Free Hugs for a Home

Will anyone help out a serial Free Hugger and professional nice guy?? I certainly hope so. Juan Mann, founder of the Free Hugs Campaign, is destined to be homeless at the end of the month unless some kindness from strangers comes through. He has been a MySpace friend of mine for almost a year, and everything coming from him is always positive, always loving, always respectful and openly honest.

I am not in a position personally to offer a home or financial assistance, but somewhere from out in cyberspace, I'm sure his guardian angel will appear. Miracles are only extraordinary commonplace occurrences -- I expect one daily!

Read the details of his plight here.

Visit his other sites at Free Hugs Campaign HQ, Juan Mann TV, Free Hugs Campaign on MySpace.

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Retro-Future Art: To The Stars!

Rare & Beautiful Vintage Visions of the Future

This is the start of a new series, collection of the most inspiring & hard-to-find retro-futuristic graphics. We will try to stay away from the well-known American pulp & book cover illustrations and instead will focus on the artwork from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & East Block "popular tech & science" magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature - all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (from 1930s to 1970s). This is only a sample of a few. There are actually 39 illustrations shown at the link below!












Link

The divine sound of silence

The divine sound of silence

Britain's No Music Day offers a welcome hush over a noisy world. It can't come to America soon enough.

By Kevin Berger



Nov. 22, 2007 | One can dream. What if no music blared from airports, supermarkets, bars, department stores or restaurants? Imagine being able to sit down in your neighborhood cafe and hear your friend talk without having to parse her words through the strains of "Sweet Child o' Mine." My god, that would be something for which to give thanks. On Nov. 21, a surprisingly wide swath of Britain honored "No Music Day." Radio stations, stores, recording studios and scores of music lovers took a laudable vow of musical silence. Should No Music Day come to America tomorrow, it wouldn't be soon enough.

The day of respite was cooked up by musician and conceptual artist Bill Drummond, best known as the mad genius at the controls of the KLF, British progenitors of ambient house music. As Drummond testified in the Guardian last year, his love of music had been rattled out of him by its ubiquity. "I decided I needed a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever," he wrote. "Instead, I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn't want from music. Not to blindly -- or should that be deafly -- consume what was on offer. A day where I could develop ideas."

Not being able to hear yourself think, or feel, or escape "Hotel California," is indeed what makes music in public places a nightmare. Your poor senses are crushed every time you step out of the house. By hammering you with pop tunes before a movie, Cineplexes manage to kill your appetite for a film. And can't we just daydream in a market's fluorescent aisles, ruminate over whether we want to prepare salmon or ravioli tonight, without having to hear "once, twice, three times a lady"?

I love the Doors, Otis Redding, the Clash, Public Enemy, Lucinda Williams and Arcade Fire as much as the next music fan. But why do bars insist on pummeling us with their songs at the decibel levels of NHRA drag races? Bars are supposed to be an oasis from work and noise, places to sort out life in conversations with friends and lovers. I don't understand why bar owners insist on undermining their storied and welcome culture with eardrum-splintering music and now panoramic TVs playing "Mission Impossible II." These days, I gauge the sound level before deciding to sit down and have a drink. One blast of "Once I had a love and it was a gas" and I'm on to the next place.

In fact, I know why music is piped into bars, markets, restaurants, department stores and Jiffy Lube waiting rooms. It's based on pop psychology and pseudoscience spouted by marketing and advertising executives. As David Owen informed us in a nifty New Yorker article last year on Muzak, "The Soundtrack of Your Life," the company for 50 years was based on a trademarked concept called Stimulus Progression, which held that "most people really were happier and more productive when there was something humming along in the background." Elevator music probably earned its name from the soothing tunes piped into early skyscrapers, designed to calm people as they rode the claustrophobic new contraptions to top floors.

In the '90s, Muzak reinvented itself with a new philosophy called audio architecture. The company sold music in public places not as a tranquilizer but as a means to enhance the shopping experience, as the marketing jargon goes. As Alvin Collins, a founder of the concept, explained to Owen, he was creating "retail theater." Muzak wasn't about soothing music anymore. "It was about selling emotion -- about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than just being an intellectual proposition." That's why you now can't escape the Cure in Urban Outfitters or the Gipsy Kings in any Mediterranean restaurant; both are trying to match their wares to the music their target audience supposedly likes. Whether or not a particular business is a client of Muzak's, they are driven by the same concept: Retail theater is all about consumption and music is a star of the show.

That leads to a deeper reason that music in public places gets under your skin. You hear songs that once lifted your spirits employed to sell you a computer. I don't see much difference between using music to make you feel good about a dining experience and using it to sell you a car on TV.

I can easily picture the bright and musically savvy employee who came up with the idea to use Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" to promote Volkswagen's new Cabrio model. Pull an esoteric song out of rock's demimonde to show off Volkswagen's coolness to its college-crowd target. I have never been more disheartened by the use of a song in a commercial, or the response to it.

