Buon compleanno a me

It's my birthday today. I'm 45 and that sounds weird to me. I certainly don't feel 45 although I suppose that how I feel right now is how 45 feels. It a curious thing to realize that I'm more than half way through and I have to say that where I am and what my life looks like at 45 bears scant resemblance to where I imagined it would be 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Ask me how thrilled I am that none of those old imaginings came true. I'll take things as they are right now any day.

The word for birthday in Italian, cumpleanno comes from the verb compiere. Compiere looks like but doesn't always mean to complete. In the sense that it's used in relation to birthdays, compiere means to fulfill. So my opening sentence, It's my birthday today would read Oggi compio gli anni in Italian and it would translate as Today, I fulfill my years.

I like to think of birthdays as fulfillments rather than as completions. Birthdays in English mark off time served. In Italian, birthdays commemorate a fulfilled life. It may be a semantics game but it helps me avoid dreading getting older. Thinking of my birthdays as fulfilled years rather than completed ones helps me concentrate on what a great, fantastic ride this is. When I think like this, it's easier to be grateful and stay grateful for the amazing people who begat me, the amazing people who surround me and the amazing people I have yet to meet.

So on that note, I am on my way out of town for the rest of the week as of this afternoon. I wrote a bunch of posts for the coming days that showcase my first foray back into the ad game in more than 15 years. I hope it's not too tedious, but I needed to do it as a credibility-building exercise. Bear with me and have a great rest of th week!

This sums up the Deepwater Horizon nightmare perfectly

Of all the images I've seen of the Louisiana coastline and the Gulf so far, this image by Gerald Herbert for the Associated Press drives home the point most bluntly.

The AP misidentified this damselfly as a dragonfly, but the point remains that nothing's safe from this spill. Scrubbing your bathtub with a half a grapefruit and some salt won't do anything for fix this or alleviate it.

This spill is the result of an industry that regulates itself and the end result of 30 years of "business friendly" government policies. Encouraging investment and innovation is a good thing, but that not what "pro-business" means. What that expression means is to allow multinational corporations to run roughshod over anything that stands in their way. That's at best short-sighted and worst criminal. It's also been the de facto operating procedure of the United States since about 1981. Hearing the party that's spent the last 30 years systematically dismantling the EPA and anything that smacks of a regulation complain that the current administration isn't doing enough is a level of hypocrisy I find hard to believe. Hearing the party that stood by and let it happen trying to assert itself is almost as bad. This isn't about political parties, it's about a deeply flawed idea of governance.

This spill is bigger than BP, it's bigger than the Minerals Management Service, it's bigger than the EPA and it's bigger than the entirety of the US Federal Government. This is a catastrophe of a scale never before seen and one that will play out in the Gulf for years and decades to come. And for what?

Industries cannot regulate themselves. Repeat after me. Industries cannot regulate themselves.

Clean your tub with grapefruit and salt. Or not.

Those crazy kids at Apartment Therapy are forever touting labor-intensive and probably ineffective "green" alternatives to household cleaning supplies. The idea seems to be that if you're inconvenienced, then you're somehow saving the earth.

I am a huge proponent of sustainable practices and stewarding resources sensibly and equitably. With that said, scrubbing out your tub with a half a grapefruit and some salt is absurd.

The piece in Apartment Therapy went on to break the process down into four easy to follow steps. I have a better idea. Here are my four steps. At the end of my steps you'll have a clean shower and full tummy.

1. Peel and eat grapefruit, preferably an Indian River pink.

2. Sprinkle salt on some fresh, crusty bread. Top with high quality olive oil and be transported.

3. Spray down shower with SC Johnson's Scrubbing Bubbles.

4. Come back ten minutes later and rinse.

Done.

Many household cleaners are a gimmick, they are marketing messages in a bottle. Developed to exploit your fears and perceived inadequacies, they represent an absolute waste of resources in the sense that they waste your money and your time.

Similarly, just because it came off a tree doesn't mean something's benign.

If you read that there was 1-Dimethoxy-2, 5-trimethyl-4-hexene, Acetic acid and decyl ester in something you were about to slosh around your bathroom would you be concerned? Well, they are but four of the thousands of chemicals in a grapefruit. They're probably harmless (I say probably because no one really studies them) but why are they inherently better than Disodium Ethanoldiglycinate, Butoxydiglycol, Ethoxylated Alcohol, Quaterinary Ammonium Chlorides? Those are the four ingredients that make Scrubbing Bubbles so gosh darn effective.

Chemicals that come from a lab and chemicals that come from a tree aren't inherently good or bad. In chemistry it's all about dose and duration. Most synthetic chemicals are engineered specifically to break down into their component parts and to do so quickly. What's in them is controlled tightly and studied thoroughly. I don't know that they're safer, but at least they're known.

Whether or not you use them is entirely up to you. There are some things I won't use because they waste resources. Usually my money, often my time and a lot of times I don't use things because they waste the earth's resources or they'll have an impact I don't want them to have. I say there's a balance you have to strike and the best way to strike that balance is to arm yourself with knowledge and to make decisions based on reason and not emotion.

To that end, SC Johnson has a new website called What's Inside. What's Inside is a product-by-product list and explanation of what's in their products. It's enough to make me buy more SC Johnson products if only to demonstrate how much I applaud their move.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my neighbors the other day. He's looking for a pesticide to kill off the caterpillars that are eating his tomato plants. He's concerned about what he's going to spray and rightly so. However, he wants something "natural" because he thinks it'll be safer. I reminded him that rattlesnake venom is natural but I doubt I'd eat a tomato that had been treated with it.

