Am I the only one that missed this Sesame Street Captain Vegetable clip as a kid? This is too funny.
As if the crazed and kooky haired muppets weren’t enough, the dialog has extra snark (“what are you, some kind of weirdo?”) and the silly song gets stuck in my head when I least expect it.
Taking the cake (er, salad?) are those sad looking vegetables! Poor Andy gets his black licorice candy swapped for a plate full of dry, raggedy celery. I dare a cracked-out puppet to try and take my licorice and replace it with celery. NO.
But that’s of course beside the point. The point is to promote good nutrition and not nightmares, so the trippy hippies at Sesame Street reprised the sketch with John Leguizamo as Captain Vegetable.
Leguizamo’s Captain Vegetable comes off awkward in places and to be honest, Elmo was never my main muppet. But it’s still a funny skit and the costume reaches new heights of ridiculousness. Is that corn silk coming out of his head? At least he’s armed with more than two vegetables. Thanks, playa!
The old link was passed on by friend, web designer, music lover, LA denizen Tim Ganter, back when he was still blogging… poke, poke… Thanks for introducing me to Captain Vegetable, Tim!
I was lucky enough to catch part of a guided tour of the exhibit, which allowed me more insight than I would have on my own. A lot of the pieces were intricately embroidered and appliqued thangka with symbol-ladden scenes from the life of important Buddhist teachers and deities.
There were also centuries old metal-cast sculptures and some ancient Buddhist ritual items including a phurba and a vajra, pictured, which I recognized because M left them here, his spiritual practice no longer a priority. This NY Times article explains how this one-of-a-kind collection was put together, the slideshow is good, too.
The exhibition was presided over by a small group of Bhutanese monks, who also lead prayers in another area of the museum called the Altar Room. The smell of incense and drone of chanting was enveloping even outside the doors, where shoes were piled. Beatific people were seated on cushions around the room in various meditation positions, throwing rice and plumeria blossoms up and into the center of the room either at certain times in the chant, or maybe just following along when the monks did it, which is what I was doing. Aping such earnest ritual made me uncomfortable.
This is a fun video from a poet of hiphop, hot off the front page of youtube. It reminds me not to accidentally turn into too much of a hippie and to take time to nurture art regardless :~j
Pretty much every blog that ever blogged in the blogosphere has a blogroll, a list of links to other blogs. Making this list is a task I’ve long put off because there are just so many cool sites to link to, I know I’ll miss someone. How could it ever be complete?
But I finally added linkage to some sites of interest in the far right column, under the Twitter updates, above the Flickr pictures, under the title Hi, Friends.
I’m starting with links to people who commented on this here humble site (many thanks!) and including a few news sites I like (tho Under The Radar Media and Lorelle on WordPress actually each count as both). The blogroll is capped off with an Airspace Workshop link since I’m like their #1 mixtape fan and happen to be listening to their "called off because of rain" mix as I write this.
Watch that space, it’s gonna grow. And comment if you have a site and want to quickly link up with jeelago.net :~j
The much anticipated WordPress 2.5 upgrade has been installed and is working away to power this blog. There shouldn’t be any changes on the front end, but let me know if anything looks off. My cynical friend among many, took the time to highlight some of the improvements.
One of the things I had hoped to do after the upgrade was install the Popularity Contest plugin which would generate a list of the most trafficked posts. Unfortunately for me, that plugin is not working correctly with the new version yet. So I’m just going to guess.
From monitoring my stats and eyeballing the numbers, rankings and search terms that bring people here, these are what I think are the most popular posts from my first eight months of blogging:
Helsinki seems to be enjoying some springtime shine in the travel pages of the U.S. press.
There was the USA Today feature on Helsinki nightlife and a piece on Finnish design in the LA Times last month. Admittedly two articles don’t exactly equal a cavalcade of coverage, but hey, the sun shines weakly that far north, and is greatly appreciated! I love that the LA Times writer tours the central part of the city for its architectural and design riches, then tucks in for a sauna. Sounds like a fabulous day in Helsinki.
The shopping recommendations in the LA Times article are overall more upscale. I’m extra intrigued by these ergonomic chopsticks they mention, wonder how much they cost. “I wanted to design a totally new type of chopsticks that would be easy for everyone to hold. Entwined together the sticks also form a useful fork,” explains designer Mika Ihanus on the website of studio Kuudes Kerros. How very practical for the chopstick-challenged, i.e. my mother, who maintains she can’t eat with “them sticks.” I bet these would work for her in the same way Nokia understands how her brain works. ;~p
Also on the topic of Finnish design and travel, a little mini-documentary by PilotGirl™ about the Helsinki design district (read: expensive stores with cool stuff) was recently featured on the retail-sponsored Finnish design blog.
