I guess we know how facebook members feel

One of my favorites: SF Zoo

This piece of communication by BBDO West has been around for a while but I keep forgetting to share it. Bus shelter posters that require interaction and encourage you to participate with the website -- what a fun way to get people involved with and interested in the zoo! I love that not only are people interacting with the zoo, but they're actually becoming (and so hopefully, relating to) animals.

http://www.oursfzoo.org/

Bobby Shew, fantastic and motivational

I saw Bobby Shew perform this summer at The Fox Note in Princeton, Wisconsin. I would guess there were about 100 people at the concert, which took place in a fabulous little hall and was incredibly intimate.

The music was fantastic; it was fun to see and hear Shew play with the John Harmon trio, which he doesn't normally play with. They obviously enjoyed working with each other, and the jazz seemed more like a story than a series of songs.

Best of all, though, was when Shew told us about a talk he gives to his students. At some point, he explains to each student that as a musician, you can either impress someone with your playing, or you can touch someone with your music. And then he went on to tell the audience the he hoped we weren't impressed with his playing. He hoped, instead, that he had manage to touch us.

Congratulations, Bobby Shew. Not only did you make wonderful music and perform a riveting concert; you were so moving I can't stop thinking about it four months afterward.

Overkill

While looking for variations on the phrase "like using an atom bomb to kill an ant," I found some fantastic images on The Mish Mash. If you ever need pictural representations of "overkill," check them out:

http://www.themishmash.com/2007/12/overkill.html

Electoral Media

Perspctv. Check it out.

From the New York Times: How Home Became Homeland

How Home Became Homeland

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 3, 2008

Oh, it’s good to be home.

Roger Cohen

The threat level has been raised (or was that lowered?) to orange. I wonder idly what this means — an image of medium-intensity jihadist chatter menacing Armonk, N.Y., comes to mind — but I have no time to get that vision in focus before another cheery message rolls out across the airport.

“Do not make jokes about security. You could be arrested.”

O.K., I won’t ask the Transport Security Administration guys with “TSA” on their shirts if the letters stand for “Team Standing Around,” and I won’t say, “Hey, remember how the U.S.A. used to be a land without fences and nobody ever called it a homeland,” and I won’t say, “Arrested? Ha! And then what?”

Nor will I mention the other America before “threat levels” and two wars and renditions and bumper stickers saying “Freedom is not free” — the land where jokes were not yet grounds for arrest and nobody got wrestled to the floor for “looking” suspicious and fear was not yet a coin of the realm.

Oh, but it’s good to be home, even if it’s a homeland now.

Just take a look at our home! A screeching belt in a bunker-like, airless hall (last painted in 1957) turns and turns without bags on it, watched by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ragged travelers straining to hear inaudible announcements, darting here and there like ants in a panic, blocking their ears against the screech, comforting babies, searching in vain for Delta baggage agents who’ve all gone home because there was a storm and it’s late and, hey, it’s summer!

Some of the marooned crowd are on cellphones screaming “Sorry, honey, you cut out, WHAT?” and the chorus rises, “Sorry, honey, you cut out, WHAT?” and I think that’s not a bad bumper sticker for this unraveled, disconnected homeland almost eight years into Bush.

Oh, yes, it’s good to be home.

Even if it’s a homeland, at least it’s not a fatherland. And how, I wonder, does our home look to others? As former President Bill Clinton noted at the Democratic national convention in Denver, the United States does better when it leads with “the power of our example” than with “the example of our power.”

To think this airport is named after J.F.K. — all that promise, and my Dad weeping at his loss in faraway London. Kennedy who asked us to ask ourselves what we could do for our country. Whatever happened to Lincoln’s “last, best hope?”

It got frayed. Let’s stop talking about an infrastructure bottleneck, sounds too like something in a Soviet 10-year Plan, and start talking about collapsing bridges, crawling trains, dilapidated airports, potholed roads, subway blues — the great national failure to build a network of public transport worthy of a modern state in the age of $110 oil.

We’ve been spending too much on fear while others spend on the future. And now J.F.K. looks like LOTH — Lagos-on-the-Hudson — while the Hong Kong airport shimmers the way American promise once did.

Yes, it’s good to be home. As Robert Frost noted, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”

Unless you make the wrong joke, or knock yourself out on the scaffolding, or have a weird beard.

Speaking of the Democratic National Convention, security there involved police in shades with sub-machine guns riding around on the backs of trucks and the image they summoned with their truculent menace was Pinochet’s Chile circa 1986, the main difference being the Colorado vehicles still had license plates.

Police dogs combed through the gym and pool area of the Denver Grand Hyatt sniffing goggles and towels as wide-eyed kids gaped.

And there, at the convention, was another Kennedy, Senator Edward Kennedy, rising from his hospital bed with a bull-like courage that nobody who witnessed it will forget, and saying, unbowed: “We are all called to a better country and a newer world.”

Yes, it can still be good to be home.

Barack Obama had this to say: “America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”

I reckon John McCain can agree with that. Everyone — Democrat, Republican or independent — can. Certainly the rest of the world can. Its thirst to close the Bush chapter is near feverish.

Winston Churchill said of the United States that it can be counted on to do “the right thing,” but only after it has tried every alternative. As Roger Smith, an acute political observer and blogger, put it in an e-mail: “Well, George W. is every other alternative.”

Unless you count Sarah Palin, John McCain’s new sidekick, the Republican lady risen from the ice out near Russia. She’s certainly alternative.

It’s good to be home, but it sure could be better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/opinion/04Cohen.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Pimp my Bike

With gas prices at record highs, car culture has taken a turn for the creative. A group of Trinidadian teenagers in Queens, once famous for cruising the streets in big cars with hyped up sound, are facing the gas crisis by creating a new driving alternative.

I think this is amazingly creative, as well as future-focused. In a time when soccer moms are complaning they can't live without their Yukons and Suburbans, these kids have taken culture and future into their own hands and trying something new.

On a side note, can you imagine the calf muscles these kids will have after biking around with 100+ pounds of speakers?