looli’s Neighborhood

and i don't always feel lucky
but i'm smart enough to try
cuz humility has buoyancy
and above us only sky

I wish I could fall into a good book. Make a room inside my head to hang out in.

I need to cultivate more dignity and grace. I want to feel more powerful and clear. I am worrying about my Mothering.
It care so much about doing a good a job, but with all that is going on I have to dig so hard. It feels unfair.

I had a dream last night that I checked into a hotel for the weekend and all of these people took care of me all weekend. It was really odd and uncomfortable in some ways. But, to have someone to just help me hold some of this would not be bad.

I think about trying to schedule a massage, but I am afraid I will cry.

survivors are part turtle
we are part potato bug
we know enough to go fetal
'til it's still up above
and you gotta crawl through the desert
between when you hear it 
and when you can play it with your hands
just to rendezvous with whoever you are 
when you finally understand


I feel really lonely and sad. My words are bouncing around all my empty spaces. 
I am dreaming of bad behavior to blunt what ever feeling I am avoiding. 
 Self hating hating distractions that mock mercy. 

I just want to be held. 

And not just because the site spells colour with a 'u'.

COLOURlovers is the brainchild of Darius A Monsef IV, a creative consultant and web designer. The web site calls itself a resource to monitor and influence trends in colour. But more simple than that, it allows its ten thousand plus members to create colours and 5-colour palettes. The social network  aspect allows users to see and vote on each other's palettes and colours and post comments on each other's profiles. The current top pick is called paris boutique by user realitybites (warning, very annoying bit of flash sound on this profile page).

paris boutique

I have found myself compulsively creating palettes for the past twenty four hours. I almost always create a palette before I start work on a graphics project, but there is something about making up palettes just for fun that  is curiously addicting. And like so many other computer phenomena, I find myself now looking around and seeing palettes everywhere. I've just been adding palettes based on the actors in  The United States of Leland, which I watched last night and loved. I just kept looking at Don Cheadle and Ryan Gosling and wondering which five colours I would use to do a palette portrait of them.

Try it and I guarantee you will become a COLOURlover, too!

Last week I watched the wonderful documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? It was infuriating and inspiring all at the same time.

The film is well researched, nicely paced and beautifully structured. I was particularly impressed by the way the film makers managed to get me to fall in love with a car, the General Motors EV1 to be precise. Now, I know Canadians and Americans fall in love with cars all the time. People name their cars, people lovingly polish their cars on the weekends, people Love Their Cars.

But I don't. I don't love cars at all. In fact, I rather hate cars. Hate! It's a strong word, but there you go. Do you know, I recently just about sprained my arm patting myself on the back when I discovered that my ecological footprint was less than half (42%) of the North American average (although I suspect that like many, by "North American" they meant only Canada and the United States). Only, I was feeling ripped off because there was no option in the first survey I took for never driving a car. The best I could do is check that I always either am or have a passenger. This is true, in my case, because I have never had a driver's license. I've never been alone in a moving car in my life. I am the ultimate car-pooler! The second survey I took gave me virtually the same result (44% of the Canadian average) and did allow for never travelling by car.

Before you get too impressed, though (if you're the type to be impressed by this sort of thing) bear in mind that is still 3.9 hectares of land (compared to the national average of 8.8) required to support my oh so luxurious bus riding, groceries in a rolling cart, small apartment in a low rise lifestyle, more than twice the global average of 1.8 hectares. If everyone lived like I do, we'd need another two and a half planets, or so goes the conceit.

So, yeah, it's a little amazing that Chris Paine got me so enamoured of the sporty little EV1, but he did. And it's crucial as a viewer to feel a little romantic towards the zippy little electric car, so that you can become crushed when  he tells you the story of the car's demise, along with the dismantling of some of the most ambitious environmental legislation in the United States, the California Air Resources Board’s Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. As a story-telling technique it's brilliant.

Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth has gotten a lot of attention and seems to have led to a genuine shift in the political currents. With a federal election supposedly looming, even the Conservatives are trying to wrap themselves in the green flag, so hot button has the topic become. But Who Killed the Electric Car is a far more engaging film, in my opinion, and does a much better job of pointing fingers and naming names. It shows who, specifically, is responsible for shutting down a programme and destroying a product that could have real impact on climate change.