Afterward, many, including Drake's sister, said the singer, who died in 1974, an apparent suicide, benefited from the commercial because it exposed millions of people to his music. That's a pretty specious defense. One of the most extraordinary qualities about Drake's sad and lovely folk music is that it has grown in popularity over the years by being passed between friends like a tender secret. The commercial did help the Drake estate sell records but at a terrible cost to "Pink Moon." The emotionally fragile song, whose central image is a haunting metaphor for encroaching depression, is now forever bound to an automobile. It's an incredible shame and a phenomenon sadly taken for granted, even endorsed.

A few years ago the talented Moby made a splash by licensing his songs to Intel, the teen TV show "Charmed," Nokia phones and Rover SUVs, sometimes before they appeared on albums. Again, he succeeded in introducing his soulful pop grooves to a wide audience, but at the expense of having them associated with other media.

Moby and a new legion of pop fans may be puzzled that I see that association as regrettable. The artist was exploiting new avenues of distribution, and what does it matter whether you hear a song on the radio, a TV show or a commercial? The difference is that today's retail theater, designed to coerce and sell, robs music of its own visual and emotional power. I once admired Moby's album "Play" but never listen to it because of its association with the oppressive drone of consumerism. Is that the legacy a musician wants? Does the human spirit find release in a phone commercial? I can't believe that Bob Seger and John Cougar Mellencamp don't regret the choice that eternally welded their music to Chevy trucks.

The offensive Muzak philosophy that music can condition consumer behavior or create a psychic soundscape shows up in all kinds of public places. I was once talked into going to a rural spa where, after sipping tea in a Zen garden, you are placed in a tub of hot cedar chips to drain the toxins and stress from your body. I must confess I began to relax like Buddha, except for one thing. Once I was in the tub, the whispering attendant asked me if there was anything else she could get me. Yes, I said, could you please turn off the soporific New Age music? Once she did I could listen to the rain outside hitting the spa's roof, and that's when I began to sink into genuine tranquility.

I don't mean to sound crotchety. I can be sitting in a bar and smile in solidarity with the bartender who programmed the wistful and witty Mountain Goats song into the sound system. And I relish the Chopin nocturnes that my corner cafe sometimes plays in the morning. I also don't mean to raise the hoary complaint that music in public is further fraying some grand social fabric, as if life in America in 2007 is supposed to resemble a 1920s Paris salon. I'm in love with the modern world. I am.

Social critics like to bemoan the iPod, complain that society has collapsed into everybody living in their own private Idahos. But in fact listening to music on an iPod, or accumulating songs through file sharing, is a way to reclaim music from the manipulations of the marketers, to escape the claws of the behaviorists. Carving my way through the crowded city, while listening to music on my iPod, allows me to feel in touch with my surroundings. Art that doesn't manipulate is what forms real social bonds.

"We do not like to be pushed around emotionally," the avant-garde composer John Cage once said. "The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences." I know that sounds high-minded, but it also sounds right to me. I daresay the minimalist piano pieces by Erik Satie and the spare organ works by Arvo Pärt owe their enduring popularity to how delicately they slice through our congested soundscape. They allow us to hear the hum of our own consciousness, to hear something like enlightenment.

Which brings me back to why No Music Day is wonderful and why we should launch the aural holiday in America. What it's really about is not escaping the incessant and unwanted drone of music in public. It's about learning how to listen again.

Salon.com

Bake Before Reading...

Croatian creative agency Bruketa & Zinić have designed an annual report for food company Podravka that has to be baked in an oven before it can be read. "Well done" created by Bruketa & Zinić is the new annual report for Podravka, the biggest food company in South-East Europe.

Called Well Done, the report features blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that, after being wrapped in foil and cooked for 25 minutes, reveal text and images.

To be able to cook like Podravka you need to be a precise cook. That is why the small Podravka booklet is printed in invisible, thermo-reactive ink. To be able to reveal Podravka’s secrets you need to cover the small booklet in aluminum foil and bake it at 100 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes.

If you are not precise, the booklet will burn, just as any overcooked meal. If you have successfully baked your sample of the annual report, the empty pages will become filled with text, and the illustrations with empty plates filled with food.

This is the seventh annual report for Podravka designed by Bruketa & Zinić OM. Those seven books won numerous awards worldwide. Bruketa & Zinić OM is a 60-people independent agency based in Zagreb, Croatia. It was established 10 years ago. The agency has been awarded for their projects by many prestigious contests and their work has been presented in many publications, books and exhibitions worldwide.

Read rest of article with Illustrations here.

Chocolate and Beer

The chocolate we love today evolved from an accidental byproduct of ancient breweries, claim researchers. Over 3,100 years ago in Central America the cacao plant was used to make a celebratory beer-like beverage, prized as a status symbol scientists revealed earlier this week.

