In this week’s LA Weekly cover story Patrick Range McDonald investigates whether there is any meat behind the Donald T. Sterling Homeless Center ads. Our campaign to stop the ugly ads gets a little mention in the article. But the amazing thing about the Homeless Center ads is that real homeless service providers don’t know much about the homeless center, there have been no plans presented to the city about the homeless center, and, in fact, apparently Skid Row doesn’t really need another homeless center. I sorta mentioned this back when I first whined about the service center ads, “Donald Sterling is Homeless and Needs your Help.”

Now we find out that the ads are not just ugly, confusing and self-aggrandizing. They don’t really exist. But I’m sure Mr. Sterling is not intentionally keeping thousands of homeless people waiting for services. He is too busy designing his own ads.

This article is truly the best compendium of Sterling knowledge assembled to date and it gives us a window into how STERLING HIMSELF DESIGNS THE ADS!

“A business associate who often visited Sterling in his penthouse office in Beverly Hills in the 1990s says Sterling actually cuts and pastes many of the flamboyantly unattractive ads himself, with scissors, tape and marker. He has spent hours getting just the right look, sometimes elongating the images of buildings to look more Sterling-worthy. For years, Sterling paid half the going rate for space in the Times, according to the associate.”

(Check out the Weekly’s fantastic archive of Donald T. Sterling ads.)

Carla would really like to move on and write about some new issues, but it is kinda hard when the planet is slowly boiling over. If your last climate change update came from an Inconvenient Truth, now’s a good time to educate yourself on the latest global warming.
Check out this review of three different climate change projections that, even in all of their uncertainty, are certain about the urgency of our need to act now: Climate Change Projections: Uncertain but Certainly Worse.

I’ll be there from 12-2 and I’m going to do a little demo from 1-2. I’ll throw some shapes on the wheel and show how I connect them together and distort them to make my funky vases.

There hasn’t been much info online about it, but this showed up today. I don’t think this event has become too huge yet, but it sounds like a lot of fun. There are specific events for kids and children always enjoy watching artists in action. Hope to see you out there.

And this has been a great chance to invite people to a party and talk to all kinds of people about something I’ve been having fun with for a while. Putting this together has forced me to think about what I’ve been making and has helped me realize that there is a lot of intention behind it. I actually do have some kind of vision behind what I’m making. And since people are enjoying it, I have even more reason to make more.
So I’m looking forward to seeing friends and meeting some new people a the big opening this weekend — Saturday night at Jennifer Joyce Pottery Studio and Gallery. You can see the official unearthed pottery show site here. And read some blather about the pottery here.

Honestly, though we can be a pain, it can be pretty easy to get a good tip from families. We come and go as quickly as possible, we feel bad because our kids make a mess, and you can totally play us by saying nice things about our kids. Or you can really screw things up by offering bad service that results in whining screaming tantrums. And the kids may get upset too.

So here is a little list that should be mandatory reading for all wait-staff. It will help you get big tips, maybe not just from the family with kids, but also from their dining neighbors.

1. Make it FAST. Don’t try to be polite and offer a relaxed dining experience. Kids and especially babies are time-bombs waiting to go off. Feel free to take dinner orders right away with the drinks, keep it coming and by all means, get that bill out there fast. You’ll be able to fill your table again quickly and it will score you big points with the family and everyone else in the restaurant.
2. Bring lots of napkins.
3. When you are setting up the table, don’t sit all the babies or toddlers together at one end of the table. They must be mixed in with adults!
4. Make sure babies have clean highchairs with functional seat belts. Or we will make you take them back and get us new ones and maybe even have to leave because there is no way our active curious kids are going to sit still and not try to climb out of the highchairs and we don’t want them falling on their heads or sucking some other kids dinner off of the arm rests.
5. Don’t set glasses full of water or bowls of soup or hot things or anything else in front of babies or toddlers. They will pick them up and dump them out or throw them on the floor. Duh.
6. Don’t bring the kids’ food early! So many waiters screw this one up. Sure, if it looks like the kids are starving you might want to check with the parents. But when the kids eat before the parents it means that, when the adults get their food, the kids will be done, whining, screaming and possibly running around the restaurant. Please, feed everyone at the same time.
7. If there is an utter and complete melt-down, yes, we would like that to go! Bring doggy bags and the check and help us leave with a small shred of dignity.
8. Tell the parents that the kids are good looking, smart and well-behaved. Unless they are acting like brats because then we’ll know your just sucking up.
9. Offering to wash off a bottle, sippy-cup or pacifier will score you big points.
10. Also, for bonus points, provide something for the kids to do. Even and especially if your restaurant does not normally offer crayons and a coloring book, you may want to have them handy. Some places even offer toys to play with. (Yea, parents should always bring these themselves, but sometimes we forget or assume something will be offered.)
11. Ok, this isn’t the waiter’s fault, but I wish you would offer something green on the kids menu. Kids don’t only eat fries and fried, cheese covered crap. (Though those are favorites). What better time to bribe encourage kids to eat their veggies, than when a fancy restaurant dessert is coming.
12. Please don’t offer dessert in front of the kids! Ask the parents first! Quietly. Discretely.
13. You don’t have to seat us off in the back corner or in an empty room. Kids like to be where the action is and if there is a lot of noise and a lot to look at the kids will be happier.

