Crafting with Leftovers

I love it when my mom comes to visit, because she often comes bearing gifts. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, those gifts are home-related. A few months ago, she came through with some garage-sale finds, including this lovely framed portrait of…some flowers:

She picked it up with the understanding I’d probably change out the contents, because hey, a frame’s a frame. Figuring I’d get inspired enough to do so, I happily accepted.

After stalling for months because I couldn’t figure out what images I’d want to put in the 8” x 10” mats, the proverbial light bulb appeared over my head this afternoon and I decided to get to work. And because I am lazy resourceful, I flipped this cheap find completely with stuff I happened to have around the house.

For the images themselves, I decided to isolate an illustration I found on iStockPhoto.com when I was hunting around for artwork to use for my wedding invites. Wanting to use something nature-inspired, I had stumbled upon this graphic:

...and fallen in love with it. I bought it without knowing how I’d use it, and sadly, it turned out I couldn’t. I tried to make one of the elements work, but it ended up relegated to the programs in favor of some more elegant scrollwork on the invitations themselves.

But I still love the image, so I popped open Illustrator this afternoon and pulled out the second and third trees, sized them to fit the mats, and isolated them in black on white. I printed them on our home printer on the linen-textured paper I had left over from our wedding programs, to surprisingly good results. (Pro-tip: Changing print quality settings from “fast draft” to “best” makes a big difference here.)

In addition to changing out the images, I knew I’d want to lose the gold mat between the ivory mat and the existing photos. I cracked open the frame and was pleased to find that the gold mat was a stand-alone and not fused to the white mat as I had feared. Using some paint that was left over from when I painted over the forest-green accents (hello ‘90s!) on our dining room furniture, I slapped two quick coats on the gold mat. I really only needed about ¼” of the border around the opening to be black, but I painted the whole thing just in case someday I (or my future garage sale patrons) need a black photo mat with two 8” x 10” openings.

Once I got into the guts of the frame, I discovered the floral images were in fact wallpaper, which had been scotch-taped to the backing of the frame. It's easily been a good 15 years since that wallpaper could have been in style, so I felt good in the knowledge that this already-DIYed ensemble had lived a full life and was ready to move on.

After the paint dried and I got everything re-assembled, I was pretty pleased with the end result:

Simple, but contemporary, and a little personalized too. Start-to-finish time: Less than an hour. Cost to me: Nada. If this is crafting, sign me up!

Study Time!

Caught the tail end of this one on CNN this morning:

Study: Hyper-texting teens more likely to smoke, drink, have sex

FTA:

All that texting and social networking by teenagers could come back to byte them.

A new study by the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine links poor health behaviors -- including smoking, drinking and sexual activity -- to hyper-texting and hyper-networking.

I'm so glad someone conducted a big fancy study to tell us that kids who have more social interaction are exposed to more experiences. I mean, that's not what the story says the data shows, but really, what other logical conclusions could be drawn from these results?

I've seen lots of studies reported in such a way as to imply causation, usually through clueless, sensational, and/or inflammatory headlines. Often the subject is something meant to strike a righteous fear into the heart of parents about what is silently, secretly killing their children.

But the typical dumb study results story does not usually feature a dumb quote from the study's lead researcher. This one does:

"The startling results of this study suggest that when left unchecked texting and other widely popular methods of staying connected can have dangerous health effects on teenagers," said Scott Frank, lead researcher on the study. "This should be a wake-up call for parents to not only help their children stay safe by not texting and driving, but by discouraging excessive use of the cell phone or social websites in general."

Congratulations: you have just blatantly exposed your agenda and thus discredited yourself.

The implication is that lots of texting causes drinking, sex, and other risky behavior. This is infuriatingly dumb. But it taps into those righteous fears, and thus gets clicks, so why bother bringing logic into the equation?

On "Borderline" Comedy

"And you guys wonder why Dave Chappelle quit and went to Africa. Wanna know why? It was because of dumb fans."

I've heard this from more than one comic. Chris Hardwick threw out a variation on the theme on a recent Nerdist podcast. His comments were more to the effect that Chappelle quit at the height of his game because the tongue-in-cheek racial comedy he delivered with the intention of satirizing racists was embraced and non-ironically co-opted by, well, racists.

The above quote came from Daniel Tosh last night, who played at the Murat Theatre in downtown Indy. It came as part of what seemed to be a canned response to hecklers, although he deployed it in response to some disruptive-but-not-malicious "woo!"-ing and shouted requests for particular bits.

