Bea Arthur Was 5' 10"

The other night, in the middle of the night, in the cozy warmth of my bed I awoke and had to google Bea Arthur's height for some reason. I needed to know. And, as I was googling I realized I didn't know WHY I needed to know, only that I was compelled to find out.

She's 5' 10".

She was 5' 10".

I remembered doing it the next day and wondered what other skipping stone points of contact I've looked up recently--not delving deeply into any one thing, but abundantly curious about all sorts of things. And, why wouldn't I be? Bea Arthur portrayed Auntie Mame's friend Vera Charles; I'm sure she heard Mame say, "Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

Not me, sister. Not me.

Let's see what I've been feasting on as of late, shall we?

I looked up how to spell McMurphy, as in the poor guy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Yggdrasil. Norse mythical tree. Huge thing.
Knutepunkt. Northern European LARPing. Look it up if you need to. Join me!
Men's rain poncho. Someone might need one.
A related search: best umbrella. And let me say here, that I don't really care how good it is, might even be the best, but an asking price of over $300 is really too much.
Here was a meta one: I had had a dream that I was involved with people selling dozens of t-shirts. When they put a hole in the tag to convey something (don't know what), the term for that was a teasing. I looked up t-shirt teasing and got smart ass sayings on shirts.
Bechdel test. Thought it was spelled with a t. Needed to know spelling.
Saw an ad for a Prada backpack. Wondered what such a thing would cost. It can stay with the excellent umbrella, unused, unbought.
When to eat persimmons. I've never had them, wanted to know what to look for. One site said eat when firm. One site said let soften.
How long to cook leg of lamb per pound. It was a little more than 20 minutes per pound. It was also a roast, not a leg, but that didn't matter. I made a paste of olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and rosemary and rubbed it onto the roast before cooking. Sprinkled a little additional salt on just before putting in the oven. Oh. My. God. It was amazing with brown rice, and lemon, Parmesan roasted broccoli.
Oregon Blue. How can there be a "new" color? Yeah, there can't.
Speaking of: What do mood ring colors mean?
Who was on the balcony with the queen on her wedding day? It's who you'd expect. Doesn't hurt to check.
Good Day Sunshine lyrics. My daughter would probably point out that I've heard that song for all of my conscious life--not counting toddler-hood. Why wouldn't I know the lyrics? Well, critical daughter, because as a rule I only remember choruses and will break out into loud singing when the songs roll around to that point, and make up the rest of the lyrics singing those parts more quietly to not out myself. Yes, but why? I don't know. Why do you think you will not be like me some day? It's coming...
Estoppel. No taksie backsies. You said it and we know you said it.
Trover Conversion. Finders keepers, but only sometimes. Maybe the other tenth of the law, as in not always. GIVE IT BACK!
Why more black squirrels? I never saw anything but grey squirrels growing up and well into adulthood. Now I see them all the time. They're striking. It's a genetic mutation. Just coming out now with more frequency. Who knows if there's an advantage to that?
Stream impeachment hearing Didn't listen/watch the whole time. It's all so awful. I'm sorry, World.
Amendment granting Native Americans the right to vote Should have been the fifteenth, but it wasn't until the Snyder Act in 1924 that they received full suffrage. So much jive.
Be gay do crime I can get behind civil disobedience for good causes.
Submittable Just so I could check if my submission "in progress" for about 6 months had been decided on. My first rejection! Do you know how many marvelous people have been rejected, over and over again throughout all of time?! I'm in very good company.
Children of Heaven so I could share a link to the synopsis and a video clip of this amazing movie from Iran. A homeschooling mom was concerned about how demanding her child had become and wanted to show them how others live with very little.
Effete Spelling is tricky.
Buy squid ink powder I think you can see why I would google that. Can you walk into your grocery store and find it? Where would I go for such a thing?

This is all some of the things I looked up in about a week's time. There's so much more. What did I do before the internet? I'm sure my mind didn't jump around as much as it does now. For all the resources at my fingertips, for all the information cataloged in clear, accessible ways, I could be diving very deeply into interests. But, I don't. I flit. I skim. I jump from here to there.

On the other hand, any curiosity I have can be immediately satisfied. It's good to know things. I like finding answers. I almost never sit in wonder and instead want to know.

