We’re pleased the announce the launch of the website for Minnesota photographer Anders Bjorling. Anders travels the world to take beautiful shots in his native Sweden, as well as Iceland, Africa, the Galapagos, Ecuador, and elsewhere. The site was built with scalable portfolio pages, so with the CMS (content management system) in place, there is no limit to the number of images Anders can add.
Makara Beach, outside of Wellington, NZ
…when you’re busy, then you go on vacation. We were in Hawaii and New Zealand for a couple of weeks, visiting relatives. It was lovely. We really should get back there more often. What was also lovely was that Blue Moue Monkey carried on in my absence. Now that we have a project manager (John Redder) and a studio manager (Sheliese Gieseke), stuff gets done even when I’m not there! I am so thrilled to have them both on board. And of course Jimmy Thomas, who strictly speaking isn’t part of Blue Mouse Monkey, but he does so much work for us he may as well be. Jimmy built the new Blue Mouse Monkey website while I was away. We’re putting the finishing touches on it and hope to launch it this week!
Since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, the “soy issue” has come up a few times. Not from doctors (who appear to care little about what you eat – hah!) but from friends. Well-meaning friends who wish to warn me about the “dangers of soy”, particularly for people with hormone-related cancers.
I’m a vegetarian. I eat soy. I love tofu and eat it in some form almost every day. (I go through a tub of Toby’s Tofu Pate a week. I must have put their kids through college by now). I like miso, but it’s so salty it’s more like a condiment than rib-sticking food. I admit I do like “vegan junk food” like tofurkey slices, smart dogs, and the like. I don’t eat this kind of processed stuff every day, but a couple of times a week I’ll indulge. I don’t like tempeh but will eat it very occasionally if it’s well-disguised. I don’t like soymilk, and rarely drink it. The exception is the occasional winter drink of hot soymilk with maple syrup and a dash of salt. Somehow, maple and salt make it divine.
Aaaaanyhow, my point is, I eat a little bit of soy, often. I don’t believe it gave me cancer. And I don’t believe omitting it from my diet will reduce the risk of cancer returning. Quite the contrary.
Japanese women have the lowest rate of breast cancer in the world. A lot has been written about the Japanese diet, and many epidemiological studies have demonstrated a correlation between soy consumption and reduced breast cancer risk there. Now I know that correlation is not cause, but epidemiological studies are all we have when it comes to understanding the long-term relationship between diet and health. You can’t do a double-blind, controlled experiment following several thousand people for 20 years, during which half of them eat real soy and the other half eat placebo soy. It’s just won’t work. So epidemiological studies are what we have, and particularly useful are meta-studies of those studies.
When a Japanese woman has breast cancer, she is more likely than an American woman to survive long term. Her cancer will likely be slower-growing, less aggressive, and hormone receptive. When a Japanese woman gets breast cancer, her tumor is easier to beat.
My tumor was slow-growing, less aggressive, and highly hormone receptive. There’s no way I’ll ever pinpoint the cause or my cancer, but based on what I understand, it might be the case that my 20 years of soy-eating (and general healthful practices) gave the tumor a less favorable terrain to get really nasty. It’s out now, and my task for the rest of my life is to make sure it doesn’t return. It’s a statistics game: I could do everything possible that’s right and good for health, and the cancer might still come back. But if I do everything that’s right and good, at least I’ll know I did everything I could.
So why does soy have such a bad rap among the general public, and also some alternative medical practitioners such as naturopaths?
If you look at the history, it’s apparent that soy’s reputation has slid for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
Here’s a link to a good article about soy and why the bad rap it’s gotten is based on politics rather than science: Is Soy Safe?
More info on soy and health can be read here: Soy improves breast cancer survival
One government that has particularly obvious anti-soy policies is New Zealand. New Zealand’s small economy is based heavily in animal agriculture. Milk there is like corn here: a massive surplus that the food industry mops up by adding milk products to a lot of processed foods, the way corn products are added to many foods here. (New Zealand is a hard place to be if you’re lactose intolerant!).
New Zelanders internalize anti-soy propaganda to the point where, e.g. my brother in law won’t eat tofu because it will “give him titties”. (Ironically, NZ has one of the highest rates of cardiovascular disease, due to high meat and dairy consumption).
Here in the US the economy is so huge and based on so many variables that pressure comes less from the federal government and more from particular industries. The effect is the same: spread of misinformation and fear-mongering.
So, say yes to soy! Food of the gods, in my opinion.
It’s a cliche that the solo business owner does everything because they have to do everything. What also goes with that territory is our difficulty with letting go of that. The thought of delegating causes more anxiety than the reality of being overworked — or so it seems. When it’s your baby, and you’re used to doing things your way, and all your systems and structures are organized idiosyncratically, it does seem hard to let someone in, even if it’s to help.
