CoolIris

I made this short video to demonstrate the browser plug-in called CoolIris that enables a new dimension of image viewing on web sites that have lots of pictures (shopping sites, photo storage sites, etc.). CoolIris works in Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, and Safari and can be downloaded here. (As with all YouTube videos, click directly in the screen below to go to YouTube for a slightly larger—and better, in this case—video.)

Movin' On Up! (Lizzie Moves to Chicago)

Here are a few pix from Elizabeth's and my trip to Chicago last weekend to take her furniture. I road to Atlanta with Gail and Anna to meet Liz at her Norcross apartment where we loaded the truck. Then Lizzie and I took off for Chicago to deliver her goods to the apartment she's been in for a month or so (with only clothes, toiletries, and her cat). We left Atlanta around 2:15 in the afternoon Saturday and got to her apartment around 2:00 a.m. Sunday. I flew home late Monday afternoon and was picked up at the airport by Anna.

Loading the truck in Atlanta:



Unloading the truck in Chicago -- note the snow. It got up to around 12-13 degrees during the day while we were unloading; a tad warmer the next day. They really know how to handle snow up there. The streets were perfectly clean with mounds of snow piled alongside the roads, and MOUNTAINS of snow piled up in shopping center and mall parking lots that look like they will probably finish melting in late July.



Liz's apartment complex is really nice. This is just a small portion of her building. There are 12 of these huge three-story buildings, all with European names, in the complex. Plus a really nice gym, pool, rec center with pool/ping pong, etc., and activities for residents every night of the week. The people in the office are really nice, the grounds and buildings are extremely well-kept, and a huge maintenance staff that fixes everything pronto. All the sidewalks are shoveled and the streets plowed immediately when it snows. She really loves the apartments -- easy to see why. (See the movie below for a quick look at her apt.)



We ate twice at the local Wholefoods -- Yay, Wholefoods! They had a HUGE and delicious food bar filled with amazing veggie dishes, hot and cold. So good!



And we took a spin through the local HUGE Ikea store. I wasn't allowed to take any pix of her store -- company policy -- but it is beautiful, about three times larger than the Perimeter store in Atlanta. She's done a great job getting the store and staff into shape.



The view from Liz's living room windows on the THIRD FLOOR. :-) Fortunately, we were able to use the elevator to move everything up except for her GINORMOUS L-shaped sofas. Those, we had to carry up by hand. I had prayed before we left Atlanta that God would provide someone to help us get the sofas up the stairs, and a really nice young Indian man who lived in the apartments saw us struggling in the door with the first sofa and asked if we needed some help. He helped us carry both sofas up to the third floor -- and wouldn't accept my offer to pay him for his troubles. He even asked us if we'd like to come down to his apartment and have something to eat with he and his wife. We needed to keep working, so declined, but he was a really nice guy. Liz is going to deliver a chocolate gift basket to their apartment this week.



HRH Trina, who condescended to sit in my lap by the second day:



And two pix of the lovely Liz, sitting on the infamous red sofas, the color of which conceals the blood (sweat and tears) we spilled on them wrestling them to the third floor:





And here is a short video tour of the inside of the apartment.(Click in the center of the video if you want to be taken to YouTube for a slightly larger formatted version.)



It was a great trip -- safe and productive. Liz has a great place to live and a great job with a great company, so is well-suited for the next chapter of the Great Adventure known as Life.

She Knows What Will Make the Prez Fat

Here's a letter a schoolgirl wrote to President Obama (see the New York Times article here.) Yes, it will make him fatter, but it will also make him deader faster:

Flying in Norway

David sent this beautiful video of base jumpers in Norway using wing suits to skim the face of cliffs at 100 mph before opening their 'chutes. Amazing, and beautiful, video. (This is large-format video -- way better than YouTube, etc.)

Inauguration Panorama

See a cool 360-degree panorama of the inauguration platform and crowd in front of the capital.

Funniest Line of the Inauguration

I kept the NBC broadcast on during most of the inauguration events yesterday, which consisted of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Lester Holt, and David Gregory at "the desk." After the swearing-in ceremony was over, the president and a couple hundred dignitaries retreated to a traditional lunch in the Capital. After that lunch, the Obamas rode in their limousine back to the White House to "freshen up" before going to the viewing stand to watch the parade.

