Adventures in Candyland

So, even though it’s 2008 (where has the time gone?!) I am going to sound very early ’90s right now. Here goes…The Internet is the coolest invention ever!!! I think most people hold that belief in some form, but now we take it for granted as it has become so embedded in almost every society and we’ve already even moved past it in its purest sense. But truly, it allows for such amazing information sharing that sometimes I just get newly excited by its concept. I think we should take a second to remember how hard it was to get information before we had this unbelievable global source available to us 24 hours a day. Of course, some people may believe that this has created a societal decline in a number of ways, mais pas moi.

Anyway - I only bring this up because today, I became overly enthused by three things I bumped into.

1) I have always loved metromint water - so refreshing - been buying it at Whole Foods since the first day I saw it (along with my favority energy drink, Inkos White Tea - so good!). Yes, it’s only spearmint and water and , yes, I could make it on my own or drink it hot (Isreali-style), but of course I often choose the convenience path and pay the price. During the last few years, they have extended their product line with peppermint, orange and lemon, but OMG - I have no idea what to say about this next iteration. If you know me or even read my yelp reviews, you might realize I have a strong predilection for chocolate and mint, together that is — since I was a little girl. To me it’s one of the most refreshing and luscious pairings. Today, I come to find out that MetroMint is launching ChocolateMint water. Yes, chocolate water may sound a little scary, but I’ll be trying it as soon as I can get my hands on it at my mecca, Whole Foods. I mean no sugar, no preservatives, no CALORIES - this is January 3rd - so I will take my dessert calorie-free thank you - at least for this month that is (well, let’s be honest, maybe this week).

2) Okay, along the same vein, if you like food, if you like cooking, if you like pairing flavors, but sometimes you feel like you don’t know what would compliment what, you must check out Foodpairing. Yes, we all know that gruyere is phenomenal in potatoes, but did you know it also can pair with licorice? Not being trained at le Cordon Bleu shouldn’t prevent you from trying unique flavor combinations for friends and family, but it also might be good to have a the pizza menu handy — sometimes experimenting with weird stuff can end up, well, weird, so it’s a good idea to have a back-up plan. In any case, I think this is so cool and I will definitely be a frequent visitor here.

3)Now, this one doesn’t have to do with food (I know, shock), but it does have to do with two of my other obsessions - Japanese minimalism and architecture. Toyo Ito is one of my most favorite architects and Sendai Mediateque is such a unique and breathtaking structure. I can’t wait till the day when I get to experience it in person. Here is my newest fave -Kengo Kuma. Check out the Lotus House…..amazing.

See why I love the Internet.

Update..got to add one more - this one from Danielle, but I had to include it as belongs in the same Asian modern minimalism/nature category as the above, is beautifully subtle yet exquisite and one of the collaborators is another amazing Japanese architect, Tadao Ando. Check it out…

Today I visited a wildlife rescue center. In addition to seeing countless exocitic animals that had been illegally kept in captivity and learning fun stats (Know what the third most popular pet in the US is? You might think its a goldfish or a hamster, but no, its an iguana! Unfortunately, most people buy them when they’re babies and don’t realize how big they will get…), I was also reminded of a brand I’ve been meaning to post about for a few days.

World Wildlife Fund has gotten a lot of exposure this past month - ranging from the results of a study entitled Deeper Luxury that looks at the effects of the luxury market on the environment, to their great holiday gifts ideas like adopting a symbolic penguin. From the trendwatching newsletters I subscribe to, to my local Yahoo! group, I’ve read about WWF several times this month. After my outing today, I decided to finally check out the WWF site and see what they’re all about. Here’s what the World Wildlife Fund in the US is currently up to:

Current campaigns:
Push for an Ocean Protection Treaty
U.S. Activists: Stop Imports of Illegal Wood
Give Thanks to Kansas for Bold Climate Change Action
Take Action to Stop Drilling in Bristol Bay
Help Lions, Snow Leopards and More
Choose Good Wood and Save Our Forests
Say YES to Sustainable Seafood

Visit their site for more info.

Yesterday we toured a very cool house in Brentwood. Wired Home by Living Homes (obviously, Chris Anderson didn’t completely turn me off). The house used state-of-the-art technology and environmentally conscious steel, glass and reclaimed redwood-encased Prefab for Living Homes by celebrated architect, Ray Kappe. The home is completely wrapped in windows - allowing the outside to be brought it - a concept that is throughly appealing to me. It was 4,000 sq. feet of design and technology exquisitness and absolutely the kind of house I see in my future. There was so much coolness in this house (forget the house keys, how about an iris reader instead) and we’re real suckers for it. Here are a few shots(sorry about the crappy camera phone) that really don’t do it justice.

