so here i am, now revealing my finds to a hopefully limited audience and also an audience who will keep the knowledge of these bags mostly to themselves.

yes i like gray bags.  i like them in grayish army green, too (see the jennyndesign bag) – but everyone’s been telling me that it’s pretty much gray as well.

<<hardgraft>>
shop.hardgraft.com
James Teal + Monika. England + Austria.

back in etsy days, they were Working Class Heroes. now they are hardgraft, with a line of laptop sleeves, and cases for phones, wallets, moleskines and various other products.

<<COTEetCIEL>>
store.coteetciel.com

they have the same types of products as does hardgraft, but at a lower price point and admittedly less ‘elite’ (apparently leather makes everything more so, but i don’t quite care personally) but at the very least not any less durable or fashionable. plus, if you’re the type who can’t handle the expense of having a full 100% tanned vegetable leather exterior (not to mention making sure never to spill or do anything to damage it), you may want to go with COTEetCIEL’s neoprene, cotton canvas, and recycled bottle fabrics that might provide some better peace of mind.

<<jennyndesign>>
www.etsy.com/shop/jennyndesign

very functional and great price point for a genuine leather bag.

-D

while their lines, categorized ‘IN’, ‘OUT’, and ‘RATTAN’, are nothing mind-blowing or revolutionary, they are undoubtedly the ideally crisp representation of contemporary furniture that is not purely architectural (what i mean is modern in form and essence but visibly uncomfortable… i have IKEA trash in mind).  the lines are clean, the color palettes of the various sets are pure and well-matched and the construction is solid and made with style, function and also sustainability (a big plus!!) in mind.

if i ever get rich… i’m importing expormim interior designers and furniture.

here are some collections that expormim put together:

Starbucks has a new cup size, the TRENTA!!!!

Here is a video of Ellen DeGeneres introducing the 4 cup sizes in hilarious fashion and a cup comparison of the trenta and the venti sizes.

Really, though, the differences between the tall and grande, venti and trenta are miniscule.  they’re like coffee cup Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian twins, respectively.  ok not that extreme, but you get my point.  and i wonder if there is a ‘short’ cup size?

i also just wanted to inform everyone that as of right now, wikipedia is not working.  i tried to make sure my Gulliver’s Travels references were accurate, and it appears that the wiki server is down.  so I used the next best thing, sparknotes.  ahh, high school…

-D

the end.

-D

And now this.  People in China are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for Tibetan Mastiffs.  These dogs aren’t even that great.  they are known to be vicious and strong and hairy and they don’t have very long lifespans.

Even the price of puppies and dogs in the US are ridiculous – most puppies are purchased for a couple hundred.

But a woman in Northern China last year purchased a Tibetan Mastiff for $600,000. this vile woman then sent 2 SUVs, and 30 Mercedes-Benz cars to take the dog back to her house.  and then made sure to call all of her other rich friends to make sure they all knew she just bought a mastiff, how much she paid for it, and how she brought it home.  i’m retching.

so how does that make sense, ever?  ok, whatever i guess, if you bought diamonds or gold or a technologically groundbreaking sportscar.  but a dog who’ll live for ~8 years, terrorize family members (most likely because the people who are buying them are irresponsible because they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into), and shed everywhere, especially if you didn’t really choose to purchase and love a dog FOR the dog itself? no.  it doesn’t make sense.

i cannot believe this quote in the NPR article:

“Among the must-haves for rich men in northeast China, the official Xinhua News Agency recently said was a young beautiful wife, a Lamborghini and a Tibetan mastiff, ‘the bigger and more ferocious the better.’”

I’m not even going to get into the ‘young beautiful wife’ part (and there won’t be that many of them young beautiful girls -at least the non-imported mail-order bride ones- if the Chinese keep aborting theirs).  i just threw up a little in my mouth.

the so-called ‘breeders’.  In the US, you can only really be a genuine ‘breeder’ if you are generally responsible, especially breed responsibly, pledge your support to each litter, carefully screen potential buyers and much much more.  THESE ‘breeders’ are just churning out puppies, what are commonly known as puppy mills in the US.  They are breeding way too many dogs that they can handle themselves or their naive and idiotic customers can handle.  Even in the US, too many owners don’t know how to take care of their dogs and set them loose, give them to shelters and rescues where they are often murdered.  Most of the time, the dogs only misbehave and cause trouble because their owners don’t know what WILL keep them in line and well-behaved.

Who knows what worse things are going on in China with pets if this type of mastiff frenzy is occurring.  Hundreds and hundreds of these dogs are just born, sold for extreme profits, and most likely killed in the end.  You think that 100lb. Ms. Wang, the purchaser of the $600,000 dog, knows how to establish herself as the alpha dog in the family with this ~160lb. Tibetan Mastiff?  Hell no.  Once she’s over the fact that the Mastiff is the new hot thing, she’ll throw this dog away and he’ll be killed.  Fuckin’ superb.  i’m pretty much full-scale projectile vomiting now.

-D

I first heard about the Naga Chilli, also termed bhut jolokia and ghost chili, on Top Gear‘s Series 8 Episode 4.  When comparing the BMW Z4 to the Porsche Boxster, Richard Hammond (the show’s pint-sized comedian of the host trio) uses naga chilli as a metaphorical representation of the former’s performance and character.  While the Boxster is excellent and powerful and smooth, the Z4 is fiery and hot.  Apparently, one can’t even touch the spicy chili pepper with bare hands, and it is merely touched against the ingredients of a dish instead of being chopped up and mixed in.  Hammond holds the pepper gingerly with gloves, sticks out his tongue at it, and is subsequently incapacitated for the next… well, no one quite knows for how long.

here’s a visual.  they don’t look that bad, you might say. here are some statistics, then:

Tabasco = 2,500-5,000 Scoville units.  Naga Chilli = slightly more than 1,000,000 Scoville units.  O_O HOLY CRAP.

so the Indian military is not fucking around. while these naga grenades that they’ll be creating will be non-toxic, the pungency ‘can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs’, said R.B. Srivastava, Director at the Defense Research and Development Organization. to be quite honest, i don’t think that is the extent of it. i legitimately think that the pain of a full-power naga grenade is perhaps comparable to that of napalm. i mean… Hammond touched the very tip of his tongue to the coated exterior of the chilli and started freaking out and crying!

