Artwork showcased monthly at Arsaga’s shops

Media Credit: Kim Torres
A piece, titled “Coastal Nomads,” is one of the many artworks by Holley Jones that is currently displayed at Arsaga’s.

Arsaga’s two main coffee shops, located on Crossover Road and Gregg Street, exhibits artwork from local artists every month.

On the first Sunday of each month, a new artist is displayed. His or her artwork is showcased until the first Sunday of the following month. After a week of being displayed, there is a reception where the artist can sell his art, meet other local artists and get acquainted with customers, said Julie Rickard, art director for Arsaga’s.

Each reception is usually published in one of the local newspapers, Rickard said.

“The reception usually has food, wine and music, if the artist can find a musician he would like to play,” Rickard said. “It’s also where the artist sells most of [the] artwork.”

Artists and photographers who are interested in displaying their work must e-mail a sample of their work and schedule an available date to display it.

“We’re booked for about a year or so,” Rickard said. “I keep an alternate list of bookings in case any of the artists drop out.”

Ice Breakers Pacs packaged strangely?

The Hershey Co. is selling Ice Breakers Pacs, which have police up in arms about the look of its packaging.  The minty sweetener is packaged in such a way that it resembles drugs.  In an ABC News article, the mints are in ”plastic slide-up cases, [and] are similar enough to drug packets that a child familiar with the candy could mistakenly swallow a heat-sealed bag of drugs.”

“Each pouch made by two dissolvable mint strips bears the Ice Breakers logo,” said Kirk Saville, spokesman for Hershey Co.

The mint’s slogan is “Prepare for an amazing blast of icy refreshment!”

The film around the white, powdery sweetener is the mint which dissolves in your mouth, leaving the cooling sweetness for last.

Quick Link:
http://video.nbc5i.com/player/?id=190996 – A news video from Dallas/Fort Worth’s NBC5, reporting on the mint pacs.

Nigersaurus taqueti unveiled at National Geographic Society in DC

Photo courtesy of AP Photos

Ten years ago, Paul Sereno, paleontologist at the University of Chicago, led teams to the Sahara desert to explore fossilized bones. The bones were “fossilized skeleton of a toothy plant-eating dinosaur with a body as big as an elephant and a relatively small cow-sized head,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

Sereno unveiled his plant-eating dinosaur, which he has named the Nigersaurus taqueti, at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, DC, on Thursday.

The Nigersaurus taqueti has an “almost perfectly squared-off jaw lined with 128 uniform front teeth, the only kind of teeth it had. When the creature closed its mouth, the rows would have joined perfectly to snip plants that the dinosaur ate,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

Plants eaten by the Nigersaurus may have included “ferns, horsetails and other ground-cover plants,” Sereno said.

The Nigersaurus is now classified as a sauropod.

According to the Britannica Online Encyclopedia, a sauropod is “any member of the dinosaur subgroup Sauropoda, marked by large size, a long neck and tail, a four-legged stance, and a herbivorous diet. These reptiles were the largest of all dinosaurs and the largest land animals that ever lived.”

Britannica Online Encyclopedia further explains what a sauropod is, for more information,

European drinking attitudes

The BBC has released a small article with five European countries and their alcohol consumption ideals.  The countries include Sweden, Spain, Italy, Finland, and Germany.

The BBC article began with this statistic and question to further investigate: 

The number of people in their late teens and early 20s being treated for alcohol-related illnesses is growing.

Is the problem as serious in other European countries and what do they do to reduce the incidence of binge drinking?

Instead of summarizing the BBC’s already summarized study, here’s the link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7093143.stm

Still interested in UK alcohol concerns?  Here are a few Quick Links:

• http://www.beerandpub.com/content.asp?id_Content=1 – The British Beer & Pub Association, who promote sensible/ responsible drinking, promote the social and commercial positives associated with brewing and pubs, represent/ defend the sector before Government and government bodies in the UK and EU, and protect the commercial freedom of members
• http://www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/servlets/home – Alcohol Concern, “the national agency on alcohol misuse” for the UK

“Mortifying face-to-face confrontations” avoided, result of Instant Messaging

Instant messaging has not only become a fast and efficient way to send quick notes to friends and family.  IMs have also allowed the average person to avoid OMG–”omigod”– moments.

According to a recent USA Today article,

More than four in 10, or 43%, of teens who instant message use it for things they wouldn’t say in person, according to an Associated Press-AOL poll released Thursday. Twenty-two percent use IMs to ask people out on dates or accept them, and 13% use them to break up.

Danny Hitt, a real estate agent, said, “To me a significant conversation takes a phone call … the inflection in the voice, you lose that” [with instant messages].

The internet has a way of building security and confidence levels, causing those involved in a conversation through IM to successfully express herself more than she would during a face-to-face confrontation, according to the study.

