Useful Information

I love latkes, but this makes my arteries ache. I have to add that knowing that there is an Association of Independent Competitive Eaters makes me feel good. It is proof that there is a hobby/profession for everyone.

A 23-year-old mechanical engineering student downed 46 of the potato pancakes in eight minutes to win a contest at a Long Island deli.

Pete Czerwinski says he’d never eaten a latke before consuming about seven pounds of them Sunday at Zan’s in Lake Grove. The Toronto bodybuilder says he’s just “a power eater” whose brain never signals that he’s full, according to the Long Island daily Newsday.

Association of Independent Competitive Eaters Chairman Arnie Chapman says Czerwinski demolished the contest’s previous record of 31 latkes, set in 2006.

There is a secret for giving gifts, but not everyone knows what it is. The bad news is that I am not going to offer it up in this post. However I will share a few thoughts/comments about giving gifts.

In many families there is one relative who is known for giving terrible gifts. That is the sort of thing that you never want to be accused of saying about another and it is definitely something that you don’t want to be said about you. But the reality is that most of us have received a gift that we found less than inspiring.

And though we tried to pretend to be grateful it was hard to smile and offer thanks for having received something that we just couldn’t believe we had gotten. One of these days I need to dedicate an entire post to this topic, but not now.

The thing about the secret to gift giving is that there really are multiple secrets to be aware. There is the secret to giving a gift to a spouse or significant other, there is the secret to trying to be the cool aunt/uncle/friend/parent and the secret to trying to make sure that other parents do not hate you.

Since I am a father I am going to share some tips for how to make sure that parents do not hate you. Believe it or not there are some relatively simple rules that you can follow.

1. Don’t give gifts that make obnoxious noises. Sirens, beeps, whistles and screeches are bad. As a rule of thumb I reciprocate by providing the child of the gift giver with a drum set. Or if they are single I hire a marching band to visit them during the early morning hours on the weekend.
2. Don’t give gifts that require 36 hours to assemble. It is not cool. The kid doesn’t like it and the parents definitely do not.

Those are the two primary ones. Obviously there are others. And just as obvious is the rule that if you dislike the parent and child you should give them a gift that is obnoxiously loud and requires a degree in engineering to assemble.

And there you have it my friends, a practical toolkit that you can use to your benefit.

New Portable Sewing Machine Lets Sweatshop Employees Work On The Go

This is kind of cool. Wired has a story about an inflatable house.

“…the “Life Cube” from startup Inflatable World is designed to provide. Packaged into a four-foot-tall cube, it inflates into a 12-foot-tall structure built from the same thick plastic as a bouncy house.

Designed to provide shelter and basic amenities for people in the days and weeks after a disaster, the instant housing will come with a $3,900 price tag, so the company’s first market could be wealthy survivalists.

“We need a versatile design that is completely self-contained that gives you instant survival,” said Nick Pedersen, business development head of the fledgling startup, based in Santa Barbara, California. “We’ll get you through the critical first 72 hours and beyond.”

Inflatable World isn’t the first company to focus on short-term housing for disaster-struck areas. In fact, a wide variety of architects and builders, notably TED-grantee Cameron Sinclair and Architecture for Humanity, have designed structures to keep people alive in the aftermath of calamity. But Inflatable World sees a market between the long-term FEMA trailers and the tents used in the immediate recovery efforts.

In FEMA’s 2008 Disaster Housing Plan, officials identified the period after the initial disaster but before homes can be rebuilt as a major priority.

“Finding and providing the actual structures to house displaced disaster victims during this interim housing period is the most tangible challenge that emergency management officials, at all levels of government, face,” they wrote (.pdf).

In developing countries, providing basic shelter after disasters is even more difficult. When a major quake struck Pakistan in October 2005, 74,000 people died, most of them from exposure to the elements in the weeks after the initial disaster. Just last week, another major earthquake struck Pakistan, prompting Red Cross officials to note the “urgent need for shelter and blankets.”