The Uniform Project

Brilliant idea.

The Idea

Starting May 2009, I have pledged to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Here’s how it works: There are 7 identical dresses, one for each day of the week. Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies. Think of it as wearing a daily uniform with enough creative license to make it look like I just crawled out of the Marquis de Sade's boudoir.

[via Teapots and Polka Dots]

Labels: art, culture, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:38 PM|| |

Labels: culture, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:13 PM|| |

Sara Zarr blogged (in her blog, The Stories of a Girl) about a number of things yesterday. I was captured by her comment,

Earth Day. I don’t know how I feel about it, as a day, which mostly feels like yet another opportunity for capitalism to taint what should be common sense.

I remember the first Earth Day. 1970. A few months before Sara Zarr was born. Spring semester of my freshman year. We buried a new car (a Ford Maverick?) in the Quad at San Jose State during the Earth Day Survival Fair. Oh, we were root-toot-tooting greenies even back then.

Looking back, though, the green we are today wouldn't even have been dreamed of back then. Sara went through some of the things she's now doing ("a few of the major though easy things") that help celebrate Earth Day year-round. Here's my list of ten greenie things that are part and parcel of my life these days.

1) WATER Like Sara we don't do bottled water -- not at home, not in restaurants. (Well, if someone else is paying for the con-gas/frizzante at an event, I will certainly imbibe. My no-frizzante-at-restaurants is because I'm way frugal too ... Why pay a restaurant for a marked-up bottle of water? Why buy water at the store? I appreciate restaurants that fizz their own water instead of bringing on the French or Italian bottled stuff.

Our local HetchHetchy water is fine water indeed. I understand that some other folks may not have tap water that tastes good. (I've been in Midland, TX. Reverse osmosis water is the ONLY way to go in that town.) But if you don't live in Midland or some place with equally bad water, have you even considered tap (or as an office mate used to say, "sink") water?

Sara doesn't live in San Francisco these days, but where she is her tap water's fine too. Are you missing out on drinking from the tap because it's "sink water"?

We have a couple bottles of chilled water in the frig for (f'rex) when we're going out for a walk on a hot day (to avoid getting so terribly thirsty that we break down and buy a bottle at the wharf). We refill our bottles. Again and again and ...

We have a case of bottled water under the bed as part of our earthquake supplies.

That's it.

2) BAGS: PLASTIC & OTHERWISE We reuse paper bags and packaging materials. And those peanuts &c. that show up in mailorder stuff that we can't use? We give those to a friend who is slowly decluttering his house by selling stuff on eBay. We stuff clean plastic (which isn't recyclable with the city recycle program in this town) into a large plastic bag and when the bag's full, take it down to Safeway, which does, still, recycle plastic. We save the larger grocery-sized plastic bags to line the wastebasket in the kitchen.

We have cloth bags (and, for Trader Joe's, paper bags) for shopping. Most of the cloth bags are from conferences: Bouchercon, AAAS, LCC. We have HUGE STURDY IKEA BAGS that we bought for $0.59-$0.99 each (they dropped the price and we bought two more) which we use to haul stuff in from the car down the stairs and up to the front door when we take the car to Costco or Trader Joe's and buy in bulk. We also use them to haul stuff UP! so we have a couple bags on either end. We have had these bags now for years and they carry a ton of stuff without wearing out or ripping at the seams.

2a) I wrap presents in Sunday comics. Did you know that you can cut long strips of comics (or any wrapping paper, really) and curl the strips with a knife/scissors edge to make ribbony attachments that MATCH!! the wrapping paper? I wrap packages for mailing in paper bags, deconstructed at the seams and turned inside out.

3) RECYCLE We recycle newspaper, magazines, cardboard, flattened boxes, clean paper items, bottles and cans, plastic bottles, &c. We stash the recycle stuffs in boxes and on the day before the twice-a-week pickup, we transfer them to paper grocery bags and carry them up to the nearest street and leave them in a recycle bin there for pickup. We empty the bags that hold bottles/cans into the bin and bring the bags back for re-use. The bags holding magazines/newspapers, we leave in the bin.

4) GREENCYCLE San Francisco has a wonderful compost program -- green bins or, as we call it, Greencycle. What can you put in the green bin for composting? All food scraps, food-soiled paper, garden clippings and cuttings, pizza boxes, paper milk cartons, tea bags, coffee filters, banana peels, food-soiled paper napkins, wooden crates, tree trimmings, sawdust. Oh, the list goes on. Fish bones, lobster and crab shells, oyster shells, bones, wine corks.

The only things that shouldn't go in the green cart are (1) things that are already recycled in the blue bin: newspaper, clean paper items, bottles and cans, empty spray cans, aluminum foil, plastic bottles, tubs and lids, &c. and (2) things that belong in the real garbage:

* Styrofoam
* plastic bags
* diapers
* kitty litter or animal feces
* rocks, stones, or dirt
* &c.

How hard is this? Well, for us, we have to make more effort than someone living in a SFH with curbside pickup. Where we are, the City will not pick up recycle or compost. A bunch of greeny neighbors FINALLY arranged for the City to pick up recycle if we carry it up to the nearest street and tuck it down on the first landing. (The neighbors on either side of the steps complained if we put the recycle bin on the sidewalk next to their buildings.) Greencycle, though, is out of the question at that spot.

Our Greencycle effort goes thusly. We have a large glass casserole dish on the counter that gets the stuff that would go into the green bin, if we only had a green bin. When the dish gets full (or at the end of the day), we transfer the contents to a large, lidded, metal menudo pot (lined with a compostable bag), which sits over in the corner of the kitchen.

When that bag gets full (or in four days, whichever is sooner, because the compostable bag begins to compost at that point), we put the bag into a larger plastic bag and take it out and drop it sans plastic bag in a green bin that we know of that's on our way out-of-town or over to Costco or somewhere else that we'd be heading anyway. I suppose we could find a neighbor with a green bin (Hey! I may know just the one!) who lives within a quarter mile who would let us drop the Greencycle in her bin.

Greencycle is so very cool. I wish everyone used it.

As the article linked above says,

San Francisco's garbage and recycling companies are leading the way in producing a high-quality, boutique compost tailored for Bay Area growers, experts say. In one year, 105,000 tons of food scraps and yard trimmings - 404 tons each weekday - get turned into 20,000 tons of compost for 10,000 acres.

