Etsy Treasury!

I was featured in an Etsy Treasury today for the first time!!!

Here is the link:

http://www.etsy.com/treasury/4bd4a33aeeb78eef20578936

Finally...

... commercials that make sense. I don't know if y'all have seen these commercials, but I think they are hilarious and refreshing. As far as the actuality of most womens' periods go - they are a lot more reflective than other commercials for menstrual products. Kotex uses footage from previous commercials and a lot of sarcasm to comment on how hush-hush our patriarchal society is about things that happen "down there" and with women in general. The fact that several networks refused to carry the commercial unless they removed the word vagina is kind of ridiculous - and illustrative.
Kudos to Kotex on a more realistic approach to tampon commercials (the two running in the US are below). A bit strange that they used an animatronic beaver for the Aussie version, but that's Aussie humor for ya.





"Don't all of these angles make me seem dynamic?" Awesome.

A Short History

Recently I finished reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and its really a great and fascinating book about the history of science and about the world in which we live. It touches on the beginnings of life, the beginnings of the universe, and all sorts of things. The book concludes with the following passage:

     "If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here - and by "we" I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
     We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings - that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities - have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.
     We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks. "

I really do like the way Bill Bryson looks at the world.

Cork, Corks, and More Cork!

Somebody's ears must have been burning or something a couple of nights ago. I'm working on a custom jewelry display/hanger for my friend N (I have some up on Etsy (check out the photo links on the right side of the page) and she wants something to put post/stud earring on built into the hanger. I wanted to experiment with recycling wine corks and incorporating them into the frame - an idea which I'll try and remember to report back on later.

The next day I wake up and check my blog roll and see that Whole Foods has started a cork recycling program - which is awesome. With very little increase into their current carbon footprint, Whole Foods will collect customer's used wine/beer/oil corks and, with a little help from FedEx, get them to various plants where cork is recycled and reused into packaging and paper products. Pretty nifty! For more info. check out their blog entry from yesterday.

For the more creative types, here are some ideas for re-using corks from some fellow Etsians:

From Oraeginalcreations

From SSFB

From Chazakia

From 4EyesAndEars

From ragbonestudio

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Well Southern California got into the shaking action of 2010 with a bit of a bang Sunday with our very own grouping of earthquake events. With a 7.2M quake in Baja (the biggest earthquake I've ever felt) and a series of related events within minutes in Imperial County just Southeast of San Diego, its been a shaky couple of days.

With Twitter and Facebook on everyone's phones, it blew my mind how fast information travelled. Within a couple of minutes I was getting phone calls and texts from friends and family far and wide, checking that we were okay or, more commonly, comparing notes. Within a minute after the shaking stopped I had 20 friends on Facebook documenting the quake, and each of us racing to post USGS magnitude maps and links. It reminds me of the last big quake I was in, and how each of us in our office raced to our computers to see where the epicenter was and what the magnitude was.

For those of us who have lived through enough of these kinds of long and rolling earthquakes, they can come out as adrenaline pumping and sometimes even kind of fun experiences - only because damage is limited and no one gets seriously hurt. By the next day everyone (including myself) is complaining because aftershocks kept waking us or our pets and we all find our houses shaking to be annoying. Maybe that's why our out of state relatives think we are crazy granola eating hippies - because we find that the result of the Earth's tectonic plates shifting is a pain in our sides and gets in the way or our daily routines. Whatever the case, I'll take Sunday's 7.2 roller over a tornado any day.

Whatever the human response, the amount of energy being released along the San Andreas down here in So Cal is pretty impressive this week. Here's a map from the USGS:

Tis the First

So its April first, which means lots of really stupid people trying to do really stupid things and trying to get away with it.

I know I'm not clever enough to come up with anything good, I don't own a huge company that I can rename after a city in Kansas, I don't have a boss who's office I can wrap in aluminum foil (well done Jn and Cb), and I don't have enough blog followers to have a band of dogs call tech support in India and hound them.

So I thought today I'd just share my favorite April Fool's plug, from 2 years ago, at the BBC. Enjoy, and happy April Fool's Day - may you, your coworkers, and friends be smart in their pranks!