The only quibble I have with the film is that it doesn't address a core part of the problem with cars, and that has to do with the volume on the roads and the extent to which Canadians and Americans are dependent on them to move about their communities. Just weaning off oil and switching to electricity won't solve that problem, and in fact, I question whether having the same number of cars on the road as we have now, powered by electricity, is even feasible.  Already half of Canadians say they believe nuclear power is a good way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul. Let's clean up the air today by creating nuclear waste that will be radioactive for ten thousand years.

Finding alternatives for oil are a great idea, but if those of us who life in the rich nations don't actually do something to curb our consumption, none of that will matter. We can look to Mexico for an example of the impact of American car drivers on the lives of the poor.  I see no reason to believe that merely replacing every gas guzzler on the road with an electric car re-charged with electricity from a coal-fired or nuclear power plant would have any better impact.

Here is a link to the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association, a twenty year old non-profit society.

The BC Federation of Labour has ramped up their campaign to raise the minimum wage in British Columbia from $8 per hour to $10. A couple of weekends ago Jim Sinclar himself handed me a flyer at a Vancouver Skytrain station and urged me to sign their on-line petition.

On Thursday, the NDP also called on the Campbell government to raise the wage to $10.

Business leaders and the BC Liberals are, predictably, against the $2 raise, arguing, among other things, that it will prove a disincentive to investors. You also often hear champions of small businesses raising the objection that it will put them out of business.

As a small business owner myself, I think that's just bad business. Sure, there are businesses that will go under if the minimum wage is raised to $10; in my opinion those businesses should go under. If the only way a business can stay afloat is by paying its workers poverty wages, then as far as I'm concerned they have no business operating. Arguing that it should be legal to pay people wages that will see them working full time but still falling far short of the poverty line (a single person working full time at $8 per hour falls about $4000, or 25%, short of the latest [2005] poverty line, never mind someone who is supporting a family) just encourages bad business practices. Because if businesses folding is an excuse for keeping wages so low, then why not lower the minimum wage? Surely there are plenty of businesses that couldn't hack it in the current wage climate that could thrive if we lowered the minimum wage to $5 an hour, no?

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report in March that challenges many of the myths of the "disastrous" consequences of raising the minimum wage minimum wage above the poverty line. You can read a press release and find the whole report here.

I first saw Josh Jakus's (http://joshjakus.com/) UM bags a couple of weeks ago at the Vancouver Art Gallery's gift shop. The first thing I noticed about the bags was their striking shape and the rich organic texture of the felt of which they are made.

But the real pleasure of these bags is when you unzip them. Jakus said the bags grew out of the challenge to "transform a flat surface into a volume using only the simplest of operations," and that operation is the zipping of a zipper. The bags get extra points for being made from industrial felt (sturdy!) scraps that would otherwise go to waste.

Click for animation of the zippering in action.

I've been meaning to write about Karim Rashid's beautifully designed Kone hand held vacuum for Dirt Devil for ages. I love the clean simple lines of the machine and the fact that I would happily have it sitting in my living room or on my kitchen counter. A far cry from the ugly beige dust buster my parentshad plugged into a hallway outlet when I was a kid!

True to Rashid's style, Kone is lovely to look at.

You can see the range of colours and see Kone at work, sort of, in Dirt Devil's spot ad for it on YouTube.

Oh I want to love this product so badly. I really do. It's reasonably priced and it looks good. I love it when something useful can also be beautiful but still remain affordable. Beauty for the masses and all that. Only, what this other YouTube video, from Popular Mechanics, shows is that Kone doesn't work. Oh sure, it's pretty but it sucks. Or, it doesn't suck! And that turns this from my favourite kind of design to the worst kind of design ever: a useless pretty thing that will frustrate the people who bought it and very quickly clutter up landfills. Shame on you Dirt Devil and Karim Rashid!

Abusive Lab Test: Handheld Vacuums