Greencycle recycles 105,000 TONS of food scraps and yard trimmings a year! How cool is that?

5) PACKAGING AND PLASTIC WRAP We don't buy many things that are in non-recyclable packaging. We still eat meat, so there are usually styrofoam trays (why?) to dispose of and the plastic wrap around them. Vegetables go into plastic bags before purchase, but if you rinse them out and dry them, the plastic bags recycle. Cheese is wrapped in plastic. Bulk rice comes in tough plastic bags. But we don't buy a lot of bagged, canned and bottled stuff, and what we do is usually in recyclable containers or something that can be Greencycle'd.

5a) When we heat things in the microwave, we tend to either use dishes with glass lids or put the food on a plate and cover the food with an inverted glass casserole dish from the cupboard. (We have several sizes.) The steam stays in. There's no plastic wrap to deal with. You can see through the glass dish to see how things are progressing. Wash the casserole dish afterwards. Reuse.

5b) All in all we probably have half a grocery bag of "garbage" a week. If that. (And the "garbage" bag is a plastic grocery bag from Chinatown now that the majors aren't allowed to give out plastic bags in our fair ville.)

6) WALK & PUBLIC TRANSIT We don't drive much. His nibs drives to work in the south bay once a week. Unfortunately, even though his company is now near a train station, the logistics are impossible for him to take the train to work unless he got out of here soon after 5A to catch the bus that would take him to the train station. Car it is. We also take the car when we're going to Costco or if we're planning to pick up A LOT of wine, &c. at Trader Joe's. Other than that we walk or take public transit. The nearest Trader Joe's is a mile each way. Coming back up hill with a bag or two of groceries each is doable. (We bring our own bags, 'natch.) We walk to dinner or down to the library or out. We do our veggie shopping in Chinatown and pickup our sweetbreads at Little City and walk (uphill) home. If we're going out to dinner somewhere too far to walk, we take public transit. We've taken one cab ride since we started living here and that was shared with fellow diners after a Subculture Dining experience that ended too late. The J-Church had stopped running. Really.

We currently have two cars (with -- ouch! -- the leased parking fees they incur). Eventually, when the older younger guy gets his license, he's due to get the 2000 Honda and we'll be down to the 2005 Mini Cooper. After his nibs stops working in the south bay altogether, we'll probably go carshare. My Mini Cooper consistently gets about 33 MPG. When we drove down to my cousin's memorial service and back, it got 36MPG, iirc.

We don't belong to a gym. The walking and the stairs and the carrying of groceries is pretty good exercise.

6) ELECTRONICS AND PAINT San Francisco has great hazardous waste dropoff/recycling. San Francisco residents can drop off household hazardous waste at the Tunnel Avenue transfer facility. Hazardous wastes accepted include batteries (large and small), paint, chemicals, motor oil, used oil filters, fluorescent bulbs, antifreeze, &c. Norcal tries to reuse as much of the "hazardous waste" as possible. Collected latex paint, for example, is available free to anyone who stops by (sometimes remixed, sometimes as donated) in large buckets. Customers can drop off up to 30 electronic items per month for free if they are delivered separate from any other garbage. You don't need to wait for the special "hazardous waste" days and hours. If all you are dropping off is electronic items, you can bypass the line of people waiting to use the public dump facility.

If you have BIG ITEMS that need pickup, you make arrangements with NorCal and they'll pick them up. When we got rid of the BULKY air conditioner that had been here when we bought the place (which was really pretty useless and took up space), we called NorCal and they sent someone out to pick it up. We paid extra to have him carry it down from our top floor, down our stairs and up the path/stairs to the street. We're no fools. The extra charge was well worth it.

7) WATER CONSUMPTION We watch water use. Short showers. Large loads of laundry. Handwash/air-dry dishes because we really don't use enough to fill/run the dishwasher even every other day and if you don't run it that often the kitchen stinks, we've found. We hardly ever drop things at the drycleaner. When we do, we've collected a batch over a while and take it all in at one time, saving the hassle of dropoff and pickup.

8) ENERGY We have photovoltaic cells on the roof with battery backup. Our meter runs backwards. The solar covers about half our use, which leaves us with a minimal power bill. No A/C. Turn off the lights. No TV. We use sweaters and sweatshirts on colder days rather than cranking up the (gas) heat. We're using compact fluorescent light bulbs, even though there are still questions how (years down the road) CFLs will be disposed of.

9) MAGAZINE RECYCLE AND ALTERNATIVES We just joined the Mechanics Institute Library downtown. I plan to give up most of our magazine subscriptions and save money and save the paper that then needs to be recycled by reading most of my magazines, and ones I don't currently subscribe to, there. Yes, I know. Magazines are having tough times. My subscriptions weren't enough to sustain them anyway.

10) THRIFT STORES, GOODWILL, FLEA MARKETS, BARTER I love thrift stores. Buy a dress or shirt or whatever that someone else bought first and you're saving all the associated construction/manufacturing costs that went into the original product. The current issue of San Francisco Magazine interviews Cris Zander of Cris, consignment boutique at 2056 Polk St., which has been in business for decades. (Full disclosure: I've never been there, although I might take a peek in to see if the prices are way over my wallet.)

The writer asked Cris about her ladies-who-lunch clientele who use her boutique to sell the clothes they don't plan to wear anymore and (perhaps) pick up alternatives. She quoted one of her clients who wondered why people worried about buying "used" clothes: "All of the clothes in my closet are used," the client said.

Exactly, I thought. But then I always got plenty of hand-me-downs from my three-years-older sister while I was growing up.

                                                ***

I look at the list I just made and think, yeah, fine, but you can do better than that. If we were vegetarian, we'd avoid all the expenses associated with raising meat. We could be more conscientious with buying locally. We still have two cars, fer pete's sake, but that will change. We have plants that are purely ornamental. Bottles and cans don't recycle easily as people would like to think. There's a glut on newsprint and cardboard because the cheap trinket folks are making fewer cheap trinkets in this downturn and don't need as much packaging. And what really happens to the plastic bags we take to Safeway?

