bookofjoe

NRA v PETA — The Main Event. Tonight at 9 p.m. two men enter — will anyone leave?

Just in via our hotline, the news that the topic, "Should Hunting Be Banned?" is going to be the subject of a live Pay–Per–View event tonight carried on cable and satellite stations worldwide.

The debate features Wayne LaPierre, the take–no–prisoners, blood–on–the–lips, fire–and–brimstone–exhaling Executive Vice–President of the National Rifle Association (NRA) squaring off against Andrew Butler, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Who would've thought that such an event could rise to the level of a World Wrestling Federation extravaganza and potentially generate megabucks?

Until today, not moi.

The event, to be perfectly candid — I know I'll never be perfect but I can be candid — became known to me via a full–page ad in today's USA Today with giant screaming headlines that read, "LIVE TV DEBATE — SHOWDOWN TONIGHT!"

They certainly chose a formidable venue for their tete–a-tete: the historic Library of King's College in London, England.

It will cost you $9.95 to watch.

The fireworks begin at 9 p.m. (ET) and are scheduled to continue until 10:30 p.m.

I suppose a TKO in the early rounds could truncate things but I suspect both gentlemen will check their weapons at the door.

My take?

Well, it's like this: if it hadn't been for some awfully Wayne LaPierre–like ancestors in the distant family tree of everyone alive, none of us would be around tonight to debate the issue.

William Tell Egg Cup

Bone china egg cup with spoon.

Want one?

Try here.

[via AW]

BehindTheMedspeak: CPR–in–a–Box

"CPR Anytime For Family and Friends" is a $30 kit from the American Heart Association (AHA) that aims to transform anyone who can fog a mirror into a potential lifesaver.

You get:

• A mini–manikin to practice on

• An instructional booklet

• An instructional DVD

The idea is that one kit suffices to teach everyone in a group in about 20 minutes how to do what's necessary to keep a person alive until more skilled aid comes.

Schools are one place the kit could be big — traditionally they haven't taught CPR because they don't have teachers certified as instructors.

Currently the AHA trains 9 million people a year in CPR; with the new kit they hope to more than double that number.

To me by far the most important thing the AHA has done here is to concede that rescue breathing — exchanging saliva and mucus with strangers out on the street — needn't be part of effective CPR.

Rarely does rescue breathing help because it's almost impossible for a lay person to do it correctly.

Good chest compressions will do the job in most cases.

But that's much easier said than done: effective chest compressions cannot be performed by most people any longer than five minutes at a time because of the tremendous effort required.

You can buy a kit here or call 877-242-4277.

There's no reason this kit shouldn't be useful in anywhere on Earth: cardiac arrest knows no boundaries.

These kits should be free for the asking to any person on the planet.

Tsaya Thigh Cellphone Holster

See, if I paid more attention to what's online and spent less time with my nose buried in all my newspapers I'd have heard of this nifty Jane Bond–ish accessory this past summer when it was all over the web.

But I don't and I didn't.

So sue me.

Or ask for all your money back — you know I'm just like L.L. Bean and Craftsman Tools in that regard: your money always cheerfully refunded with no reason required no matter how long it's been.

But I digress.

Have you noticed that's happening more and more lately?

Me too.

Anyway, I first encountered Tsaya's Thigh Cellphone Holster in today's Washington Post front–page story by Yuki Noguchi on the stylish new wave of tech fashion accessories.

Accompanying the article's continuation on page A14 was a photo of the Tsaya device.

Pablos [sic] Holman, the designer, said that the thigh holster "turned out to be really practical and really sexy."

I agree.

From the website:

Made of delectable black patent leather, the Tsaya is smooth against your clothes.

Gription on the back ensures that it will stay comfortably in place.

Engineered to automatically adjust for any mobile phone, the pocket expands only as thick as your phone.

A separate pocket for your ID, credit card of cash.

This is the first site I've ever seen with a dropdown box for your thigh measurement.

Acceptable values range from 14"–24".

Don't worry — the company encrypts your measurement so no one need ever know.

The Tsaya holster costs $79 here.

******************

Note just added (2:31 p.m.) after email back-and–forth with Pablos Holman himself: his name is "Pablos" and the Washington Post got it right; the Pittsburgh Post–Gazette, in its interview with him, repeatedly misspelled it "Pablo."

$ for a lucky bookofjoe reader

As always, anything I think of that might have positive financial repercussions goes immediately onto bookofjoe so that an enterprising reader (hey, LLT out Colorado way, how's our project coming? But I digress...) can take it and grow rich.

Today's brainstorm — some might choose a suffix other than "storm" but let's not be haters, OK? — occurred to me when it came time to empty the coffee grounds from the 24k gold–plated filter (what, you don't think we skimp on important stuff, do you? No way Josefina...).

I'd just placed a new paper grocery bag on my handy–dandy easy–access hidden grocery bag holder (construction details another time) and was about to dump the grounds when I realized that doing so would be grounds for certification as a first–class imbecile.

Oh, you say there's no need, that's already been taken care of?

Excellent.

Anyway, if you do something like I didn't do you'll find that in a couple of days, when it comes time to take the jam–packed, stuffed to the brim (and above) bag outside to the big trash bin, a garbage drop will occur right there on the kitchen floor as the wet bag dissolves and eggshells, tomato sauce and other rotten, unappealing leftovers pour out onto the tiles.

Not a pretty sight.

Been there way too many times.

Then the penny dropped.

I got out a Barnes & Noble bag and put it inside the paper bag as a liner — voila, a plastic–lined, moisture–proof, self–supporting paper bag.

w00t!