Still. I wonder if something is lost in that. Maybe sitting in wonder allows the mind to wander, to connect disparate dots, to further ask more questions. Maybe there's something rich in not knowing but wondering.

Honestly, I'm tempted to google that: what is lost by immediately satisfying curiosity?

I'm not going to. I'm going to let that one go.

Bea Arthur was 5' 10". Maybe I'll just think about that for a while.

What the...

Hello. Long time, no talk.  Been busy with life and putting funny little comments on Facebook. Having a really difficult time getting it together for here.  Or, more accurately, ignoring this blog completely at this point.

I just moseyed over here to check it out, as if someone else might have contributed, and I see ads. Do you see ads? I see them on the left hand side towards the bottom, at the bottom, and at the top.

I didn't put them there. I didn't ask for them to be there. I get no money from them being there--they're just there. How long have they been there? When did Blogger decide it would put things on people's blogs without their consent or notification?

Can there be no ad-free space anywhere? Is that simply not allowed? On a blog that espouses simple living and trying to reduce, reuse and recycle and NOT buying a bunch of crap, can't that be a single space that doesn't try to convince people to go out and buy stuff?

Outrage! Outrage, I tell you!

I will get to the bottom of this and report back. Or, I'll get sidetracked by life and not report back. Either way, know that I am appalled at this abomination on my blog.

When You Know You are Right...

Because we sometimes have strong feelings about what we know to be right, I offer this comic relief:

Ha, ha, ha, hee, ho, ha!!

A Blog by Any Other Name...

My kids have blogs!! What was just an offhand suggestion that maybe they would like to create their own blogs, has become a viral popping up of all sorts of blogs throughout our homeschooling group--lots of the kids now have blogs, with more being created every day!

My son and daughter now have their own e-mail addresses, the better to create their own autonomous blogs where they can download pictures and polls and movies and funny stories about their family. And, by the way, where they can write and read and share in meaningful ways with their friends and family.

With all of this creativity expressed by my kids, they have been using up a lot of computer time--I'm not getting any! OK, I'm still getting some, but it is far less than I had.

I'm sure that screen time is damaging to them--right? I'm sure I should be limiting it far more so that I can have my screen time--right? Isn't there a study somewhere to support the idea that the unbridled, shared creativity of kids is a bad, bad thing?

Really, what good can possibly come from this? I ask you...

Wicked Cool--Eagle Cam!

The Norfolk Va. Botanical Garden has a camera trained on a bald eagle's nest. A few eggs have hatched within the last few days.

You can get updates about it all on a blog and see clips and photos there as well.

Wicked cool.

Do Whales Have Uvulas?

My son asked me this after watching Finding Nemo. He thought it improbable because as he suggested, what would be large enough to choke a whale and therefore necessitate having a uvula to help cause a protective gag reflex? Excellent question, Son.

We googled it: "Do whales have a uvula?"--no, whales do not have uvulas (uvulae?). In fact very few animals do--humans and apes being some who do.

Then we looked up uvula and found that there is no consensus as to the purpose of the uvula. It may not be to elicit a gag reflex. The uvula secretes saliva, so perhaps it helps coat the throat; it is responsible for the formation of some sounds in some languages, so perhaps evolved as our languages did; it closes off the nasopharynx so that you don't constantly blow milk out of your nose. No one knows for sure what it's for.

What is it for??? I really want to know now.

New poll up at the left. Please vote and make your voice heard about this extremely important issue. Thank you.

DoulaMomma's Art Moment Last Week

My cyber friend, DoulaMomma, recently wrote about being caught by her 4 year old son throwing out said 4 year old son's art work...Oh. My. God. Can you imagine the reaction?!

Read about it here. May I offer my deepest sympathies for everyone involved.

Less is More

See all of that fantastic information over to the left? See all of the links of places to go to learn more? See that? I need to get rid of almost all of that, I think. Why? Because it's too cluttered around here, that's why. I think I need to streamline here.

Have any of you gone to any of those links? Which ones? Did you find them useful? Do you think they are good resources? Did you learn something new? Did you learn something that will help you in your life?

If this was your blog, how would you make it look different? How would you declutter?