The researchers identified residue of a chemical compound that comes exclusively from the cacao plant in pottery vessels dating from about 1100 BC in Puerto Escondido, Honduras.

This is 500 years earlier than any other documented use of cacao, which later became and important luxury commodity in Mesoamerica before European invaders arrived, and is now the basis of the modern chocolate industry.

The Cacao seeds were used to make ceremonial beverages consumed by elites of the Aztecs and other civilizations, and were also used as a form of currency. The Spanish conquistadors who destroyed the Aztec empire in the 16th century fell in love with the chocolate beverage made from cacao seeds served in the palace of the emperor. But this wasn’t how chocolate beverages started out the researchers found.

"The earliest cacao beverages consumed at Puerto Escondido were likely produced by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds," the scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the researchers, anthropologist John Henderson of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said cacao beverages were being concocted far earlier than previously believed, and that this beer-like drink started the whole chocolate craze.

"What we're seeing in this early village is a very early stage in which serving cacao at fancy occasions is one of the strategies that upwardly mobile families are using to establish themselves, to accumulate social prestige." Henderson told Reuters. "I think this is part of the process by which you eventually get stratified societies.”

Henderson, says the cacao brew consumed at the village of perhaps 200 to 300 people probably evolved into the chocolate beverage not by design but as "an accidental byproduct of some brewing." Henderson said.

Thanks to that brewery mishap, here are a few of the scientifically backed benefits of dark chocolate that we enjoy today:

1. Chocolate is known to improve blood flow to the brain - a University of Nottingham study found that drinking cocoa drinks rich in flavanols improves blood flow to key areas of the brain for up to two to three hours. Flavanols in the cocoa drink are a key ingredient of dark chocolate. The study also suggested that cocoa flavanols in chocolate may enhance brain function to help fight sleep deprivation, fatigue, and the effects of ageing.

2. Reduce high blood pressure – the flavonoids in cocoa have been found to help balance out blood pressure and reduce clotting. Researchers from Germany’s University Hospital of Cologne found that cocoa consumption lowered blood pressure by an average of 4.7/2.8 mm Hg. The New York Times recently reported on a study showing that dark chocolate is almost as effective at lowering blood pressure as the most commonly prescribed antihypertensive drugs.

3. Boosts mood – It is reported that certain chemicals in dark chocolate can improve your mood and ease premenstrual symptoms.

4. Prevents cell damage—Pure, dark chocolate is loaded with antioxidant chemicals that help prevent cell damage and improve blood sugar levels.

5. Reduces risk of heart attack - a researcher from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine said that eating a few squares of dark chocolate every day may reduce your risk of dying from a heart attack by almost 50%. The study also found that blood platelets clotted slower in people who eat chocolate.

Thanks ancient Mesopotamia!

Posted by Rebecca Sato The Daily Galaxy

Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1248646820071112

Mr. Whipped Cream Does Facebook

"Queen of Facebook" gets comeuppance

By Michelle Slatalla
Published: November 8, 2007

Last week, I stumbled across a short item at a site called Mashable.com, which described how one of Facebook's most popular programs allowed users to give each other virtual Naughty Gifts.

This raised obvious questions like, what sorts of naughty gifts? I clicked on a link, and on-screen appeared a pair of thigh-high black platform boots along with a statement that the program had 149,421 daily users who send one another digital replicas of foil-wrapped condoms, black thongs and cans of something called Mr. Whipped Cream.

Who were these users whose attraction to furry handcuffs has earned Naughty Gifts a spot among the 50 most popular of the site's programs? I scrolled down. I saw, under the heading "Friends who have added this application," photos of three people I knew.

All three were teenagers.

Two were my offspring.

Continued here

Democratic committee says Colbert cannot run - News

Democratic committee says Colbert cannot run - News

The Stephen T. Colbert presidential campaign was just grounded by the Democratic Party executive committee of South Carolina.

Chairwoman Carol Fowler said that Colbert was not allowed to run because the committee did not believe he was a "legitimate candidate."

Of his campaign promises, he vowed to "crush Georgia," because South Carolina peaches are more numerous and "juiciful." Many fans of the comedian support him because of his mockery of the democratic process and how candidates, of both political parties, cater their message to the audience they are speaking to.

His much-publicized run had grown support from many different groups, including the popular social networking site Facebook. The group "1,000,000 strong for Stephen T Colbert" has amassed over 1,400,000 members, more support than any other candidate has in their group.

Colbert's run at the White House coincided with the release of his book, "I Am America (And So Can You!)" throwing his run under the national spotlight more prominently, and allowing him to publicize both his campaign and book at the same time.

Lock of Lennon's hair to go up for auction

Buy John Lennon's hair!




(Wednesday October 31, 2007 12:29 AM)

A lock of John Lennon's hair is to be sold at auction later this year, it has been announced.