And, as always when I buy something (or even pick it up free), do I really need that? Do I need that book? Do I need that stuff I picked up at Bonham's/Butterfield yesterday? Can I cut back?

Sure.

Labels: culture, environmentalism, life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:11 AM|| |

The National Organization for Marriage's A Gathering Storm advertisement against gay marriage has triggered yet another parody, this one starring Alicia Silverstone, Lance Bass, George Takei, Sophia Bush, and others.



Oh, please. Hurry with that giant umbrella that will save us from the storm of gay people about to shower down on us opposites.


(The original ad)

Labels: advertising, culture, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:18 PM|| |

Carl Sagan's Cosmos is available for free! at Hulu.

In 1980, the landmark series Cosmos premiered on public television. Since then, it is estimated that more than a billion people around the planet have seen it. Cosmos chronicles the evolution of the planet and efforts to find our place in the universe. Each of the 13 episodes focuses on a specific aspect of the nature of life, consciousness, the universe and time. Topics include the origin of life on Earth (and perhaps elsewhere), the nature of consciousness, and the birth and death of stars. When it first aired, the series catapulted creator and host Carl Sagan to the status of pop culture icon and opened countless minds to the power of science and the possibility of life on other worlds.

[via JDRoth's twitterfeed]

Labels: culture, science, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:46 AM|| |

So I open my Chron yesterday to find this article: Social isolation a significant health issue by Katherine Seligman.

I promised yesterday to blog about why the article's focus annoyed me so much.

They could have more friends than ever online but, on average, Americans have fewer intimates to confide in than they did a decade ago, according to one study. Another found that 20 percent of all individuals are, at any given time, unhappy because of social isolation, according to University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo. And, frankly, they'd rather not talk about it.

i.e. "friends online" aren't considered fodder for intimate confidences.

The article also points out that 80% of people are not feeling socially isolated, but that doesn't sell books. (I doubt their 20% figure anyway.)

The article goes on to quote Jacqueline Olds, a psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School and co-authored "The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century." "People are so embarrassed about being lonely that no one admits it. Loneliness is stigmatized, even though everyone feels it at one time or another."

Olds wrote the book with her husband, Dr. Richard Schwartz, because, she said, she wanted to bring loneliness "out of the closet." The two were struck by findings from the General Social Survey (conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago), showing that people reported having fewer intimate friends in 2004 than they had in 1985. When asked how many people they could confide in, the average number declined over that same time period from three to two.

Why would three be better than two?

In 2004, almost a quarter of those surveyed said they had no one to discuss important matters with in the past six months; in 1985, only 7 percent were devoid of close confidantes.

Two separate issues [1) no one to disuss important matters with in the past six months, 2) devoid of close confidantes for a year]

I'd be interested re 1) in what the question text was. Was it, "Did you discuss important matters with a close personal friend in the past six months?" If so, what if there were no "important matters" to discuss with anyone? Does a "No" answer mean that you're lonely?

Those who know me can see where I'm going here.

#1 The authors writing these books are obviously more comfortable with people around to talk things over with.

#2 The authors writing these books obviously don't think that people can "talk things over" with online buddies. It's F2F or on the phone or nothing at all, according to them.

So I read on

But humans are not wired to live alone, researchers say. The impulse for social connection - though it is stronger in some people than others - is rooted in the basic urge to survive. The need is so great, says Cacioppo, [John Cacioppo, whose research was mentioned at the beginning of the article and who has also! written a book, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection] that it is reflected in our neural wiring. Most neuroscientists agree, he said, that it was the need to process social cues that led to the expansion of the cortical mantle of the brain.

In "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection," which he co-authored last year, he wrote, "In other words, it was the need to deal with other people that, in large part, made us who and what we are today."

Loneliness, Cacioppo explained in an interview, has more in common with hunger, thirst and pain than it does with mental illness. It signals that something is wrong and needs to be corrected.

and at about this point I twigged that Olds and Seligman and others who worry so much about loneliness and being alone are probably extroverts, eh?

See the Atlantic article Caring for Your Introvert by Jonathan Rauch, to see what I mean. (DT recently reposted a link on his Facebook page, just in time for me to get my every-couple-years re-read of a great article.)

Labels: culture, life, news

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:11 PM|| |

Schwarzenegger Declares California Drought Emergency

Some more rain is arriving tonight, if the weather mavens are to be believed, and carry over for a few days, but things aren't looking good.

Step one: encourage farmers who suck up water to raise crops like cotton and rice to move their operations to places that are better suited for water-guzzling crops.

Step two: encourage folks who plant golf courses in deserts to transform them into something else and/or let the land lapse back into sand dunes.

Step three: see where steps one and two take you.

Labels: California, culture, government, weather

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:54 PM|| |

[via a Kelley Eskridge blog post]

Playmobil Security Check Point

Customer reviews take the cake.

e.g.
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.

Labels: culture, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:47 PM|| |

Wonderful papercuts and other works from sustainable materials and everyday objects.

Projects - Yuken Teruya Studio

[via Sour Grapes' shared items in Google Reader]

Labels: art, culture

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:34 PM|| |

20 Worst Foods of 2009 - 1. The Worst Food in America of 2009 (from Men's Health)

Baskin Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake
2,600 calories
135 g fat (59 g saturated fat, 2.5 g trans fats)
263 g sugars
1,700 mg sodium

We didn't think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins' 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you'll find in most chemist labs.

Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It's soiled with more than a day's worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.

The Men's Health article has twenty of the worst foods in America: worst salad, worst breakfast, worst burger, &c. (Hard to navigate, but interesting. ...)

[via Sour Grapes' Google Reader]

Labels: culture, food, health

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:25 PM|| |

Underage Facebook party busted

Remember what we say kids. Nothing is private on the internet. If you don’t want the cops to come to your house don’t post it on Facebook.

Parents, don't let your children grow up to do stupid things and crow about it on Facebook.

But, oldkins can be clueless too. The husband of a woman in Sheffield, UK, murdered her after she posted on her Facebook page that she was leaving him. The husband of another woman, this one from Croydon, near London, murdered her after she changed her Facebook status to "single" a couple days after the husband moved out. Stabbed to death.

