I wonder if this laptop bag would have helped my friend Kai in Barcelona, where he was robbed twice on one trip.
It’s a bag that has an alarm and strobe lights you can activate quite easily, but what if you don’t know your bag’s been stolen?
Personally, I think it would be more useful to have a magic harp, like the one Jack tries to pinch in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I like the idea of possessions that know when they are being stolen and call for help.
After climbing the beanstalk, “Jack is hidden by the giant’s wife and overhears the giant counting his money. Jack steals a bag of gold coins as he makes his escape down the beanstalk. Jack repeats his journey up the beanstalk two more times, each time he is helped by the increasingly suspicious wife of the giant and narrowly escapes with one of the giant’s treasures. The second time, he steals a hen which laid golden eggs and the third time a magical harp that played by itself.”
If I can’t have magic, I think I would at least want a gizmo that can activate the bag’s alarm from a distance as soon as I realize it’s been stolen.
When I worked with Denise at a certain hyped management magazine, I always knew she had better things in her than the tasks she was given there.
Moreover, she was the most sensible 25-year-old I had ever met. After moving on to better jobs, including writing for teens at Scholastic, she turned to the hardest and most important work in the world. And on the whole, it seems to suit her.
But nothing can stop the itch to write. Here she shares the joy and frustration of reading repetitive stories to book-hungry kids:
“Nothing brings me more joy than knowing how much my 5-year-old son, Isaiah, looks forward to sitting in our rocking chair while I read him books at bedtime. And my heart swells with love whenever my 2-year-old twins, Joel and Nina, bring me books and say, ‘Read book, please.’
“But, holy moly, I’ve run into a very serious problem. While Isaiah can enjoy a variety of different stories, the twins are all about sameness. Even though I rotate their books constantly so we’re not reading the same ones every week, the repetitiveness of reading these books is driving me crazy.
“I’m sure many parents are familiar with the rhythm and rhyme scheme of many children’s board books, ‘Bend and reach, touch your toes. Now stand up straight and touch your nose!’ Lately, I’ve been adding a few colorful rhymes in my head as I read these books to the twins. ‘Clap your hands, then point to your shoes, reading this book is driving me to booze!’ ” Read more.
(I admit I felt the same way about Richard Scarry. The pictures were darling, but the words, not so, even if I did let “five-seater pencil car” become part of my vocabulary.)
For a mom with twins, it is must be twice as much “bend, reach, touch your toes,” but for sure these kids will grow up to be readers.
Eben Horton, a glassblower with a studio in Wakefield, Rhode Island, loved hearing how glassblowers in Lincoln City, Oregon, had hidden special creations on a local beach for a community treasure hunt.
Inspired to do something similar, he settled on the idea of glass floats, the kind traditionally used on fishing nets.
The Block Island Tourism Council helped Horton launch the Glass Float Project. The council’s site has details.
“WHEN: The hunt begins June 2nd, 2012, and continues indefinitely. It only ends when all the floats have been found!
“WHAT: 200 Glass Floats (glass orbs about the size of a grapefruit) will be hidden on Block Island. Floats will be dated, numbered and stamped with the shape of Block Island. All floats are clear glass except for 12 (because it is 2012), which are special colored orbs. One super special float is made entirely out of gold leaf.
“WHERE: 100 floats on beaches and 100 floats on Greenway trails. Floats will be hidden above the high tide mark but NEVER in the dunes or up the bluffs.”
Understandably, they don’t want people walking on the dunes, which protect the island in storms.
Check the council website for the bio on the artist, too: “Eben creates custom one of a kind pieces on an individual basis out of his studio that he calls ‘The Glass Station’- a converted 1920’s gas station.” More.
These photos were placed on the Greenway sidewalk near Boston’s North End. They are the result of the Flash Forward Festival for emerging photographers, which took place earlier this month. The event is sponsored by the Magenta Foundation of Magenta magazine (“publishing for the arts”).
“Set within the Boston cityscape, the five-day festival is based out of the Fairmont Battery Wharf, offering an in-depth experience through organized networking events and educational programming that brings internationally respected industry professionals together to share their knowledge with the next generation of photographers. Programming includes curated indoor and outdoor exhibitions, a Harborwalk exhibition series featuring work from local galleries, along with lectures, panel discussions, and nightly events.” Read more about it here.
I am trying too figure out what the acronym RAW stands for. It’s an organization to promote young artists in many media.
