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.

Tinfoil hats are so passé. So what should you wear to Faraday’s Cafe?

Check out the latest collection of electromagnetic field blocking and “anti-identity theft” clothing at DDCLAB (427 W 14th St, New York NY 10014 map).

Here’s the text from the windows:

EMF: Electro Magnetic Field Block
Anti•Identity•Theft•Fabric
Electric Resistivity
measure of how strongly a material opposes the flow of electric current and allows the movement of electrical charge.

DDCLAB
Woven of super sheer mesh polyester fibers coated with blackened copper, this high performance ultra thin, light weight and flexible mesh shield has a high ohm/sq resistivity that protects against identity theft by blocking high tech scanners from lifting valuable passport and ID information.

• IE Best Buy Polo Shirts at Improv Everywhere
  I’ll always have a soft spot for the corporate polo, since it was the required uniform in my family’s business growing up. The best ones, of course, are subversive. This is based on Improv Everywhere’s indelible Best Buy mission that had over 60 agents dress in the distinctive store uniform and swarm a 23rd St. Best Buy (but “just happened to dress this way today”). Get one before they get a cease and desist.
  (tags: improveverywhere improv subversive uniform retail)

Reporting from New York Criminal Court, 100 Centre St, Jury Duty, Day 2. Wow, the wheels of justice move slowly. At least you can now enjoy wifi while you’re waiting to be called, so bring your laptop (Twitter, Facebook and Meebo blocked). But during voir dire, you are expected to pay attention even while you’re not being interviewed. Not continuous partial attention but laptops, iphones and sketchbooks away total attention. You may observe, meditate, be present, and check in with yourself. You can also suck on hard candies*.

Lucky for you, Papabubble just opened a few blocks away [380 Broome St at Mulberry St, 212.966.2599]. This wondrous candy laboratory with outposts in Barcelona and Tokyo provides the ultimate in jury duty lozenges: fruit candies that look like Venetian millefiore glass, peppermint pebbles and addictive chocolate-filled coffee bites. They also handcraft giant lollies, gold-tipped finger rings and even anatomically correct hearts (which I would definitely not advise sucking on in the courtroom). If you’re feeling thrifty, note they also have bags of aesthetically inferior ‘seconds’ that start at fifty cents.

* Note you can, but you may not… I am not offering legal advice. Don’t follow me. At least be quiet about it.

Technorati Tags: candy, food, jury duty, nyc, restaurants, vegetarian

Other sweet treats nearby:

• Chinatown Ice Cream Company [65 Bayard Street btw Mott and Elizabeth 212.608.4170] I personally recommend the black sesame seed, green tea, red bean and ginger flavors. Love that the Asian flavors are listed as ‘traditional’ and the western standards as ‘exotics.’)
• Longans and rambutans from fruit vendors throughout Chinatown.

Where to eat vegetarian when you’re on jury duty in NYC:

• Wild Ginger [380 Broome St btw Mott & Mulberry 212.966.1883 menu]
• Buddha Boddai [5 Mott St at Worth 212.566.8388 menu]
• Vegetarian Dim Sum House [24 Pell St at Doyers St 212.577.7176 menu]

Loved this jury duty report from Melissa Kirsch, author of the fun and useful book, The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything.

Map of places noted in this article:

View Larger Map

Her Story Is Strange

• Debbie Millman interviews Maira Kalman for her Design Matters podcast, introducing her subject with a story about the sign at right.

  On Vagueness: “The word itself defines the entire essence of being and how things are always confused and unknown and then you go ahead and make some kind of sense out of it, and then you make some kind of nonsense about it and it’s a full time job, just figuring it out.”

  Her last installment of “The Principles of Uncertainty” comes tomorrow, but the book is coming out in Fall (with a fabulous index!).