The interior was also pretty spot on - modern yet not cold. The art was interesting, particularly from this artist -Andy Diaz Hope. Here’s something kinda trippy that I took - reminded Danielle of the show, “Flight of the Concords”. This was the mirror in the upstair bathroom.

But, there was only one issue - the price tag. The house is on the market for 4.3 mill. I don’t know if I will be able to afford this in the near future. And that begs the question, how many people really can? I understand that this home was for touring and sets the standard, but when will the masses, or even the upper middle class, be able to afford a sustainable PREFAB home. The definition of Prefab has definitely changed and so has the price. I don’t know the exact price of putting one of these homes up, but I’m assuming it’s quite costly even when they aren’t customized.

For me, the home symbolizes the green movement. Lots of new ways to be environmentally conscious, yet ironically, the majority of products are typically more expensive than their non-green counterparts. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule so you don’t need to list off all the ways or products I’m wrong about, but if we are to move in this direction, I hope that this kind of lifestyle can become more cost-effective and easily accessible for more people in the near future. I, for one, am waiting for the day.

Sadly, a large portion of Southern California is up in flames today. What’s even worse? This is nothing new. As a native, I have seen fire after fire ravage the hillsides where I grew up. For me, driving through Malibu canyon and smelling Eucalyptus trees is akin to eating a bowl of mac and cheese - I’m home.

So, it’s painful to repeatedly drive through canyons, once covered by California’s distinct green vegetation when it’s been blackened and burnt to a crisp. Tree after tree reduced to charred stick figures. And the cycle continues. Years pass - the greenery rejuvenates and then like clockwork, it happens all over again. Yesterday the clock struck extraordinarily loud and all at once over Southern California.

Here’s an image I took from Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica yesterday. It’s actually beautifully tragic, right. Guess you put ocean in anything and it has the tendency to be so.

And today, as I sit in my office watching the trees wave back and forth with alarming intensity due to the hot, dry and unrelenting Santa Ana winds, I have to tell you I feel sad. According to this piece on Mega Fires, Global Warming is the fuel for these fires and only promises to get worse as the years progress and we ultimately lose half the forests in the West.

This definitely ties into my last entry… and even though I’m not really a political person, I hope that our next President makes the earth’s survival a priority. Because it’s becoming more an more apparent how we’ve slipped up.

People who aren’t from LA always wonder why anyone would want to live here. The earthquakes, the fires, the traffic the smog, the expense. It might seem daunting to some, but I’ve lived other places and when I was away, all I ever wanted was to come home. Boy, am I a dork!

Did you know today is Blog Action Day? It’s a cool idea. Basically, a group of bloggers set out to heighten the awareness of one of the most important topics, environmentalism, throughout the blogoshpere and all on the same day. This mass blogging event will be the topic of the day on 15,000 blogs and reach 12 million readers. So - of course I wanted to participate. What is more important than preserving our earth?

So full disclosure, I am kind of a dork (yes, I like Sci-fi) and I love the NEW Battlestar Gallactica. The premise is humans invented robots, the robots rebel, kill many and take over the world, so the humans left have to flee into space to preserve the what’s left of the race. The characters are constantly craving earth’s environment, so they all want to get away on this one ship that replicates the beauty of earth’s outdoors. A reoccuring theme in shows of this nature for sure, but it always reminds me of how many of us take what we have here for granted. So, hopefully all this awareness will turn into action and not peter out because the reality is: this kind of revolution takes time. This month’s issue of Wired focuses quite a bit on this topic of time and trial and error particularly in regards to the future of energy.

One of the articles addresses the very prevalent molecule, cellulosic ethanol. This molecule is the answer to all our energy woes and even better, it’s just waiting for a good use in everyone’s lawnmowers! Problem is - it’s hard to break down. So even though there are ways to do it, it can’t be done at the proper scale and speed at this point. Sort of the like the whole corn ethanol deal - fuel can be made from it, but it’s not effective and efficient enought. I’m not going to get into the chemistry of it, but I think the underlying topic here is creative solutions and raising awareness regularly so people will continually clamor for solutions even if there isn’t a real answer for many years. Because in truth, there is no option for the US or the world whether due to the environmental or financial ramifications. Therejust isn’t a choice. And there needs to be mavericks who make it their goal to not let these issues just coast along.

