Month: August 2007

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

A photographer and journalist traveled around the world to see what families eat during a weeks time. They covered 30 families spanning 24 countries. The most expensive weekly total for food belonged to a family from Germany at $500. The least expensive family from Mali was able to feed a family of twelve for under $27 a week.

Their book is called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats and is available from Amazon. Below are a handful of the family photos published by Time Magazine.

Notice how the poorer countries eat far less processed or boxed food. They eat a lot more fruits and vegetables it appears from these pictures. And I sure didn’t know that Canadians eat polar bear!

Click picture to begin slideshow.

hungry_planet_02

Guatemala: The Mendozas of Todos Santos
Food expenditure for one week: 573 Quetzales or $75.70
Family Recipe: Turkey Stew and Susana Perez Matias’s Sheep Soup

Monkey on the Loose

monkeyI came across this article on MSNBC about a monkey named Oliver who has escaped capture on three separate occasions.

I wonder if the person who composed the text at the AP found it as funny as I did.

We’ve got a monkey named Oliver, a park manager named Nemecheck and the police were called in to help.

But it’s Nemecheck’s quote near the end of the story the put this into Fark territory:

“I’m tired of chasing the monkey”

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The Lookout on DVD

The Lookout arrived this week on DVD. If you haven’t seen it add it to your Netflix queue. Better yet, go buy the DVD like I did today. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in the past couple of years. I saw it in the theater and liked it just as much tonight watching it for the second time.

lookout

Here are a few links on the film:

The Lookout Trailer at Netflix

Review at Rolling Stone

IGN Reviews the DVD release

Richard Roper review from the Chicago Sun Times – Roper named this movie his favorite so far this year.

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My favorite Gnomedex 2007 reviews

I’ve read a number of Gnomedex reviews over the past couple of days and there are a few I enjoyed.

  1. Dave Delaney tells us what he learned at Gnomedex. I could not agree more that “open money” should be explained in 140 characters or less. The review is full of insider jokes that will be better appreciated if you were there.
  2. Ethan Kaplan – “We pay attention to some stupid fight between overweight white guys inside a conference hall, where outside there are significant problems that we ignore for the sake of our own false prophet building”
  3. Scott Rosenberg –  Scott provides a thoughtful run down of the sessions. I enjoyed his review of the Calacanis controversy.
  4. William Smith at Sugar Attack gives a blow by blow review. Check out this Robert Steele quotes such as “I don’t have time to fool around with Wikipedia, it is full of morons”
  5. Randy Stewart created the Gnomedex 2007 poster. Excellent!
  6. Official Gnomedex comics are up on Flickr
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Visiting the Seattle Aquarium

We visited the renovated Seattle Aquarium today with our kids and had a wonderful time. There are many interesting exhibits to see and we plan to go back soon.

DSC_0756 One thing I noticed is that as many of us grow older we go from doing to watching. One example would be that I used to play a lot of basketball and baseball. Now I spend far more time watching both on TV.

At the aquarium, this point was driven home as I noticed the exhibits my kids found most interesting were those that included a hands-on element. One particular exhibit was an open tank that included various marine life that encouraged the kids to gently touch. They kids loved touching starfish, crabs and various colorful sea anemone. They couldn’t believe how rough and scratchy the starfish felt.

Kids love to touch, and move and play with items. As adults sometimes we’d rather step back and observe. It was fun to watch our kids enjoy the exhibits, but it was even more enjoyable getting my hands wet with my kids as we learned about sea life.

Kim does a good job of jumping in to whatever activity the kids are doing and playing alongside them like when she and Luca play the piano together.

I’m going to do a better job of getting involved at that level with my kids even if it means getting dirty of wet. Or both.

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