Now I’ve worked with subcontractors for years, and I even share an office with developer Jimmy Thomas of Acts of Good, for we do most of our projects together. But it became clear during 2009 that if I didn’t make changes, I was looking at a lifetime of switching gears between strategizing for clients, creating brands, taking care of all aspects of design, updating legacy client sites (the ones built before I was using content management systems), handling inquiries, facilitating team meetings, managing projects from soup to nuts, networking, and keeping on top of administrative tasks like scheduling, planning, bookkeeping, budgeting, invoicing, updating the business plan, talking with lawyers, CPAs, and so on.
So I should hire some help, right? Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. For starters, help with what? I do a million different things—which several hundred thousand would the help help with? “Get a junior designer” was the frequently offered advice. But it’s my design sensibilities that make Blue Mouse Monkey’s work unique. And besides, the design is the funnest part. How sad would that be to give it up.
What I needed help with was the administrative tasks. So it became a matter of figuring out which parts of my workload I could “peel off” and give to someone else. Preferably someone who is better at them than I. Then designing a job description around that, then designing a want-ad around that, then designing interview questions, then posting the ad…
…Craigslist. Part-time. No benefits. The only draw was a non-standard workplace, seeing as we’re creative types and all…
…165 applications. I read every single one. I filled out a matrix that assigned scores of 1-5 to several criteria for each applicant, plus I wrote notes. Then I averaged out the scores, telling myself I’d revisit all the ’4′s and ’5′s. There were a dozen or so complete duds, but there were also so many ’5′s I had to cut some of those out in the first round. Then I interviewed the remaining ’5′s. Seventeen in all. Jimmy participated, even though this wasn’t his hire, he’d be sharing space and projects with whomever I chose. Plus, it was good to have his company while a parade of talent passed through our office.
Part of me was thrilled that so many over-qualified people were interested. But another part of me was heartbroken to see so much smarts and creativity and talent so dreadfully unemployed. Brilliant resumes that ended in 2008 or 2009. One woman who wrote me an apologetic email after firing off an angry one (I had rejected her in the first round) had me in tears. There is no reason why good people who have done all the “right” things should be set adrift so cruelly by an economic system that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them and considers them nothing but a “human resource.” It’s unfair, and undignified. This is not the way it should be, I kept thinking. This is not the way it should be.
But, it’s the way it is, and I had to keep going through the process. And it’s true I was grateful that “too many to choose from” was my biggest problem.
For the second round of interviews I got it down to five applicants. The “final five” I called them. Every one of them was excellent. As I said to Jimmy, “I’ll hire them all, and we’ll take over the world!” But the budget was for one, and part-time at that. So after the second round of interviews I spent a weekend in agony, going back and forth, considering every variable I could.
Funnily enough, after considering all the variables, I offered the job to the person who I had instinctively thought “This is the one” right after her interview. I kept trying to ignore that instinctive response, telling myself that I should take all the variables into consideration. But after that weekend of agonizing, Shelise Gieseke really was the one, and I offered her the job the following week. She is settling in to her role as Studio Manager and I remain thrilled to have her at Blue Mouse Monkey.
Oddly, Shelise doesn’t come from a design background. I say oddly, because many design industry folks applied. Shelise’s background includes communications and being a legal assistant, so I knew she’d be great at client care and staying on top of detailed tasks. But what distinguished her in the end was a combination of good humor, critical thinking skills, and an interest in social justice issues. Shelise splits her time with Adoption Mosaic, a local non-profit that provides information and resources to address the unique needs of the adoption community, particularly around international adoptions. Shelise is a Korean adoptee and she is interested in the way society shapes the adoptee experience through language. I didn’t know much about international adoption until I met Shelise, but apparently the complexities and risks are numerous.
I’m not adopted, international or otherwise, but I am an ex-pat who didn’t live in her native country till the age of 10, then spent a total of only 13 years there. Perhaps it’s the “outsider’s edge” that I can relate to, the faint background hum of being “not from here”. And the knowledge that there is nowhere in the world where that hum would fall completely silent.
But this isn’t a problem, because it’s the edge that give us outsiders a inbuilt appreciation of cultural relativity, great observation skills, awareness of the shaping powers of culture, and makes us take extra care with communications. All excellent skills for brand creators and web designers!
It keeps us nimble and resourceful, too, for navigating the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.
My name is Julia, and I’m a recovering solopreneuraholic.
Argentinean born Monica Camin is a painter and sculptor whose work mixes European and South American influences. Cultural history, displacement, and family are recurring themes within Monica’s gestural, expressionistic works.
This website is made in Flash and includes a content management system that allows Monica to create new pages and edit existing ones.
Designer and design theorist Tony Fry presented a PNCA-sponsored lecture today based on his book ”Design Futuring, Culture and the Coming Age of Unsettlement“.
