I had been seduced by a terroirist network known as New Zealand Artisan Honey, made up of passionate beekeepers producing honeys in small, quality batches from specific varietal sources among some of New Zealand’s most spectactular locations.

Sadly, most bees and beekeepers are not having such a romantic experience. I had noticed my previous honey brands losing their organic status as the varroa mite has spread south through New Zealand. There is evidence that CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) has arrived in New Zealand, and it’s likely due to the strong neonicotinoids, a class of systemic insecticides which France, Italy and Switzerland have banned because of its effects on bees.

Once uploaded, people can bookmark, share and comment on it. Text is searchable so the document is easy to find. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of publications. Finally, you can also post and embed Issuu documents on any external site.

Now actually, it’s still not a joy to quote, because you apparently can’t deep link in there, and you can’t copy and paste text and do all the things you could do with a standard webpage (or PDF for that matter). But it’s so close… you can almost taste it. And you can just embed the whole darn thing… In any case, this is a wonderful way to share the experience of a printed thing (without the waste and expense of printing and shipping).

N.B. to those who like to tear, save and share the parts they like out of printed things… you’ll love Skitch.

Waveplace is a non-profit starting an XO pilot in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in ten days [February 17th]. OLPC was going to be giving us laptops as part of the Get One Give One program, but it fell through, which is why I’m trying to get twenty XOs from elsewhere.

Your laptop may end up in the hands of one of the most needy children in the Western Hemisphere. The school where the laptop will be sent is run by Susie Scott Krabacher, who has been the Mother Theresa of Haiti for 15 years. In fact, a major motion picture is being made about her life right now, based upon her autobiography, Angels of a Lower Flight: One Womans Mission to Save a Country… One Child at a Time

You could really help by agreeing to sell us your laptop. We’ve only got ten days to get the laptops to Miami, as we’re leaving for Haiti on Feb 17th.

To see the kids that will get them, watch this video, which we shot last month.

Susie’s organization: Mercy and Sharing Foundation (Check on GuideStar.)

You can see a slideshow of the conditions and read an article by Susie from our newsletter.

One way or another, we’ll be in Haiti in ten days. [They're leaving for Haiti February 17th] Please help us bring more laptops.

Please pass the word, and if you have a laptop to sell, click contact on the Waveplace site.

Thank you!

I’m giving mine. David Weinberger’s giving his too. Timothy noted that Waveplace will update with news and video, some of which will include your XO laptop in the hands of the Haitian child who gets it.

Would love to have seen more transparency from the original One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and the G1G1 (Get One Give One) program regarding the children who receive it and connection between the giver and the getter. Nevertheless, it’s a thrill to see the news and pictures from the pilot in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

I loved the idea of OLPC project and the G1G1 program from the start and still do (despite some bungling in execution and logistics). Yes to empowering children around the world to learn, connect, explore and experiment with their own connected computers! (Yes to nutrition and health initiatives also! Why would that be an either/or?) It feels great to participate.

It’s hard to remember any specific classroom lessons from that age, but I distinctly remember the joy of experimenting on a Commodore PET, guided by books of python BASIC programs and stacks of Make BYTE magazines. The excitement of discovering the logic by altering the code and testing whether the programs ran (and sense of accomplishment when they did) stoked my curiosity, imagination and love of learning. Not to mention the fun of making ASCII art… (Thanks, Dad!)

That feeling rushed back as I opened and beheld the XO for the first time. This adorable, mesh networking, environmentally friendly(ish), highly portable and rugged networked laptop delights the kid in all of us. The magic really starts to happen when multiple XOs mesh with each other. But as much as I wanted it not to be true, it is designed for kids. The mini-keyboard’s a dealbreaker for writing anything longer than short messages with my adult fingers.

Engineered to withstand extreme environmental conditions like high heat, humidity and dust, I figured this three pound membrane-sealed computer would be ideal for tossing in my solar backpack for jaunts to cafes (including spills) and mountain hikes. It excels in high light environments, and the swiveling display delights. I was intrigued to learn even though it’s completely sealed to the elements and accident-resistant, it’s also easy to access and replace parts.