No Time to Post Today--Again

This has happened before. Real life takes precedence over cyber/internet/youtubes/google/blogspot/facebook/mothering.com/DailyKos/HuffingtonPost life. My real mother is here and my real father will be coming back from a lunch with friends shortly.

I'm enjoying hearing my mom read to my kids right now as I type this out. Earlier, my son wrote out a googol for my mother--a one with one hundred zeros. That's a big number.

Any way, see you cyber-people later. I have a real life to live here, you know. I know you're real too over there where you are. I don't mean to diminish your reality... But I don't interface with that--I just get pixels from you people, so it's not really real to me. Really.

So, no time to post.

Uh oh...I've Discovered Facebook...

Well, I am now a member of Facebook. You know what that means don't you? I will never experience reality again. Never. All of my understanding of the world will come through Daily Kos and Huffington Post and Mothering.com and now my connection to my friends will come through their and my Facebook pages. On the other hand, I wasn't calling anyone, and no one was calling me and I have now had little chats here and there yesterday and the night before with the fun, caring people who are my friends, but when do we have time to connect? We don't.

I've slipped into the Matrix...or have I? Or was my life before the Matrix?

If a Soccer Ball Falls in a Forest...

My son has discovered Monty Python...not the nude bits, of course, just the clean skits on youtube. He likes this Philosophical Soccer. As he says, "What is soccer? Why does the ball exist? Why do we think of the ball as round? Why does the ball appeal to us? Why is this sphere so common?" Really. Why? Good questions, Son.

What questions does this skit conjure up for you? It's important to ask the big questions , isn't it? An unexamined life is not worth living...

New Guestbook--You Can Contact Me!

I have a new guestbook up on the left there. Do you see it? If you want to contact me now, you can! You can keep it public, and others will see it--the default setting. Or, if you want to say something privately to me, be sure to click the "private" box when you sign in the guestbook.

Sign in if you'd like to. Ask a question. Angrily react to that unbelievable jive post I put up there the other day--just kidding, that would never happen! Say anything you want.

You are welcome here!

Weltschmerz

My grandmother, my dad's mother, would give me her Amnesty International letters when she was done copying them, so that I could type them up and send them to whatever offensive, cruel dictator was torturing and keeping political prisoners. By shining a light on the injustice, it helped to apply the pressure of world condemnation and free hundreds of prisoners. It worked and probably still does...which brings me to my point.

I'm sad. I feel futile. Not completely futile, but I feel like there are those that care and those who don't and the ones who don't care outnumber the ones who do and we're in trouble. It wouldn't matter, if it didn't matter, but it does matter.

I've felt this way before. In the 80's I marched at nuclear freeze rallies in Chicago. While at school in Santa Fe, I was part of a peaceful blockade of Los Alamos and no bombs were built for about an hour and then we were all arrested. It was a small, small gesture, but it felt like we were doing something.

The blockade got me handcuffed (with those plastic tie thingies with the barbs that you put around Glad garbage bags and the like), fingerprinted, photographed, dressed in an orange jumper so if I made a break for it across the New Mexican desert, I would have been easily caught. My cell companion was a tiny lizard that scuttled across the floor. I didn't get to know the habits of a jail lizard because we were out, released to my friend's dad, in about 3 hours. It really wasn't hard time. This wasn't the march on Selma. It was just a protest and they arrested us college kids for obstructing traffic. We kind of felt like Arlo Gutherie in Alice's Restaurant where he was on the bench with the mother rapers and the father stabbers and the father rapers and he was asked, "What were you arrested for, Kid?" He told them he was busted for littering.

These days I write on my piddly little blog hoping to inspire others to cut back on what they don't need, what is getting us all into so much trouble--our American, absolutely out sized thirst for things. We must have, all the bloody time and it has created: a garbage gyre the size of Texas in the Pacific, pollution all over the world, slave labor and way under compensated labor all over the world, human rights abuses, oil consumption that has such a horrific effect--did you know that some greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for decades? So, the polluted atmosphere that we're seeing now is a result of what we did all of this last century and before...how many hummers were there back then? What will we see 50 years from now?

