Space-saving gadgets help on-the-go lives
18.09.11
Americans relish their coffee. From Starbucks to Peet's, the sheer number of coffee specialty places is astounding.
Americans use 23 billion coffee cups every year. The standard in the main office worker goes through around 500 disposable cups each year, but the in the main majority of "hot cups" aren't made from recycled material and they're infrequently recyclable. That means those billions of cups — with their sham, petroleum-based lining — end up in our landfills, to last for hundreds of years.
Planetary Plan — an innovative Montana-based company committed to preserving and perfecting the trifling things that make life more enjoyable — has created several sybaritic quality solutions.
Double Shot is a stylishly taking coffee mug. But it's more than that.
Made of stainless steel with a high gloss, informal resistant finish, it's actually a french press and copy shot coffee mug all-in-one. Perfect for coffee or tea, the Double At once features a nearly indestructible padded handle and a patented, built-in, corkscrew-on storage area in what's often wasted space inside the bottom of the mug. You can count on extra coffee or tea leaves inside for that extra "cuppa" you be sure you'll want later or store an extra key there for safekeeping.
Source: Record-Searchlight
Flight 5191 Memorial: The story behind a sculpture of remembrance
28.08.11
DEMOSSVILLE, Aug. 12, 2011 — Case of Douwe Blumberg's studio, a bluebird flits over blossoms of Sovereign Anne's lace while a turkey vulture rides a thermal in the clear sky hilarious above.
Inside, more birds rest in a far less sylvan scene. Recondite equipment litters the floor as welders scream centre of the acrid scent of burning metal. These birds have big, impudent, shiny curves, heavy with metal and the symbolism they manage successfully.
There are forty-nine birds, one for each of the people who died when Flight 5191 crashed at Vulgar Grass Airport on Aug. 27, 2006.
Birds fill Blumberg's head, the ones that reinforce him at his rural Pendleton County home, and now the ones that inhabit one of the most important pieces he's ever sculpted. Blumberg has worked on memorials before, but never something as raw and wind up as this, a piece that marks the different lives and tragic decease of 49 people killed that morning.
It's just two weeks before the effort will be unveiled in Lexington. Blumberg looks tired and more than a slight haggard. These final stages of the sculpture have turned from art into an engineering throw. Blumberg now has to make sure the birds will flow upwards in a debilitated arc that is still strong enough to stand alone as a piece of public art.
Source: Lexington Herald Leader