If OLPC can make an XO that does that for around $200, how come Apple’s $1799 MacBook Air is so vulnerable to the elements and being dropped, yet impossible to open for something as simple as battery changing? Ok, ok, compromises must be made because it’s so thin. But the same vulnerability is true for the whole MacBook line and indeed, most laptop computers. (I know, the Toughbook. But aesthetics count, and you shouldn’t have to pay that much of a premium.)

What I’d really love is a powerful MacBook Air with XO’s ruggedness, openness and flexibility. An elegant and sophisticated yet slim and lightweight Fisher Price My First Mac case with Pro brains and easily replacable and recyclable components to cut down on the massive amounts of e-waste my gadget lust produces. Until then, I’ll settle (eagerly) for the MacBook Air, but if you have a laptop like that to sell or donate, please contact me.

So goodbye sweet XO, it’s been wonderful knowing you. Have fun with the new kid in Haiti and stay in touch!

XOXOXO
Emily

Coming from a deep natural aquifer to the surface in Whakatane, New Zealand, Antipodes has real mouth appeal. It’s less aggressively carbonated than my usual brew, San Pellegrino, and it’s easy on the eyes too.

Dressed in classic Mrs. Eaves, Antipodes complements any table without overpowering it. The oviform bottle echoes the round beads streaming up when opened. It’s a happy thing to hold.

I know, I know… you have issues with bottled water. I do too. But a girl’s gotta have a vice, and until I can pour sparkling from the tap, I’ll order the bottle. (When out… technically I could make my own at home.) If it makes you feel any better, Antipodes is the first premium water to be certified carbon neutral in production and export, and they plan to be carbon neutral to any table, hotel room or home anywhere in the world by 2008.

Antipodes is currently served only in hand-picked great restaurants around New Zealand, hence their restaurant list is a good guide to the restaurants I want to try. You can order Antipodes by the case for home delivery in the United States through New Zealand Natural Goods, but at $60 for 12, I’d have to consider it a design element to justify it. Oh, wonderful! Oprah already did.

What’s the best way to get from New York to Boston? It’s not the Delta Shuttle or Amtrak Acela. Forget about Fung Wah and Vamoose. The most fabulous, luxurious and yet relatively environmentally friendly way to get from the Big Apple to Beantown is… the bus. But not just any bus, it’s the LimoLiner. (Even Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles would approve.)

I’m posting this from somewhere along the Mass Pike on a bus with 28 spacious seats, electrical power outlets, wifi, lunch and beverage service by a pleasant attendant, movies, magazines, uninterrupted cell service (and a cell-free area as well). You can select your seat in advance online, and you can book a 10 seat conference area in back for meeting before the big meeting. I never thought I’d say this, but… I love the bus.

LimoLiner.com $89 one way.
888.546.5469
Departure and Arrival Poins: Hilton in Midtown NYC and Hilton in Boston’s Back Bay with optional stop in Framingham, MA.

N.B. If you’re traveling from the Framingham stop to the Babson Executive Conference Center (or back), Veterans Taxi was almost half the price of Wellesley Carriage (508. 653.5027). But if you’re on someone else’s dime or just don’t care, note you can charge Wellesley Carriage to your room at the conference center.

Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you.

Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.)

Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:

• A pull out “Map of the United States” by Kalman’s beautiful mother, Sara Berman, with instructions to: “Either put it on the wall or put it back in the book. If you put it back in the book, it may one day fall out when someone browses through the book and it will become a thing that falls out of the book.”



• An appendix filled with “things that fall out of books” and a fabulous collection of numbers in the wild. (Kalman would love the Numbers fonts by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)
• Luscious liner page images of mosses of Long Island.
• An index that’s amusing on its own, featuring laughter, love (as a guarantee of sanity), finding self, forgetting, forgiveness, hairdos, dreams (bad, fragment of, good, malaise after bad, no answer to), and even happiness. One thing you won’t find in the index is “inner peace” (p. 245-6), a phrase that seems to trigger its opposite for Kalman. (What is that about?)

Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?”

I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.

• The Principles of Uncertainty book on Amazon
• The Principles of Uncertainty blog on NYT
• NYT’s video highlights of the celebration at the NYPL

1. 50% of single women ages 21 to 34 report that “at this time in their lives money is for spending not saving.”
2. 55% agreed with the statement that “they were more likely to accumulate 30 pairs of shoes than $30,000 in retirement savings.”
3. Thirty million of America’s 40 million-plus boomer women will not be able to afford to retire, will fall below the poverty line, and will experience poorer health in their later years with limited aid from traditional safety nets.
4. The average age of widowhood in America is 55. Four out of five widows
   living below the poverty line had not been poor before their husbands died.

Four Empowering Insights About Money:

1. Most people don’t have a clue about money.
2. Things aren’t always what they seem.
3. Literally millions of people are intimidated by money matters.
4. After reading this book, you’ll know more than the vast majority of
   Americans.

Manisha Thakor and Sharon Kedar’s excellent financial guide, On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl’s Guide to Personal Finance, is essential reading for women in their 20′s and 30′s. This quick read demystifies financial planning and gives you the tools to manage your money, and in doing so, your life. If you’ve ever felt stressed out about money issues, Thakor and Kedar’s straightforward information and advice will give you the confidence to make wise choices and avoid becoming a statistic like those above. The delivery is fun, and the material is lifechanging.

In under 200 pages, you’ll learn what you need to do, why you need to do it, and how to do it. You get both the big picture and specific advice for budgeting, saving and investing wisely, maximizing your credit score, handling taxes, avoiding credit card debt, and making wise decisions on insurance plans, homes and cars.

Another powerful section addresses the issues that can arise with money and relationships. Learning how to talk openly and get naked financially with your partner, create a shared game plan and protect yourself in case things don’t work out is worth the purchase price alone.

You’ll also learn why it’s important to start now and take advantage compound interest, so you can enjoy the freedom and autonomy to do whatever you want in the future.

For example, regarding longer-term investing (money that you can afford to leave in for at least five years — the longer the better), they present the pros and cons of the mos popular options and prescribe a simple and effective plan. They advise people under 50 that “stocks are where the action is.” Since index funds have historically done better than 80% percent of active, professionally managed funds and cost much less, they recommend investing in an S&P 500 index fund. For people who find that too simple and want more options, they present alternatives, links and resources in the appendices.

Both Manisha and Sharon are eminently qualified to offer financial advice: they’ve earned MBA degrees from Harvard and are Chartered Financial Analyst (“CFA”) charterholders. They have extensive experience in investment management firms with billions of dollars in assets. They’ve managed to communicate their knowledge through writing that’s simple, clear and well organized with charts and graphs, so it’s easy for anyone to understand and translate into an action plan.

Whether you’re a fresh college grad, a working woman or stay-at-home-mom, you’ll find something helpful here. The advice works for men too (if you don’t mind the occasional references to prince charming and Manolo Blahniks). This book makes an excellent gift for young women just starting out and those rapidly approaching their 40′s or beyond without a firm financial footing.

Though targeted towards women in their 20′s and 30′s, it would also make an ideal gift for teens graduating from high school. College is when most women begin to use — or abuse — credit cards, and learning credit score, budgeting and saving skills early will make a world of difference in college and beyond.

Knowledge is power, and money is power. On My Own Two Feet is a power tool you can’t afford to miss.

Links:

• On My Own Two Feet at Amazon
• Official On My Own Two Feet site
• On My Own Two Feet at Myspace

Today the ASPCA issued an urgent alert stating that the pet food crisis isn’t over and nobody knows anything, including what’s actually poisoning pets. This follows on the heels of yesterday’s recall of Natural Balance pet foods due to rice protein concentrate contaminated with melamine, the same chemical that led to a nationwide recall of more than 100 brands of cat and dog food produced by Menu Foods last month. In between, Nestle Purina Pet Care pulled a selection of Alpo products off the shelves, and Del Monte recalled several brands of pet treats. The FDA blocked imports of wheat gluten from one company in China as a result, but clearly the problem goes far beyond this incident or ingredient.

