“Well maybe it does present more of a challenge this way, but I still think you should have let me wear my other hiking outfit.”

—Bill Ward, 1919-1998 (‘good girl’ cartoonist/illustrator)

“The 2008 crash is probably the most serious economic crisis we have faced since the Great Depression. Stock markets from around the world fell as much as 20% in a single week, dozens of banks either failed or were rescued by government and private institutions, and companies started laying off employees as a consequence of the reduced demand. We know how we entered into the crisis, but we don’t know when or how we will be getting out of it. Considering that issue, we decided to do our little bit to help cheer everyone up by redoing the logos of some renowned companies …. after the crisis.”

(original source unknown—thanks, Guy)

Germantown, Maryland

A year ago I posted about PostSecret, a remarkable ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Since it started in 2004, people from around the world have had their most excruciating secrets appear anonymously on the popular website PostSecret.com.

PostSecret.com has won several awards, attracts many millions of visits per year, and has now gone international (German, French, Spanish, Korean). To date, its founder Frank Warren has received hundreds of thousands of secret-bearing postcards (joyful, poignant, sad, passive aggressive, you name it…) and has published four books featuring the cards. View an online selection of the cards here. Watch short videos by/about PostSecret here and here.

No question, the eyes have it—here’s to Bette (born one hundred years ago) and those enduringly penetrating gazes. Catch Kim Carnes’ memetic 1980s hit tune on YouTube here.

…and she’ll tease you

she’ll unease you

all the better just to please you

she’s precocious, and she knows

just what it takes to make a pro blush

all the boys think she’s a spy

she’s got Bette Davis eyes…

An endearing little message full of love and tenderness… (found here).

I’m heading back to Europe for the next few days… and I suspect this “message on a T-shirt” will once again ring all too true…

Freiburg, Germany

This diagram is meant to demonstrate the difference between a man and a woman when asked by their respective partner, “Shall we go for a drink?” Makes me glad that I’m a man… (most days, at least). On further reflection though, might this also imply that men prefer to drink naked?

Thanks, Silvie :-)

Bhopal, India

Twenty-four years ago, on the night of Dec. 3rd 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal. Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal.

In 1999, local groundwater and wellwater testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected. Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits. Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women.

In 2001, the Michigan-based multinational chemical corporation Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide, thereby acquiring its assets and liabilities. However, Dow Chemical has steadfastly refused to clean up the Bhopal disaster site, provide safe drinking water, compensate the victims, or disclose the composition of the gas leak, information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims.

+ + +

Nearly a quarter century after the disaster, the Bhopal site has still not been properly cleaned up. (Dow’s reported profits for 2007 were over $3.7 billion… so the lack of restorative action on this horrific issue is clearly not because the firm cannot afford to make things right). Children of victims continue to suffer, but have no health coverage. Hundreds of children are still being born with birth defects as a result of what is considered to be the world’s worst industrial disaster to date…

Photo: ‘Burial of an unknown child’ by Raghu Rai, 1984.

One of my favorites, by Marty Neumeier (smart consultant, great author, and talented designer). Download this copyright-free poster here… along with numerous others by American designers.

Worldwide…

Today is International Buy Nothing Day (a day later than in the U.S., where BND coincides with the annual frenzy of Black Friday, described by the New York Times as: “A quintessentially American ritual at the altar of consumerism, Black Friday marks a day of 5 a.m. openings, 50 percent discounts and… lurid spectacle(s) of shopping as competitive sport.”)

Shopping truly is an ugly orgy of consumerism in the U.S., where (according to the National Retail Federation) more than 128 million are expected to shop this weekend. To wit—at 4:55 yesterday morning, a shrieking mob of thousands of Wal-Mart shoppers in Long Island broke through glass entrance doors and trampled 34-year-old worker Jdimytai Damour (Jimmy) to death in a blind stampede for holiday bargains. Other workers were also trampled as they tried to rescue Jimmy, and customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials said they were closing because of the death, according to police and witnesses. There’s more wrong with that picture than I can begin to shake a stick at…