In 2005 I took part in the Melbourne Fringe Festival with a project called Display Purposes Only. It involved hundreds of hand printed t-shirts distributed in 13 international cities. Each t-shirt had a card attached asking that the finder register their t-shirt online by uploading a photo of it and answering a series of questions.
I remember when I was young going to live music gigs and coming home feeling like the luckiest girl alive if I managed to get hold of the musicians' set list. There are some writers who inspire this feeling in me. I see their name on the cover of a magazine or book or in a table of contents and I feel my heart change gear. Malcolm Gladwell is one such writer."Outlier" is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be an outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.I find all of Gladwell's ideas uplifting. And I found this book uplifting too – I just couldn't put it down.
We spent the afternoon down at the lake again today; swimming, reading, listening to the Hottest 100 playing on a nearby stereo.
We had leftover pancake mixture this morning so I thought I'd cook a few up for the chooks. I got sidetracked and left this one on the pan too long. It didn't burn but it was a bit stiff. I soaked it in water and fed it to them along with some others I made.
When I first saw this tree on swissmiss I thought about all the rain I couldn't stop crying over my grandmother's death.
This is us yesterday morning before all our lovely guests arrived.
From reading a book about caring for chooks to a book about caring for sons – two subjects about which I knew zilch before I moved to the country.
I'm glad this echidna didn't read my blog when I confessed that I am not a fan of visitors dropping by unexpectedly.
On the way to the train station in Melbourne last night, we passed by some people rummaging through a skip piled high with goods from a nearby church-run op shop. They found some old suitcases they were filling with their loot. The wastefulness was mind blowing; clothes, toys, books, office supplies, food, games – it was all thrown in.
Because I'm an enthusiastic reader, I'm always eager to see what books strangers are engrossed in when I see people reading on public transport. 
It's been three weeks since we received 8 fertilised eggs and I am thrilled to announce the arrival of 5 chicks to our brood.
All my Contradictions have the same motivation/meaning. Technologies and the marketing behind them usually push the almost religious aspect of their evolution, as also said by Leander Kaheny in his Cult of Mac book, and the users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions. And this aspect works for the social-networks too.
The idealization connected with these experiences provokes a small-but-important detach of the perception of reality and what I want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies.
It's a kind of reminder, for people like me which I'm an Apple user and also have social-network accounts that the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it, not only in the third world and even if technologies and globalization are good things.
Several months ago, I wrote about World Dividers; how the world can be divided into two categories, those who do certain things and those who don't. The orgasm will peel you like an orange. You may feel exposed, raw, even wounded. The orgasm wants you to live life without the rind.
I enjoyed Loobylu's review of this book so much I had to read it for myself. Normally she reads books while stirring pots at the stove or stopped at red lights, but as her copy of The Dud Avocado is so well-thumbed she needed a hand to hold each cover for fear the pages would fall out. 
Sixteen years ago, the graphic designer Tibor Kalman erected a giant billboard on Forty-second Street in NYC. It was bright yellow and had the word EVERYBODY written on it. Even though it was at street level, it hung graffiti-free for its two year run.
From DirectDaily:Schott Solar produces solar panels with 20 years warranty. In order to present the brand Schott Solar in a distinctive and meaningful way in wholesale markets, they created a 20 year warranty calendar, which sticks out of the wall more than 60 centimeters. A message which can hardly be ignored. The first calenders were sent out for free, in the meantime the sales force is confronted with more and more calendar requests.