If the common conventional foods humans eat are full of pesticides, drugs and hormones, what can we possibly expect from ingredients deemed “unfit for human consumption” that regularly go into commercial dog foods, even when they’re not tainted? Sabine Contreras has created an excellent resource in The Dog Food Project, offering label information 101 and specific ingredients to avoid. I’ve been reading a lot of suggestions for making your own dog food at home, but who has the time or inclination to cook every meal for themselves, much less their pets?

When Cosmo was a pup, he ate Iams and Eukanuba, two of the “premium” Proctor & Gamble brands by Menu Foods. He had all sorts of health issues, and thinking diet might have something to do with it, we went on a search to find something better.

The quest was fulfilled when we discovered The Honest Kitchen, which offers several formulations of 100% human-food-grade dehydrated raw pet food. Before it was available in New York stores, Lucy Postins, the lovely founder, used to pack each Internet order with a handwritten thank you. Now the products are widely available nationwide.

What a thrill to open the first pack of Force — rather than the usual unidentifiable glop or pellets, I could actually recognize individual ingredients: USDA chicken, organic sweet potatoes, organic celery, organic flax seed, and more. When you add water, it looks and smells like a hearty chicken stew. After a while on the new food, his weight normalized, his coat went from flaky to glossy, his health problems (and copious gas) disappeared. He’s more healthy and energetic now at nine years old than he was at four.

One advantage of dehydrated food is that you can give your dog the benefits of a minimally processed raw diet without having to deal with the safety concerns of storing and handling raw meat. (There are no bones in The Honest Kitchen’s recipes, only muscle meat, so you don’t have to worry about that either.) Another advantage is that it takes up little space or weight, making it ideal for travel and resulting in less packaging waste.

Ideal Bite points out other ways The Honest Kitchen shows they care about conserving energy and championing animal rights. To be sure, I would prefer no animals were killed to feed mine, and at the very least I could certify that any who were had humane treatment and a happy life. But this is the very best dog food I’ve found yet.

The Honest Kitchen Dog Food is wholeheartedly Emily (and Cosmo) approved.

Bonus: What do we know is toxic for dogs?

Cosmo the Welsh Corgi outside The Chocolate Bar of NYC’s West Village, where he’s been spotted trying to get in before.

Chocolate. Yes, chocolate. Although chocolate’s now known to be healthy for humans (hooray!), dogs lack the enzyme to digest theobromine, a compound that naturally occurs in the cocoa bean. No, it’s not a hoax.

The dose is the determinant of toxicity here… the darker the chocolate, the greater the amount of theobromine. Just one ounce of baker’s chocolate is considered deadly for a 10-pound dog. Hershey’s provides a list of theobromine content in their various chocolate products for reference.

The bottom line: while stealthily scarfing half a bag of Paul Newman’s Champion Chocolate Chip Cookies probably won’t knock your dog out (at least it didn’t seem to affect Cosmo), better to keep your cases of Green & Black’s Maya Gold far, far away from Fido. (…and scoot a little closer to me!)

Trivia Important Question: What is the plural of Corgi?

Corgwyn.

Healthy, well wishes to all pets and humans! Plants too. And sea turtles. Oh! I want to send a special shout out to all you beautiful species in the Galapagos Islands. Ok, ok, all sentient beings. But especially the bees. This one’s going out just for you tonight:

Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying yesterday
To someone you know
That you were due.

The frogs got home last week,
Are settled, and at work;
Birds, mostly back,
The clover warm and thick.

You’ll get my letter by
The seventeenth; reply
Or better, be with me,
Yours, Fly.

– Emily Dickinson

Alessi (with Joe, the art of coffee inside) 130 Greene St, New York, NY (map)