Both women were, obviously, married to unstable, abusing men. Both were murdered after they unthinkingly used Facebook to tell the world they were (or soon would be) well-rid of their husbands. They must've already known what sort of creepoid jerks their husbands were and that they might react to the public exposure.

Watch what you post to Facebook, folks young and old. Word has a way of getting 'round.

Update: Keep your illegal/dumb stuff off YouTube too.

Labels: culture, web2.0

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:40 AM|| |

Raising a Gamer? Employers Turning Down World of Warcraft Players

A word to the wise ... don't tell your employer or co-workers that you are a Tauren shaman known as GoldenRabbitsoul. Don't mention allakhazam.com. Pretend you spend your evenings knitting and your weekends hiking in local parks.

Labels: culture, web2.0

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:32 AM|| |

"Next year all our troubles will be miles away. ..."

YouTube - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas -- Sinatra.

"Some day soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. ..."

Labels: culture, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:44 PM|| |

OK. Granted. I have an odd family.

When Dad was still alive, our children's sigoths would sometimes freak at family gatherings because we'd be discussing "If you were a terrorist intent on making Americans feel shakier than shaky -- and killing some Americans as an added benefit -- what target would you attack?"

These discussions happened to have a concrete reason behind them because some of the family members were/are concerned with what terrorists might target.

Question: Would you target a monument like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Alamo, or Mount Rushmore or would you wreak terror by targeting small malls and roller skating rinks across America -- both of which are easier to target.

Is it more effective to clobber some national symbols or to make EVERYONE -- including Laverne's cousin in Tucson -- worried about whether it's safe to go out for dinner?

Well, we don't have those discussions anymore, for various reasons.

Instead today (AT OUR FAMILY CHRISTMAS), we talked about Bunny Suicide.

Labels: culture, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:21 PM|| |

Lionel Barrymore as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Dickens

I've listened to this every Christmas Eve for probably the last forty or fifty years.

Tomorrow night, do thou likewise.

We'll be sitting around on the floor, listening too.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

Labels: culture, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:17 PM|| |

Melissa Etheridge: The Choice Is Ours Now

Melissa Etheridge on the Rev. Rick Warren.

[...]

On the day of the conference I received a call from Pastor Rick, and before I could say anything, he told me what a fan he was. He had most of my albums from the very first one. What? This didn't sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher. He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection.

[...]

She tells everyone to chill.

[...]

Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.

I know, call me a dreamer, but I feel a new era is upon us.

I will be attending the inauguration with my family, and with hope in my heart. I know we are headed in the direction of marriage equality and equal protection for all families.

Happy Holidays my friends and a Happy New Year to you.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward all men and women... and everyone in-between.

Labels: causes, commentary, culture, election2008, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:55 PM|| |

'Bush Shoe' Gives Firm a Footing in the Market

By SEBNEM ARSU
Published: December 20, 2008

ISTANBUL — When a pair of black leather oxfords hurled at President Bush in Baghdad produced a gasp heard around the world, a Turkish cobbler had a different reaction: They were his shoes.

"We have been producing that specific style, which I personally designed, for 10 years, so I couldn’t have missed it, no way," said Ramazan Baydan, a shoemaker in Istanbul. "As a shoemaker, you understand."

[...]

... orders for Mr. Baydan’s shoes, formerly known as Ducati Model 271 and since renamed "The Bush Shoe," have poured in from around the world.

15K pairs for Iraq
95K pairs for Europe
18K pairs for USA

Five thousand posters advertising the shoes, on their way to the Middle East and Turkey, proclaim "Goodbye Bush, Welcome Democracy"” in Turkish, English and Arabic.

[...]

Ah. Capitalism at its finest.

Labels: culture, history, SanFranciscoBay

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:49 PM|| |

Esquire's 70 Greatest Sentences

Well, these sorts of things are always, "Why did they choose that?" "Why didn't they choose that?"

Sample sentences from the list:

Also, I shouldn't have to say this, but do not, under any circumstances, put Pop Rocks in your ass. --Stacey Grenrock Woods, Sex column, 2003

It showed a crowd of freaks bending over a dying fat man on a dark and lonely road, looking at a tattoo on his back which illustrated a crowd of freaks bending over a dying fat man on a . . . --Ray Bradbury, "The Illustrated Man," 1950

Many of the great sentences deal with sex, erections, and/or war.

Hm.


[via Grapes2.0]

Labels: culture, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:11 PM|| |

I'm a huge fan of Paul Madonna and his ALL OVER COFFEE work in the Sunday Chronicle.

Got this note from him today (that would be me and the zillion others on his e-mail list):

I've had an overwhelming response to this week's "Obama:Progress" All Over Coffee piece. Since the original sold within the first few hours it was published, (including a backup waitlist) I decided to make a fine art limited edition print of this particular strip to honor this momentous time in history.

The full-color print is 16x22 inches, signed and numbered in a limited edition of 100, at $195 each. Produced by the fabulous printer SF Electric Works, these prints are of the highest quality.

Follow this link to both view and order.

If you missed Sunday's Madonna, check it out. If you don't know ALL OVER COFFEE or Paul Madonna, check him out.

Labels: art, culture, election2008, San Francisco, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:23 PM|| |

The court will overturn Prop. 8 by LaDoris H. Cordell. (op-ed in today's San Francisco Chronicle)

I was reading this commentary in the Chron this morning -- a commentary I agree with totally, btw.

LaDoris Cordell was a Superior Court judge in the south bay back when I lived in the south bay, so I was surprised when she mentioned she was lesbian.

That's odd, I thought. I knew she was a woman judge, not all that common, and a black woman judge at that, even more uncommon, but I hadn't realized she was a lesbian black woman judge. Huh. What do you know? Had I just not been paying attention? Was it just not important? Had I forgotten? (I've forgotten a lot of things.)

But then, I went to college, then to law school, opened a law practice in a black community, became a law school administrator, and then went on to a successful career on the bench. Along the way, I got married and had two wonderful daughters. I was perfect. And then one fine day, as these black voters would have it, I chose to simply throw it all away - to become an Untouchable? Ridiculous. I did not choose to be gay anymore than I chose to be black.

Ah. Penny drops. Cordell was married with a family when I knew of her, so I knew of the black woman judge aspect of her life but at that time, the lesbian side wasn't front and center. I didn't know and, frankly, had I known, wouldn't have cared.