In fact, check out these two guys, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. These two probably might not being having a lot of “coffee talk” with mainstream environmentalist. A result of their controversial manifesto from 2005, “Death of Enviromentalism” and new book titled, “Break Through: From “The Death of Environmentalism” to the Politics of Possibility,” but I bet they do inspire passion and hopefully change. They opine current mainstream ideas proposed aren’t extreme enough to make an actual dent in the reality of greenhouse emmisions and the only way for change to be had is if the solutions are, “pro-growth, pro-technology, and pro-environment.” Seems like common sense right, but apprently these are the non-conformist ideas that will turn the enviromental movement onto its ear so something actually gets accomplished. Well, that and money of course.

Whatever they inspire, at least at least they inspire something! Me, I am going to do something too, not world changing big, but world changing in my life big. I drink coffee at least once a day, so I going to make it a point to to use my own cup because it kills me when I see the 30 cups from the past week piling up in the trash. It’s definitely not going to make the impact Nordhaus and Shellenberger want to make, but we all got to start the change somewhere. What are you doing?

Innovation never stops and never ceases to amaze. Last Sunday, Danielle and I ventured downtown to the LA Convention Center to experience Wired Nextfest, one of the coolest “tradeshows” I’ve ever attended. As we browsed the booths, we were continously awed by the creativity and cool factor of the products and technologies shaping the future of our world. We were reminded that we’re living during an amazing period of time, where interactivity is the sign of the times as well as the proliferation of communities continually being by reshaped by the technology and inspiration featured at this show. The shape of things to come is about customization, collaboration and innovation tied into entertainment and culture tied into creating a more sustainable and empathetic world.

Honestly, I could write chapters on the innovations we saw Sunday, but instead, I’ll just hightlight a few of of my favorites.

Light Harp
This is the first interactive art you experience upon entering the show. The sound coming from this thing was really beautiful.

Brainball
Are you calm enough to win a game of brain ball. I know I’m not, but it might be a good challenge for me. Brainball is a game where you compete by relaxing your brain and move a little ball across a table into a little circle using your brainwaves. The person who is calmer will get the ball in first. Seriously, who needs mediation when you can just play this game. Everyone was circled around these two players sitting their with their eyes closed while their brain waves were being charted on screen behing them. It was fascinating!

Desktop Factory 3D Printer
This is so cool and so inexpensive when you compare it to the past cost of creating some kind of prototype. The machine looks like a microwave oven and basically layers what sort of looks like sand to create a 3D model of the digital data you feed it and only for $4995.

Jukebots
People DJs may soon be extinct with the introduction of Jukebots, industrial robots who scratch, spin and mix records. They kind of dance as the decise which record they’re going to pick. Ridiculously cool!

LifeStraw
It’s difficult to imagine living somewhere without access to a clean water source. It’s painful to realize children still die from contaminated water — soooo these LifeStraws, which are shockingly inexpensive and simple( $3 )will save many, many lives.

Obviously I could chronicle every experience that seemed significant or fabulous, but I don’t want to bore you. So I’m going end this entry by illustrating the use of technology and art.

Today, text messaging is taking the place of calling, emailing and yes, talking. So I think we can all expect to see many iterations of this technology in the future. Here are two we learned about and took advantage of many times that day. So many times in fact, the guy from Nanikawa who was running the Wind and Swimming Messagesystem was either thinking we were really crazy or really annoying. The other is TXTual Healing, SMS Enabled Interactive Street Performance. Both very cool and the wave of the future. Below are a few samples of what I’m talking about, but please don’t judge me for my camera work, which is absolutely painful and pretty much unbearable - I truly apologize, but I want to illustrate what I’m talking about. Today, we actually bought a really cool handheld video camera by PURE DIGITAL, that we learned about at a PSFK conference. We’ll blog on how that benefits my awful filming ability later.

Both of the below technologies allow you to call a number they provide, enter your message which is immediately rendered into these two artistic forms.

TXTual Healing - Text Message Customizable Graffiti Art

Wind and Swimming MessageSystem - The wind blows your text from screen to screen in front of a beautiful background

Which unique technologies and products do you think will make an impact in the future?

