Category Archives: Useful Information

Kickstarter…definitive evidence that creativity is alive and well

By Betsy | Published: March 17, 2010
sign painted by Caitlyn Galloway

a sign painted by Caitlyn Galloway of Little City Gardens

Kickstarter is an online networking tool which allows us to fund the creative and hardworking people among us who need just a little more money in order to make their vision a reality.

This is not a lending arrangement. With Kickstarter, you actually give money to the project in question, although your gift will not be accepted/cashed if the recipient fails to reach the stated goal. (This helps protect you from going out on a limb to support clearly lost causes.) You give the money because you feel that our society will be improved if the project in question goes forward. Also, in return for your gift, you may receive some type of small, frequently personal premium from the grateful recipient. The minimum donations are usually small, on the order of $3 to $5.

Let’s take an example which I randomly chose from Kickstarter’s list of projects: Little City Gardens. Two women in the Mission District of San Francisco had put together an urban market garden in which they grew salad greens and other beautiful food. Meanwhile, they were still both holding down regular fulltime jobs. They needed $15,000. to expand onto another half acre and to pay for some more seeds and tools, to move up to the next level of farming.

At the beginning of February, the two farmers posted their project on Kickstarter.com. They explained themselves and their experience, posted their business plan and a video, and offered some appealing premiums to givers at different levels. These premiums ranged from a hand-lettered thank you by name on their blog all the way up through zines and posters (they’re also artists) to a personal garden consultation anywhere in the country to donors of $2500 or more.

Within two weeks, they had their $15,000 startup money, and none of it is a loan! Right now, they’re up to over $17,000 and they still have 47 days to go on the Kickstarter website. Needless to say, their blog is overflowing with gratitude and excitement.

How cool is this? My whole underlying faith in our society has just been given a kickstart.

Also posted in 2010 blog posts, Art | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

A morning of dances

By Betsy | Published: February 12, 2010

Teenagers in Indian (indigenous) costumes, complete with cardboard bows and arrows, poured out of the creamy front doors of the cathedral. They joined a throng of onlookers, including dozens of other young people in brilliant-colored flamenco outfits.

Across the street, painters on a scaffolding were hastily putting a fresh coat of white on a worn-out school building, while students inside crowded at the windows to watch the goings on.

In the street between the two, a national TV news team was filming a cooking demonstration, with a whole kitchen set up on the pavement and a guy cutting and frying peppers on camera.

Police milled around here and there, and guys selling popcorn and vile snow-cone knockoffs (regrettably, I bought one and ended up with sticky hands and a trash disposal problem.)

Matagalpa is just launching its 100th anniversary, and it´ll be going strong all weekend. Sadly, we`re on our way in a few minutes to the bus station because we have commitments in Granada … but at least we had the chance to see the Indians and the flamenco satin people dance in the morning sunshine. We´re trying to record everything now in our memories, because our time here is so short.

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Storytelling totally wins!

By Betsy | Published: November 21, 2009

missouri-shotglass-550

Check out the Significant Objects Project!   During the space of 4 months or so, these researchers listed 100 objects on eBay, with a total value of about $128.  The objects were just doodads from garage sales, just odds and ends.   The researchers drafted some writers to make stories to go along with the objects, and each object was then listed for sale on eBay with its fictional story in place of a description.   This was not done in such a way as to mislead the buyer;  the author’s byline was at the end of the description, and the stories were very clearly fiction.   The profits from each object were given to the writer who wrote the story.  Over the course of the 4 months, the initial $128. worth of objects were sold on eBay for over $3000!!!

Below is the story, by Jonathan Lethem, which went with the Missouri shotglass, pictured above. (It was bought at a thrift store for $1 and sold on eBay for $76. Click here to see the eBay listing.)

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Listen, friend, forget about the bartender, you could wait all day in this dive, we might as well be invisible over here, I kid you not. Here, let me pour you a drink. No, really, I insist, it’s on me. I brought my own. Just swab out the dust and fingerprints with my shirttails, good as new. Love the way it claps down on the bar, gets your glands salivating, doesn’t it?

No, after you, I insist. My pleasure.

See that freaky little bird? That’s the state bird, my friend. The Missouri Hunt-and-Pecker. Never heard of ’em? Well, then I guess you’ve never been to Missouri, have you? Maybe passed through, didn’t get out of the car. Or changed planes in the airport, or went up in the Arch once, just to say you’d done it. But that’s not Missouri to me. St. Louis is the gateway, sure, but you want to know Missouri you need to drive a few hours into the corn, you want to visit St. Joseph, up through Maryville — skirt the Iowa border, though Iowa’s a sore point from where I sit. You need to get lost in Missouri or you never really were there in the first place. Even then you won’t be likely to meet the Hunt-and-Pecker unless you circulate a manuscript or two.