Good commentary.

I also liked Keith Olbermann's commentary on Proposition 8 but for Pete's sake, he can sure over-emote, can't he? Easier to read his commentary than to watch it.

Labels: commentary, culture, election2008, life, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:29 AM|| |

Click to Give @ The Hunger Site

from the site: The Hunger Site launched in June 1999 as the brainchild of a private citizen from Indiana, with the purpose of helping to alleviate world hunger by using the Internet in a creative way. A simple daily click of a button on www.thehungersite.com would give funding — paid for by the site's sponsors — to the United Nations World Food Programme.

In its first nine months, the site funded more than nine million pounds of food for the hungry — an astonishing feat. Eventually the site became too large for one man to manage, and in 2000 The Hunger Site was sold to GreaterGood.com, which today operates as the GreaterGood Network family of websites.

The shopshopshop portion of this site is superb as well. Very cool stuffs for those friends and family for whom a gift certificate to Olive Garden just won't do. Cheap shipping deals too.

Go there and check it out.

Labels: culture, goodworks, nonprofits, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:38 PM|| |

Amazing work.

I've written about Lego sculptures and sculptors before, but never linked to Nathan Sawaya's Lego sculptures.

Well, for one thing, I don't think they existed the last time I wrote about Legos (in 2002).

Here's an article on his sculptures from portfolio.com. (The media show at the first link is from the same source.)

And here's Sawaya's Web site - brickartist.com: the Art of the Brick.

Enjoy.

Labels: art, craft, culture, design, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:48 PM|| |

Etsy :: Oven Mitts

The perfect gift for your literary friends ... with a warped sense of humor.

Labels: culture, shopshopshop, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:20 PM|| |

Singing skull [MAKE magazine blog post on the project]

And a vid of the actual skull singing!



Some people have waaaaay too much time on their hands.

[via a tweet from Make Magazine]

Labels: craft, culture, web2.0, yikes

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:50 PM|| |

"The Constitution of California currently sees all of our children and grandchildren as equal ... Why would you change that?"

Labels: culture, election2008, legal, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:40 PM|| |

Folks I know remember the original Burning Man events out on Baker Beach and ... refuse to go to the what-now-it-is experience out in the Nevada desert.

(Shout out! to Don who's off on his post-significant-bday Burning Man experience! and to those folks his nibs worked with in the Exploratorium tech haven who are burners in their off-hours!)

Here is an alternative this Saturday out at Baker Beach for those in town.

We'll be up at Donner Lake with the Bixby Creek crowd who soon (well, now, obviously) will no longer have a Bixby Creek place to gather because our illustrious hosts are selling their place and none of the rest of us -- much as we love the place and the memories -- have the wherewithal to buy it.

Alas.


[via Laughing Squid]

Labels: culture, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:27 PM|| |

John Cleese's Cleeseblog

John Cleese on Twitter

John Cleese on friendfeed

John Cleese ning

John Cleese podcasts

... A taste of Cleese. [via laughingsquid]

Labels: culture, people, web2.0

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:41 AM|| |

FORA.tv - Videos Covering Today's Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues

FORA.tv is advertising for unpaid interns on CraigsList.

Toddled off to see what's up with that. I'd seen a stack of FORA.tv lit over at the Commonwealth Club offices on Saturday.

Long Now talks. Aspen Institute talks. Commonwealth Club talks. ...

Here's a Roger Rosenblatt interview with Amy Tan at the Chautauqua Institution on July 10, 2008. The interview is broken out in sections. If you only want to hear Tan speak on "Writer's Memory" you can click straight to the spot.

E.L. Doctorow on the Problematic Nature of Writing Novels

The indexing is superb. You can select one of the broad subject ranges and then one of the sub-sections. You can search for subjects. You can find all videos from the Hoover Institution.

Brilliant stuff.

Labels: culture, media, politics, video, web2.0, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:09 PM|| |

Prop. 8 backers sue to change ballot wording

Seems Jerry Brown (formerly Governor Moonbeam, currently State Attorney General perhaps Governor again after the next election, who knows ...) has authorized the following ballot language for Proposition 8: "eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry."

Says he, since the time the petition signatures were collected, the court confirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry. Therefore, Prop 8, which reads "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." would disenfranchise those who just May 15th got the right to marry and his wording is fine and good and valid.

Prop 8 proponents claim Brown's verbiage is "inherently argumentative and highly likely to create prejudice" and they aren't eliminating anyone's rights. They're simply trying to reinstate the definition of marriage that existed in California before the judicial decision in May.

Ya. Right.

Yay! hooray! for Jerry Brown. You go, guy!

Labels: California, causes, culture, life, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:42 AM|| |

Karolina Kurkova Labeled Too Fat

Her walk is at the 8: marker, mas o menos.

Fat?

Too fat?

Oh, puhleeze. No wonder we have Olsen twins and the girl next door worrying about their body images.

Labels: culture, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:43 PM|| |

Finished PopCo while I was away.

Like The End of Mr. Y, this Scarlett Thomas book had a to-me sympathetic main female character who roamed around in her head and jumped from subject to subject and landing pad to leaping-off-point in a manner I'm quite familiar with. Thomas' heroines remind me strongly of Cayce Pollard, the heroine in Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

The books are filled with consumer culture, philosophy, and weird, quirky bits of trivia. PopCo specifically has enough code breaking arcana to keep you going for a while. Alice Butler, the main character, creates sleuth kits for kids for a megacorp called PopCo (#3 in the world after Mattel and Hasbro) and finds herself stashed away in a corporate getaway with other PopCo creatives, tasked with finding a brilliant product for the teengirl market, which is notoriously hard for toy companies to crack.

I took pages and pages of notes of clever phraseology and references I had no clue to (the Riemann Hypothesis, the Voynich Manuscript), book titles I need to check our bookstash for (and buy if we don't have a copy) (Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers by Fletcher Pratt) and more.

Thomas even gave a brief explanation to another character of how public key encryption works, an explanation my aunt Ethel would be able to understand!

Is this really the way toy companies are run? Is marketing really as cynical about tapping into the pocketbooks of teens and pre-teens as the book suggests? Could be.