A few weeks ago Lauren wrote about the Mean Green Media Machine and pondered whether the current eco-craze is being perpetuated by the media and will turn out to be a fad, or if we are in fact becoming a “greener” society.  Since then, we have read countless articles about all things green, worked on an event to raise money for an environmental cause and attended a conference that included sessions about planning green events.  And we have had several conversations about the inconsistencies that still exist in the media about these issues.  Here’s one small example we recently experienced:

We went to a conference for event planners last week that was produced by the publisher of events industry news magazines.  After a session about the greening of events that featured a presentation by an NRDC board member, a conference organizer told us that in an attempt to be a greener event, they would not distribute any handouts during the day.  He received a round of applause.  At lunch, we found it interesting when we went downstairs to the event’s lounge-area that was decorated with about 200 mylar balloons.  Here’s what the Balloon Council, a coalition of balloon manufacturers and distributors, says about mylar balloons:  “Mylar balloons are made with mylar nylon, a material developed for use with the US space program. Balloons made from mylar are often coated with a metallic finish and are available in a variety of shapes and imprinted designs. Mylar balloons are not classified bio-degradable and should not be released.”

It can be tough to know how serious some of the media is about all this environmental stuff.  It can sometimes seem like perhaps they are jumping on a bio-diesel bandwagon.  But here’s an eco-friendly promotion that makes sense.  WIRED has teamed up with LivingHomes to create the first WIRED Home.  Its high tech and low impact.  And its coming to L.A. this Fall.  We’re hoping to check it out to see if its the real deal or just part of the Mean Green Media Machine.      

I know there’s that whole underlying Google backlash brewing just below the surface - they’re tyrants, they’re planning to take over the world, they’re just plain mean and evil - that kind of thing.  And in fact, wasn’t it just last week that we heard about Google acquiring DoubleClick, an online advertising company - can you see antitrust issues down the road?  So its safe to say I started out a bit skeptical (okay, cynical) about Blackle.

If you haven’t searched with Blackle yet, its basically Google search with a black screen.  Why?  Well, Google explains that its an attempt to be more environmentally friendly.  In the first conversation Sweet Talk had about Blackle, I was convinced that it was a great marketing stunt from Google.  With green living so hot right now (see Lauren’s post below) and more and more companies trying to find ways to be eco-responsible (btw - I have no idea if that’s a real term), it seems an obvious time for Google to craft and present that image as well.  The launch of Blackle this month garnered some good publicity - so much that it actually went down for a bit after the onslaught of visitors.  But I wonder how many people have switched to Blackle as their homepage.

Despite my cynicism about Blackle being a marketing stunt, I checked it out anyway.  It looks pretty cool.  And here’s what Google has to say about it:

“How is Blackle saving energy?

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: “Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time”.

There are a lot of great web sites about saving energy and being more environmentally friendly. They are full of great tips covering the little things that we can all do to make a difference today. Try Blackling “energy saving tips” or visit treehugger.com a great blog dedicated to environmental awareness.”

And yes, after reading this, my cynicism miraculously vanished.  As part of a recycling, Prius-driving family, how could I not set Blackle as my homepage?  So…this post is my plug for Blackle.  It might be just a marketing stunt, but at least it’s one you can feel good about - one search at a time. 

Last weekend I attended AltBuild at the Santa Monica Airport featuring manufacturers of green building materials, green architects and other businesses that make it possible to build sustainable homes.   It was packed.    

Green living has become so mainstream, an amazing thing, but I sometimes I have to wonder is it’s all a  result of a massive marketing campaign primed for a backlash, or will this finally become an everyday reality for Americans.

For decades, green living has been the norm in Europe.  There’s an article in last week’s New York Time Magazine talking about just that. “Why Are They Greener Than We Are?” which talks about how sophisticated green architecture is completely common in Germany and the Netherlands. So with all the technology, talent and incessant talk, why is it so hard to make our buildings sustainable too?

Once again, it seems as America has somehow made it more difficult than it should be by creating bureaucracies and impeding the creativity of architects by almost mocking their innovative ideas.  At this event, I was also struck by the high cost of materials that are made from recycled elements and earth minerals.  Shouldn’t building with these kinds of materials be less cost-prohibitive? 

I hope that the mean green media machine taken over, but that we continue on this path towards awareness of our surroundings and the movement becomes more of a way of life than a trend.  That it won’t seem life an effort to make changes, but that it’s just the way it is.