Showing posts with label Wacky Holidays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wacky Holidays. Show all posts

Monday, July 27, 2009

National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day: Celebrate Free Speech!

Today I feel like I have a giant rush of thoughts, ideas, musings, and rants all pushing to stream out of one tiny little opening - the window of time. And I know I'm not going to have time to post pretty pictures, and create links, and just generally make this post one that is relatively interesting.

Or I could just force the window to open wider anyway...

Today's Wacky Holiday is National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day. Turns out the genesis of this holiday happened when a photography artist, Tom Forsythe of Utah, took pictures of Barbie, well, in a blender and other kitchen appliances and created "Food Chain Barbie", a "pictorial antidote to the powerful cultural forces persuading us to buy the impossible beauty myth".
"Triple Barbie Smoothie", by Tom Forsythe, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Mattel didn't like it and proceeded to sue him citing 'copyright infringement' among other things. Long story short, he won the case, and today's 'holiday' was created to bring awareness to the fact that despite many losses in the Free Speech arena nowadays, this event proves it is possible to win, and we need to celebrate that fact. (Photo below courtesy of "Debbie C.B." on Flickr.)

Read more about the event here.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

NaBloPoMo, Eclipses, TweetDeck, and stuff

Wow, I had to turn off the visual notifications for TweetDeck - every time I tried to open a tab to write in my blog the little flag would pop up, and I'd read the tweets! I was getting nothing done. Wow. O, the tribulations of following 200 people on Twitter.

First of all, I discovered this on WordPress.com: NaBloPoMo, which is short for "National Blog Posting Month". It's not regulated to a rigid set of dates (the month of September for example); it is simply the challenge of making a blog post for a solid 30 days. So I have decided to take the challenge! Now I just need to decide which date to start. I could start today, I suppose, with this post; and yet something makes me want to find a more meaningful date, something more romantic (not in the mushy love sense either). In fact, I already know what I'm going to write about! Read on ...

Something else I want to announce: I started a public calendar called "Wacky Holidays".
I got all my information from two great websites: one is called, Brownielocks and the 3 Teddy Bears - I guess. It's actually kind of difficult to tell exactly what the name of the website is, but they have THE most comprehensive database of Wacky Holiday information I could find. The other one is called, Holiday Insights. I invested a lot of time and care into making this calendar today, mostly to entertain and amuse myself (and harass my co-workers: "Embrace Your Geekness Day" anyone?). I've got August and September done, and I'm about halfway through October. October is proving to be a challenge in and of itself; there's a reason it's called "National Month Month" (it's also National Sarcastic Awareness Month). I've had to pick and choose the most interesting ones because I simply don't have the time to include them all. I took the liberty of editing August and September too, but believe me, there are more than enough items of interest there to pique anybody's interest - and keep them busy raising awareness too!

So apparently there's some interesting little phenomenon going on right now over in Asia, something about an eclipse or something ... yawn. Whatever. The only thing I can say seems 'odd' about this time right now, slipping into a fantasy-themed daydream comes rather easily of late, but I'm pretty sure that has more to do with the fact that Glenn and I just got done watching Season 1 of the "Legend of the Seeker" TV series on Hulu.com more than anything. (For the uninformed it's based on Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" book series.) Also a book I'm reading: "Confessions of an Ugly Step-Sister" which draws on the fantasy theme quite a bit. Also the beautiful and ethereal Joanna Newsom and her harp-playing I've been getting into lately.
Also the fantasy-themed knitting and crocheting communities I've joined. Also might have something to do with the fact that ever since I canceled my WoW account I've been pining to play my beloved online video game. *lesigh*

Otherwise I'm enjoying a nice, quiet evening at home on the computer with Glenn. He's doing his thing and I'm doing mine. It's really nice; and I installed Google Chrome which is turning out to be wicked cool, so all is well. Earlier we watched a movie, Pineapple Express. We laughed our asses off! Except it got rather violent with lots of people dying, which I hate in a movie, but it was tolerable, and it was pretty funny.

I really believe the people who seriously believe anything catastrophic is going to come out of this eclipse are people who generally create their very own self-fulfilling prophecies. I know what I speak of: I used to be one of those people. Luckily the news business made a skeptic out of me. Wars, and natural disasters, and strange phenomena happen all the time; with or without cool astronomical events happening. If you really believe a disaster is going to happen, then it very likely will. One tends to go wherever their thoughts take them. That's about all I have to say on that.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to warm up my cold tea and curl up on the couch with my book ...