I try not to buy stuff I don't =need=. This book made me even more aware of how you, me, and Mr. McGee are sold to.

Witness: Uncrate | The Buyer's Guide For Men Talk about cool stuff you don't really need!

We won't even begin to explore Archie McPhee and Things You Never Knew Existed.

I received an offer in the mail the other day. Because I'm a special person (because of my W subscription? because of my ZIPcode? because of the stylish, fashionable things I buy at the Goodwill?), ELLE offered me a year's subscription (normally $48! or something close thereto) for only $8!

Well, hey, yes! Of course, they'd love to have me on their subscription rolls.

But we talked about our dear mailman and all the mail he has to bring down the steps and then up our stairs to our front door. And then we talked about the bags of recycle we have to take down our stairs and up the steps to the recycle bin on Montgomery. And we decided that I didn't really need ELLE that much.

We aren't getting a stimulus check from the government. No manna from heaven $$ for stuff. I guess they figure we stimulate the economy as much as we ever will.

The younger niblet, who is doing his Peace Corps stint until June 2010, got his check, though. We'll put it in his bank account and maybe he'll be able to tap it at some point if he is in desperate need for something while he's there. At least it will still be available when he comes home.

Somehow I think his check would go a lot further there than it would in San Francisco. Be more appreciated too. Somehow I think there's less "stuff" where he is and more "Do we have enough food for dinner and breakfast tomorrow?"

Labels: books, culture, life, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:45 PM|| |

Shoetube

Life, love, everything shoe.

Labels: culture, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:16 PM|| |

Vinyl Gallery: Vintage classical album cover graphics - a set on Flickr

[via Laughing Squid]

Labels: art, culture, graphics, music

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:01 PM|| |

A headzup to everyone writing in the blogosphere, in newspapers and in magazines: what César and Dolores and the UFW were all about was "¡Sí, se puede!" not "Si se puede."

Sure, the two phrases sound the same, but the first means, "Yes, we can!" (or more accurately, 'Yes, it's possible' or 'Yes, it can be done.') and the second, "If we can ..."

Big difference.

(I kept, and never used, a freebie notepad the UFW sent me -- along with a solicitation for a donation, natch -- because they used "Si" instead of "Sí" in the tagline on the notepad. And don't try to tell me that the accent mark has become superfluous in the twenty-first century. I ain't buying it. ...)

Thus ends the Spanish I lesson for the afternoon.

Labels: culture, life, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:49 PM|| |

The FAIL Blog

Must be seen to be believed. (Lots of ouchies here!)

via his nibs.

Labels: blog, culture, yikes

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:40 PM|| |

Super Bowl 2008 ads now up on hulu: Watch your favorites. Anytime. Anywhere.

Link courtesy Laughing Squid

Labels: culture, design, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:23 AM|| |

Went to a Vintners' Club event at the Bankers' Club on 08Jan. ... a pinot tasting.

Interesting!

We went because his nibs lurves pinot noir and because David Bruce was going to speak.

One of his nibs' students at UCSB (who grew up just a stone skip from the bucolic ville we used to call home) is someone with whom we still hang out and whose ballpark tickets HipLiz sometimes buys.

This guy, as a teenager, spent his weekends at his dermatologist's Santa Cruz mountains home (dermatologist being Dr. David), digging dirt to plant the vines that became David Bruce's foray into pinot making.

Here's me looking very grumpy ... ah... focussed.

Look at those glasses! We had twelve pinot noirs to taste. They were lined up and poured before we came in: six up, six down.

I am such a naïf. I could say, "Here are my top three. Here is my least favorite."

Ask me to rate the intermediate eight wines, given forty-five minutes?

No can do.

But we had fun. ...

Each person (who wanted) sent in their scores.

Each table put together their tasting notes.

The guy clockwise plus one was the winemaker for one of the wines being tasted (Domaine Chandon Reserve. Russian River Valley) and served as table chair.

I'd rated his wine [2] but the accumulated crowd wasn't so generous.

The experience was interesting. What was really interesting was looking at the accumulated scores. Here's a top scorer: five people rated it #1; five people rated it #2; six people rated it #12.

Whah?

It really is all about what you like in a wine.

Really!

So for the Vintners' Club events, you rate the wines you're tasting with no regard to what your spouse, best friend or most erudite wine snob might think.

Then you go 'round the table and seat#2 says, "This was my favorite wine because ..." and everyone else goes round and says "Well ... this is what I thought of the wine ..."

Next person (seat #3) says, "This was my favorite wine because ..." (or my least favorite wine or my second favorite wine because someone else already mentioned my favorite wine.) ...

... until all the twelve wines have been discussed.

David Bruce (the gentleman on the left in the photo)... scored highest when the overall wine scores were totted up, and well he should.

We had a splendid time.

Afterwards, we said farewell to the amazing views from the Bankers Club and said farewell to our co-conspirators and headed up hill and home, stopping off at Boccadillos on Montgomery for some tasty pig parts before we walked the rest of the way ... home

Labels: culture, food, life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:04 PM|| |

Every Christmas as the younger guys were growing up, we listened to Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge on an old family record (later xfered to cassette tape the year I gave a tape copy to each of my living siblings).

The older younger guy's partner had heard about this tradition but the two of them were never over for Christmas Eve and he only knew of the practice from being subjected to "a blot of mustard, a bit of undigested beef" sorts of "God bless us. Every one!" riffs.

Christmas Eve 2006 they stayed with us (so we could all head off the next day to my younger brother's home for Christmas festivities) but that year we couldn't track down a sound system to play the tape and didn't have a record player in the house to play the record.

Finally, this last just past Christmas, the older younger one's partner finally was over for Christmas Eve and got to sit down and listen en famille to the Barrymore do his Scrooge.

And a wonderful Scrooge he is.

Just got a note that the older younger guy's partner had found a Barrymore Christmas Carol at the Internet Archive.

And there it is! The Christmas Carol I've listened to every Christmas Eve since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

Barrymore's A Christmas Carol -- mp3

The Web is a wonder. ...

(God bless us. Every one!)

Labels: culture, life, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:15 PM|| |

Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing: High Heels And The Body

AKA why I wear walking shoes everywhere -- unless I'm home, in which case I'm barefoot.