“RAW:natural born artists is an independent arts organization, for artists, by artists. We’re a community made up of creative individuals across the nation. Our mission is to provide independent artists within the first 10 years of their career with the tools, resources and exposure needed to inspire and cultivate creativity.”
The website says that in 2003, Heidi Luerra moved from a small town to Los Angeles to become a fashion designer. But being a small fish in a big pond was a struggle. She met young people in other fields who were also struggling, and she had an idea for bringing them together.
“In 2005, Heidi Luerra threw her first multi-faceted showcase in Los Angeles. After much interest from the over 750 attendees that came to the event, she found her calling — to create a platform for the many people who are talented, yet go unnoticed.
“In 2009, equipped with a mission of bringing tools and resources to artists who were fighting the good fight on their own, RAW was born. After the first RAW event, a local web developer, Matthew Klahorst, approached Heidi about combining these art events with an online showcase for artists. From this collaboration came the next evolution of RAW — promoting artists both online and offline.
“In 2011, they decided to take the concept beyond Southern California. RAW now hosts monthly showcases that spotlight indie talent in film, fashion, music, art, hair & makeup artistry, performing art and photography in 54 cities across the U.S and counting. By July 2012, RAW will be in 54 U.S. cities and Australia. RAW will launch in China and Europe in 2013.”
Read more. And if you are an artist in the first ten years of your career, consider joining the showcase.
No doubt I would have grown up to be a photographer if the Brownie cameras and box cameras I used as a child had not gotten sand in them. After at least a week of high anticipation, the film kept coming back black. Very discouraging. All the effort I had put into creating little still-life scenes with dolls and sea shells — wasted!
So a word to the wise, if you take a camera to the beach, protect it.
I got a few pictures on this lovely June day, but I fear they lack the artistry that surely would have been evident had sand not mysteriously worked its way into all cameras in my youth.
An article in the Christian Science Monitor talks about Family-to-Family, a nonprofit group started by a kindly New York woman who was moved to help people less fortunate.
Reporter Katherine Arms writes that Pam Koner “started her charity, Family-to-Family, in 2002 when she saw a newspaper article about Pembroke, Ill., which noted that 51 percent of families with children there were living below the poverty line.
“She was shocked to read that the town had little in the way of infrastructure: no supermarket, no pharmacy, no bank. Many families lived in houses with dirt floors.
“She immediately sprang into action and found families [in] Hastings-on-Hudson, a small commuter village just 19 miles north of New York City, who wanted to help families in Pembroke. Soon food – canned vegetables, fruit, spaghetti sauce, tuna – was on its way.”
Here is Koner’s story and the story of how Family-to-Family efforts spread.
Now here is my question. Since there are many organizations doing nearly the same thing, why do so many people start their own organization?
Answer: Because it’s theirs. That’s what I think anyway. Rather than work for the Red Cross, the Salvation Army or any other established group, people like to do their own thing. It’s more motivating. Even though only the big organizations can handle the big disasters, everyone can do a little bit that is important to some person in need.
At the same time, I can’t help wondering about the rest of the Pembroke story. Do the people need to rely on donations forever? Has the state noticed Pembroke? Has it offered home renovation or weatherization? Training? Jobs? If you know anything about Pembroke, please tell me.
Although there are alternative possibilities for a morning walk, I nearly always take the same route. I like to see the small changes — new plants blooming, different books in the book shop window, a house being renovated. I feel like I can keep checking out this small territory and never know it all.
I am reminded of a far more eloquently expressed thought by T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
These are the pictures I took early this morning. First is a tree I pass often. I love the trunk. Next is the herb garden behind the church.
Next time I pass this way, I will add a flower to the little memorial in the third picture.
Yvonne Zipp wrote a nice article about a Christian Science Monitor-designated Difference Maker. He is Mario Morino, a philanthropist based in Rocky River, Ohio, outside Cleveland. He wrote the free book Leap of Reason to help large nonprofits demonstrate that they are serving the public in the ways they think they are.
Zipp writes that in 2009, after a day of meetings with three different nonprofit boards, Morino was about to burst from frustration.
“At each, a board was discussing how it would assess its nonprofit group. The problem? ‘There wasn’t a nonprofit executive in the room,’ he says.” How could the people who run nonprofits and the boards that assess them ever get agreement on worthwhile measures?
“Morino, who owned his own software development business in the 1980s before setting up the Morino Institute and later Venture Philanthropy Partners, went home and fired off one e-mail, then another. After a fourth, he had what became the core of his book, Leap of Reason, which has more than 40,000 copies in circulation so far – an impressive number for a book about the rarefied topic of nonprofit management. …
The book isn’t aimed at small nonprofits or “civic-minded individuals, Morino says. ‘They represent the strongest core of philanthropy in the US. You don’t want to touch that.’ He likens these folks to his long-ago neighbors in Cleveland, where, ‘if somebody’s building a garage, everyone helped build the garage.’
