gut that we’re up against something unbeatable. When I say “The Man,” I mean my cell phone service provider. And by provider I mean AT&T. And for a brief shining moment, my contract was f’in up. Booyah!

In fact, though it seemed to pass in a heartbeat, it was more than a brief period that I enjoyed the pleasure of having AT&T over a barrel. (Provider. What a generous title.) My Golden Era lasted two years (ironically the same amount of time they make you commit to those inane contracts which ensure you that you are joined at the mobile hip for a full, glorious sentence.)

The freedom – both real and imagined – was extraordinary. When I received my monthly bill, I’d simply have a gander and pick out those charges that I really just didn’t think were fair. “That call to Eastern Europe cost how much?!” ” I thought I had unlimited texts!” “You mean I wasn’t covered for Internet usage?!”

All it took was a simple call and a moment for the front-line customer assistant to figure out who I was – an off-contract customer, An Opportunity for Customer Retention.

“Sir how can help you? Are you ready to re-up your contract?”

“Um, no, I’m shopping providers right now and will be making a decision very soon, but in the meantime, there’s this thing on my bill”¦”

“Oh dear, Mr. Adelson, I am so sorry! Just give me a moment here and”¦ there now, all those nasty charges have just been deleted. So about your contract”¦”

“Oh hey, gotta run. Thanks though! You just kept me from jumping ship! Back to you soon on the contract thing!”

Such sweet pleasure.

But how real was it? In the end, was it a mere illusion of freedom? Just a voice on the other end of the line telling me what I wanted to hear? Did I have Him or did He have me?

On the can-we-really-get-along-without-certain-gadgets front (here we’re talking the penultimate gadget; the Cell Phone), I’ve recently seen a few articles fly by on the power of living without. What would it be like to be off the grid completely, beholden to no cell-phone Man?

Joel Stein, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, posits that the “Luddites may actually be power brokers,” and that “not having a cell phone means that the world has to run on your time.”

In the article, he sums up what we’re up against: “Everyone has a cell phone now. There are more than 280 million mobile subscribers in America, according to the Federal Communications Commission. According to a 2005 international study by Advertising Age, 15 percent of Americans have interrupted sex to answer their phones. Even people who are videotaping themselves having sex, like Paris Hilton, stop to answer a call.”

Stein goes on to say not having a cell phone is a way we can take back power, noting that a few people who know power on first name basis, like Warren Buffett and Russian billionaire and New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, have dumped the gadgets. (Some heavy-hitter celebs, too, have chosen to hang up.) The article goes on to tell the tales of a number of other people who have given up the habit, folks who have had enough and are not gonna take it anymore. I read each of their stories. I was impressed.

In many ways, we present a paradox of gadget infatuation. We talk about what’s cool and new, shiny and green, all with a what’s-happening-now bent. But we also talk about ways to avoid being slaves to The Man, thinking outside the proverbial box, not being afraid to “just say no” to obvious trends that aren’t healthy for you. Recently, I posted a story about the green and not-so-green aspects of the iPad, in which I posed a question of awareness regarding our decision to buy any gadget: do you need it or do you want it?

This question – and freedom from gadgets and the Men and Women who service our addictions – is something I wrestle with almost every day. And while I’m happily a later-than-some adopter when it comes to toys and I think I do a pretty good job distinguishing between my needs and wants, I will say this when it comes to certain products: When I fall, I fall hard.

Which brings me back to my cell phone moment in the sun. Oddly, it was a moment in the sun that brought it all to an end. I was sitting on my balcony, doing some hardcore Ra worship, talking into my contract-free, trusty little Razor (my connection to freedom – as long as that little baby held up, I was safe). And the screen went black. Literally. It died in the heat that day, and though I cannot say exactly how long I held out after that moment, it was probably mere minutes before I realized what had to be done.

I crawled back to The Man. I took the deal on the iPhone and I smiled big when they handed it to me. So there it is. Was I really ever going anywhere? A new “provider,” maybe. But true freedom? Was I threatening the man or was I blowing in the cell phone wind? The answer came way too easy: Two years? Where do I sign?

Image: lemuelinchrist

Metallic Glam has been identified and secured by Style.com and WWD as a significant category for this fall. Designers such as Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karen all offered up their renditions for this eye-catching trend! Fortunately, eco-designers were equally ambitious and attuned.

Linda Loudermilk included a sleek and sexy silver dress in her Fall collection. Sara Shepherd’s silver dress crosses over from office attire to a sophisticated evening look. And if you are preparing for a night at the Opera, attending an evening wedding this fall or a charity black-tie event Leanne Marshall has just the dress for you in a full length charcoal grey gown.

Style tip: If you are fair skinned, opt for the silver toned dresses, while darker skinned femmes should sport golden hues.

Regardless of the occasion, give your standby black beauty a rest and go for a metallic number that will catch everyone’s attention and hold it!