It was Brian Williams' comment after the luncheon that cracked me up, along with his buddies on the NBC desk: (you have to know that President Obama is a private smoker who is trying to quit to understand Williams' comment)

It was after the Capital luncheon and the Obamas were back in the limousine, leaving for the White House. The television cameras focused on the President through the window of the limousine, where he was obviously chewing a piece of gum -- and the camera held that shot long enough for the post-lunch gum-chewing to be obvious.

Brian Williams (who demonstrates a wicked sense of humor when he is away from the "Nightly News" anchor desk), noting the gum-chewing, said, "I'll bet the president is jonesing* for a piece of Nicorette about now." (*jonesing: slang for withdrawal or craving) Obama was no doubt feeling the pain, having been in the public eye since early that morning without a fix.

You could hear the other men at the desk cracking up -- David Gregory even tried to save the moment by adding, "Or a piece of Dentyne." Wrong and too late -- the joke was out of the studio -- and it was a funny one. They immediately moved the conversation to other things, but it was a funny moment.

Congrats to the Prez for trying to kick the habit. It seems odd that he won't allow himself to be photographed smoking -- most people probably don't know about it. Let's hope he makes it.

Horns in the House Band

When Chicago and Blood, Sweat, and Tears added horns to rock in the late 1960's, I never looked back. The groundwork had been laid by the horns in the Motown Sound, but horns added to rock? Chicago IX (1975) is still the album I would take to a desert island if I could only take one -- and "Make Me Smile" remains my favorite rock song of all time. (Mark Spitz, the pre-Phelps most-gold Olympic swimmer, used to train in the pool with "Make Me Smile" thumping in his underwater headphones. It's why he won gold!)

This morning at Elevation Church in Charlotte I thought I was back at the University of Alabama where I saw Chicago in concert for the first (the only) time -- there were horns in the house band. Admittedly, a small start -- two saxaphones -- and only for one song. But what a sound! I've said before in this blog that Elevation's music/worship band(s) is the best I've EVER seen. There are several house bands that rotate between the three church campuses on Sunday morning, and none is better than the others. They are all polished, practiced, and performance-oriented. Unlike a lot of church bands, there is NOTHING tentative about these bands. From the get-go, they know exactly what they're doing and they don't hold back. (Unfortunately, the weekly video of the services on the church's web site only includes the sermon, not the music, so you'll have to attend in person to get thumped -- and you will get thumped. The bass player's Ampeg stack was taller than he was.)

As good as the music was today, the sermon was the focal point. I first learned about Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 9) from a carpet cleaner with a sixth grade education from Cleveland, TN, named Milton Green (now in heaven). It's one of the most powerful stories of redemption and grace in the whole Bible. And Steven Furtick did it justice this morning. I would encourage all to watch the sermon when it's posted online by Monday or Tuesday of this week. (When you go the Elevation Church homepage, click on the "Launch Full Media Player" button. The list of three sermons in the current "Come Home" series will show to the right, and today's sermon (don't know the actual name) will be the first in the list of three. It's one of the best sermons I've heard Steven preach.)

The Pleasures of Malabar

The last few weeks I've been reading books by Louis Bromfield, an American novelist who wrote in the 1930's-1950's. He wrote around 30 books, mostly novels (Pulitzer Prize for Early Autumn in 1926), but also books on farming and the rural life. It is the latter group I am collecting and reading.

Bromfield grew up in an Ohio farming family, studied agriculture for two years at Cornell, then transferred to Columbia to study journalism, but dropped out after a year to join the American army and fight in WW I. After decorated service he returned to New York, took a job as a reporter, and began writing novels. Almost all of his books, novels as well memoirs, were bestsellers in their day, a couple having been made into motion pictures.

He then lived in France, then India, for a decade before returning to Ohio -- his beloved Pleasant Valley region -- to live and write on the land. His novels had made him wealthy, and he bought three worn-out (contiguous) farms in Pleasant Valley, the region of his roots, in northern Ohio where he had grown up. He soon added a fourth farm, bringing his total holdings to a thousand acres.

He moved his family into the most suitable of the four farmsteads and began rebuilding the house and buildings and establishing a plan to renovate and restore the farms to what they could be. He named his main farm "Malabar" after a region on the southwest coast of India where he lived for a time, and it exists today as an historical agricultural site in Ohio, open to the public.

