Burlesque against Breast Cancer!

Folks in the New York area have a good reason to look at scantily clad women on November 14th ...
The Miss Hollywood Follies is putting on a second Burlesque Against Breast Cancer event, the proceeds of which go to benefit CancerCare.
Performers include Miss Dirty Martini, Nasty Canasta, Jo Boobs, Little Brooklyn, The World Famous "Bob", Darlinda just Darlinda, Clams Casino as well as the talents of Albert Cadabra, Tyler Fyre, The Starlettes and our friend The Lady Aye!

Get details and tickets here.

Is big business good for organics?

The recent issue of Ode Magazine makes the somewhat radical claim that the mainstreaming of organics is a good thing:

The accelerated advance of organic production means less and less poison is used to produce our food—poison that damages the planet and threatens our health. It also means that the use of genetic manipulation—the effects of which are unclear—is declining, since organic production prohibits it. And it means food will be less often irradiated to extend its shelf life.
...
Then there’s the promising fact that these economies of scale—resulting from the fast growth of Wal-Mart and Whole Foods—will increase people’s access to organic foods. The yield of the small-scale production of the past was mainly destined for the elite consumer while studies show that currently, two-thirds of Americans occasionally buy organic goods.

However they recognize the possible problems that could result from corporate influence on the future of organics and they recommend these 4 steps: Tighten organic certification standards, Include more information on labels, Adopt fair-trade policies, maintain realistic energy prices. Personally, I wonder if Wal-Mart will be as enthusiastic about organics if these changes happen. Read the entire article here and decide for yourself.

Will your vote count?

Before you go cast your ballot in November you might want to read these articles...

The Mother Jones article "Try Voting Here" lists the 11 worst places in America to place a vote. For example #9 in Walter County, Texas:

Prairie View A&M is a black school in the heart of east Texas, where the local leadership has, over many decades, worked to deny the students' claims to being full-time county residents and thus eligible to vote. In 2003, Waller County district attorney Oliver Kitzman wrote a letter to the elections administrator and the local newspaper warning that any students who tried to vote could face 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The NAACP filed suit, noting that as far back as 1979 the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling on a lawsuit brought by Prairie View students, held that students could register to vote in the communities in which they attended college. Students in Arkansas, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, and Virginia have also been prevented or discouraged from registering; in Williamsburg, Virginia, William and Mary students were denied permission to register merely for acknowledging that they were going home on vacation.

And Rolling Stone asks "Will The Next Election Be Hacked?" in an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. which reviews the problems with the new electronic voting machines:

The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised - by people inside, and outside, the companies.

Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party.

Thanks Charlie!

Subversive Knitting

The Knitta crew tag public property like graffiti artists, except their medium is yarn instead of spray paint. Check out their latest pieces here.

via Veer

Eating Green?

The folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) have made a simple online tool to help you see the effects of your diet on the environment. For instance, if you had 5 servings of beef in a week, the cows you ate produced 7,359 pounds of manure. Are you ready to put your diet to the test? Try out the Eating Green Calculator.

The Voting Public

The UK based Space Hijackers have "discovered" several London street crossing boxes that have been made into "1984 style" voting booths. They've even provided a downloadable PDF so that others can make thier own voting machines to "help the government"

Thanks Marc!

Lie by Lie

Mother Jones magazine has created an interactive timeline of the history of the Iraq war (from 1990-2003) and the lies that led to it. This is the first installment of an ongoing project and they encourage readers to sign up to be notified when additional items are added.

Quanto Project

The Quanto Project is an international design competition focused on raising awareness of women and children involved in prostitution. Over 400 works were submitted from around the world and 200 pre-selected works are featured on their site. In November 36 winners will be selected for an exhibition in Venice.

Thanks Marc!

Mark Your Calendars

The Fall season of Green Festivals is upon us.

• Washington D.C.'s is October 14-15
• San Francisco's is November 10-12
• Chicago's is April 21-22

There will be dozens of exhibitors plus a wide range of speakers. There's a small cost to attend, but having gone to D.C.'s last year I can say it was well worth it.

Plus Co-Op America is giving away a free trip to the SF event which you can enter by filling out a survey here.

Impact Festival!

Folks in the NYC area should check out the Impact Festival which opened September 12 and runs through the 22nd of October. This international multi-disciplinary festival features work that deals with the intersection of culture and politics.

