It’s beginning to look a lot like Friday Props / Everywhere I goooooo….. The first significant snow covers the ground here in Vermont after a beautiful evening of flakes last night. The church down the street is selling cut balsam trees as a fundraiser and I avoided the bombardment of cheesy, overblown, mall-style Christmas consumerism thus far. This doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about gifts for folks, but I’ve very picky about my gift-giving. Two factors dominate my selection process: functionality and sustained fun. If a potential gift doesn’t meet either of these two criteria, I’m not buyin’ it! This Friday Read More >>

The holiday yesterday, a slammed schedule of client work and proposals due coupled with Phil being a slacker taking today off (something about "family" and "holiday" PFFFT!) the normal release of Friday Props got the short end of the stick today. But it looks like I've still got an hour or more to get this in before it becomes Saturday Props so I'm going for it. Since it is getting late I'm feeling a bit tired. And since it seems appropriate to at least pay some amount of homage to the Thanksgiving holiday I thought I'd hand out Props to a turkey of tires. Tired Turkey   When we hand out Props we like to think big. And when we hand out Props to turkeys we want to recognize the seriously big of big, so we're tipping our hats this week to Tom. Tom is (was... ) the world's biggest turkey (No, the biggest turkey is not the Republican party though some might disagree) standing at sixteen feet tall. Tom was a resident of Frazee, Minnesota. Tom was made from white-painted fiberglass, cardboard and insulation attached to a steel frame. Big Tom put Frazee on the map as the home of The World’s Largest Turkey. But [....] Read More >>

Friday Props turns 21 this week. If anyone wants to send Friday Props a drink for it's 21st just let us know. You'd think I would have bundled together some interesting category of things to celebrate the 21st week, but you'd be wrong. I've done no such thing. Q: What do remote control cockroaches, paper horses and lamps have in common? A: Nothing until now. Remote Control Cockroaches When disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis strike, the sad fact is oftentimes there are people who die buried in rubble that could survive if only they could be located.  The difficulty in locating people trapped in these situations is getting deep enough down inside the devastation to actually find them. Well Props are going out today to the engineers and scientists of the North Carolina State University for pioneering control of cockroaches for exactly this purpose. By outfitting the cockroaches with a backpack capable of delivering small electrical impulses to the antenna and rear of the insects, scientists are able to control where the roaches go - effectively giving scientists the opportunity to use these critters as miniature eyes beneath the surface of a disaster and potentially helping to save lives. The program still has lots of [....] Read More >>

Ed is coding away on a tight deadline and Phil is on vacation, so I get to do Friday Props this week. I was "noodling" (as Ed would say) what my theme could be when I saw a Facebook post by Ed's son, Addison, about "liking" all the colors of the rainbow. I completely understand that. When someone asks "what color is your favorite?" all I can think is "how in the world do I answer that?" It's like asking which of your children is your favorite. None--each is uniquely themselves--perfect as they are. OK, to be fair there are a few colors I prefer less, but overall color and me--we have a love affair. Soothing greens, energizing reds, happy making yellows--well let's just say I am "for them." So here is my Friday Props going out to big, bold, fantastic, daring, exuberant COLOR!!! First--let's start with an architect who is after my heart.: Emmanuelle Moureaux. Here's just a couple of photos of her work. Check out her website and you will see why I am enamoured; she brings fun into her spaces with her use of vibrant color!     Every Christmas for years my fabulous sister-in-law, Cathy, has presented one family member [....] Read More >>

We had a great response to our Friday props request from Jeanelle Achee. Enjoy! So I heard that Ed Rooney likes fish tacos. I guess that spending time in California will do that to you... Anyway, it seemed like a great Friday Props! I just recently returned from Alaska where I learned how to make traditional Mexican tortillas (it's actually pretty darn easy, it involves two ingredients...) and to place inside the newly formed tortillas we made beer battered fish. Here's how to make fish tacos: 1. Buy a boat load of tilapia 2. Cut that tilapia up into strips 3. Mix fish batter and beer and dip the tilapia into it and let it soak 4. Buy a vat of peanut oil and deep fry that shiz 5. Put into a corn tortilla, add lettuce, mexican creme, fresh salsa and limes 6. Stuff your face (and if you are of age, 21 in the United States, add some tequila) It looks something like this when you are done: Another way to do it is you can just catch them in the wild... like this: That seems way more reasonable to me, but whatever. They wanted to do it the traditional way. It seemed important to learn a little about Mexican culture since [....] Read More >>