Bromfield and his family lived out their years at Malabar where he developed an international reputation for advances in sustainable agriculture. When he returned to Ohio after being away for several decades (and after being exposed to French intensive gardening techniques for sustaining the land) he was shocked at how the lush, mineral-rich Ohio farmland had been ravaged by poor, unsustainable practices. He seems to have had an intuitive sense of how to re-enrich the land so that it would hold rainfall and produce nutritious food for humans and animals.

He wrote a series of books about life at Malabar Farm -- these are the books I am collecting and reading. And I have to say, I have never had such pleasure in reading as I have had in these volumes. I think Bromfield must have lived at a genius level of intelligence. It seems that most of what he touched turned to gold -- and not by his own account only. Thousands of visitors from around the world streamed to Malabar Farm during its glory years of operation to learn Bromfield's secrets of farming. Not only is he a beautiful writer, but his descriptions of everyday life at Malabar Farm are both instructive, philosophical, and delightful all at the same time.

I have read Pleasant Valley (1943), am almost finished with Malabar Farm (1947), and have waiting The Farm (1933), From My Experience (1955), and The Heritage—A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield (1962), written by his daugher Ellen who established a Malabar-like farm in Brazil. I believe there may be one or two more that he wrote about Malabar, but I have yet to track them down. Some of these books are available in paperback only so I've slowly tracked down used hardbacks for a few dollars here and there. What a treasure these books are!

How, one might ask, could someone write a half-dozen books about life on a farm without repeating himself over and over? Therein lies Bromfield's genius as a writer -- or as a thinker. First, life at Malabar was a constant crossroads of activity. The "big house" was always filled with visitors coming and going (common people as well as dignitaries and luminaries and government officials -- Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married at Malabar in 1945). The stories of keeping fields, animals, springs and ponds, buildings on four farms, employees, and food crops all humming harmoniously along makes for page-turning reading. Yet it is his love for the land and the natural processes that underlie the point of all his storytelling. The books almost read like novels, yet history attests to the reality of what he described.

Second, his prose is beautifully descriptive and thoughtful. He surely must be ranked with the likes of today's Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon, and Lynn Miller for his combination of literary skill and passion for the indispensable task of developing and sustaining agricultural systems that will continue to fulfill humanity's need for biological fuel as well as for soulish satisfaction.

And third, there was never a dull moment over the two decades in which he ran Malabar. He was continually experimenting and developing new techniques, hosting new and different guests, and having new adventures and experiences. The richness of his memoirs of daily life stand in STARK contrast to the shallow posts that pass as descriptions of life in the Facebook/Twitter era ("I'm having lunch now."). I never tire of reading about life at Malabar, so rich and diverse were the days he describes.

Bromfield was the kind of person who attracted others and who (apparently) commanded respect because of his successes at Malabar. Within a few years the farms he purchased were gully-free and resplendent with grains and grasses on which livestock grazed and with food crops that sustained Bromfield's family, permanent and part-time employees, and the perpetual house-full of visitors. The 18 springs on the four farms flowed strong and clear again because the land was soaking up water after years of being parched and barren -- like parking lots off which the rain drains. The ponds on the farm teemed with life and were a constant laboratory for the cycles of biology and botany on which all of nature depends.

I could go on and on about these books and the life they describe. They have been the latest source of stimulation and inspiration for thinking that "the faster we go, the behinder we get" in our modern culture and economy. I don't see anything around me in my metropolitan environment that moves me like what I have read about in Bromfield's books. I know -- I'm probably idealizing something that was human to the core and therefore was probably replete with problems -- i.e., Bromfield the man and Malabar the experience. But I'm enjoying it nonetheless. And trying to store up as many images and lessons as I can.

You may not want to track down and purchase these books, but look in your local library for the titles I've mentioned. Given that one of his novels won a Pulitzer and others were turned into movies, I'm sure they must be worth a read as well. Perhaps you'll find "Bromfield, Louis" in your library's catalog.

A professional photographer named Ted White, in conjunction with the Malabar Farm Foundation, offers beautiful pictures of Malabar for sale on his web site. You can view the pictures starting on this page -- then click on "Next Page" at the bottom of each page to view more pix. Well worth the time.

