Earth Hour
Does anyone else think the event being based on turning off all "non-essential lights" for an hour is rather ridiculous? Who leaves non-essential lights on? WHO RAISED YOU PEOPLE?
Links
Tall boy, tiny house
Who quits their job in a recession and moves to a cornfield in Iowa to build a little environmentally-focused pod house? While I'm sure we could have a rousing game of guess who here, I'm going to spoil the fun and reveal the answer to be Steve, who finally tired of designing and building things that other people wanted and is going to do so for himself for five months. For the writers out there, this is the architect's equivalent of holing up and writing the great American novel, except in this case it's more like a really, really, ridiculously good poem. Or a haiku. For serious, this is a teensy house:
(For the curious, my request to telecommute from Iowa for part of his absence was politely denied, which is really only good news for this space as finding a roommate will involve dealing with the vagaries of Craigslist, for which I've professed my love before.)
Davey Dance Blog
So there's the guy that dances really, really badly everywhere, and then there's Davey, who has more sick moves than one person should be allowed to posess. I had a hard time picking which video to embed; sometimes the music isn't as peppy as it could be, but it matches the setting really well, and sometimes the song and choreography is great but he's in, like, Iowa City or something. I settled on the following, and I hope it's a fair introduction.
Davey Dance Blog -5- ROMA - Peter Bjorn and John - from Pheasant Plucker on Vimeo
1001 rules for my unborn son
The most recent rule popped up in my feed reader this morning ("312. Don't rush. No coffee until you're 16.") and I realized I better make sure everybody else was reading this site. What with the first posts happening in late May and the 300th rule arriving mid-November, the due date is around February 2010, which either means the author is still trying to get pregnant or is an elephant. Regardless, the commandments are sweet but no-nonsense, and I've agreed with 99% of them so far.
NPR's Planet Money
NPR created this podcast when the economy was just starting to implode, and even though the financial apocalypse is less sensationally horrible now (and more just plain depressing) it's still great reporting of the issues at a level anyone can understand.
I've been listening since the beginning but wanted to wait until my mad investigative journalism skills were featured on the site, which finally happened today:
The devil you know.