Ok, that is what I have. Any parents or waiters have other pet peeves or helpful restaurant suggestions?

Is John Dingell for real? Floating a carbon tax

But the real issue is this — there is a constant market for the newest, cheapest, character branded trinkets. So companies just keep churning out new plastic crap that has an unnecessary environmental impact all the way from production through transportation and finally to its disposal.

The real solution isn’t to more closely monitor China. Really we make better toys that last longer. We don’t need to come up with a new line of toys every few months. Concentrate on making a few simple toys.

And that all comes down to us. Buy the good stuff. By less…

(Here’s our list of the top toys that our kids enjoyed as toddlers and babies. We focus on the best toys that last a long time. Some are plastic and there is a place for plastic. But only when it is not used for some disposable crap that is just going straight to the landfill.)

Working in clay has been so satisfying — plunging my fingers into something substantial, away from the computer, in real life. And being able to create things that just ooze out of my brain. No flow charts, no code, no organization, no usability testing.

So, with complete disregard for utility or what anyone else thinks, I’ve somehow been making some nice pieces that people like. I don’t want to whine… I’m not quite satisfied with the work I’m producing. I feel like I’m just now starting to control the clay more than it controls me. But I’m pleased with enough that I’ll be able to fill a small room with some interesting stuff I’ve made.

Anyway, the show is called ‘unearthed’ and you can check out a few pieces of pottery at www.quixo.com/unearthed. You can give each piece a little spin with the fancy interactive-online-art-spinning-widget. And I hope you’ll join me at the opening Saturday, October 13, 5-8pm.

I try not to analyze it too much, but I like to think of it as punk pottery, all spiky and pock-marked. But, you know, not the punk rock of pure oblivion, destruction and fury, but more the throw out the rules, start over from scratch, anti-pop punk. And I’m sure you can see the other influences banging around in my head too. It is abstract but with enough direct connection to the natural world that the forms are sensual, grotesque and maybe a little humorous. The kind of thing you might find in the forest or under a microscope or possibly just after a meteorite has made landfall delivering artifacts from a lost or future civilization. Or whatever. I’m just making this stuff up. Come on out and you can take from it what you like…

Oh, and the art will surely be upstaged by the yummy munchables crafted by Stacy TenHouten who is firing up her new business, Butterlove Bakery.

We just returned from the opening and this exhibition is set up differently from the San Diego show. In San Diego the work was grouped thematically, but here Zeisel’s work is laid out chronologically. This made for a great tour led by Pat Moore, my step-mom and the founder of the Eva Zeisel Forum. I had heard all the stories before but never all at once, in order and with examples laid out so beautifully. While I’ve long appreciated the work, Zeisel’s biography really hit home tonight. Highlights of the tour include hearing her history including traditional apprenticeship in Hungary, imprisonment by Stalin and a conscious move against the coldness of Bauhaus and modernism. Gonna have to break out some of her books (listed here). Anyways, check it out before the end of the year. (and the circus exhibit, also now showing, is great fun!)

Lots of good info and photos can be found at the Natural History Museum’s Spider Survey page. You can even participate by dunking your spiders into alcohol, filling out a form and sending them to the museum. (I prefer to leave them in my yard). And we love this book, Insects of the Los Angeles Basin for all of our figuring-out-what-bug-this-is needs, also written by folks at the Natural History Museum.