• Happy first birthday Photojojo, a delightful site/e-mail list that’s all about fun with digital photos. Inspired to try out today’s tip and tutorial on making Videoramas – full motion video panoramas.
• Scrapblog is another fun tool for creating and sharing multimedia scrapbooks or presentations online with photos from Flickr/Yahoo/Photobucket and videos from YouTube.
• Today’s Daily Om comes right on time: Centering And Expressing.
• Lonely Planet launches travel video social networking channel lonelyplanet.tv, and Charles Simonyi blogs about traveling beyond this lonely planet, following in the weightless footsteps of the amazing Anousheh Ansari. If you’re over the moon about space tourism or terraforming, you’ll want to attend Esther’s Flight School.
• If like Maira, you prefer to explore more vague territories, NYTimes points out you, along with everyone in China, can take “Topics in Philosophy of Language: Vagueness,” a graduate level course at M.I.T.
• Apple announced that they will sell EMI’s entire catalog of music without copy-protection from the iTunes store. Thank you! The other important news here is that the music will be higher quality, encoded at 256 kilobits per second rather than 128 kbps. I’ll be one of their best customers once again, and not have to feel bad about the superfluous CD and packaging waste generated just to enjoy music. (Which reminds me, dear Poptech, why can’t I buy the Antibabel EP by Yungchen Lhamo and Reggie Watts as downloadable files? Will you carbon offset my CD purchase and shipping?) Lately, I’ve been receiving most of my aural gratification from the Hype Machine.

One of my passions is to collect and sell indigenous religious antique artifacts. I once received a call from a New York City dealer telling me about a rare Ming Dynasty Buddha available at a very good price. He said he would send it to me with no obligations. When the package arrived, I opened it anxiously — and was somewhat taken aback. This Buddha was giving me the middle finger! I thought my dealer friend must have played a joke on me. I took the Buddha to a Chinese antique expert, who examined it and to my surprise, told me that it was very special, and definitely authentic. What about the middle finger? I asked him. He explained that the middle finger means Oneness — it symbolizes God, who is one with everything. This Buddha now has a very special place in my house. It reminds me that when someone gives me the middle finger, I must bow and see God in that person.

From Alivelihood: The Art of Sustainable Success by Horst M. Rechelbacher, founder of Aveda and IntelligentNutrients, an intriguing start up offering organic highly nutritional food based products that can be used both internally or externally and opening a store in NYC Fall ’07.

In any case, the announcement email is brilliant in that instead of telling me I can purchase a gadget, they make it seem like I’m about to rescue a pet: Adopt A Rabbit and welcome me to the Rabbit Community.

.
Should I be worried about Sherry Turkle’s concerns about nurturing technology?

I’m willing to bet on abundance… developing love or care for robots expands the total love pie, and can be step towards expanding and expressing love to sentient beings.

Eyebeam is pleased to present a daylong Shopdropping Workshop led by the Anti-Advertising Agency. Shopdropping (the opposite of shoplifting) is a tactic used by artists and activists to clandestinely place objects in retail stores. “Dropped” objects are usually versions of consumer products altered or recreated to detourn the retail experience. Shopdropping is a fun and easy form of culture jamming, gently subverting dominant cultural forms to create new meanings.

Starting at noon, participants will receive a shopdropping overview, including artists’ shopdropping projects information and demonstrations of the necessary tools for shopdropping, and time will be given to test out some of the techniques discussed. Immediately following, participants will head into the field to help distribute a new, unreleased Anti-Advertising Agency project (as well as some creations of their own) into stores around Manhattan. This workshop will begin at Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st Street (between 10th & 11th Aves), and is open to the public free of charge.

 If you have a digital camera of any kind, please bring it.
Your hosts:
Steve Lambert – Eyebeam OpenLab Fellow, Steve is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, and former undercover store investigator. Steve will share the secrets he learned on the job leading to the arrest of dozens of shoplifters. Learn the top three things store investigators watch for and how to shopdrop undetected! (He also knows a few things about art.)

Amanda Eicher – Anti-Advertising Agency “Art Director,” Amanda has been developing a project that will visually rejoin products and the labor that creates them. Drawing on two years of research in production factories in Central America, her project incorporates portraits of workers there with the products they have made here.

Marisa Jahn – is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator whose work explores, constructs, and intervenes natural and social systems. Marisa is also the Curator of “Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle” and will entertain participants with an overview of artists shopdropping projects.

Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.

Eyebeam’s current programs are made possible through the generous support of the Atlantic Foundation, Time Warner Youth Media and Arts Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. For a list of past supporters, please visit www.eyebeam.org.

540 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011
[T] 212.937.6580
[F] 212.937.6582
www.eyebeam.org

Hours: Tues-Sat, 12-6pm