However, “of the 1.5 million nonprofit groups in the US, 40,000 have budgets of more than $1 million, according to Bridgespan [an organization that consults to nonprofits]. They are the targets of Leap of Reason.”
More here on how the data-driven approach outlined in the book has helped some large nonprofits become more effective.
By the way, the Center for Effective Philanthropy, where WordPress blogger Judith once worked as a writer, addresses the same issue. And Zipp’s article lists other organizations that advise charities.
Photograph of Mario Morino, Ken Blaze / Special to the Christian Science Monitor
I have been reading a comic book by Jessica Abel, “How to Make Radio That’s Good,” about Ira Glass and his special brand of storytelling for Public Radio International’s “This American Life.” The book was recommended by a National Public Radio guest speaker where I work. The library was able to order it from WBEZ in Chicago, but it might be out of print.
I have to admit that I have never been a huge fan of “This American Life” or the Ira Glass style of speech. But I’m really liking his ideas on how to build a story from a central character and hooking onto “something surprising.”
And I love this little animation of one of the shows, which is a near-perfect illustration of the comic book’s precepts.
As you may recall, Occupy Boston camped out in Dewey Square. Today the new sod and the demonstration garden are flourishing alongside gourmet food trucks — and on farmers market days, alongside vendor tents.
But it’s still a place for the public voice to express itself. I hope you can see these chalk drawings, captured Tuesday. Already gone, they were a rather fleeting public voice, as street art often is. One is called “Octopi Boston.” There’s another featuring Cirque du Soleil and one on the Red Sox. Icon Architecture stealth is apparently behind that one.
Some days I walk in Boston and snap the sights down side streets. The first photo was taken near the harbor. The others were taken near Downtown Crossing.
I like the Adrienne Rich line painted on a bookstore wall: “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
Most of my family (other than me) does a lot of biking. John, for example, biked from Arlington, Mass., to Syracuse, N.Y., last week just because he felt like it. It took several days.
My husband bikes most weekends in good weather. And he reads a biking magazine where he saw a story he thought would interest my Swedish readers.
Writes April Streeter at Treehugger (reprinted by the biking magazine), “If you want to find an unassuming place where bicycling is a way of life and nobody makes a big deal about it, head south. The south of Sweden, that is, where the small university town of Lund has a big bicycle habit. They just don’t advertise it.
“In Lund, 60% of the populace bikes or takes public transport to go about their daily tasks. And then there’s Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city — only 20 miles southwest of Lund. Malmö also doesn’t have a reputation for fantastic biking. But some [Swedes] say it is the country’s best biking city — ahead of both Stockholm, the capital; Gothenburg, the second largest Swedish metropolitan area, and a host of smaller bike-friendly burgs.
“Just across the Øresund sound from Copenhagen, Malmö has always lived a bit in the shadow of the Danish capital. But in the last few years it has done a lot to take a place among the great biking cities of Northern Europe, mostly by its investment in infrastructure and pure commitment to get people on their bikes. That has paid off — cycling has increased 30% each year for the last four years, while car trips under five kilometers have dropped.
“Now Malmö is upping the stakes by putting up 30 million Swedish crowns (about US$4.1 million) toward the building of a four-lane super cycling highway between it and its bike-happy northern neighbor city Lund.” See the article here.
Feel like dancing? I’d love to see this sort of thing in every town in America. How nice it would be to walk a few blocks on a summer evening, and there it would be!
“It’s Monday night in Boston. Under the locust trees of the Blackstone Community Center surrounded by basketball games, tight parking spaces, and children playing, the dance floor heats up in the park as the night air cools off and the stars come out.
“Many salseros in Boston claim [Salsa in the Park] as their favorite event of the city, not only for the appeal of dancing outside ‘al aire libre’, but as a way to give back to the community. Dancers volunteer all summer, donating their time to teach dance lessons to adults and children, set up dance floors, assist with event staffing, maintain a recycling program, and clean up from the festivities until late into the evening.
“This event is staffed in collaboration with the Mayor’s Program of Cambridge, and the Blackstone Community Center Youth Summer Programs. We emphasize healthy lifestyle choices for the individual and the community, through dancing, healthy food options, and greening our event as much as possible with educational materials and interactive information.”
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