Next week includes the opening of Women Present, a feminist art show curated by Zoeann Murphy of Bread & Roses. There will also be screenings of The Prosecution of Brandon Hein, Guantanamo Guidebook, We Feed The World, Victoria Para Chino, Rights on The Line, Farmingville, Punishment Park, The Warrior, along with panels, workshops and more.

10 Free Trees! *Offer valid in Sacramento only.

Residents of Sacrameto, California can get 10 free trees by calling their local utility company. The program aims to reduce temperatures in the city via the shade the trees provide. In the last 16 years 375,000 trees have been given away (with another 4 million to go!). From the Washington Post article:

Most American cities have shrinking tree canopies in relation to their growth. That's because of inadequate budgets to maintain older trees and a failure to plant shade trees in new residential and commercial developments, according to federal experts, tree-planting organizations and scholars of urban ecology.
...

Sacramento's shade crusade easily pays for itself, with summertime energy savings about double what SMUD spends on trees each year. As they mature, trees already planted by the utility are expected to save enough electricity to power about 14,000 homes.

Read the entire article here.

When war required sacrifices

I ran into this image while doing some design research in the Northwestern University Library WWII Poster Collection.

Coincidentally a friend just told me that at the height of World War II 40% of produce consumed in the US was grown in Victory Gardens!

ALR in LOHO

Thanks to Pat Arnow, who wrote a lovely article about ALR's design for the the Abrons Arts Center catalog in the LOHO 10002 blog. Check it out here.

Target Targeted

Target has been sued by the National Federation for the Blind because their website is not accesible to people with impaired vision. From the Tech Filter article:

The grounds for this lawsuit are that web sites apply to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target was initially asked to just make their web site accessible and they (Target) moved to have the case dismissed due to there being no law that applies to the Internet or web sites involving the ADA. A federal district court judge, Marilyn Hall Patel, proved them wrong and the plaintiffs are going ahead with the lawsuit due to Targets unwillingness to make the web site accessible.

Read the entire article here and the NFB's press release on the case here.

Thanks Charlie!

RATS, RATS, RATS!

A couple days after Ernesto came through my neighborhood we found this brochure (image left) on our porch. Thanks to some poor planning on the part of the city of Richmond our neighborhood park became a toxic swimming pool filled with sewage and the rats that used to live there have taken up residence in many people's houses. While we were hoping that "Rats Rats Rats" was going to be subtitled "care and feeding of your new pet, courtesy of the City of Richmond" it turns out we've been given another DIY duty:

• Control of rodents on your property is your responsibility.
• Stop feeding rats and giving them a home, and you will control the factors that cause rat infestation.

Gee, thanks! You can download a PDF of the entire brochure here.

DIY Disaster Relief

The neighborhood where I live and work is being considered a possible disaster area by FEMA after tropical depression Ernesto came through last week. I survived relatively unscathed, though some of my neighbors had to be evacuated. In the wake of the storm Red Cross ambulances drove through the area delivering disaster clean-up kits. What's inside these mysterious brown boxes?:

• 1 Mop
  
• 2 Brooms
• 1 "gift from the American Red Cross" bucket (with clean-up instructions on it)
  
• 4 trash bags
• 1 bottle of bleach
• 1 scrub brush
• 1 package of sponges
• 1 package of rubber gloves
• 1 rather scary looking cleaning product called Bully II

Now if only they would come through with some air fresheners for the smell of raw sewage that is pervading the area now that the water has receded.

Next entry I'll show you the brochure on rats that the city just left for me!

Helvetica, the movie!

The ubiquitous typeface gets its due in an upcoming documentary:

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.

Thanks Mica!

Shards O' Glass!

Who doesn't love a delicious popsicle full of broken glass?!? The folks at The Truth have put up an entertaining parody of the cigarette industry's marketing with their Shards O' Glass site. From their "Responsible Marketing" page:

At Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops, we believe in doing the right thing. Our products are intended for adults and as such, we only market to them. While some studies suggest that over 80% of our adult customers started eating Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops before the age of 18, the intent of our marketing efforts is to encourage customers to switch glass pop brands and not to get young people to start licking. In fact, we've introduced a million dollar youth prevention campaign with the highly effective slogan "Licking Glass Pops as a teen? Then you're missing the point!"

Be sure to watch the commercial for Shards O' Glass Lights.

via sum1

Kudos pt. I

Thanks to Andy Fluke at Thirteen Penny Picayune for including us as one of his five BlogDay 2006 picks!