Teenagers and adults tend to use an IM program while multitasking.  According to the study,

Nearly six in 10 teens say they research homework while IMing — a percentage many parents might find suspiciously low. Large numbers of people check e-mail and search the Internet while instant messaging, while a third to half of teens say while IMing they also upload photographs, download music or videos, listen to online radio or update their blogs or social networking profiles.

Adults outdo teens in only one activity while instant messaging — online shopping.

More news, you ask?

Within the coming week or so, I should be able to write more news.  I just wanted to apologize for failing to do so in the previous weeks.

Look out for some news!

$42 billion on marijuana policies

On Tuesday, a writer for AlterNet.com wrote an article on legalizing marijuana for the sake of using $42 billion dollars on other expenses in the United States.

In short, Rob Kampia proposed several different ways of spending the annual $42 billion used on marijuana. “$10.7 billion in direct law enforcement costs, and $31.1 billion in lost tax revenues,” according to alternet.com.

Kampia also wrote about the effects of marijuana, relative to alcohol effects.

… All this might make some sense if marijuana were so terribly dangerous that it needed to be banned at all costs, but science long ago came to precisely the opposite conclusion. Compared to alcohol, for example, marijuana is astonishingly safe. For one thing, marijuana is much less addictive than alcohol, with just nine percent of users becoming dependent, as opposed to 15 percent for booze. And marijuana is much less toxic. Heavy drinking is well-documented to damage the brain and liver, and to increase the risk of many types of cancer. Marijuana, on the other hand, has never caused a medically documented overdose death, and scientists are still debating whether even heavy marijuana use causes any permanent harm at all. And then there’s violence. Again, the scientific findings are overwhelming: Booze incites violence and aggression; marijuana doesn’t.

Every 38 seconds, one American is arrested on marijuana charges, according to alternet.com.

Rob Kampia is also a member of the Marijuana Policy Project. The MPP Web site can also track local marijuana policies and laws for the public’s convenience.

Quick Links:
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/64465/
http://www.mpp.org/site/c.glKZLeMQIsG/b.1086497/k.BF78/Home.htm

Trent Reznor sticks it to the man

Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, has made the announcement to rid himself of agents and their costly ways.

Reznor’s decision seems to reflect his “steal my music” views from earlier this past May, according to billboard.biz. Reznor had sounded off on Universal Music Group for their initial pricing for Year Zero.

Here’s the blog post from billboard.biz:

May 14, 2007

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor sounds off on music pricing and packaging on his blog. He particularly rails against the pricing of the new “Year Zero” album in Australia, where is it selling for the equivalent of almost US$30.

“Shame on you UMG,” he writes about his label, Universal Music Group. “No wonder people steal music.”

He also is against repackaging singles as a tactic for increasing multiple sales. “Nothing but a consumer rip-off that I’ve been talked into my whole career. No more.”

Reznor and Radiohead are now two of the well-known artists to be free of agents. The fans have been excited, as seen through digg.com, stereogum.com, techcrunch.com, and musicblog.ugo.com.

Via ninhotline.net (due to lack of archival retrieval after a newer post is created), Trent’s blog post can be read here:

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

MSNBC buys Newsvine

MSNBC.com has bought Newsvine, a small user-based news Web site.

MSNBC.com reporter Alex Johnson wrote,

With just more than a million monthly users, Newsvine not only is dwarfed by its new parent, which attracts more than 29 million users a month, but it also widely trails such competitors in the news-social media field as Digg.com, Reddit.com and the latest incarnation of Netscape.com as a social news site.
But the site has generated significant buzz since its launch in March 2006 because of its inventive merger of mainstream reporting from The Associated Press and ESPN; the contributions of individual users, who are paid for their writing; and the social media model of user-driven ranking of the news.

Newsvine.com will remain a separate news Web site and was acquired for an undisclosed sum, according to lostremote.com.

The Web site is the first purchase within the Microsoft/NBC’s 11-year history, according to msnbc.com.

Quick Link:
http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-3267.cfm

Attraction studied at FSU

A recent study shows how quickly and strongly people are attracted to others.

The paper, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You: Attentional Adhesion to Mates and Rivals,”  was written by an assistant psychology professor at Florida State University, Jon Maner.

Maner found that “all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half of a second of seeing them,” according to physorg.com.  “Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course, but those in committed relationships also checked people out, with one major difference: They were more interested in beautiful people of the same sex.”

The attraction to the opposite sex was prominent in single participants, while the coupled participants were attracted to the same sex because they found that the same sex may potentially be a competitor, according to physorg.com.

Here is what the experiment consisted of:

In the experiments, study participants — 120 people in the first study and 160 and 162 in the second and third studies, respectively — completed questionnaires to determine the extent to which they were motivated to seek out members of the opposite sex. They then took part in a series of “priming” activities before they were shown photos of highly attractive men, highly attractive women, average-looking men and average-looking women.

After a photo of one of the faces flashed in one quadrant of a computer screen, the participants were required to shift their attention away from that face to somewhere else on the screen. Using a precise measure of reaction time, Maner found that it took the participants longer to shift their attention away from the photos of the highly attractive people.