Quote of the day

“He did exactly as I expected,” she said. “He lived in it for a day, then he ate it. Then he bit me.”

Sally Muir, co-author of “Pet Projects: The Animal Knits Bible” as reviewed in today's Times, speaking of the hamster house.

There's a good future in potato peelers

By request, and because it really is very cool, I bring your attention to Joe Ades who died on Sunday. He sold potato peelers on the street outside the Union Square Greenmarket in NYC. And had an Upper East Side apartment. He was "was a regular at expensive East Side restaurants, where no one believed his answer to the 'So what do you do?' question: 'I sell potato peelers on the street.'"

There's also a great profile of him in (wait for it!) Vanity Fair, thus fulfilling their potato peeler seller profile quote for the century, I imagine. But, you know, there's a lot of money in it, apparently, and an opening now, so if you're looking for work, you might want to consider it.

Here's a quick view of his spiel. Much more on YouTube if you've got a lot of time to kill.

Millard Fuller

I learned this morning that Millard Fuller died. He's the man who founded Habitat for Humanity and you can learn more about him here.

I admire the Habitat model that includes the beneficiaries in the process. They help build the house and they also contribute financially. But they pay no interest. Habitat, Heifer, and microlending I think all have in common this sense that the poor don't need to be pitied or exploited, and that help doesn't mean I'll take care of everything for you. Instead there are ways to work towards solutions together. I think that's the way to go.

Another bus

And here was my own submission to the bus parade.

More lovely parodies of things that annoy me

Remember that bus that proclaimed there's probably no God? Now there's a Bus Slogan Generator! MadPriest is running a bus slogan competition on his blog "Of Course I Could Be Wrong" and far cleverer people than I are coming up with slogans that make me very happy. This is my personal favorite:


You can find more here. Or create your own!

Quote of the Day

If you knew the first fricking thing about football, you'd take any of these former and current QB's over Roethlisberger for the final drive of the 4th quarter to lead your time down the field for a touchdown to win the game.

Commenter JK at 3:16 on a Super Bowl Open Thread blog. He got a bit of a drubbing later after Roethlisberger took the Steelers for a final drive of the 4th quarter to a game-winning touchdown. Man, that was a great game.

No easy answers

I very much appreciated this post on the Change.org website talking about how Save Darfur and other organizations of that kind can't accomplish what their slogans say. "Often it seems Darfur activists are raising expectations they can never hope to meet. Any organization which claims it can save Darfur is courting hubris, at the least. At the end of the day, Darfur - and Sudan - have to save themselves."

If there's one thing I brought home with me from Uganda, it was an understanding that there was much I did not understand and that solutions were not all that simple. Also a huge mistrust of 'doing good' in the sense of going in and making it all better. But I haven't yet been able to articulate all of that, and this small entry does help.