The idea were huge and his presence steady, quiet and firm. He began by framing his talk with the idea that we (human beings) are designers, we design our world, we live in a designed world. We are very good at creating things, and very bad at recognizing what we’re destroying in the process. The implications of this are of course enormous as we face global climate catastrophe. The social and cultural changes to be forced upon us from dealing with upheavals, including the displacement of about 10% of the world’s population, will be of a scale not seen since the last time humanity reacted to major climate change, about 12,000 years ago when disparate peoples moved into Mesopotamia, and nomads turned agrarian.
The following selective bits and pieces from the rest of Fry’s lecture made it into my notes:
War is the most dramatic manifestation of unsustainment. It destroys the environment, it destroys bodies.
The current economic recovery is really just a reinstatement of the status quo, rather than the paradigm shift needed from a quantitative economy to a qualitative economy.
An economy base on perpetual growth is like the concept of perpetual motion. It’s physically impossible.
Our current form of democracy won’t deliver sustainment. People won’t vote for a different world if they are unable to imagine it. What’s needed is the creation and dissemination of a vision of a different world.
The problems we’re facing can’t be solved by individuals (i.e. the ‘genius’ model). What’s required are teams of people with ranges of expertise.
Designers need to move from just designing things, to learning how to mobilize them strategically. Fry proposes a ‘redirective practice’, which entails new design practices and new design activities. E.g a practice of ‘design for elimination’ – how do you turn a designer’s eye toward the problem of how to get rid of things?
It’s not just about changing the world, it”s about changing ourselves. It’s a process as big as the Enlightenment, but we don’t have 500 years to do it.
Seems impossible? Human history is the history of the attainment of the impossible. It’s about changing the perception of what’s possible. The world, after all, is not flat.
When the inevitable audience question came up of, ‘there’s so much to be done, how does one prioritize?’, Fry quoted a Swedish associate: “Dig where you stand.”
Agave nectar (which sounds so foreign, so of-the-desert, and damn hard to get out of agave) tastes remarkably like the Golden Syrup of my NZ youth! I mean, it’s like Golden Syrup is really agave nectar but they never said so! Or someone’s been syringing Golden Syrup into agave plants!
I have yet to try it out as a substitute for Golden Syrup in making Hokey Pokey.
Don’t know what Hokey Pokey is? It’s an easy-to-make candy that’s like honeycombed caramel. It’s brittle like toffee, but full of bubbles like, well, pumice. But it tastes way better than pumice. Here’s a recipe.
1000 Languages
The Mandarin word for “www” is wanweiwang, a loan translation meaning literally “10,000 connections net”.
- from a review of Peter K. Austin’s new book One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost in The New Scientist.
Obama supporters outside the white house
“Obama’s national margin in the popular vote will approach ten million. He has won by the largest margin for a non-incumbent candidate for president since Eisenhower in 1952.
First and foremost, the election outcome is a massive repudiation of the Bush presidency, the Republican Party and nearly three decades of right-wing domination of American politics. It is a watershed election, one which reflects, in the electoral framework, the massive demographic, socio-economic and cultural shifts over the past quarter-century.
All of the right-wing nostrums reiterated by the media and political establishment of both parties in recent years—that America is a “right” or “center-right” nation with a majority of “red states” unshakably loyal to the Republicans, that religion and cultural “values” are the decisive political issues—have been shattered.”
Read the complete article at wsws.org
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“I truly believe that the example of how Obama has lived his life, what he has learned, his many years of grass roots activism to improve the lives of people, how he has coped with racism and being the “outsider” ….these things connect to the countless layers of American society. Obama speaks to them because he has lived it; and the living-of-it gives him the right to talk about inclusiveness. He personifies hope for a better future for our fractured and hurting country.”
– Sylvia Alf, 68, Obama volunteer in Florida, as cited on Five Thirty Eight.com
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Australian Greens leader Senator Bob Brown said in Auckland today: “President-elect Barack Obama raises the hopes of the world for a fairer, securer more ecologically sound future.
“The world’s richest nation is set to enter a new era. Hope for George W. Bush’s replacement will return a greater decency and dignity to the White House. The world faces a rapid countdown to climate change, over consumption and misuse of catastrophic weaponry. Obama’s election is a breath of fresh air after perhaps the most important presidency in a century. His biggest challenge will be to end the undemocratic power wielded by an army of lobbyists and vested interests which is camped in Washington,” Senator Brown said.
***
“The country regarded loftily by many Europeans as hopelessly racist and irredeemably right wing has voted to be ruled by a black man, at the head of a party committed to economic redistribution and a foreign policy rooted in peaceful diplomatic engagement.”
Read the complete article on the UK’s Times Online
Screenshot from Horn OK Please
Horn OK Please is an award-winning short claymation film in the style of Wallace and Gromit.
“…directly inspired by director Joel Simon´s journey in the heat and frenzy of Mumbai, India.
It follows a day in the life of an Indian taxi driver whose goal is to earn enough rupees to buy the air-conditioned taxi of his dreams…The film was made over a 10 month period by Irish and Indian animators and Joel Simon, a Belgian director. It´s a combination of claymation and hand drawn backgrounds…” It’s fun and very well done.