Face it, we are surrounded by ugly.  Every where we look the buildings, landscapes, cars and other gadgets are constructed, arranged, or designed without much imaginative spark. But it isn't this way everywhere.  Functional things can also be interesting and there are a number of websites out there that make the point.

One of the best design websites I've seen is Bill Tikos's The Cool Hunter.  The site has been around since 2004, features stunning photography of innovative designs from every imaginable area of human endeavor: art, food, restaurants & bars, architecture, fashion, gadgets, kids, offices, stores & transportation.  It includes bicycle dispensers, light sculpture, tapas bars & tree houses.  The site won the 2007 and 2008 Weblog Awards for Best Culture Blog.

The ubiquitous PC is a good example of an object that would be helped by a little originality.  A PC doesn't have to be ugly to perform well and another remarkable site, Million-Dollar PC, shows us some spectacular alternatives.  Here artists, architects and other design professionals have focused on the PC as Art. 

Toxel  is an excellent site devoted to imaginative design for everyday objects.  There is, for example, the runaway alarm clock that gets you out of bed by making you chase after it.  Or the scanning toaster than burns a design of your choosing into your morning slice of bread.  It's just good to know there are some folks still using their heads out there.

The above picture, by the way, is totally unrelated to any of these sites but has the undeniable advantage over other, more relevant, pictures in that I have the rights to it (requests for permission to use others weren't answered in time for this post).

Tropical storm systems (i.e. hurricanes & such) aren't anywhere near the problem in the Baltimore-Washington area as they are elsewhere on the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard. Occasionally though they do intrude in a major way and every year the remnants of tropical storms give us a bit of heavy weather -- as the remains of Tropical Storm Nicole are now. For those of you who want to know about tropical storms before they arrive, the National Hurricane Center maintains email advisory lists and an RSS feed. You can sign up at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/signup.shtml . It’s free and you only need to provide an email address.

There are a number of advisories to choose from. The daily Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook is the the best all-purpose advisory. It provides a text weather forecast plus a link that takes you to a satellite image showing tropical disturbances and more links that allow you to track storms 3-5 days out and determine whether high winds are going to occur in your area.

Pretty handy, and you'll never have a day without mail (during hurricane season anyway).

Let me say right off that, for those of you who would be writers but aren't sure how to go about it, you will find wonderful help in the Ursula LeGuin essay "Talking About Writing" (page 195 of The Language of the Night, a collection of LeGuin's essays edited by Susan Wood). I mention this up front because, while I am confident that I will have your attention at least as far as the end of the first sentence, I am less confident that you will still be with me at the end of this one.

So, I figured I had better get that piece of information out there. Later, I will tell you how to make your own glass cleaner, superior to any brand-name variety, and at a fraction of the cost . . . and those two things might be the only things I know that will be of any interest, certainly of any use, to anyone else.

Now, you might think from the forgoing that Ursula LeGuin is one of my favorite writers. Well, she isn't, although she is very good. LeGuin did, in fact, write one of the few "I-couldn't-put-it-down" novels I've read (The Left Hand of Darkness). Actually my favorite authors (I believe bloggers are required to inform their readers of such particulars) are John Steinbeck (only his so-called 'lesser fiction' such as Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and Travels with Charley), E. B. White (Charlotte's Web, of course, but really his essays which are the writer's craft brought to perfection), and Sally Jenkins (the sports columnist - who in every column manages to think of something I wish I had been smart enough to think of myself). And then there is Jane Austen - to paraphrase Rex Stout, no one ever wrote as well as Jane Austen. Unless it was Edmund Rostand whose unmatched Cyrano conveys in 5 short lines the inspiring power of true love so completely that the words vibrate on the page. And then there is . . . well, the list gets rather long after that and so I'd better stop now.

If you have read this far, you may think that this blog will be about books; or, perhaps, about writing. Well, it isn't.

It's about other things. Principally, it is about satisfying a classroom requirement (CMSY129 - Howard Community College) to create and post to a blog. And having said that, I need to take care of some housekeeping here as one of the project requirements is to post a short introduction of myself -- here goes: I was born in 1953 and grew up in Washington DC back in the days when you could sit on the North bank of the Potomac and look across the water at corn fields in Virginia and listen to the Watergate (then a converted ferry-boat with a band) as it chugged up and down the river. I love boats, old ships, and the sea and so gravitated to the Coast Guard (all their ships are old) where I spent a happy and useful 30 years. I am now unemployed and back in school - it's kind of like being 18 again.

That's introduction enough lest I start telling sea stories and then you'll have to listen to me explain how I learned that when a volcano blows a 40,000ft plume of rock and ash into the air - the big rocks come down first.

So, a check mark for project item #4. If you are still reading, thanks for your support and I'll leave a post on your project blog.