TV On The Radio – Caffeinated Consciousness – YouTube.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.].

Among other things, how happiness can be measured:

The Science Behind the Smile – Harvard Business Review.

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2011/11/15/the-candy-bomber/

About 60 workers were left in a Eastern Washington field yesterday after they decided that $25 was not enough money for four to five hours of work.

They had to walk an hour and a half just to get to the street so they could wave at cars to find a way home, which is an hour and half away.

The same day, another story starts like this:

Even after deploying 105 prison inmates this week to help pick apples in Eastern Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire said growers still need from 3,000 to 4,000 workers to help harvest before the season’s first major freeze.

A quick look at the map shows that the prison workers in the Wenatchee Valley were an hour and a half away from the Mattawa Orchard, where the “unimprisoned” workers were stranded, the same distance the they had to hitchhike home.

The prison workers are getting paid $8.67 an hour. The “unimprisoned” workers were told they would be paid less than $6.50.

According to the TriCity Herald, Governor Gregoire’s rationale for using prison workers was that “growers could not find enough workers, even after advertising jobs with pay of $120 to $150 a day.”

If the workers in Mattawa had seen those advertisements, I have a feeling they might have passed on the opportunity that left them stranded for an entire work day.

As a web designer with an interest in marketing, I would like to offer my services to any of these growers. Let me promote your $120 a day jobs. I will find workers for you. I think I know some people already (although we might have to take an hour and a half walk to find them.)

If the dissonance has not yet made your head explode, another look at Google Maps reveals that the prisoners were driven at least 6 hours, 290 miles, from the other side of the Puget Sound.

The grower is paying $22 an hour for each prisoner. A lot of that money goes to the security, seven guards, transportation, housing and food. The average prisoner will see “net pay of $1 to $2 per hour after money is subtracted for child support, taxes, crime victim compensation, incarceration costs and any other legal and financial obligations,” according to state officials.

This does not compute.

A video about the stranded workers can be found here.
The story about the prison workers can be found here

Suddenly, what i have to say is less urgent.

I love the site. The comment about the article was insightful but I have some great perspective to bring.

I want to tell them that they should read the book Blappity Blooppity, by Awesome McBrilliant because it brings a whole new perspective to the issue.

Is my username tinynow or oddremark?
…
…
Fk it. I’m watching some Hulu.

In this video, psychotherapist Kathy McMahon totally hits the nail on its cognitively-biased head. She talks about how to deal with dangerous optimism, the overly-self reliant, our need to admit, “we are all Bozos on this bus,” and how to react well to Peak Oil.

Thanks to Gita Moulton and Transition Voice for bringing this needed conversation into my life.

Wintertime in New York town the wind blowing snow around
Walk around with nowhere to go
Somebody could freeze right to the bone
I froze right to the bone, New York Times said,
“It was the coldest winter in seventeen years”
I didn’t feel so cold then

Here is the Dylan song that McMahon mentions:

Not much to say about these videos, except that I really wish I was the actor and thanks to Zoe from Sacred Soul Hypnotherapy for putting it in her newsletter.

This post documents my lazy way of modifying the WordPress theme Bones by making tiny CSS modifications – incrementally improving the look and feel of the Tinynow Blog.

Here is how we start…

Tweak #1 is not a best practice. I may go back and change this in the PHP, but for now, I will remove the part at the top of each post that says, “Read more on…” because it is repetitive and breaks up the flow of the typography. I have read that you should not make changes in a half-a**ed way if you know if you are going to have to go back and do it again, but I  may decide to keep this functionality and a change to the CSS is very easy to change back.

.read-more {display:none;}

Way too much white-space below the copy.

It is actually caused by a few things, but the margin and padding on the bottom of a div with the class of article[*id="post-"] footer. This is intermediate to advanced level CSS and a very interesting and economical way of selecting elements. Because every post is automatically framed in an article element that has a unique id that begins like this:

<article id="post-12"

The [*id="post-"] looks for any id that starts with “post-” This allows for it to apply across many situations, but because id is a very specific way of selecting something, it will override more general css declarations

So, we do this:

article[*id="post-"] footer {padding-bottom: 0; margin-bottom: 0;}