Cuban tile isn't encaustic, it's cement. It's not really cement either, it's concrete.

For as long as I've lived in Florida, I've been enamored with what's known in these parts as Cuban tile. Cuban tile was all the rage in Florida from the turn of the last century up until the 1950s. The embargo against Cuba pretty much sealed its fate as a lost material until fairly recently.

I live in an old neighborhood and this house is down the street from me.

Wild as it is, all that Mission-style mish mash and stucco is original and that house is about 70 years old. The front porch had been closed in at some point after the advent of air conditioning, but if you look in the door you can see what's on the floor in there.

It's an original Cuban tile floor.

I've written about Cuban tile before though it's been quite a while. All this time, I've been using the terms Cuban tile, encaustic tile and cement tile interchangeably but it's come to my attention recently that encaustic and cement tiles are very different things and to split the hair even finer, cement tile's more accurately called concrete tile. Zoe Voigt, a writer and great friend of this blog, explains the differences thoroughly in an article called The Difference between Encaustic and Cement on Tile Style.

In the comments that follow Zoe's post, Richard Holdshuh explains that cement tile isn't really cement after all. It's concrete. Richard's opinion is backed up in a follow up comment left by Jorge Aguayo of Industrias Aguayo.

Industrias Aguayo is one the world's few manufacturers of concrete tile. From their factory in the Dominican Republic, Aguayo keeps alive the Cuban tradition through a concrete tile series they call Herencia Cubana. That's Cuban Heritage in English.

Bill Buyok, another friend and occasional contributor to this blog, happens to sell Aguayo's Herencia Cubana from his fashionable shop, Avente Tile, on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. I think we can safely call it Cuban Tile 90210.

Bill's Flickr stream is where I got these images of traditional Cuban patterns that are back in production and readily available.

So the next time someone asks, Cuban tile is cement tile and not encaustic tile. And it's not really cement tile either, it's concrete. Got that?

Some off topic notes about Facebook

@greenbes: You're not Facebook's customer. You're the product they sell to their real customers - advertisers. Forget this at your peril.

So wrote Steve Greenberg on Twitter yesterday, and I have to say it's one of the better Tweets I've ever read.

It landed in the fertile field of my attention because moments earlier, I had been shaking my head over the idiocy of yet another petition on Facebook someone had sent me. This time, the petition was "No, I will not start to pay for Facebook!"

Facebook has no intentions to charge its users a dime for the very reason @greenbes pointed out. Facebook's users are their product, and as of the last count, there are 400 million of them worldwide.

Facebook got its start in 2003 when a sophomore at Havard named Mark Zuckerburg started a web site he called Facesmash. Facesmash was an underground thing, and Zuckerburg got into all kinds of trouble for hacking into Harvard's computer system to get the photos and names of his fellow students. Facesmash was shut down by Harvard's administration and they charged him with invasion of privacy among other things. Harvard being Harvard, the charges were dropped eventually.

The following semester, Zuckerburg launched a somewhat more reputable site called The Facebook. I say somewhat more respectable because within weeks he was facing another lawsuit from angry Harvardians who accused him of hacking into their e-mail accounts. The Facebook is what became just Facebook in 2004. The rest is history.

All of that information is readily available anywhere on the internet. Clearly, this is not Sergey Brin and Larry Page we're talking about.

A lot of people get all poetic when they talk about Facebook, if I hear it called a global village one more time I'm going to scream. It's not a town square, it doesn't exist to allow you to play Farmville, it's not there so that you can reconnect with people you knew 20 years ago. Sure, it does all of those things, but they are not why Facebook exists. Facebook exists to make money. That's by no means a bad thing, but it is something to keep in mind when you're adjusting your privacy settings.

Put simply, as Facebook's product you're performing two tasks. First, the ads on the right side of your Facebook page are there for you to click. Facebook makes money when you do. The second task you're performing is filling out your profile and leaving it in the open for the world to see. Facebook uses the information it gathers from your profile and your activity to draw a profile of you. It can then place more ads in front of you that you're more likely to click. It can also sell its carefully drawn demographic information to anyone who's willing to pay for it.

The global village is a Potemkin Village after all. (Look it up.)

I see the petitions and moot protests about paying for Facebook and I can't help but think that the folks at Facebook are laughing about the red herrings people grab. Facebook will never charge a user fee, but as their latest grab at your private information shows, that's the last thing in the world to be concerned about when it comes to Facebook.

Through it all, I find Facebook to be useful and helpful. I keep track of my multitudes of nieces and nephews through it. I keep in touch with old friends, fellow bloggers, fellow Twitterers, readers and friends. I syndicate my blog through it and thanks to Facebook, I never have to remember when peoples' birthdays are.

But I take as many measures as I can to keep the profile information I don't want to fall into the wrong hands out of the wrong hands.

My pals at the ACLU put together a quiz that shows you how much of your information goes public every time you take a quiz or use a Facebook app. Take their quiz and I guarantee you you'll never take another quiz.

I dug through the labyrinth of Facebook's new privacy settings a few weeks ago. Just the other day, the great and powerful Nancie Mills-Pipgras had a link on her page to something called Reclaim Privacy. Go to this website and follow their instructions. Reclaim Privacy will audit your Facebook settings and let you know what you're leaving out in the open.

So go use Facebook, and have fun while your there. Just remember what you're dealing with.