I am no philatelist (though I was a half-hearted member of The Stamp Bug Club — and no, I didn’t know who Alain de Cadenet was, either) but this is the best thing ever: Muppets to appear on U.S. stamps.
The article says: Kermit and his friends are not the first puppets to be featured on a U.S. stamp
… That’s strange, I don’t remember seeing a stamp with George W. Bush on it.
It’s so nice to have a November 5th without having neds lobbing rockets and firecrackers about the place.
(click on the image for larger versions)
Ford Canada really have excelled themselves with the Escape Hybrid. It’s a great big huge SUV, but that doesn’t matter because it’s one of those lovely clean hybrids. Yes, that’s right, you can feel good about driving it, because you’re only supporting repressive regimes a bit.
But the best bit is in the writeup (emphasis mine):
Giving back to the environment doesn’t just stop at printing this advertisement on recyclable paper. …
C’mon guys, it’s just a regular car glossy. All paper is recyclable. If you’d have printed it on recycled hemp paper using vegetable inks, maybe, just maybe, you’d be giving something back. But this is just a sop to the car-besotted consumer.
As they go on to say: We keep thinking about the environment.
There’s a huge gap between just thinking, and actually doing something useful.
On several people’s recommendation, I bought Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender CD. It is quite remarkable. Her lyrics remind me of Mervyn Peake‘s nonsense poems (… Even mollusks have weddings, / though solemn and leaden / but you dirge for the dead, / take no jam on your bread …
). She sings of catenaries and dirigibles, rephrasing words into unfamiliar shapes. It’s not the most common act, a harpist with a fey wee voice who can also raise up a real backwoods caterwaul, but it works for me.
Here’s a video of one of her songs: Sprout and the Bean.
(Norvin, you’d hate it. In fact, you’d hate it so much that I’d advise you listen to it, just so folks around you can experience the ‘neitzen’ effect.)