Really, my credit card is glad I am not there! It’s worth noting that many young people take pride in thrift-store shopping and home-made clothes cuz the Euro is no joke and the resulting styles are more unique. Which is fine for clothes, but please believe that when I have $50 to spare on a shower curtain, this baby is mine!
Saw this Icelandic group at Hawaii Theatre and have been respectful ever since. I’m only seven minutes in but wholly impressed with ‘Heima’ by Sigur Rós. Visiting Iceland was something like this, I wish.
[youtube video no longer available]
UPDATE 3/18/08: Boooooooooooooooooooo @ them removing the video after it was splashed across the youtube front page for DAYS. >:-[ And their myspace is all bragging about being the first artists to have a full-length doc on youtube. I guess one could actually buy the damn thing, but I really don’t like this bait and switch. If it is an officially sanctioned release on the interweb, it should not go away. IMHO.
Coppé of Mango and Sweet Rice records played in January at The Next Movement at Next Door in Honolulu. It was wonderful to catch her live again, only the second time I’ve seen her in Honolulu. A former island resident, Coppé passes through on occasion, though clearly(?!) not nearly often enough.
To my ears, much of what Coppé does has a trippy underwater electronic hallucinatory feel to it, but she’s prolific and collaborates often, so no single description (no matter how packed with adjectives) does her music justice. That night at Next Door, for example, it was her glitchy, part-Japanese take on the jazz-pop standard “Fly Me to the Moon” that had me swooning.
In this clip she talks about her performance, new album, influences and being well-received in Europe. The video (and the interviewer!* ugh) are not the greatest but… well, whatever… Coppe’s spark still shines.
As I’m loading this on youtube, I see that Dark has uploaded some videos he did for her songs and I’m reminded that he was supposed to do visuals for her show. For whatever reason, his work didn’t make it on to the screen that night. It’s too bad, they would have added a lot.
Dark’s videos to two of Coppé’s song are included below.
Popcorn is an amazing food. Kernels of whole grain goodness that pop to unique, tasty shapes. Like snowflakes with substance. It tastes so great all salty and crunchy and chewy and in the case of my recent addiction, coated in white cheddar powder. We were eating it bag by organic bag-full when the “popcorn lung” scare hit mainstream media.
Even tho the scare concerns the ConAgra-fake-buttered type of microwave popcorn and not the heath-food-store-bought version we’d been consuming like popcorn-crazed maniacs, the story did make popcorn suddenly seem a little less wonderful.
This is all you have to do to make your own microwave popcorn.
You’ll need a brown paper lunch sack about 1/4 cup of loose, organic popcorn kernels. Measure the kernels into your bag. Add one teaspoon of olive oil and popcorn salt to taste. Fold the top of the bag and shake gently to mix.
Press most of the air out of the bag. Secure with two staples (they won’t spark in most ovens) or tape loosely, leaving room for steam to vent. Place flat on a microwave-safe plate and heat on a high setting until the pops have slowed down to about three seconds apart. it will take less than four minutes.
Within hours of reading this recipe, I had to try it, and the results were fantastic (see photo). The recipe is extra simple, but can be refined with different proportions, flavors and methods.
Recently took in The Century of the Self, about psycho-analysis, advertising, consumerism, mass behavior and how we’re all getting got. The BBC-produced series illustrates how both Freud’s theories and his family members were well in the mix of American public relations, advertising, entertainment and politics before, during and after World War II. It goes on to show how their influences still guide the hand of business in producing consumer-citizens who are “constantly moving happiness machines” (as Herbert Hoover put it) seeking only the fulfillment of personal desire and identity.
Shows like this get me agitated. Thankfully, this level-headed Village Voice review helped me be less hysterical in my thinking. Consumerism is not just a trap, it’s a total head trip. Middle classics like me are conditioned by the powers-that-be to salivate at the site of new consumer goods like the Nokia e90 Communicator. What can I do? Say no to technology? That’s no fun! Meh.
The BBC-produced Century of the Self is available free online, in four hour-long parts.
There were also centuries old metal-cast sculptures and some ancient Buddhist ritual items including a 
The shopping recommendations in the LA Times article are overall more upscale. I’m extra intrigued by these ergonomic chopsticks they mention, wonder how much they cost. “I wanted to design a totally new type of chopsticks that would be easy for everyone to hold. Entwined together the sticks also form a useful fork,” explains designer Mika Ihanus on the 
