Dopp Juice Archive

I had heard of this, but had never seen it. Once a month, at quittin’ time on Friday, hundreds and hundreds of bicyclists flood Market Street (SF’s downtown drag), effectively cutting off traffic for about half an hour. It’s called Critical Mass, and apparently it is an unorganized phenomenon that happens all over the world — often as an activist statement about environmentally-friendly transportation. So, at 6:30pm on Friday night, I was stepping out of the halloween store and getting ready to head home (my shopping bag contained some cat ears, a cat tail, and some fake claw nails… guess what I’m gonna be?). I looked out on the street before me, and saw hundreds of people on bicycles in costume. Cars honked furiously; the riders laughed and waved. It was beautiful, typical mayhem.

Unexpected Grammar Question Which of the options below is the correct way of communicating “more than one person who is capable of riding a bike”? a) People who can ride bikes.b) People who can ride a bike.The first one, when taken the wrong way, suggests that an individual is able to ride multiple bikes at once (maybe side-by-side, one butt cheek on one, one butt cheek on the other), and that there are more than one of such people in existence. Or maybe it just suggests that these people are each capable of riding more than one type of bike (say, a road bike and a mountain bike)?The second one, when taken the wrong way, suggests multiple people riding a single bicycle — maybe in the style of a chinese acrobatic pyramid.

Let me tell you about a phenomenal woman named Sue Richards. Sue Richards lives in Canada. She started off on the “normal” life track — you know, go to school, get a job, be the best corporate monkey you can be… when suddenly, right smack dab in the middle of her default life, she realized she wanted to do so much more than sit at this boring desk. She threw her hands up in the air, screamed “SCREW THIS!” at the top of her Canadian lungs, and set out across the great land of “eh?” and “aboot” to do something phenomenal. Sue Richards became a social pioneer. A chunkful of fearless years later, she’s now the proud organizer of the multifaceted calendar project, Breast of Canada. On its sixth year of beauty, the Breast of Canada calendar is an incredible compilation of artistic photos and breast cancer awareness health information.Let me put it this way:

1. You buy the calendar and hang it in your kitchen.
2. You immediately have a fascinating conversation topic whenever someone comes over to visit, thus increasing your social prowess and reputation as a cultured, artistic, and interesting friend.
3. You learn about and increase your awareness of breast health, body image, and general health.
4. You feel good that the net proceeds of your purchase are going to help the Canadian Breast Cancer Network
5. Every day you look at the calendar, you are reminded of the story of Sue Richards — the phenomenal woman who broke free of the daily grind to save the world one boob at a time.

Sold yet? Good. Now go buy your Christmas/Hannukah/Solstice/Yule/New Years gifts here: http://www.breastofcanada.com/order.phpI’ve got one. I’m also overexcited to get to January, just so I can start using it without looking too strange. Now, back to Sue. Sue’s my hero for a lot of reasons. One is that she broke free of social restraint to do something phenomenal. Two is that she blogs in red satin gloves that stretch all the way up to her elbows. Three is that she runs an art collective. Four is that she tells the world about her menopause in a riveting must-read format. She is nothing short of outlandish, couragous, and fearless.Her other blogs include Calendar Girl, The Breast Views, and a local interest blog about her hometown, Guelph. I met Sue Richards at the Chéz Badgerbag Woolfcamp after the BlogHer ’06 conference. After bearing witness to her fearless presence, I bowed down before her and asked to be knighted a Breast Ambassador to the United States of America. She pulled out a four-foot long bejewelled sword with her red satin elbow-length gloves, tapped me on each shoulder with its razor-sharp blade, and blessed me. I moved mountains that day.

You know you want that condo on the north shore of Oahu. Or at least, you want to dream about living in it and stare at pictures of it for a few hours. Allow me to recommend MichaelShower.com… a full-service Realtor website with about 6,000 listings updated daily. You can save your favorite searches, receive useful notifications, get tons of info on your favorite properties, and bask in the Hawaiian beauty of excellent photos and ambient graphic design. And if that’s not enough, the site makes it really easy for you to contact Michael Shower himself — a friendly guy who knows his stuff and wants you to get the perfect townhouse. Prepare to drool:By now you’re probably wondering why the heck a San Franciscan is pushing a Hawaii Real Estate website on you. I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count. Okay, you got it. I built the website. Well, not alone of course. This one required a diverse and talented team, which I had the honor of managing. And I am really, truly excited at how it turned out. There were some tough challenges on this project, the biggest of which was how to handle how image-heavy it had to be, just by the nature of the content. Another was how to get all the many, many user functions onto the page and “above the fold,” so you could get to where you wanted to go in less than three clicks. The design and user interface address these challenges in creative, beautiful, and intuitive ways without feeling cluttered. I’m impressed. And after working on this project for a few months, I am absolutely convinced that I need a condo in Oahu. Like now.