Kudos pt. II

Thanks to the folks at sum1 for adding us to their blogroll and saying:

Zwei Klassiker die eigentlich keiner Vorstellung bedürften für meine Stammleser sind Houtlust und ALR (Another Limited Rebellion), beide sind zumindest zu 60% sum1-kompatibel. Menschen die so auf meiner Wellenlänge sind, kommen meist einmal jede 500 Millionen Erdenbewohner vor. Themen sind Social Design bei ALR im weitesten Sinne, bei Houtlust mit Fokus auf Werbung und manchmal auch Antiwerbung. Fazit: Nicht alle Designer und Werber sind gedankenlose Opportunisten.

Which Babelfish translates as:

Two classical authors those no conception would actually require for my master readers are Houtlust and ALR (Another Limited rebellion), both are at least to 60% sum1-kompatibel. Humans like that on my wavelength are, occur usually once each 500 million ground connection inhabitant. Topics are Social Design with ALR in the broadest sense, with Houtlust with focus on advertisement and sometimes also anti-advertisement. Result: Not all designers and solicitor are thoughtless Opportunisten.

(any actual German speaking folks are welcome to give a more coherent translation!)

Logical Progression

I just realized the other day that the transmogrification of yellow ribbons into ribbon-shaped magnets portends the next logical progression of silicone awareness bracelets being turned into bracelet-shaped magnets (see my illustration above). I feel sick to my stomach even considering making these for real, but I'm sure there's a fortune to be made. Let me know the first time you see one of these on the road.

GMO's gone wild

The Christian Science Monitor writes on the increasing amount of genetically modified plants that are sneaking into the wild:

In rice-growing states, traces of an unapproved genetically modified (GM) rice have been found mixed in with conventional rice meant for human consumption.

In Oregon, genetically engineered creeping bentgrass, being tested for possible use on golf courses, has been found miles outside its test beds, making it the first GM plant known to have escaped into the wild.

In Hawaii, a federal judge has admonished the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for displaying "utter disregard" for the state's endangered native plant species. The judge says the USDA failed to conduct research on the environmental effects of fields of experimental corn and sugarcane that had been genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals. Environmental and food-safety groups have asked for a moratorium on all field tests of experimental drug-producing plants until their safety precautions can be reviewed.

The article also notes that "This year 61 percent of all corn and 89 percent of all soybeans planted in the United States were GM varieties, the USDA estimates. More than 80 percent of the US cotton crop is also GM."

Read the entire article here.

Cancer Fighting Video Game

Re-Mission, from Hope Lab, is a video game designed for teens dealing with cancer, in which they get to play Roxxi, a nanobot that fights cancer cells. It's free to young people with cancer and has been proven effective in helping kids stay healthy! From their site:

HopeLab conducted a randomized, controlled trial to test the effect of Re-Mission on treatment adherence, cancer-related knowledge, self-efficacy, and quality of life among adolescents and young adults with cancer. 375 male and female cancer patients aged 13- 29 were enrolled at 34 medical centers in the US, Canada and Australia, and randomly assigned to receive PCs pre-loaded with a popular video game only or that same control video game plus Re-Mission. Study results, which were presented in March of 2006 at peer-reviewed scientific meetings, indicate that playing Re-Mission produced significant increases in quality of life, self-efficacy, and cancer-related knowledge for adolescents and young adults with cancer. In addition, young people who played Re-Mission maintained higher blood levels of chemotherapy and showed higher rates of antibiotic utilization than those in the control group, both results suggesting that Re-Mission helps patients adhere to cancer therapy regimens.

Just Say No to Drug Ads

Jonathan Rowe, of Commercial Alert, writes about the power of drug ads in a recent edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

Spending on drug ads for the general public more than tripled between 1996 and 2001. It is now some $4 billion a year, which is more than twice what McDonald's spends on ads. In 1994, the typical American had seven prescriptions a year, which is no small number. By 2004, that was up to 12 a year. Homebuilders are touting medicine cabinets that are "triple-wide."

The industry says this is all about "educating" the consumer. But an ad executive was more candid when he said - boasted, really - that the goal is to "drive patients to their doctors." Reuters Business Insight, a publication for investors, explained that the future of the industry depends on its ability to "create new disease markets." "The coming years," it said, "will bear greater witness to the corporate-sponsored creation of disease."

Read the entire article here.