The quest for things has a more personal scope as well as causing such havoc around the world. What are we doing when we're buying, throwing out, and quickly buying again? What holes are permanently filled by such actions? Is there some space that will get filled in by these things? Why the need to buy more? As a society we've been suckered and conned and many see American society and America as merely a capitalist enterprise. Our citizenship is to be expressed by our purchases (God Bless the USA!! t-shirts) instead of involvement and pressure to force change.

I don't think the fat cats are going to give it up willingly--I think we all have to get mad and make them change.

One of the comments to my I-can't-believe-Palin-doesn't-know-Africa's-a-continent-post (I later conceded that she probably did know after all...) was from someone who agreed with another angry poster that I was filled with hate and she wondered why everything had to be about politics. I'll tell you why. This is why:

• The ice caps are melting because we create too much pollution.
• The world is warming and creating erratic, unpredictable, damaging weather.
• Greenland's, Alaska's, Europe's glaciers are all retreating--Europe's glaciers supply water to its citizens. Where will the water come from when these are gone?
• Bee Colony Collapse Disorder is causing bees to die in many places around the world--are you going to hand pollinate fruit and vegetables and grain...who will? What will you and your family eat?
• Our country has been torturing people--pouring water into faces and throats almost to the point of drowning (waterboarding). We've had special extradition--sending people to countries that torture so they will do that for us. These are people who've not had trials, nor have they been specifically charged. There's no proof of guilt for anything.
• We've engaged in an unprovoked war that has killed almost one hundred thousand (some say more) innocent Iraqi civilians and has maimed tens of thousands of our men and women and killed over four thousand of our soldiers.

There are more things wrong, but that's enough to start being a little political, isn't it? How will these things change, if not through active citizens demanding it? Obama gave so much hope for so many--he gets it. He has announced that he will close Guantanamo. That's a start.

In the meantime, I'm sad. I don't do very much towards changing any of this. I try to inform as I learn things, and I try to share how our life experiment, The Compact, is going--maybe others will join us? And then I see what people are interested in--purchasing stuff, Hollywood gossip, popular culture. It's disheartening. I know others are worried about our shared future and care too, but my frustration comes in the realization that using cloth napkins is not going to halt the retreat of glaciers. I can wipe up spills in the kitchen with our old cloth diapers and it won't keep the oceans rising. If I buy used clothing from Goodwill, it doesn't stop slave labor making plastic spiders in China.

They're chopping down rain forests to plant palms for bio-diesel fuel production.

They're making "green" objects that you still don't really need--it will still be unnecessary consumption. People will then feel that they're saving the earth when they buy recycled paper napkins: post-consumer no less. Or, when they buy a giant hybrid SUV that gets maybe 18 mpg instead of 8 mpg. Go green!!

Where are the corporations in all of this? They exist for their own survival--not your's, not mine, not the earth's. They will not change without force. They will change if they think it's good for their bottom line.

What if they had to recycle all of their excessive packaging--what if they were responsible for that garbage? Do you think they would produce more, or less? There are such laws in Germany. They've reduced their waste by significant amounts. These were regulations passed by the government--industry didn't volunteer these changes.

And speaking of Germany, my grandmother told me back in my nuclear freeze days that I had the German term, Weltschmerz--world pain, basically. I did, and do. But, I'm not completely depressed. I have the immediacy of my life with my kids and husband and friends. I'm not thinking about the melting polar ice caps when I'm making faces with my daughter and son. I allow joy and hope in. I try to give it to them as well. Oh, but I wonder what my husband and I will leave for my kids and theirs, and theirs, and theirs. It matters, I think, and I'm a little sad about it all.

Oh well. Thanksgiving is coming soon. Let's just listen to some Arlo Guthrie now and you can imagine me as a 17 year old weltschmerz struck girl in a Santa Fe jail watching a scuttling lizard on the floor.

Lizards probably don't care about melting polar ice caps.



Part two...

People Want Obama Buttons!

Do you know what people want? Obama buttons, that's what!

I have looked on my stat counter and have been seeing for weeks and weeks that people are doing google searches to find where they can get a free Obama button. I wrote about getting my free Obama button from Moveon.org and people find that post.

Look at all of these google searches by people from Pennsylvania, Indiana, Minnesota, Washington D.C., and Florida looking for an Obama button.