If I'm going to an event/venue that frowns on walking shoes (drinks at the Bankers' Club comes to mind), I carry a purse big enough to carry heels to the venue and to pop my walking shoes into when I change footwear on arrival. ...

His nibs worked with someone long ago who wore HIGH high heels everywhere until eventually she could not wear flat shoes without pain because her leg muscles (gastrocnemius muscles this illustration shows) had shortened in reaction to the abnormally high heels.

Barefoot girl, me.

(via Jason Schultz, Law Geek via Lori Dorn, HR Lori via a tweet from Laughing Squid)

Labels: culture, health, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:53 PM|| |

Met a couple at the Slow Food crab fest at the County Building in Golden Gate Park a week ago yesterday. We were all taking the N-Judah home and they asked if we'd like to stop off for a glass of wine before catching the next N-Judah and continuing home. We said sure, and continued the fun we'd been having at the fest.

As a result of the evening, they invited us to the Wine Hos Winter Soiree, which was being held at their place in the Lower Haight last night. The Wine Hos meet monthly to try out wines. Their December meeting is one which they can invite friends or chance-met acquaintances to. The host provides snacks and the wine. The attendees split the cost of the wine.

Last night's wingding was champagne-focused with sparkling cocktails and snacks after. Five champagnes tasted. Costs ranged from $24/bottle to something like $70. We had about eighteen people and ten bottles ... so the shared cost was reasonable.

One of the hosts put together a sheet with the five champagnes listed on one side and on the other side a description of each. Except the descriptions were not necessarily next to the champagne they described. (One of the descriptions: "This one has the violet scent of Pernand-Vergelesses; oh man, even with no dosage this is jail-bait wine, more vinous and "serious" than '04; sappier and, um, fuller-bodied. She said she was 18, your honor.")

Our task was to match a champagne to its description. I got five out of five and felt like I'd survived a major exam. I also felt like I learned something about champagne at the same time in a congenial atmosphere.

The sparkling cocktails were great. The snacks were delish. The white elephant present exchange was a stitch. (We didn't bring a white elephant present because we had nothing in the house to offer. With space at a premium, we tend to take anything we don't need or love to the Goodwill post haste.)

We met interesting people, including a couple of regular wine hos who live about a hundred steps further down the hill from us (Small world!) and an adorable five-month-old Chihuahua named Jolene.

Brilliant evening. Loads of fun. Exhausted by the time we walked up the hill home.

Thanks for the invite!

Labels: culture, life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:47 PM|| |

His nibs went down to Palo Alto today to help MHP get some "stuff" out of his basement and delivered to TechShop in Menlo Park, a Maker's dreamland, a burner's heaven.

Never heard of TechShop?

TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment...or a Kinko's for geeks.

TechShop was founded in 2006 by Jim Newton, a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster.

TechShop is located in Menlo Park, California, on the San Francisco peninsula 25 miles south of San Francisco.
Anyone can come in and build and make all kinds of things themselves using the TechShop tools, machines and equipment, and draw on the TechShop instructors and experts to help them with their projects. TechShop is designed for everyone, regardless of their skill level. TechShop is perfect for inventors, "makers", hackers, tinkerers, artists, roboteers, families, entrepreneurs, youth groups, FIRST robotic teams, arts and crafts enthusiasts, and anyone else who wants to be able to make things that they dream up but don't have the tools, space or skills.

If this sounds like your piece of heaven, TechShop is open 9A->midnight, seven days a week.

Cost: Daily pass:$30 Monthly pass:$100 Annual pass:$1200 (except they're having a sale just now.) The Annual and Monthly passes allow you to reserve time on specific pieces of equipment. The Annual pass allows you to reserve equipment up to two weeks in advance. The Monthly pass allows you to reserve equipment up to a day in advance. If you buy a multiple-months pass, you can reserve equipment for multiple days in advance. e.g. If you buy a five-month pass, you can reserve equipment up to five days in advance. If you buy a seven-month pass, you can reserve equipment up to seven days in advance.

TechShop gives classes on how to use the equipment. Some pieces of equipment =require= you to take a class before you are allowed to use the equipment.

Check it out.

Labels: craft, culture, design, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:52 PM|| |

Talking with an old friend, well, exchanging e-mails and mentioned that I was feeling old.

His nibs and I'd had dinner a week or so ago with a friend who'd turned eighty in August. Eighty-year-old friend is looking good and, really, looks not that much different than he did when I met him thirty-two years ago. He's involved with crafting little technology whizbang solutions for folks at the VA hospital. He's a Maker. He hasn't slowed down much if any at all. He's just pretty darn cool.

I wrote to the e-mail friend, "I'm seven years older than he was when I first met him. Yikes, I'm feeling old."

Then I found this test: Are you a hippy?

which gave these stats on the folks who had taken the test:

54% of test takers are Male, while 46% are Female.
93% of test takers are under the age of forty, while 7% are over forty.
78% of test takers have hair shorter than 6", while 22% have hair that is longer.
7% of test takers were at Woodstock in 1969, while 93% were not.
[That in itself is astounding when you consider only 15% of the test takers were even =alive= in the 1960s. That means that ~50% of the people taking the test who were alive in the 1960s were at Woodstock. Is that even remotely possible?]
54% of test takers prefer John over George at 12% as their favorite Beatle.
15% of test takers were alive in the 1960's, while 85% were not.
21% of test takers are vegetarians, while 79% are not.
11% of test takers have lived in a commune, while 89% have not.
10% of test takers voted for Ronald Reagan, while 90% did not.
[They forgot to ask how many had even had an opportunity to vote for Ronald Reagan.]

The questions hit me with pangs of nostalgia: "Do you smell like patchouli?" "Do you own an incense burner?" "Do you have a brownie recipe with ingredients you can't find at the A&P?" "Do you think Bob Dylan has a good voice?"

Do you feel old?

Update> and the doorbell rings. By the time I get there, the doorbell ringer is gone, but there's an Amazon package under the doormat. "Thank you!" I call. "You're welcome," comes the reply from down the path. The package contained a couple books and Kristofferson's latest.