(For pure pleasure of this sort, but from a less agricultural and more modern perspective, I would also recommend Michael Korda's Country Matters—The Pleasure and Tribulation of Moving from a Big City to an Old Country Farmhouse (2001). Korda was (is still?) the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, the venerable New York City publisher. He writes beautifully and hilariously as he tells the story of his and his wife's establishing a new home in an old, upstate New York rural homestead.)

Online Farmers Market

Three young 20-somethings start an online Farmers Market for local, hard-to-fine, artisan food products. Read the NYT article here

What's Good for the Doctor

A good friend in another city was monitoring some potentially risky blood markers during 2008 which, absent improvement, could have led to some serious invasive treatment. Without telling his primary doctor, he switched to a vegan diet a few months ago and also visited a naturopathic doctor where he received some "snake oils" (my friend's words; he doesn't use those words disparagingly -- he just doesn't know why they work -- and they did seem to work).

He reported this week that his blood tests were much improved, to the delight of his doctor. My friend then told the doc that he had switched to a vegan diet, visited the naturopath, etc. While his doctor wouldn't assign any correlation between the much improved blood markers and my friend's diet change and alternative treatments, the doc did say this: "I've been a vegetarian for 40 years. Vegetarian and vegan diets are definitely healthier." The doc had never made inquiry into my friend's diet or recommended he switch to a "definitely healthier" lifestyle.

Question: Why wouldn't a doctor recommend to his own patient the same lifestyle protocols he himself had been following for 40 years? Even if he didn't think it would help a particular condition, as the old saying goes, "It couldn't hurt."

It's amazing how constricted the AMA crowd is when it comes to making recommendations outside the mainstream medical practices. This is similar to Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic being asked by his fellow doctors to treat their heart conditions with his plant-based therapies, but those same doctors won't recommend that their own heart patients adopt Esselstyn's protocols. The real reason may be found in the words of one of Dr. Esselstyn's fellow Cleveland Clinic cardiologists: "I billed five million dollars last year." As "Deep Throat" told Bob Woodward in All the President's Men, "Follow the money."

Kudos to my friend for taking charge of his own healthcare and being willing to go outside the mainstream for help. Live long, bro'. (Job 5:26)

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Aggregation Without Aggravation

Alltop.com is a new information and news aggregation site ("a magazine rack of popular topics") from the fertile brain of Guy Kawasaki and friends, formerly the chief Apple evangelist and now a venture capitalist. Look at the the clean homepage for an overview, but here is the page that aggregates news for "vegan" just as an example of what it does -- and the topics are almost limitless. (I couldn't believe how many "vegan" web sites Alltop aggregates -- sites I've never seen or heard of. I can only assume that depth and breadth of aggregation exists in all the topics it covers.) The news feeds are updated automatically. Roll your cursor over the headlines to get a pop-up summary of the article, etc. You can also create your own RSS feeds from most of the sites listed. Play around with it and you'll get the idea. (This page explains more about the concept.) Worth bookmarking along with other favorite news/search sites.

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Post-Biblical America

USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan reported something telling in her column today. It has to do with Tim Tebow, the Heisman-winning quarterback of the BCS national champion Florida Gators. All America saw the "John 3:16" he had printed on his eye-black during the game. But apparently a lot of people had no idea what it meant. Brennan reported that for a while during the game, "John 3:16" was the most-looked-up item on Google. It's been said for several decades, and is apparently proved, that America is a post-Christian nation. Or at least no longer biblically literate. Who can argue with Google?
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Tweeting from the Bike

Ah, technology -- Lance Armstrong is in Australia training for the upcoming Tour Down Under race. While on a training ride earlier today -- note in the picture he's riding with no hands, sending the picture he just took along with a Tweet (Twitter message) -- he uploaded a request to the "Twitterati" (those who follow his Twitter account) asking their opinion on whether the Team Astana bikes should have yellow or black handlebar hoods (currently yellow as in the pic). Hundreds of bikers around the world responded within minutes with their opinion. We might as well eliminate the words "distance" and "time" from the lexicon -- they seem to have been trumped by technology.

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Best Mac Browser

I've posted this before -- but a reminder: If you use a Mac, you should take a look at using Flock as your web browser of choice. It recently was given an Eddy Award by the editors of MacUser magazine -- meaning it's the best new browser for the Mac platform.