But I was reminded of Hardwick's comments during Tosh's set. Tosh has blown up in popularity since Tosh.0 started airing on Comedy Central, and part of the show's schtick is a lot of borderline (and not-so-borderline) racist and misogynistic riffing on the people featured in the web videos. I was admittedly addicted to the show through the first dozen or so episodes, but my interest started to wane when the off-color jokes seemed to make up the majority of the content. Not because I was offended, but because it seemed to rely on the principle that it's funny because it's wrong, which is not inherently true. And also maybe a little because if you repeat something enough, people start to think you really mean it.

Although my husband and I and quite a few of our mid-20s, totally non-racist friends are pretty regular viewers, I can't help but wonder if Tosh.0 hits a lot of the same demographic that made Chappelle pull anchor and GTFO. I'm sure Tosh and his show's writers don't really subscribe to the stereotypes they play off of, but  I'm guessing the material is received by a few people who kinda do.

Tosh's standup last night was hilarious, and he's a very talented performer. His standup does weave in some of the funny-because-it's-wrong stuff, but it's balanced out by enough non-squirmy material that it didn't bring down the show for me.

I did find myself bracing a little every time he rolled out another black or Latino joke*, but it was mostly because I was afraid the Indy audience would break out in roaring applause and cheers and just generally be a little TOO appreciative of the stereotyping and all "he's one of us! this guy gets it!" I was pleasantly surprised to see this not happen. But I still walked away feeling a little like maybe this isn't for me.


*There were some misogynistic jokes in the standup too, but (logically or not) this bothers me a little less. I guess because I find it plausible that some people in the audience are "a little bit racist" but I'm not really banking on anyone being "a little bit of a wife-beater."

Smugly Rocking My "I Voted" Sticker

I rolled out of bed bright and early expecting a long detour, but even after stopping to vote and to get coffee, I STILL made it to work earlier than I typically do.

I think that says more about my all-around punctuality than it does about how long it took me to vote, but turnout at my polling place did appear to drop off remarkably from the presidential election two years ago. It was my first time voting in a mid-term (yeah, I know), so I guess I didn't really have a frame of reference. Still, I waited in line for something like an hour - 20-30 minutes of that actually outside in the cold - in '08, whereas this morning there were three whole people ahead of me. Almost two hours into the day, I was the 35th voter at the polling place.

So today I will be proudly displaying my "I Vote/I Count" sticker, on my purse, which sits under my desk most of the day. Maybe tonight I will exercise my newly codified right to purchase alcohol on election day, just because I can. Welcome to the 21st century, Indiana!*


*Now how 'bout we legalize Sunday carry-out sales.

Tourist in my own town

Taking advantage of an unseasonably warm late October, my parents drove down from South Bend last weekend for a visit. The weather promised to be mid-70s and rain-free, so we decided to hit downtown in the middle of the afternoon and see what there was to see.

The parents, the sister, the husband and I all met up and started off with a great late lunch at Palomino. It was a first for me, and while I'd love to make it back soon, it might have been a bit on the fancy side for the boy, who has the palate of a nine-year-old. He made do with a burger (minus veggies) and fries. I had a perfectly portioned tomato/pesto/mozzarella panini with a side salad of field greens with goat cheese and pumpkin seeds dressed with olive oil and topped with a lemon wedge. I took a wild guess that the lemon was meant to be squeezed over the salad to finish the dressing, which met with reasonable success. Mom had the same salad and was a bit mystified by it, so she took my lead, to mixed results. The goat cheese was a little out of her comfort zone as well, but, baby steps, I guess.

Next up on the rotation was a walk along the canal, which I'm ashamed to admit was also a first for me, even after four years as a Naptowner. We spent some time at the Medal of Honor recipients memorial, which in addition to being fascinating and humbling, is also just plain pretty. We continued along the canal walk onward to White River State Park, past the museums and down the sculpture path until we turned around at the zoo. All the while I was kicking myself for not having taken advantage of such a beautiful, culture-fied resource right in my own downtown. What else had I been missing out on for so long?

Well, Monument Circle, of course. I was astonished to recently learn you can actually go inside the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at the center of downtown, to something called the observation level, which blew my mind, because it looks so narrow, right? So we went inside the base of the monument, which has a gift shop (also a revelation) as well as an elevator and a mind-numbing number of stairs leading to the top of the monument.

Now, I don't see myself as clinically claustrophobic, but I can certainly see how that mindset could have some merit. A little intimidated by the 20-some stories worth of narrow stairs, we instead opted for the narrow elevator. This thing seriously was built for two people, and we crammed five grown adults into it. Any kind of weight limit or capacity guidelines were notably absent. We took this to mean "go for it."