The strands from the dead Beatle's head are being sold by the group's former hairdresser Betty Glasgow.

She worked as a stylist on the Fab Four films "Hard Day's Night" and "Help" and was given the lock along with hand-written note from Lennon.

Worthing auction house Gorringes will be putting the lot under the hammer as part of "The Betty Glasgow Collection of Beatles and Film Memorabilia" in December.

The hair sample is expected to reach between £2,000 and £3,000, although Glasgow admits she will be sorry to see the many items go.

"It was great fun working with the boys on the films. They were always together in a group and having a laugh.

"My job was to keep their hair in order as the film was made over three months, so their trademark, mop-top haircuts had to be regularly trimmed", she explained.

Watch John Lennon's music videos here...

Mel Brooks Starts Nonprofit Foundation To Save Word 'Schmuck'

NEW YORK—Saying he could no longer stand idly by while a vital part of American culture is lost forever, activist and Broadway producer Mel Brooks has founded a private nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the word "schmuck."

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An emotional Brooks stopped short of kvetching at a schmuck fundraiser Monday.

"Schmuck is dying," a sober Brooks said during a 2,000-person rally held in his hometown of Williamsburg, Brooklyn Monday. "For many of us, saying 'schmuck' is a way of life. Yet when I walk down the street and see people behaving in foolish, pathetic, or otherwise schmucky ways, I hear only the words 'prick' and 'douche bag.' I just shake my head and think, 'I don't want to live in a world like this.'"

The nonprofit, Schmucks For Schmuck, has compiled schmuck-related data from the past 80 years and conducted its own independent research on contemporary "schmuck" usage. According to Brooks, the statistics are frightening: Utterances of the word "schmuck" have declined every year since its peak in 1951, and in 2006, the word was spoken a mere 28 times—17 of these times by Brooks himself. The study indicates that today, when faced with a situation in which one can use a targeted or self-deprecating insult to convey a general feeling of disgust, people are 50 times more likely to use the word "jerk" than "schmuck," 100 times more likely to use "dick," and 15,000 times more likely to use "fucking asshole."

Perhaps more startling, only 23 percent of men know what schmuck means, and only 1.2 percent of these men are under the age of 78. If such trends continue, Brooks estimates that by 2011, such lesser-used terms as "imbecile," "dummy," "schlub," and "contemptible ne'er-do-well" will all surpass schmuck, which is projected to completely disappear by the year 2020 or whenever Brooks dies.

"We must save this word!" Brooks said to thunderous applause as those in attendance began chanting "Schmuck! Schmuck! Schmuck!" "How will we be able to charmingly describe someone who acts in an inappropriate manner? Especially given the tragic loss of the word 'schmegeggie' in 2001. So I urge you: Tonight, when you get home, please, call up your family, your friends, your loved ones, and tell them they're a bunch of schmucks."

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Hundreds turned out at a Boca Raton, FL demonstration to show their support for the dying word.

"I've never told anyone this before," Brooks added, choking back tears, "but my father was a schmuck."

The foundation has already raised more than $20 million, thanks to donations from supporters such as Jackie Mason, Albert Brooks, the Schtupp Institute, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), and the Henny Youngman Endowment for the Preservation of Schmekel. The money will go toward projects aimed at reintegrating "schmuck" into the English lexicon, including billboards and flyers plastered with the word "schmuck," the upcoming 5K Schlep for Schmuck Awareness, and a new Mel Brooks film.

"The world cannot afford to lose this valuable and versatile word," Brooks told reporters during a charity auction in Manhattan's Upper West Side Tuesday, where attendees bid for the chance to have a private lunch with Brooks and repeatedly call him a schmuck. "You can be a poor schmuck, a lazy schmuck, a dumb schmuck, or just a plain old schmuck. A group of people can be collectively referred to as schmucks. You can call someone a schmuck, and you can be called a schmuck. You can even call yourself a schmuck."

"Plus, it's just so fun to say," Brooks added. "Schmuck."

Many of the foundation's volunteers say they share Brooks' passion for the word "schmuck," as well as his outrage that it is slowly disappearing from everyday use. They claim that if they do not act now, the trend could create a snowball effect.

"Today it's schmuck, tomorrow it might be toochis," said SFS volunteer Harry Steinbergmann, 82. "What's next, schlemiel? Putz? Schlimazel?"

Steinbergmann went on to classify this scenario as farcockteh.

Brooks will be appearing at Brooklyn's Francis Scott Key Junior High on Nov. 12 to give an informal lecture about his experiences using the word "schmuck," and build grassroots support among a key group of young Americans by explaining that "schmuck" is a Yiddish term for the foreskin on the head of a penis. In addition, he has hinted at the possibility of a reunion with longtime comedy partner Gene Wilder, during which the two will call each other schmucks.