Mexico hates Emo

Blender and star reporting are like milk and bourbon. But Senior Editor Josh Eells did a great piece called The Eyeliner Wars. While trying to find the story online, I found a related one on NPR. 

Basically, Mexico is rapidly becoming more liberal. Goths and Emo kids are not as hip here because of how quickly it hit mainstream, but over there it is aspirational and somewhat underground still, and the Mayor and others in politics are not so happy. Looking for a political drum to beat, they label these non-conformist as anti-church, anti-family trouble makers and has put an all out ban on Emo. One kid's trash is another kids treasure. It makes you wonder how other US trends fair overseas. 

Coltan

One of the best articles I've read on Coltan. Basically, Coltan is the new blood diamond. It is a metal mined in places like Canada, Australia, and the Congo for tantalum. Tantalum is used in hi-rel capacitors because of it's great thermal properties. It is used in cell phones and laptops. Demand has forced the US gov to keep reserves. Price has gone way up and so has the fight for profits. Congo has been victim to internal and external profiteers, resulting in bloodshed, humanitarian and environmental crises, and little attention from the international community. Many companies including vodaphone and nokia have spoken to their supply chain to stop using the metal in their capacitors, and US-based Kemet is swearing that all coltan is from the non-Congo region. 

artist of the month

joe girandola does cool things with duct tape. He considers himself a sculptor. check him out at www.joegirandola.com

big companies thinking sustainability

Here's an article about the work of Patagonia's Mike
Brown and others:
http://www.fastcompany.com/node/60982/print

and here's Brown's company:
http://www.bw-environmental.com/

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http://odamnap.blogspot.com

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Artist of the month

This month's privilege goes to cellist Wendy Sutter. Sutter teaches at Colombia and has a number of albums under her belt, but she is best known for ravaging her strings to works Philip Glass wrote for her. They date and have been touring the country for the past year. Her performance at LACMA earlier this month gave me chills; she did things to that cello I have never seen done with any string, and she even had little skulls and angels on her beast (original Amati). 

new favorite blog

this is genius: 

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

The Boneyard

Ever wonder where our old military planes go? They get sent to the yard to be preserved. The boneyard is known as AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance And Regeneration Center). Every once in a while, a big company like BAE would regenerate some planes to sell overseas. Check out their site:

http://www.amarcexperience.com/AMARCDescription.asp

 

Imagine the land and maintenance staff wasted to maintain 4200 planes that we don’t use while the military ponies up for JSF planes? It’s a bit of a waste. But is it cheaper than trying to find spare parts on a carrier? Should we replace our computers after 3 years, our 747s after 30? Or should we continue to maintain. I sometimes wonder how much an airplane or ship would cost if we focused on reducing costs instead of improving technology that we don’t really need.