Manuscript, you heard me right. See, very few know it, because we keep it to ourselves, but Missouri is sick and silly with apprentice fictioneers, the whole state’s like one vast harrowed and furrowed MFA workshop. Why do you think the license plates call it The Show-Don’t-Tell State?

Yeah, sure, Iowa. We’re not promiscuous like them. Rather sit on a manuscript for a hundred years than publish before we’re ready. And when you really contemplate the motto’s implications… show, don’t tell… well, get me here, we’ve taken it to heart. By the time a roving Missouri critique outfit has detasseled your kernels, you better believe me you’ll have second thoughts about advancing into the marketplace. More likely cancel your subscription to Poets & Writers, renew your vows to craft. Scene, setting, voice. Look at that fugging bartender, he’d serve a wood duck in a halter top before he so much as glanced at us.

You like that? Here’s another. Go ahead, you know you want to.

Or shut up entirely, always an option. That’s the ultimate endpoint, you know. Don’t write a word, just be a writer. We’re more than a little stoical out here on the plain, son. Write more? Write less. I strive to write less every day, some day I’ll get there. Not-telling isn’t as easy as it appears.

Lookit ’im there, cool as a flippin’ cucumber, straddling the state like nobody’s business. Crazy little red-tailed devil knows more than he’s saying too, can’t you tell? Love the way he flushes amber, then goes all transparent again. Strive to be like a windowpane, not a mirror, that’s how he makes his way through the world.

All right, I’m out of here. Here you go, you bastard! Keep the change! See, I always leave that sonuvabitch a tip — one red cent. Honest Abe, another fellow from the heartland who knew exactly when to shut up. Keep it real, friend.

written by Jonathan Lethem

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Balm of Gilead

By Betsy | Published: October 23, 2009
poplar buds in olive oil

poplar buds in olive oil

Yesterday my friend and I walked up a moist forest trail to a place where our naturalist neighbor had cut a few poplar branches from the tall, overhanging trees.  We walked under fir trees dripping with fog, and through an old abandoned apple orchard where the mossy trees had red apples all over them like ornaments. 

The resinous buds of the poplar were what we were out to collect:  Balm of Gilead, they’re called.  The tree is either Populus candicans or Populus balsamifera, I’m not sure which, but the resinous little leaf buds that we picked seemed to be at their sticky prime.  Pretty soon our fingers were so sticky from the resin that it was hard to drop the buds into our little containers.  It took perhaps 45 minutes or so for us each to pick maybe a cup and a half;  the buds are small, and with our sticky fingers the picking went slowly.

But I came home and put some into olive oil, to serve as a massage oil for aching joints.  Now, just 24 hours later, the oil is richly fragrant.  In the photo, which is not a good one, you can see the little buds like fish in their jar.  The red resin is visible as well.   Here’s a page about them on Local Harvest, which is a website everyone should know about anyway.

I also immersed some in a jar with brandy, to serve as a headache remedy in dark wintry days to come.

You come across the fragrance of these trees in the woods before you actually see the tree.  I picked green coriander berries from the garden after the balm of gilead, and the combination left my hands covered with such intense perfume I couldn’t bear to wash them all evening long.

Other things on my mind tonight are bees and story-telling, but that will all wait for another day.  Sometimes I’m crammed so full of ideas I can hardly sort them all out.

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Unsolicited praise for ESET: the best anti-spyware going!

By Betsy | Published: October 26, 2008

This is just an unsolicited shout-out to ESET in appreciation for it protecting my computer from all the big bad monsters out there in the cyber-jungle.

I’ve got a PC running Windows Vista (I know, I know … but I got a company discount on the purchase that made it about a quarter the price of an equivalent Mac.)

After experimenting unhappily for years with the top-rated free anti-spyware and anti-virus programs out there, as well as a year of paid (and pointless) Microsoft “One-care” , and dealing with all the slowdowns and software popups that they all generated, and still occasionally having my machine get possessed by demons, I paid for a year’s worth of Eset.

That was 7 months ago, and it’s been magic ever since.  Using Eset, which doesn’t noticeably slow down my computer, I would never even know that such a thing as spyware exists in the world.  Except that last night, after browsing on CNet, I stupidly left the website open and the internet connected while I just did some writing.  At one point, a little splash screen popped up from Eset, politely informing me that a Trojan downloader had tried to take up residence, but Eset had quarantined and deleted it.  In a few seconds, the splash screen went away. 

Eset doesn’t require any babysitting, any manual scans, any turning on or off, any attention at all. It updates itself daily and just quietly sits in the background, on guard.  I almost never actually pay for software, but this is one program that I’ll happily shell out for every year.

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