-D

no point trying to convince the enemy – after all, the country-splitting, staunchly partisan and obstinate Republicans will vote against the bill even if the bill allowed them the secret butt sex (Larry Craig), little-boy texting (Mark Foley),  ’burly black men’ fellating (Bob Allen), young-colleague mouth-to-penis-’resuscitation’-giving (Glenn Murphy Jr.), Argentinian-whore-with-douchebag/assface-affair-having (Mark Sanford), and phallic-name-having (John Boehner – it’s pronounced boner.  he insists that it’s of German origin and it should be pronounced bayner, but fuck that.  if you actually meant for that to happen you would’ve spelled it out with an umlaut and all that jazz.  your last name is fucking pronounced BONER.  get over it or legally change your name) they and probably many other of their colleagues so desperately want.

the NYTimes reports that Pelosi is basically fucking bad-ass. “Ms. Pelosi said she would not allow separate votes on abortion or other controversial issues. ‘Not on abortion, not on public option, not on single-payer, not on anything,’ she said.”

Though she’s met with a couple of these anti-abortion Democrats behind the curtain, I’m still happy with the state of affairs and the bill on the table.  The ‘expansion of abortion, an absolute moral evil’, was expanded enough in this current version that it made Republican Anh Cao of Louisiana, the sole Republican who voted for this bill back in November, retract his support for the bill.  Yeah.. if one of your daughters Sophia or Betsy accidentally gets knocked up in college and isn’t ready for children, you might want to rethink this.

and i don’t know who these protesters are… but under NO circumstances, even in a country with free speech, are they allowed to gang up, spit on people with whom they don’t agree, and scream racial epithets and other offensive tirades in their faces.  refer to my previous post… the overpopulation problem of BIGOTS hasn’t been solved yet, obviously.  ugh.  by the way…don’t say that i’m doing the same.  i can post whatever i want.  you don’t have to read it!!

rooting for the 216 votes to emerge and solidify.  and get launched into the Republicans’ faces.  they can bitch about how Democrats are being unconstitutional in their attempts to pass this bill… but hey, when you’re working with donkeys (yes, stubborn asses), you sometimes have to just whip them.  hard.  or just cart them away somewhere until they come to their senses.

UPDATE!!! – BILL PASSED. now to calm the masses, and overturn the entrenched ideas that some misguided people have about this legislation…

-D

But recently, German scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology may have found the secret to creating an invisibility cloak – according to the report, they were able to find a way to make three dimensional objects disappear from view.

They swathed a microscopic lump of gold under a mysteriously termed ‘microscopic structure’ like a ‘reflective carpet’.  by manipulating and distorting light shone on the covered item, they were able to hit the item in a way that it was not visible from any angle.

certainly a long way from actually being able to manipulate a human-sized ‘microscopic structure’ cloak, but it’s quite amazing what people are capable of creating.  and anyway, it’s not supposed to be perfect anyway, right?  if the cloak is/will be anything like the one in the harry potter movies, you can still kind of tell there’s a moving object even while invisible – watch again if you didn’t notice the flutter in the scenes where harry is just draping on the cloak, rustling and moving around, etc.  seems like if and when this item ever gets made, it might slightly betray the user in the same way when the light is hitting it in different ways.  i’m very curious how they’ll decide to proceed with this…

-D

anyway, the best pair for me were the Zoom Katanas.

weight wise, they are very much on the lightweight, zero arch support marathon shoe end, so unless you have decently good biomechanics in your feet, you might want to go light on the use of these as well until your feet have strengthened – add in some very short barefoot runs as well to help the feet with their natural gait and pronation (which is not a bad thing, it is just what the arch does to absorb impact).

i’d say these are pretty similar to Vibrams, just they don’t separate the toes – the ones below are the Vibram Classics.

on a side note, the Vibram people are coming out with a running-specific model called Bikila, after the Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila who won the 1960 Summer Olympics marathon running barefoot.  but it is starting to go against the concept of the FiveFingers line – it has additional EVA padding.. just a couple millimeters, but hopefully they don’t start adding actual arch support, any more padding, or heel support.

about the others – don’t get the ds-trainer if you’re planning to strengthen your feet naturally.  this pair is among the majority of running shoes nowadays – huge clunkers that are too heavy, weaken your feet and put you on the annoying cycle of injuries, unnecessary orthotics, repeat.

Kara Goucher is often seen wearing the lunaracers during competitions off the track.  personally, i haven’t gotten my mileage up to the point where i potentially would need the relatively cushier and bouncier landing these have, but they are very comfortable.  i wouldn’t recommend the lunaracer 2′s though – no more flywire (light material holding the upper together), less flexible, a huge visible chunk of arch support (not necessary!!!), and heavier.

the piranhas are my second favorite of the bunch.  they are ridiculously light (4.2oz for a men’s size 9, as opposed to the katana rac3r’s 6.0oz).  however, i probably wouldn’t wear this shoe for anything around marathon length – just way too little support.  the katanas also feel relatively (and understandably) sturdier… it’s difficult to switch shoes for that reason – they’re pretty much the ideal for me at the moment.

-D

-D