GREEN Doodles part 3

Here is the third part of our green doodles. Seeing the need of knowledge that many of you have expressed during our “Green Doodles” campaign, we try to diversify as much as possible our subjects each week, without forgetting our main piece – green. We have found out many interesting things ourselves about this symbol, many things that we had no clue about, but which turned out to be extremely logic, once you’ve looked at them in a different manner than the usual one.
In order to start today’s story about green, we will present to you the ultimate green face known worldwide.

The Green Man
The face in the leaves stares down at us from the roofs, pillars and doorways of our great cathedrals and churches; he appears on second century Roman columns in Turkey and in Jain temples in Rajasthan. He is found all over England, some parts of Wales and Scotland and a few rare places in Ireland.

The Green Man is the representation of a god of vegetation and plant life in the English culture. He symbolizes the life that is found in the natural plant world, and in the earth itself. In the British Isles, a thousand years ago, the forests were vast, spreading for miles and miles, farther than the eye could see. Because of the sheer size, the forest could be a dark and scary place.
The Green Man is typically portrayed as a human face surrounded by dense foliage. Such images appear as far back as the eleventh century, in church carvings. As Christianity spread, the Green Man went into hiding, with stonemasons leaving secret images of his face around cathedrals and churches. He enjoyed a revival during the Victorian era, when he became popular with architects, who used his visage as a decorative aspect in buildings.

Legends connected to the archetype of the Green Man are everywhere. In the Arthurian legend, the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a first example. The Green Knight represents the pre-Christian nature religion of the British Isles. Although he originally confronts Gawain as an enemy, the two later are able to work together – perhaps a metaphor for the assimilation of British Paganism with the new Christian theology.

Many scholars also suggest that the tales of Robin Hood evolved from Green Man mythology. Allusions to the Green Man can even be found in J.M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan – an eternally youthful boy, dressed in green and living in the forest with the wild animals. Today, some traditions of Wicca interpret the Green Man as an aspect of the Horned God, Cernunnos.

Famous Green Characters
As we have seen so far, green surrounds us in many legends, myths as well as many urban legends as well. It has been with us, surrounding us, from medieval times and will remain for centuries to be.
Seeing this, people started to put green in everything – from paintings to architecture, from ancient forms of art to contemporary works, green is surrounding us wherever we are. It is also present along with our most beloved TV characters, the ones we grew up with and that we love dearly.

One of these characters is the Green Lady from Star Trek. She is Marta, the nutty but nubile green lady from the 1969 “Star Trek” episode “Whom Gods Destroy”. But unfortunately for her, she is not the only green lady in Star Trek; Susan Oliver played a lime-colored hottie in the original pilot, “The Cage,” and popped up again in the “The Menagerie.”

Another green figure in the entertainment sector are, in fact, 5: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were just goofing on comic-book trends in the early 1980s when they cooked up the idea for these heroes on the half-shell. Comics, cartoons, toys, live-action TV shows and films, video games and all sorts of merchandise have turned the pizza-loving Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo into iconic adventure heroes for several generations of young fans.

“You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry!” is the line that made The Incredible Hulk, another well known and beloved green character, what he is today. The producers of the Hulk came up with this idea after taking a page from “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and little did they know what this will turn out to be. Did you know that in his first appearance Hulk was gray?

From a Grinch to a grump, we bring you the garbage genius of Oscar the Grouch, the fuzzy misanthrope of Sesame Street who sings “I Love Trash” and gives everybody a major ration of grief. Oscar is given voice by the great Caroll Spinney, who specializes in sweet and sour, as he is also the voice of Big Bird.

With the line that will stay in the animated cartoons history for a very long time: “Ogres are like onions”, Shrek is one of the most loved green characters of our times. Don’t be surprised to find him here because we found out that “Shrek II” is the fourth-highest-grossing film in American history! And here is an inside tip: Mike Myers said that he modeled his Shrek voice on the inflections his mother used while reading him bedtime stories back in his youth. Ouch!

There’s been a lot of frogs in pop culture (the Budweiser frogs, Keroppi, Frogger, Dig’em from Sugar Smacks) but the only one strong enough to jump on this list is Jim Henson’s gentle soul from the swamp. On “Sesame Street,” the silver screen and “The Muppet Show,” Kermit was the most warm-blooded amphibian ever.

The great and powerful wizard of the George Lucas universe is a towering figure in pop culture, even if he’s shorter than a Jawa. Yoda is our final character for today and don’t forget: “Do or do not… there is no try.”

Green Houses
For many years now, people started to be worried about the environment and tried to reduce the consumption of materials, energy and, in the end, everything that involves carbon dioxide as much as possible. We have done our best to reduce CO2 emissions by eating green, living green, traveling green, but this was not enough.

The concept of building green is extremely familiar today, but still holds the high price of almost luxury, even though it is merely a matter of will and involvement. Unfortunately, not many people have a green house or home, motivating their choice with the price that this choice involves, but what they don’t know or consider is that it is not necessary to build one from scratch; nowadays, just making some minor modifications on your already-owned house can spare you a whole bunch of CO2 emissions.
Therefore, we will try to concentrate on some tips that can help you make your house green, instead of saying what building with green materials is all about. There are a lot of things that you can do in order to make your home CO2-emissions free, some of them are really easy and simple and costs-free, some of them are a bit more expensive or time-consuming.

First and foremost, the ultimate modification that everyone should make is greening up your appliances. Get ride of the old fridge, which is the biggest energy-consumer appliance in a home, and basically every electronic that is more than 10 years old. Energy Star-qualified appliances use 10%-50% less energy and water than standard models.

The second tip that is easy to do and saves you some money as well is watching the temperature inside the house by keeping the thermostat low when is cold outside and up when it is hot. Each degree below 20°C(68°F) during colder weather saves 3%-5% more heating energy, while keeping your thermostat at 25°C(78°F) in warmer weather will save you energy and money.

Saving water goes without saying into this list as a major modification of you habits that will not only help you and your savings, but the most important will help the more unprivileged people.

Cleaning can also be green and think of all the money you can save if you stop buying all those chemicals that help you clean up your hose, and start making some of your own with a little help from plain soap, water, baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), vinegar, washing soda (sodium carbonate), lemon juice and borax.

Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs use 66% less energy than a standard incandescent bulb and last up to 10 times longer. Replacing a 100-watt incandescent bulb with a 32-watt CFL can save $30 approx in energy costs over the life of the bulb, so let the light be green also.

Last but not least is saving the trees by saving the paper that you use. You can buy “tree-free” 100% post-consumer recycled paper for everything from greeting cards to toilet paper. Paper with a high post-consumer waste content uses less virgin pulp and keeps more waste paper out of landfills.

These are not all of the tips we can provide you with. You can do a lot of other ingenuous things to save our planet; the most important thing is for you to wish to make a difference.

This completes our Green Doodles for today, but do not panic – there are more to come!