Times is hard

I signed a contract with a builder last week. Ordinarily, that would be no big deal. But this contract with a builder was the first contract I'd signed with anybody in weeks. I do my best to resist the punditry's cries of wail and woe concerning the state of the US economy, but enough of it gets into my head that I start to get nervous when my phone doesn't ring for a couple of days.

Anyhow, in order to get this job with this builder, I had to do a couple of things I wouldn't normally agree to do. But as everybody knows, times is hard and the time to relax standards is upon us. Well, it's upon me at any rate.

The first thing I agreed to do that I wouldn't do normally was to prepare a bid. Now, under ordinary circumstances I decline to participate in bids. I don't sell tile, cabinetry, counters, etc. What I'm actually selling is me --my perspective and my expertise. I'm the only one who has those things, so a "bid" is meaningless. I normally work within a budget, but a bid? I don't think so. That was until I remembered the stories I'd read that morning about a collapsing Florida housing market.

So anyhow, my new pal the builder had a parts list, a layout and a bid from another supplier. "Can you beat this?" he wanted to know. My blood pressure started ticking up and I had to talk myself out of explaining to him that I wasn't in the business of helping people to shop. Since I'm more worried about business slowing down than I am in holding onto my pride, I looked over what he'd prepared.

The layout was appalling, just bad --real suburban tract house crap. I told him that there were some technical problems with his layout and he said that I'd be able to change things around if I got the job. Then he left me his set of prints and I told him I'd get back to him the following day. The only technical problem was my bruised ego by the way.

I spent the next four hours putting together what I would do with the space if these were normal times and I were free to do my thing the way I've become accustomed to. With that out of my system, I spent a half an hour recreating the crap he left me and preparing his bid. I used half my normal mark up and spent the rest of the day being with the idea of not making as much money as I'm used to. This was a double whammy I haven't had to deal with in years. This guy was not only telling me what to do, he was controlling how much money I stood to make at the same time. Ugh.

So I wrote up a bid and faxed it to him the next day as promised. He called me almost immediately and told me that I had the job. I'm grateful to have one last thing on the books for 2008. Really I am. But I can't help but wonder if this is what 2009 is going to look like.

It's a Shapeways Christmas

In September, I wrote two posts about a company and website called Shapeways. If you're so inclined, you can re-read them here and here. Shapeways is a three-dimensional printer that allows anybody with access to a 3-D renderer to upload a model and they will print it out and ship it back. Three-dimensional model printers have been around for a while, a little while at any rate. Where Shapeways takes it a step beyond is that they have an online rendering program and anybody with a computer can make his or her own fully customized and one-of-a-kind thing.

This kind of technology integration curls my toes. I mean, ten years ago nobody'd ever heard of Google, or a blog, or a 3-D model printer for that matter. Amazing!

Well, just in time for Christmas, Shapeways has come up with a couple of seasonal offerings and the one that I think is just plain cool is a napkin ring that sells for between $5 and $7. This napkin ring is silver and it can be composed of any copy you'd like it to be.

So to prove that anybody can do this, I went through the process and made a set of napkin rings of my own. I mulled over ideas for a couple of days. I wanted to have my rings be both seasonal and related to food. Hmmmm. What to do what to do? Visions of sugarplums danced in their heads? Nah, too precious. So I pulled out my copy of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and re-read it for the first time in years. I kept coming back to this part of it:

Then the Whos, young and old, would sit down to a feast. 
And they'd feast! And they'd feast! And they'd FEAST! 
FEAST! FEAST! FEAST! 
They would feast on Who-pudding, and rare Who-roast beast. 
Which was something the Grinch couldn't stand in the least!

That's it! So I used the line They would feast on Who-pudding, and rare Who-roast beast. And it came out looking something like this:

Not bad for six bucks apiece. Let me now state for the record that I am ready for Christmas. On second thought, let's make that I'm ready to start getting ready for Christmas. So to quote How the Grinch Stole Christmas again:

Fah who foraze! 

Dah who doraze! 

Welcome Christmas! 

Bring your cheer. 

Wow, wrap your head around this

Last week, the gang over at Consumerist ran a short piece on the amount of money on the line for 2008's historic bailout. The numbers being bandied about are massive to the point of incomprehensibility and all of these numbers are being removed of all context in order to make the whole unseemly thing more palatable. Anyhow, Consumerist put all of it in an inflation-adjusted context and every one needs to see this. Check out this pie chart:

Mind bending. Really. Here's their inflation-adjusted breakdown:

Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion

Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion

Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion

S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion

Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion

The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)

Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion

Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion

NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3,920,000,000,000

2008 BAILOUT TOTAL AS OF NOV 2008: $4,616,000,000,000

This is being undertaken by a Republican administration. Can we please never hear the phrase "tax and spend liberal" in another campaign?

Try being Jackson Pollack for a change

Jackson Pollack was an American abstract-expressionist whose paint dribbles have become icons to the modern art world. Stand in front of one of his paintings at MOMA sometime and you can still feel the man's rages and furies even though he's been dead for 52 years. His work's exhausting, really. But now, thanks to the power of the Internet, you can try your hand at his now-famous painting method. Well, sort of anyway. You can't smear these or grind glass and cigarette ashes into them.

Go to this website, Jackson Pollack.org, and your cursor will turn into one of Pollack's dripping brushes and your screen a blank canvas, ready for an assault. Got a couple of minutes or a couple of hours to kill? Check it out!

Hah! I love a clever package

This was a package designed by a British printer and sent out as a Christmas present last year. Maybe it's from having hung out in art departments for so many years, but this is a hilarious pun. Cheers to Today and Tomorrow, the graphics blog where I found this. Confused? Send me a note and I'll explain.