Flock runs on the Firefox 3.0 engine, so if you currently use Firefox you will lose nothing by switching to Flock (all the Firefox extensions and add-ons run seamlessly on Flock) -- and gain much more. What you will gain is a browser designed to connect you with all the social networking portals and platforms you use. I've been using Flock for nearly a year and feel like I'm just scratching the surface on its ability to keep me connected (i.e., "waste my time on the Internet").

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Made in (Everywhere but) America

This is not a political observation (from me, at least) -- just a snapshot of our times:

John Smith started the day early having set his alarm clock (MADE IN JAPAN ) for 6 am. While his coffeepot (MADE IN CHINA ) was perking, he shaved with his electric razor (MADE IN HONG KONG). He put on a dress shirt (MADE IN SRI LANKA ), designer jeans (MADE IN SINGAPORE) and tennis shoes (MADE IN KOREA). After cooking his breakfast in his new electric skillet (MADE IN INDIA) he sat down with his calculator (MADE IN MEXICO ) to see how much he could spend today. After setting his watch (MADE IN TAIWAN ) to the radio (MADE IN INDIA) he got in his car (MADE IN GERMANY) filled it with gas (FROM SAUDI ARABIA) and continued his search for a good paying job. At the end of yet another discouraging and fruitless day checking his computer (MADE IN MALAYSIA), Joe decided to relax for a while. He put on his sandals (MADE IN BRAZIL), poured himself a glass of wine (MADE IN FRANCE ) and turned on his TV (MADE IN INDONESIA ), and then wondered why he can't find a good paying job in AMERICA.
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Bed, Bath and Beyond the Call of Duty

While the Panthers are getting their heads handed to them by the Cardinals in the play-off game, I'll use the time for something constructive -- like giving props to Bed, Bath and Beyond. I read where Linens 'n Things went out of business recently in this bad economy, but BB&B was overflowing with customers today.

Went to BB&B this afternoon to get a small appliance that only they sell. While I was getting a very helpful explanation about the appliance from one of the salesmen, I mentioned that another rather expensive appliance I had bought from them three years before had recently stopped working. It was under warranty and the manufacturer is shipping me a replacement part, but the BB&B guy amazed me by saying, "If you have any further problem with it, just bring the whole thing back to us and we'll give you a new one and we'll handle the return to the manufacturer. We stand behind what we sell."

What? I was blown away by that. That's an amazing policy.

You know those ubiquitous blue and white BB&B discount coupons that come in the mail? They have an expiration date on them and I have thrown scads of them away in the past because they expired before I used them. But the lady in the checkout line ahead of me had a whole stack of them that she applied to her numerous purchases. So I asked the checkout clerk how the lady was able to use so many of the coupons -- "Don't they expire after a few weeks?"

"Yes, they have expiration dates on them but we'll honor them anyway -- one coupon per item purchased. Just save them and bring in one for each item you purchase and we'll honor them even if they''ve expired. In fact, you can bring in any old BB&B receipts for which you didn't use a coupon and we'll refund the discounted amount to you based on using a current coupon."

Okay -- I'm now a BB&B customer. Has anyone else had a similar good (or not good) experience at BB&B? If this is how they do business, I'm not surprised they're weathering the bad economy while others are going out of business.

Halftime's over -- time to see if the Panthers can stop embarrassing themselves and get back in the game.

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Sustaining Land and Food

Two of the wisest and sanest American voices on the subject of preserving America's land and labor in order to preserve our food, Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, published a brief op-ed piece in The New York Times this week. Given the source of this piece, "well worth reading" goes without saying. Read it here.

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Bear Attack

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Pool Crew

Snagged this pic off of Anna's Facebook page and added the names of the Kruidenier swimmers. This was the Winding Vista Swim Team from our neighborhood in Tucker (Atlanta), Georgia, from the early 1990's. Anybody know the exact year? Liz, how did all that hair fit under a swim cap? I don't remember all these kids' names but I sure recognize a lot of faces. Remember when the boys ran the Winding Vista snack bar for a summer? First foray into entrepreneurship.

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Where Demons Live

I once heard a Bible teacher say, when he had to stop his delivery because of a malfunction in the venue's sound system, that, "Demons live in sound systems—and piles of coat hangers." I laugh out loud whenever I think of his observation. Or when I'm trying to untangle wire coat hangers. Or Christmas tree lights.

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