People come here every day looking for a button...unless, they're looking for other things.

These people are all looking for free Obama stuff. They're not picky. The just need some stuff, it doesn't matter if it's a button, or a shirt or a bumper sticker. "Where can I get some free Obama stuff?!" they eagerly implore! You came to the right place here, active citizens, as I am always extolling the virtue of not buying stuff and getting stuff for free, recycling and freecycling.

Look at the people from Kansas, Ohio, New Mexico and California all seeking out their free Obama stuff.







I don't know if you can still get a free Obama button or not. I read somewhere that Moveon.org has given out over 2 million buttons. They might be out...but, you could try.

Here's a link to them to see if you can get a button, or other "free Obama stuff"

Good luck activist citizens! If you do get a button, wear it with pride and the hope and expectation of an Obama presidency in January. Yes we can!

If you want to buy a button, you can go here to Obama's site. Some of you might still be buying things unlike my family...OK, a confession is forthcoming, but it's not all that bad. Really.

Keating Five

I've written about the Keating Five before. I had a link in that previous post that brings you to a site that speaks about all aspects of the Keating Five scandal. You can read it for a quick summary of what happened and why.

Obama's campaign has recently released a video that explains it all in further detail and shows the link between the deregulation back then and now and how it has led to the financial morass we are all in. McCain's campaign says the Keating Five investigation was a political smear job. Yeah, except the other four of the Keating five were Democrats...so, not a political smear job. Just routing out corruption and McCain was part of that.

At the time, December 1999, McCain thought he had done something wrong. He said, "The fact is, it was the wrong thing to do, and it will be on my tombstone and deservedly so," So McCain, how can you back pedal now? We have the Google you know. We have the intertubes, and the interwebs. We can see what happened for ourselves. We can look it up. You would know that if you knew even a little bit about the world wide google/web/tubes/yahoo/ thingy. But, ya don't.

After the investigation by Congress into the whole Keating Five scandal, McCain said that he was contrite and knew the error of his ways. Now, he says he never did anything wrong. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! You WERE contrite and now you say you did NOTHING wrong?!? What were you contrite about then? That makes no sense. That's a lie. Was the contrition a lie, or is now saying that you did nothing wrong a lie? Which is it?

Who else do we know that never admits mistakes? Who else has that kind of intellectual dishonesty? Who else lies a lot? (HINT: It's sort of spelled like "Lush", which is what he was...but it's pronounced more like "Push" which is how he got us into war...)

"You set up perverse systems that allow people to lie." says a former regulator in this video about the scandal then and now. Perverse. That doesn't sound reasonable or measured or smart or thoughtful or insightful. We don't want perverse policies do we?

Look at this video and judge for yourself.

Random Questions for You

The other day, I posted a response over at Pioneer Woman's blog. Do you know her? She's a homeschooling rancher's wife and a great photographer. Since then, people have been visiting me from over there and I've been absolutely inundated with throngs of wonderful, curious people. Thanks for visiting my blog!

I get lots of other visitors too, some from Mothering, some from google searches, some from other blogs who've listed me as good people. (Thanks, and it's mutual). Mostly, people are fairly quiet when they visit here. But, I thought it'd be fun if I could ask you guys questions, and hopefully you'll feel like answering. Answer any or all of the questions--whatever strikes your mood! I would like to get to know all of you.


Here we go:

If you had your choice of a chocolate croissant or some potato chips, which would you choose?

Would you rather laugh or cry at a movie?

Who's your favorite philosopher?

Which is your favorite monster family--Addams or Munsters?

Do you care about public aesthetics? (I hate the look of certain water towers, for example--do you find some structures in public spaces that you don't like?)

Kids, or no kids? How many?

How did you meet your partner?

How long have you been together?

What is important to you?

What work do you do that's important?

What do you love?

What do you hate?

What worries you?

What sustains you?

What reaffirms your faith in Man?

Do you always use your turn signal?

What are you looking for?

What have you found?

What have you lost?

Milk chocolate or dark?

Will the Cubs ever win the World Series, and do you care?

What's your favorite Summer Olympics event, and do you love the Olympics as much as I do? (It's coming soon!)

When you create, what do you do?

What's your least favorite chore around the house?

What do you like least about this blog (I might have some ideas...)

