Giant Art Crush

Lanea, Anubh, and I had a great time performing at the Pennsylvania Celtic Fling, thanks in large part to the primal ecstasy that is Albannach. I have a big crush on them.

Articles and geography

In the movie we saw last night about Bela Fleck taking the banjo back to its African context (which was very moving and deserves more than the off-hand mention it gets here), it struck us that the country we thought of as "Gambia" is actually "The Gambia". Which led to a brief bit of research into what other countries have a "The". Officially, just The Bahamas. Unofficially, Ehren decided, it should be all countries that start with "United", plus all plural island chains.

Ecoguilt parameters, continued

Eating local good; eating veggies better.
This article from Science News discusses the various sources of greenhouse emissions in the farm-to-table chain.
Sadly, the online version does not include the fab pie chart from the print version, but you'll get the idea: eating less beef and dairy does more to reduce your ecoguilt total than only buying local.
I guess it's time to start phasing out the lattes...

Outraged, and mollified

Outraged: What happens to unsold books.

Mollified: Inspired, even. These people were outraged too, and look what they did. (I think their domain name is a little bit of a stretch, though.)

The Mysteries of Google, continued

Google has changed its favicon in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. [1]
Puzzling.
In IE it's still the boxy capital G we're all used to.
In Firefox, it's suddenly the lower-case g ("good girl's glasses").
Weird how such a small thing can be such a big distraction.
(Not unlike corn in Italian wedding soup.)

[1] Is this a geek badge?

Bad Timing.

From the schadenfreude file:
FranklinCovey just sent me an email about a huge sale.
My LLBean Traveler convertible backpack finally bit the dust last week after a hard ten years of use. [Digression: to my deep annoyance, particularly following on Aveda's recent decision to discontinue the best shampoo of all time, I discover LLBean has redesigned the bag, and there's no convertible-backpack option, so I find myself considering a $300 handmade Italian bag instead, but that's another rant].
FranklinCovey has nice totes.
Big FranklinCovey email.
Huge Sale.
Tell everyone, said the email.
Shop now, said the email.
I tried.
I clicked through.
Their site is down for "scheduled maintenance."

I don't think so. I don't think anyone schedules maintenance for the same time as the "everyone come to the big giant sale" email is going out.