Tomorrow night my friend and cartoonist extraordinaire, Paige Braddock, is launching her new book, Jane’s World Vol. 8, up north at the Charles Schultz Museum. That alone would be pretty damn exciting, but it a fit of whimsy she asked Girlyman to come play at her book launch and they agreed. I remembered she called and asked me if I was sitting down before she told me the news.
The fanboy in me can, from time to time, completely geek out about bands… For a decade or so I was a total Indigo Girls geek. (Still am…) But the last few years I’ve been spreading the gospel of Girlyman. (Which, came by way of IG when I saw Nate, Ty and Doris open for Amy & Emily. Incidently, that show is captured in Wordplay.)
So needless to say, I’m pretty excited about seeing the band in a teeny venue with less than 300 people. In an effort to catch some friends up before the show I did some digging on YouTube. Finding badly recorded concert videos online is the more modern day version of all the bootleg tape trading I did in high school. Apologies to my family to making them suffer through endless hours of raspy concert recordings.
So for those of you who have never seen Girlyman live, I offer three clips.
a. Young James Dean, not horribly recorded, with a wee bit of banter.
b. Son of a Preacher Man, preceded by their benediction, not perfect, but fun.
c. and finally, this was completely new to me, the girlygrass cover of Father Figure. If I get any requests tomorrow night, this is going to be it.
Le and I headed down to the Maker Faire today with every other techie-DIY-kid-or-kid-at-heart in the Bay Area. Now my head is spinning with projects and I can’t wait to jump in and start working in my newly organized and cleaned out studio area.
Tonight, doing some post-Maker Faire internet stumbling landed me on the Extreme Craft blog, which focuses on that blurry line between art and craft. (Reminds me of the YKnit podcast I listened to the other day where they were debating whether or not knitting is art or craft.) Anyhow, I have to share this amazing video I found on EC which pretty much speaks for itself.
Etsy made buying handmade goods online easy and awesome. Meanwhile they’ve nurtured a kickass community of sellers and buyers who are invested in one another and the site. I’ve admired how they communicate business decisions to their stakeholders through their blogs and town halls. I love that there’s this new breed of companies (flickr, 37 signals) that use blogs and web 2.0 zaniness to increase their corporate transparency. Here’s hoping it also leads to better accountability and spreads to bigger, more secretive and tougher to penetrate corporations.
So of course, when they hire a new executive, rather than just put out a press release, the good new media-saavy folks at Etsy introduce their COO Maria Thomas with a video profile. Come to find out she’s one of the people responsible for NPR’s ridiculously awesome digital content.
…i’m posting on my blog again.
…i picked up my knitting needles.
…i feel a whole lot less stressed.
…last night, while walking home I saw WALL•E on the J.
UPDATE: Here’s the full ad on a Muni street car, thanks to jjohnsen.
The Sarah Silverman/Jimmy Kimmel videos had me laughing for days… so why not share this little send up. It’s two weeks old now, but maybe some of you haven’t seen it. And while it’s completely inappropriate, it’s damn brilliant.