What do you like most about this blog?




Thanks very much for participating in the first interactive We Don't Buy It data retrieval process trends analysis compilation set!

What??

French Translation. Bon jour France!

I looked at my stat counter the other day, and noticed that someone from Ile-de-france, Paris, France clicked on my blog after a google search for Cheap Trick at Budokan. They then had it translated into French by google!

Look:




I feel like I should be more sophisticated than I am. I feel like this should be no big deal...but, I can't help it!! It's a HUGE deal!!! THIS IS SO COOL!!

I'm not buying anything new, so I have to amuse myself with life instead. Not that cyber space IS life, because it isn't. But, I am sitting here typing away and the kids are playing behind me with battling robots that they built from a k-nex set and that they're having invade a doll house. Since they are children that IS life. It works for us.

All I know is that I feel like Steve Martin in The Jerk. He yelled excitedly that he was famous after seeing himself in print in the phone directory.

"I've been translated!! I've been translated!!"

Pitiful, ne trouves-tu pas?

Google Searches

NOTE: Click on each google search to see it better.

I've spoken about this before. You know that many people stumble across this blog because of google searches. With my trusty Stat Counter at my disposal, I can track where in all of cyber space they've come from and where they thought they were headed. Some searches reasonably drop them off in We-Don't-Buy-It land. It makes sense. Like, for example, look at all of these kefir searches:


I actually wrote about kefir. Kefir was the subject. I linked to Dom's kefir site which will tell you anything you could ever want to know about kefir. I feel relatively well assured that the people who came here with all of their kefir questions found something worthwhile. They found something they could use.

And, here, although I was critical of Trader Joe's organic frozen strawberries cross Atlantic voyage all the way from Turkey, still those people interested in frozen strawberries would maybe be able to glean something useful from my little rant. Here they are searching for information about strawberries:



Here, someone was looking for where to go to buy the stupidest thing he/she could. I think it's fun that someone else, somewhere else in the world is even interested in the concept of stupid stuff! It's like they get it...unless they weren't being sardonic and they really WANT to get stupid stuff...



After reading about a family in St. Louis who are working very hard to reduce their waste and have put themselves on a "waste diet", I wrote a post and asked about handkerchiefs and whether there even is a handkerchief etiquette. (My friend Neo-Agrarian discovered that there is.) Someone else was curious about this,


Another person was probably looking for something along the lines of this,

not this,
when they had this google search for McGill castle

Someone in Adelaide, Autralia was curious about Cheap Trick.

All of these previous searches are interesting, but it is these following searches that I find the most compelling.

I've written, really confessed, about purchasing new ballet shoes for my daughter right in the first month of our year long compact not to buy anything new. I didn't buy her used ones, I just shot right out and got her a new pair. Ultimately, I'm OK with that. We are not going to be perfect in this quest of ours and that was OK to do. Also, I wrote about how the Republicans in our township tried to get me to vote their way by sending me a sample ballot. Mass mailings are funny creatures--like those giant fishing nets that inadvertantly catch dolphins when they're trying to get tuna--they are just sent out all over the place and they will hopefully snare a Republican or two and don't even care that the rest of us Democrats or Independents or Greens or Libertarians or Socialists are flopping around on deck frantically gasping for breath. I wrote about it in a post called, Republican Sample Ballot, or Barking up the Wrong Tree.

So in the mish-mash, crazy, topsy turvy world that is the internet and google searches, those two ideas, "ballet" and "republican sample ballots" converge here at We Don't But It. The search engines know this. No sane human would know this because we can think and discern. We are not cold electronic computers like HAL. We can know what people are TRYING to say, even when they're saying it wrong. So...when the good Republicans around this nation were looking for a Republican Sample Ballot, and they mistakenly typed in, Republican Sample BALLET...well, they got dumped right here. Ball-OT. Not Ball-ET. Ballot. Ballet. Ballot. Ballet. I can see it. Kind of. I'm not perfect in my writing either. I'm sure I make goofs all of the time. Even so, I can't help it--I think these searches are funny. Look:

I think it all just comes down to the fact that I'm easily amused, which frankly bodes well for my family...