For better or for worse, the elevator is equipped with windows on a couple sides, so during the painfully slow ascent, we got to watch the guts of the monument fall below us. My dad, not knowing what we were signing up for, casually brought up the recently resolved Chilean miner crisis, seeing no irony in the discussion of being trapped in an enclosed space while we were all in a terribly enclosed space.

So my inner claustrophobe starts in with some low-level panicking, wondering how recently the elevator had been serviced and how often it malfunctioned, and, oh Jebus, what if it stops RIGHT NOW. Fortunately we reached the top of the line in due time, where we filed out and took a couple quick flights of stairs to the apex. Along the way, we passed a woman who made me feel simultaneously better and worse, as she was huddled under the stairs, white as a ghost and sweating, repeating to no one in particular, "I'm sorry, I'm just really claustrophobic, I'm just really claustrophobic." Yikes.

It was admittedly a great view. I made sure to take in the sights from each side, noting landmarks and marveling at how quickly downtown Indy falls away and blends into wooded residential, suburban, and finally rural territory. The fall colors have been hit or miss this year, but they were as great as I've seen them from that height.

We decided we'd had enough observatin' after about 60 seconds though, and made our way back down to the elevator. I steeled myself for the descent and came to realize why I had only just heard of this attraction after several years of Indy residency.

But the whole excursion did give me the staycation bug just a little. I mean, I moved to Indy to get away from the dead-end-ness of South Bend, and I haven't really made good on the resources now available to me.

So now I'm on a mission to start exposing myself and my other half to some culture, dammit. Where should we start?

My Unsolicited 2 Cents on Ugly Websites

As I'm working through the editorial proofs for our upcoming magazine, I have the unenviable task of verifying the contact info for every company that's credited on the featured projects. My first stop in most cases is Google, in hopes of tracking down a professional company website with complete contact information.

Believe it or not, not every company has made it a priority to establish such a website. (Thankfully, the primary offenders here are not companies in our industry, but rather their project partners.)

After browsing something like 50 websites over the past week or so, many of which feature a few key common threads of badness, I feel prepared to launch a crusade against these common offenses.

I'm no web designer, or anything-designer, but as a user, here are a few things I feel qualified to say should be fireable offenses if you catch your web designer trying to implement them:

Flash Intros: Come on, just get to it. If you're so hip and modern and have such great aesthetic sensibilities, demonstrate it by implementing a user-friendly web design, not by dropping a 15-second roadblock in the middle of my path to your company's primary public interface.

Incomplete or Nonexistent Contact Info: At a minimum, give me a phone number and a (monitored) email address. Physical address is a bonus. I've spent the past five minutes browsing through a very pretty website (behind a Flash intro wall!) that has no contact information. Whatsoever. Just one of those nifty "Contact Us" forms. Which leads me to...

Unmonitored "Contact Us" Forms: You know, those lead-retrieval forms where you type in your email address and a brief message and click "send", only to have your note sent through a wormhole and delivered into the same alternate universe where mismatched socks are dispatched to, never to be seen by a human being again. Has anyone ever gotten a meaningful response after using those forms? Not me. Unless you count the time I tried to schedule a massage appointment through one. No response, but when I called the spa three days later to try again, the receptionist did say, "Oh, you're the one who emailed us...?"

Comic Sans ANYTHING: Maybe, mercifully, someday, future editions of MS Office and other such suites will quietly retire Comic Sans from their lineup of system fonts. Until that day, we are stuck with legions of Geocities-level websites displaying grating Comic Sans, employed by people who shouldn't have the power to determine what fonts users and clients have to read, all because it looks "friendly" or "fun" or something (?). My fave today was the website of a professional construction company that yells at me in bold, all-caps Comic Sans, offset by some delightful bold Monotype Corsiva. Yes indeed. Of course, all of these things so far are better than...

No Website At All: It's 2010. 'Nuff said.

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I'm sure there's plenty more, but these seem to be the most consistent offenses. I'm baffled that so many business owners today overlook the importance of having a simple, findable, navigable, informative website. From my perspective as a Gen-Y-er who barely remembers a time before the Internet (okay, AOL for the first few years), if a company is not on the web, that company does not exist.

So if you spot these issues on your own company website and want to fire your web designer and throw me some money to make it better...well, I've exhuasted the whole of my expertise on this blog post, so, anyway.