especially unexpected things, which become funny when juxtaposed with the all-too-serious chart format.
these are hilarious.
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November 26, 2007
November 25, 2007
November 13, 2007
Working Class Heroes
Etsy is pretty much changing my life. Well, not really. But I'm getting some cool stuff, and you never know where that can take you.
I just got my new laptop sleeve from Working Class Heroes, a shop on Etsy helmed by a nice Englishman named James and his gf Monie.ka from Austria. Apparently they used to work in advertising and got sick of it. Go figure.
Here's my little laptop sleeve!
There were some cute Austrian wafer cookies in the package, and a little note. So far, everything I've gotten from Etsy has come in really cute packaging, with a handwritten note of some sort. I don't get many handwritten notes, so it's nice to see that people can still write. ( full disclosure - I don't write many handwritten notes either, so I guess that could be why I'm not raking them in. )
They also have a Flickr page, and a blog. And here's an interview-ish thing too.
Go buy things from them!
November 10, 2007
androids coming to terms with their issues
My esteemed colleagues have started a blog called Tranny Android, which i have added to my blogroll. One of the authors is a candy-addicted diabetic ladies man, while the other is a bourgeoisie nantucket-red-pant-wearing connoisseur of tufted leather furniture. ***
A more unlikely pair I've never met, but they are adorable together. And the logo they've commissioned is funny:
***This post is pretty much meaningless to you unless you know these particular gentlemen, but at the very least, you use it as fodder to make fun of people who think their inside jokes are hilarious to everyone.
November 07, 2007
Dying Professions
This post stems from a conversation I had at dinner tonight; Amy, Alex, Johanna and I were eating at an Italian restaurant, and there was a map on the wall of Italy, which prompted me to wonder aloud about exactly when people figured out Italy looked like a boot. Since maps existed long before airplanes, we assumed that cartographers must have figured it out just by sailing around the coast, or something.
This, in turn, lead to us talking about cartography as a dying (or dead?) profession. This wasn't a new topic for me, as I'd started co-writing a short story/script about a year ago called The Last Cartographer, about a cartographer and his son, who has been an apprentice to his dad all his life, then suddenly had to find a new profession because there just weren't any more maps to make.
( I don't even really know much about cartography - I can only assume that the majority of the earth, at this point, has been mapped over and over. Maybe they've begun to map other planets? I'm not sure. )
We then started talking about other professions that were extinct, or becoming so. When I got home, I did some research, and one of the dying professions I stumbled upon was a cobbler ( fixer of shoes). The article I found painted a picture of American throwaway culture today, and how rather than getting things fixed, we tend to just get new things.
This wasn't always true, I guess - there was the Depression era, when no one ever got new stuff, and even after that, people patched and repaired clothes rather than getting new ones, and scissor-sharpening trucks would come around and, uh, sharpen your knives and scissors, prolonging their lives. Did people, at some point, come to the conclusion that it was cheaper or easier to replace something rather than get it fixed?
I guess the new green-mania could reverse this trend. Now we're looking more closely at how much waste we produce, and how we can consume less overall - and repairing things, rather than throwing them away certainly helps with that. So maybe the cobbler in the article does have a shot after all.
Another profession that is sometimes referred to as dying is Journalism. Now that everyone is a reporter, equipped with the equipment to capture and spread news as fast as any traditional journalist can, is there as much of a need to wait for a professional to tell you what's going on? I would argue that it isn't really journalism that is dying, because I believe journalism can evolve to include vigilante news-capturers, but rather, the idea of reporters as a select group of people qualified to bring you news.
Sorry, this post was sort of rambly - are there any other dying professions out there? Or what professions do you think are sure to die in the near future?
November 04, 2007
Kiosk
There's a store in Soho called Kiosk, which features a rotating collection of not-mundane-to-us items from other countries. While the real life store has one nation's goods at a time, they now have a large international, ongoing collection of stuff on their website, in addition to the current featured country ( which, at the moment, is Finland.)
I was poking around on there, looking for would-be holiday gifts, and I noticed a few really interesting bike accessories.
One is a net from Japan, which you attach to your bike basket, so things don't fly out of it if you hit a bump. I've never seen one of these here (have you?) but it seems like a pretty good idea!
They also have a Finnish bike reflector that you can swing out when it's dark, or in traffic. Riding a bike in New York is incredibly dangerous, in my opinion, and it's rare that you even see reflector lights on rider's bags, let alone something like this.
This reminded me a little of last weekend, when Johanna and I did our AWNY conference thingy, and she mentioned that a friend had told her about bike culture in Holland, and she was really interested.
I wonder if these countries where bikes a the prevalent mode of transportation have the same breadth of bike accessories that we do car air fresheners, or weird Calvin and Hobbes character "peeing" stickers.
Seriously, have you ever been in an auto store? like where they sell tires? The range of these products is astounding. Maybe it's because pretty much everything you put on a bike has to be functional because it's taking up valuable space, whereas in a car, you can fill your back window with Beanie Babies and action figures and still have room for a few well placed boxes of Kleenex.
Something tells me we should re-focus our efforts as traveling Americans on items that make sense, like the bike accessories above.
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