Aesthetics

Packaging sells stuff. How you see something sometimes determines if you look more, and if you then buy it. Looks then really do matter and do tell us a lot about things.

I am actually trying to sell something here. I don't think I'm doing a hard sell. I don't think I'm being strident or pushy. But, I would like it if there was less consumption all around the world. I'm promoting that idea at this free site. I'm showing through my own family's example how people could make alternative choices about buying stuff and what people could do instead of purchasing things at Walmart or Best Buy. I would like it, if this idea caught on.

I have said in a previous post that I feel that life is fragile and short and whatever gets you through the night is just fine with me. I'm not going to judge you for going to Walmart and getting a dozen sweater shavers because they're on sale--how could you NOT buy them!!!!???? I'm not trying to fool you into being more conscious about your own consumption, I'm just trying to help you think about your own consumption. I am not without an underlying purpose here, but it's not insidious, and I think I'm up front about it.

Knowing, as I do, that marketing does sell, I am trying to see how this blog could be more appealing. How could I make changes that draw in more people, that keep them engaged in a way that they are then even more receptive to my upfront not-at-all insidious message? Packaging sells. How could I package this blog differently?

I kind of like the spare quality of this blog. Colors show up in some of the photos and it feels pleasant. It's not too jarring, in my humble opinion. On the other hand, maybe a bit more color would liven things up. What if I fooled around with the colors a bit?

Would the yellow background, here, make the blues and greens more lush and soothing? Would it bring a certain warmth and comforting feel to the blog? Would it lend a brightness like a sunny day?




What about this blue background? Would it seem more moody, or ethereal or placid? Would the blog take on a more subdued quality? When I write about serious or somber things, would the subjects gain some additional credibility by virtue of the blue?




Would this muddishy color bring out an earthiness to the blog? Would our more down-to-earth lifestyle be reflected more in this earthier color? Although, it's kind of hideous isn't it?




Um, no. Not up for debate. Not even under gun point. Not avant garde, not interesting, not urban and cutting edge. No. No, no, no, no, no.

ACK!!!!

Leave a comment and vote. What do you think? Should it be white, yellow, blue, mud, orange, or purple?

The Cyber Side of the Street

My Dad is now finally hooked up to the internet. For a long time, he had a little mail station which was a device that allowed him to send and receive e-mail, but would not allow for attachments or for navigating the internet. He is just starting out on his round-the-world discovery of cyber space. How exciting!

And speaking of round-the-world, I mentioned in a previous post that I can see where my visitors come from with the stat counter that is associated with this blog. It's not really big brotherish, but sorta, kinda. I can know if you've come here from say Boise, Idaho, and how long you stayed and if you've come here before and if you came here from a google search looking for a specific subject. Kinda big brotherish, but with the anonymity of the internet in that I don't know who is driving the computer that sent you here through cyber space and dropped you off in We Don't Buy It land.

LOTS of people have come to my blog looking to read about kefir. There seems to be a worldwide subculture of grain heads who are into kefir. (I'm one of them, but I didn't realize how many more there were out there. I speak curd...)

Some people, it seems, were wanting to find out about yurts in Connecticut and instead ended up at my blog at this post. My post which drew comparisons between yurts, and our house model, the Connecticut. If they read it, it might have amused them, but it didn't inform them about seeing yurts in Connecticut, or buying yurts in Connecticut, or building codes about yurts in Connecticut--to say nothing of zoning regulations... Try putting up a yurt in New Canaan or Greenwich and see how that flies. I bet it doesn't!

A couple of days ago a person from Berlin, Germany tried to find out about cakes. They did a search that said, "Birthday Cake to Buy in London". Someone is going to have a birthday in London some time and this nice Berliner is looking into finding out where to get a cake. How very nice. How thoughtful to be doing this kind of research for a friend, a lover, or a family member! Was this poor, kind soul directed to a number of bakeries in London, maybe in Kensington, or Covent Garden? No. They were instead diverted to my blog where they read a post titled, "Floam birthday cake...Yum!" Helpful, huh?!

All this to say that although the internet can open up the world to you with instant and varied information, it can also fling you across continents and oceans where you end up in a suburb of Chicago looking for a place to buy a birthday cake in London.

Watch yourself, Dad. Look both ways before you cross the cyber street.