The photographer Chris Jordan has up a series of photographs on American consumption, heres some of the numbers.

8,000,000 Trees every month for mail-order catalogs -

Annually: 96,000,000

426,000 Cell phones retired every day -

Annually: 155,490,000

170,000 Energizer batteries every fifteen minutes -

Annually: 5,956,800,000

1,140,000 Paper bags every hour -

Annually: 9,986,400,000

410,000 Paper cups every fifteen minutes -

Annually: 14,366,400,000

106,000 Aluminum cans every THIRTY SECONDS -

Annually: 111,427,200,000 (half are recycled)

2,000,000 Plastic Bottles every FIVE MINUTES -

Annually: 210,240,000,000

60,000 Plastic bags every FIVE SECONDS -

Annually: 378,432,000,000

These are only statistics, to see them for yourself go look at Chris Jordan's gallery HERE.

With all the angst and chaos going on around Jeff's firing perhaps this isn't the best time to post this, but I'm doing it anyways.

Those of you who haven't checked out Jamendo (which I'll assume is everyone reading this) I definitely suggest you try checking it out. Jamendo is a website where you can go to find independent artists and listen to or download their music, entirely free of charge. Of course they encourage you to donate to them if you really enjoy the music you find, but its not strictly necessary. Having spent around twenty minutes on the site I've already found a number of pretty decent guys:

Scoldt - http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/scoldt/

JT Bruce - http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/jtbruce/

Louis Tanguay - http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/louis.tanguay/

Jaugernaut - http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Jaugernaut/

Of course a critical mass hasn't exactly been reached, but with 6K albums you aren't likely to run out of new things anytime soon. Another place you may want to checkout is Overclocked Remix, they have a ton of videogame music remixes and not in that crap midi quality like vgmusic either.