How exciting is this…?
I described my individual items of clothing to Geoff Hassing and he brought them to life. He came up with the idea of doing the the circles that zoomed in on the tags.
Thanks Geoff. You rock!…
Apparently it’s time for me to renew by subscription of National Geographic Traveler. I received an offer in the mail that if I renew I can give a free subscription to someone else.
You could be that someone else!
HOW TO WIN A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO NGT
Give me your best you might be a “You might be a Touron if…” Go here for examples. Whoever makes me think or giggle the most gets the subscription.
Off the top of my head, here’s a few that I could use from my time in Bangladesh:
If you aren’t allowed to stay in Dhaka’s “Hotel Tourist” because you are a tourist, you might be a touron
If you’ve ever paid $1,200 for a plane ticket to visit the factory that made your underwear, you…
Don’t know about you, but I would pay NOT to run a marathon. I got an email the other day from a fella that’s running the NYC marathon while collecting money for one of my favorite charities, Casa Guatemala. (Note: If donating to orphans doesn’t do it for you, support this guy for his name alone – Egbert. How cool is that? It’s as if he finally escaped Dilbert’s strip and Dogbert’s rule. Keep on running Egbert. Keep on running.)
Dear friends,
What do the New York City Marathon and Casa Guatemala have in common? Well, they’re both sponsored by ING (my employer). About 4 years ago ING granted me a sabbatical to volunteer in Casa Guatemala, an orphanage located on the banks of the…
I’ve talked before about how James Sullivan’s book Jeans is a little too much into the Americaness of jeans, but really it’s hard to argue with him too much. Here’s a passage:
All blue jeans, whether they are rough as sidewalk or burnished to a hand as fine as cashmere, share an “Americana” feel. They may be cut and sewn in Japan, Vietnam, or Hong Kong, using denim from mills in Mexico, India, Italy, or Turkey and synthetic indigo dye from Germany or Brazil. Yet wherever its origins, a pair of blue jeans embodies two centuries’ worth of the myths and ideals of American culture. Jeans are the surviving relic of the western frontier. The epitomize our present-day pre-occupations – celebrity and consumer culture…
Remember that movie with Sally Fields? The one where she is a successful businesswoman or doctor and she marries a fella, specifically Dr. Octopus, from Iran. And when they move to Iran her social status and her face take a few hits. She’s not allowed to eat with the men or join in their conversations and other stuff like that. When she oversteps her bounds she gets a beat down. This is all I knew about the role of women in an Islamic culture until I actually spent some time in Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh, some women wouldn’t shake my hand or make eye contact. (Yes, it was pretty touronic of me to try and shake their hand, but hey,…
You know all of those signs at temples in places like Nepal and India that say or show some version of “No Touch Monkey,”? Well, they mean business. Because the monkeys…umm…mean business.
The Deputy Mayor of Delhi was attacked and killed by monkeys. As reported by the BBC:
SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys.
…
Today seems like the first day of fall. The breeze is cool and the leaves seemed to have turned color overnight. I wish I was hiking! I wish I was here…
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Plumpy Nut is a peanut butter, powder milk past that is saving Niger children from dying of malnutrition. I heard about it on this evening’s 60 Minutes.
Here’s a report on PN from UNICEF:
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My agent and I are going back and forth with the proposal right now and we hope to send it out before the end of the month. Her latest version included the following sentences:
I can be the “everyman” for any American consumer out there, I’m just that humanly accessible! Although I am quite ordinary in many ways, I do have some credentials to back up the credibility of Where am I Wearing? …
This passage cracked me up. I’m that humanly accessible, but in a way, you know, I’m super-humanly normal.
Is there anything less normal than a normal guy that will tell you how normal he is?
I see where she is going with this: we need to set myself as the average American consumer. Although, I got…
If you are the Chinese government he does. They aren’t to happy with George W. Bush who met him in public at a recent ceremony and said, “I admire the Dalai Lama a lot. I support religious freedom.”
It’s good to see a public official do something that’s not in the best interest of trade and money now and then. Go Bush!
How can you not just love the Dalai Lama? He’s always wearing that holy smile that has a bit of mischief behind it like he might have slipped a whoopee cushion onto some dignitaries chair.
Speaking of monks…below the cut you’ll find a story I wrote way back in 2004 about one that is Bulletproof.
