"fresh" air

So today I was driving home behind a woman who had one of those pine tree shaped air fresheners hanging from her rear view mirror. I never understood the appeal of such odor reducers/masks. Personally I like my car to smell like air, not chemical. And, if there's a gross smell in the car, then I want to clean the car, not camouflage it with another stronger scent. But, that opinion isn't really what made me feel the need to share this sighting. The punch line of this story is, the woman was driving in a..... convertible! Seriously? We were driving past a wooded area and her car was filled with fresh air. Are we that brain washed by commercialization that we need to have a pine scent hovering by our noses, even as we drive down the road with the top down and our noses hang out in the open air? I understand that she probably bought the air freshener for when the top is up, but it makes me seriously wonder what we could be convinced of needing. Maybe I should be spraying Febreze on my balcony or washing the dirt out of my plant containers?


Also, I found out today that "it takes the same amount of energy to produce just four sheets of paper as it does to power a laptop for an hour" from my ideal bite tip of the day. That made me feel pretty good about the number of blogs I read and games I play online. They are suggesting reading books on one of those e-book readers, which I'm not sure I'm quite ready to do, but its nice to know that since my laptop already exists I am actually being more effective playing online rather than buying a book of Sudoku puzzles.