Earlier this month we'd been at the Fillmore for an AIM benefit. I was reminded again how much I like his words and his voice. A few days ago I put an order in and here it was. I put my new purchase into the CD player. First song was the title song, This Old Road.

Yeah, feeling old. And that's okay. Kristofferson, after all, is only ten years younger than our eighty-year-old friend and he's still kickin'.

Labels: books, culture, music, timewaster

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:41 PM|| |

Entertaining blog with news tidbits.

The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back

You can find such gems as a post about Batter Blaster:

Occasionally we see products that make us wonder how we got to this late day without them. "Batter Blaster" (which is pancake batter in a Cheese Whiz or Redi Whip bottle) is one such product.

Will we be buying this? No. Are we happy the it exists? Yeah. Actually, we are.

I think the product's an abomination (How hard is it to add water to your Krusteaz mix?) but about half the comments are in a "hell-yeah, I've been waiting for something like this" vein.

Labels: blog, culture, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:40 AM|| |

Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean by Justin Berton, SFChronicle.

[...]

At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie "American Beauty," a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life's unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a "most beautiful thing."

To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.

In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

[...]

At the end of the article is a link to Save The Bay's Bay Trash Hot Spots. Click on a hot spot and get the details of dumped trash between Hunter's Point and Candlestick Point, Colma Creek's trash, trash in Coyote Creek in the south bay and more.

3.5 million tons of plastics and other debris floating out in the ocean between us and Hawaii! Yikes.

Do what you can to help, or at least don't make it worse. Minimize bag use and don't let the ones you have get loose and wind up in the wild.

His nibs and I are signed up for a SPUR tour of Norcal's transfer station out on Tunnel Ave next Tuesday AM. Should be interesting.

Labels: culture, environmentalism, news, San Francisco, urban

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:24 PM|| |

Porn Spammers Get Five Years.

Nice coupla guys.

Harsh sentencing of Kilbride is credited to his attempts to prevent a witness from testifying at the trial. Kilbride received six years in prison and Schaffer received a 5-1/4 year sentence. Each was fined $100,000 and had to forfeit $1.1 million of their porn spam profits. They also had to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL, which claimed 1.5 million of its customers complained about their spam.

Labels: culture, internet, legal, news

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:19 AM|| |

[via the brilliant collection of advertisements at I believe in advertising]

Labels: blog, culture, media, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:30 PM|| |

Sectwanto's HUGE tag on a brick building down by Potrero Point, was painted out last week. The brick building was originally tagged (according to this site) in 2005. Seemed a year or two earlier than that at least, but I have photos from July 2004 that show the brick building untagged. Memory's a funny thing.

SECTWANTO always reminded me of RIGO's TRUTH over by City Hall, "but different," as they say.



Still, two years from tag date, SECTWANTO and the fribbly tagged crap beneath it were painted over.

Why now?

Well, perhaps because plans are afoot to revitalize Pier 70 and surrounds.

Labels: culture, San Francisco, SF Port Authority, street-art, urban

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:44 AM|| |

Jimbo Wales at the Commonwealth Club

Founder, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation and Wikia

[...]

"Come hear Wales talk about what's next on his agenda, his opinions on the politics of the Internet and his thoughts on the accuracy of Wikipedia posts."

6:00 p.m., Check-in | 6:30 p.m., Program
7:30 p.m., Wine and Hors d'oeuvres Reception

Club office, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco
$12 for Members
$20 for Non-Members
$7 for Students (with valid ID)

Labels: culture, information, San Francisco, web2.0, webstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:46 PM|| |

The amazing world of the Web.

Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D by Amy Hackney Blackwell

[Action takes place in Venice at the Public Library of St. Mark.]

After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer's Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.

[...]

To store the data, the team used a 1-terabyte redundant-disk storage system on a high-speed network. The classicists on duty backed up the data every evening on two 750-GB drives and on digital tape. Blackwell carried the hard drives home with him every night, rather than leave the data in the library.

The next step is making the images readable. The Venetus A is handwritten and contains ligatures and abbreviations that boggle most text-recognition software. So, this summer a group of graduate and undergraduate students of Greek will gather at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., to produce XML transcriptions of the text. Eventually, their work will be posted online for anyone to search, as part of the Homer Multitext Project.

Brilliant use of technology.

Labels: books, culture, science, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:28 PM|| |

Obit in today's Chron: Edwin Traisman -- french fry innovator.

Seems Traisman bought the first McDonald's franchise in Madison, WI, in the late 1950s. At the time there was a problem getting the fresh potatoes to make fries. (McDonald's fries at that time were made fresh in each location.) Ray Kroc asked Traisman to help work on the problem of making tasty frozen fries and a "Method for Preparing Frozen French Fried Potatoes" (a Traisman innovation) was patented in 1962.

But wait. There's more.

Before becoming a McDonald's franchisee, Traisman was director of food research at Kraft where he was instrumental in the development of Cheez Whiz cheese spread, instant pudding and other food products.

Cheez Whiz AND McDonald's french fries! Where would we be today without Traisman?

Labels: culture, history, obit

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:00 PM|| |

The Bata Shoe Museum - Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Labels: culture, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:40 AM|| |

[Caution reading Goodman's column and blog. There may be spoilers lurking therein.]

Tim Goodman (SFC) says ARRIVEDERCI to the Sopranos.

(Speculation/discussion/news of the Sopranos finale was above the fold on page one of today's paper!)

I've never seen an entire Sopranos show, just a few bits, and I mean a few. One bit, maybe. We're too parsimonious, you see, to subscribe to HBO. We have plain vanilla cable (about $3/mo when added on to our broadband costs) and that only because I figured we might want to watch some breaking news some time. Oh, and watch the Today Show broadcast from Bhutan. (Thank you, Auntie K, for that heads-up!)

My lack of viewing experience and serious lack in the fandom department does not, however, stop me from joining in the frantic speculation about the most hyped show finale since Dallas went off the air.

I have my own theory how it will all end next Sunday.

As a nod to our European contingent, who are a ways behind in the episodes, I've put my theory here.

Read Tim's blog entry / synopsis of Ep. 20: "A glorified crew." Search for "towse" to retrieve my comment from the 298 (so far) comments re the end of the Sopranos ... if you care and don't mind my uninformed speculations.

Labels: culture, news

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:31 AM|| |