This week I'm handing out Props to awesome steeped in a sense of history.

This week it's old-school style and to start out we're going to go WAY old school - back to the 7th century in Japan where there is a tradition of grandparents and parents using silk threads of worn kimonos to fashion intricate balls for their children as gifts on New Years' day. One 92 year old woman in Japan has been creating these since the 1960's and now has a collection of nearly 500 of these fanciful and impressive traditional Japanese temari handballs. Serious Props handed out to this woman. Unfortunately I do not have her name. The original Flickr collection is here. It is totally worth a look!

 I asked around the office for help in figuring out what else to hand out for "Old School" props and the ideas started flowing about other types of schools. Schools for things like alligator wrestlers or astronauts or secret agents. Secret Agents. That started me thinking about all the not-so-props-worthy doings of our favorite domestic spy agencies. When I started thinking about spies and old school spies I naturally ended up handing out Old School Props to these ol' spies:

Lastly I want to hand out Old School Props a new-school solution for a vexing and seriously important old-school issue for our world: how to get off fossil fuels. Recently scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, have shown they can turn algae into a crude oil in minutes using a relatively simple process. What nature took millions of years to do we are now able to do in under an hour. The algae are plentiful (as I understand it) and this could bring to fruition an answer to our old school problem of fossil fuels.