Strange Maps

One of my best friends loves maps. He is kind of a nerd about them, but that is one of the things that makes him great. So when on Even Cleveland I saw posts about maps I was intrigued, and even more so when I saw a link to an amazing blog called Strange Maps. It is exactly as the title says, a blog of strange maps. The above is an image from the blog.

Peonies

Peonies have been one of my favorite flowers for a long time. It is peonies in the spring, and ranunculus in the fall. Last week on Smitten I read this:

My friend Abbey is a believer in feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of arranging design elements in certain ways, in order to create a harmonious environment. So, here's an awesome tip for attracting love...

Amazingly, feng shui experts say that hanging a painting of peonies or putting fresh peonies in your house will help bring romantic love into your life. When Abbey graduated from college, her mom got her a lamp with peonies on it. Soon, Abbey met an amazing man, fell madly in love and got hitched. So who knows? It just might work!

Well since I love peonies anyways, I decided to give it ago. Right now my background on my iphone is the above image from the lovely my polaroid blog. I wonder if that qualifies for the Feng Shui rules?

Pop Culture is my Calling

As I mentioned a couple days  ago I am really into pop culture. To illustrate to you how true this is, let me tell you about the papers I have written since coming to Parsons. Last semester I wrote a paper about Batman, and how Gotham city is essentially NYC. If you want to argue that Gotham is Chicago, I will debate you to the death. In my last few papers for my global issues classes I have managed to reference both Seinfeld and Michael Jordan. 

My favorite paper though was my paper on the Evolution of the Nerd. Essentially my paper illustrated how the Nerd has evolved from Socially unacceptable to hearthrob over the past 50 30-50 years, and that also the Nerd is the predecessor to the hipster. My paper covered Richie Cunningham, Louis Skolnick, and Seth Cohen. Then concluded with a bit about hipsters and using the hipster olympics as my main source. If you have not seen the hipster olympics, watch it now, do it. I even embedded it in this post for your convenience.

JFK

I am quite a pop culture fiend, and my family and I are full of random facts. I never realized how random my facts were until a couple of summers ago.

My friends and I were at Lake Tahoe, and my friend Julianne read the final two Harry Potter books and Vanity Fair in about three days, so we were talking about her incredibly reading speed. The conversation lulled for a minute and then I sat up and asked, "Wasn't JFK a speed reader?"

My friends looked at my as if I just started speaking in tongues, apparently the fact that JFK was a speed reader is not common knowledge.

To enlighten you, JFK could read approximately 2500 words per minute (wpm in the speed reading world) which is 10 times the average. He would read 6 newspapers every morning at breakfast cover to cover.

Some more fun facts about JFK:

• He had his suit jackets made with extra long pockets. This is because he liked to smoke cigars but didn't want to be photographed smoking. So when photographers were around, he would put his cigar in his pocket. Resulting in him having the lining of his pocket redone all the time. 
  
• JFK was also a speed talker.  He was the fastest random speaker in the world with upwards of 350 words per minute.

Image from Life Google Archives

What an investment

IN 1926, A DUTCHMAN BOUGHT THE IDLAND OF MANHATTAN FROM NATIVE AMERICANS FOR $24. TODAY IT WOULD COST MORE THAN $8 BILLION.