LetterCult has some very creative hand (and digital) lettering.

SmashingApps collected some fantastic stop-action shorts. I love this stuff. Want to find time and focus to do some time.

And NYTimes Nicholas Kristof describes how (40 years on) the “War on Drugs” is a failure.

PS: I need to curl up sometime and read this extensive NYTimes article on data centers and the cloud and I’ll bet there’s a creepy ending.

But I’d get headaches for a bit after I’d done it. Made me wonder. So about four months ago I was at the Co-op (sort of a local one-up Whole Foods, I guess; been around since the ’70s when it really was a co-operative and you had to put your time in weekly with the bins of bulk grain, etc.). And I asked what they’d recommend (beside the henna track).

I ended up with a couple of shades of Naturcolor. Two boxes (5N, 5R), two bottles, I used one set to mix up for one session and another for the next session. It’s nice. No stink. No scalp burning. No headache. And the color isn’t flat; it seems to pick out individual strands to color different shades. My hair seems fuller and not so traumatized.

I don’t even need to use the whole amount, so I think I’ll get a dye brush and pot and use just half a portion each time. That’ll mean the price is less than or comparable to the grocery store prices.

American perceptions of European-style social welfare are seriously skewed. The system in which I have embedded myself has its faults, some of them lampoonable. But does the cartoon image of it — encapsulated in the dread slur “socialism,” which is being lobbed in American political circles like a bomb — match reality? Is there, maybe, a significant upside that is worth exploring?

LET’S FOCUS FIRST ON the slur. I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?

See more at The Story of Stuff

The Statesman gives some recent (2008) history on the machinations…

House Minority Leader John Rusche, D-Lewiston, said the stakes in this latest gas tax debate are so small - just $36 per year for the average driver after 2013, according to the proposal Otter now insists on - that this surely must be about something more than just a tax hike. “This is about the hearts and minds of the Republican Party,” Rusche said

But the real pièce de résistance is this second post which gives it the smell of a Stalinistic purge (albeit without any real blood).

Meanwhile the Republican Party has lost the ability to effectively govern. It is no longer about what might be best for the state of Idaho. They are so consumed with their party war that the people of the state of Idaho are being left out in the cold.

As the Republicans move further to the far right, the ability to craft consensus legislation that serves the people is lost. Instead we get a litany of legislative initiatives that have unintended consequences, cater to the most conservative element of their party, are either unenforceable or represent empty messages instead of good public policy, or provide special interests with benefits at the expense of the people..

Then there’s the cost factor. Money can buy a moderate amount of crap food or a smaller bit of good food that makes for more “life, experienced, now” moments. Who knew parsnips were so sweet? I mentioned the garden, right? Reminding myself a watched seed doesn’t germinate. It’s a process. Anyway, I really enjoyed this article at Salon by a woman who answers the question “Can we afford to eat ethically?” by which she means sustainable, local, organic. Some good links in the article as well.

One stupid mistake yesterday: I dropped one of the pots of leek seedlings. I may’ve saved most of them; we’ll see.

On the other end of things: for a bit of perspective, who was dead at your age?