Tag! You're It! This week we're asking you to hand out the Friday Props either here in the comments on the blog or over on our Facebook page   Read More >>

Eggplant. Who doesn't love a little  Solanum melongena now and again? In this, our twelfth week of Friday Props, we're looking at eggplant. What a strange thing to be handing out props for, yes? Yes. But hold onto your hats because I promise you'll fully like what we have in store for you this week. Cooking up Color Love You might think we're going to look at recipes (and the thought did cross our minds), but instead we're handing out props to one of our favorite spots on the web to get inspiration for color schemes. Colour Lovers is a spot to create, share and use color schemes contributed by a community of users. The aubergine flower to the left was made with a color palette we liked named ... wait for it .... eggplant       Vermont Style Gardening We all know there are no better gardeners than those who manage to bring forth in our short growing season enough bounty to get a family through the winter. Well here's a garden in Rochester, Vermont where the bounty is so rich and the heart behind growing it so generous that we just had to hand out Props. (We don't actually know if there is any eggplant in [....] Read More >>

For our eleventh installment of Friday Props I was going to start out with a tribute to space exploration and specifically to the Mars Curiosity rover en route and nearly arrived, but it got me thinking about the spirit of exploration in general. That then led me to thinking about the boundless potential of childhood and childhood dreams. So this week we are giving out Props for people and things in some way related to the wonder of childhood. Super Heroes The window washers at the London Children's Hospital dress in super hero costumes for the kids. This is just plain awesome. You can imagine how it might lift the spirits of some kids who could really use it. Major Props going out for these guys - a super hero thing to do. Moonrise Kingdom We won't be handing out Props too often for movies, but this movie is just too good to ignore. It's a sweet, silly, random story of childhood love and wanderings set in the fictional New England island of "New Penzance". The casting, the dialogue, the hillarity  ... it's all so much worth seeing. Props going out to Wes Anderson for his film. Watch the trailer below, check out the [....] Read More >>

It's another Friday making it time for another round of Friday Props. I'm back in the drivers seat for this week so we'll be steering clear of the crazy things Phil presented the last couple weeks. Let's dig right in! Let it Rain! Musical Rain Gutters In the student district of Desden, Germany there is a building fitted with rain gutters that are so whimsical and creative as to deserve Props. The Kunsthofpassage Funnel Wall actually plays music when it rains. They are not only designed to look like instruments, they are instruments. How cool is that!?   Parallax to the Max There is a new trend in web design called parallax design. The idea is to provide the illusion of depth to a web page by taking advantage of the parallax effect. According to Wikipedia: Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.  The term is derived from the Greek ?????????? (parallaxis), meaning "alteration". Nearby objects have a larger parallax than more distant objects when observed from different positions, so parallax can be used to determine distances. We've been spending a fair amount of time recently [....] Read More >>

Ed is still hunkered down behind the four computer screens in his office while I gaze longingly through the windows at the beautiful blue skies....FREE ME FROM MY CHAINS! Since all my work is done, I get the honor of giving you this week's edition of Friday Props, brought to you by the friendly interwebs, Where All Good Things Happen. For our first prop, I will add this disclaimer: I don't understand Spanish very well. OK, yeah, I used to work with a whole lot of guys from El Salvador, but most of our conversation revolved around food so my vocabulary is almost useless outside a grocery store or kitchen. Don't worry if you don't know Spanish. It won't take you too long to figure out how this invention works and how it will improve society:   Speaking of commercialization that helps improve the world, Rhett and Link have made an art of making low budget commercials for local businesses. This came out three years ago but its so campy, it makes me chuckle everytime I see it because it is so ridiculous. If every TV commercial was this interesting, I would watch TV for the commercials. What gets the Props here is not [....] Read More >>