Here's the moneymaker: spray a plastic coating on the rectangle of the paper that will form the bag's bottom before it enters the folding machine.

Level 2: spray so that there's an area perhaps 2"–high around the bottom when the bag's open, to prevent leakage near the coated base.

Level 3: spray the entire inside of the bag.

Serious cash here for whomever files the patent.

You know, more and more I'm thinking that bookofjoe is a blog that somehow traveled to our universe via a wormhole from the Bizarro World.

Why do I say this?

1) Most blogs dream of having enough traffic to make some money from ads — I've got it (the traffic), but where are the ads?

2) Most blogs link to other places on the web to improve their own Google search rankings — where are my links?

3) Most bloggers who have good ideas use them to generate income for themselves, not their readers — what's wrong with me?

Clearly it all stems from the fact that back when I was little I didn't have stuff like a talking animal bowl to eat my pablum from.

I once read that the child is the father to the man — oh, you too? — and I think that in my case it is definitely true.

Kayak–in–a–Backpack

It's made by FirstLight, a New Zealand company.

You start with a backpack holding 20 pounds worth of parts and end up with a sea–going vessel that's 12 feet, 6 inches long.

The company claims it sets up in 20 minutes but I.D. magazine, which cited it for excellence, noted that their tester required two hours "even with the assistance of an instructional DVD and her 'mechanically gifted' 16–year–old niece."

Visit the company's media page here and watch all manner of fun movies showing their kayaks in action.

Kayaks start at $2,285 here.

'Spending the Night With Frank Lloyd Wright'

That was the headline over Terry Teachout's story in the October 12 Wall Street Journal about the little–known fact that for the price of a hotel room you can spend the night as a paying resident in any of three houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Teachout did just that at two of the three and wrote that the experiences were transcendent.

The photo above is of the Schwartz House, one of the three.

The article follows, after which lodging details for each house are provided.

Even if you never get to one of these landmark places, visiting each via their websites in the links provided is itself oddly soothing and pleasant.

And you can't beat the price.

Spending the Night With Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright dreamed up his fair share of spectacular public buildings, with New York's spiral-shaped Guggenheim Museum topping the list.

But America's greatest architect spent most of his life designing houses for American families.

Some were meant for the rich, others for ordinary middle-class folk (though the latter dwellings rarely ended up being as affordable as he incautiously promised).

Whatever the price tag, though, they were built with one overarching purpose in mind: Wright believed passionately that a "natural" house, designed in such a way as to blend organically into its physical environment and be fully compatible with the everyday needs of its occupants, could serve as the basis of "a better way of life."

How practical was Wright's idealistic vision of better living through organic architecture?

No one is in a stronger position to answer that question than those who live in his houses.

Of the nearly 300 surviving houses designed by Wright between 1889 and 1959, all but 35 are still in use as private residences. (As of this week, nine are on the market.)

Alas, few of their owners have written about the day-to-day experience of living in a Wright house, though one couple who did, Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, testified to "relishing the beauty and convenience" of their "simple, luxurious house."

But what about the rest?

Were they happy with Wright's radical innovations?

Or did they prefer to suffer in silence, unwilling to admit that comfort mattered more to them than beauty?

While all 35 of the Wright houses open to the public are worth visiting, no tour can possibly have more than a fraction of the impact of spending the night in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright -- and you can do just that.

Three Wright houses, two of which are located in Wisconsin, the architect's home state (the third, the Penfield House, is near Cleveland), are currently available for short-term rentals.

Last month I visited the four-bedroom Schwartz House in Two Rivers and the studio-sized Seth Peterson Cottage in Lake Delton, the latter not far from Taliesin, Wright's estate and headquarters, where visitors can see his theories of domestic architecture and décor writ large.

To turn the key of a Wright house is to step into a parallel universe.

The huge windows, the open, uncluttered floor plans, the straightforward use of such simple materials as wood, brick, concrete and rough-textured masonry: All create the illusion of a vast interior space in close harmony with its natural surroundings.

Instead of walls, subtly varied ceiling heights denote the different living areas surrounding the massive fireplace that is the linchpin of every Wright house.

This unoppressive openness -- both from area to area and between indoors and out -- is what makes even a small house like the 880-square-foot Peterson Cottage, which was boarded up for two decades before being rehabilitated in 1992, seem so much larger than it really is.

For all their essential similarities, Wright's houses affect their occupants in very different ways.

The Peterson Cottage, built in 1959 on the edge of an isolated, heavily wooded bluff overlooking Mirror Lake, is so tranquil and serene that I felt as though I could sit in meditative silence by its great sandstone hearth for hours on end.

The 3,000-square-foot Schwartz House, on the other hand, is in a built-up residential neighborhood and has the friendly, slightly down-at-heel look of a place that has been occupied by children ever since it was built in 1939.

To put it another way, the Peterson Cottage feels like a work of art, the Schwartz House like a comfortable home that just happens to be heart-stoppingly beautiful. (Taliesin, which was built, rebuilt and constantly remodeled between 1911 and Wright's death in 1959, suggests a cross between these two qualities.)

While a visitor might well sense such things in the course of a daytime visit, it's only when the sun sets that you take full possession of a Wright house and start to imagine what it would be like to live there around the clock.

After dark I turned on all the lights in the Schwartz House, stepped into the back yard and reveled in the warm amber glow that photographs only suggest.

Then I went back inside, plugged my iPod into a pair of portable speakers and filled the house with the spacious, all-American sounds of Aaron Copland's Piano Sonata and Pat Metheny's "Midwestern Night's Dream," both of which were ideally suited to Wright's prairie-evoking interiors.

You can't do that on an hour-long tour!

Of course I wouldn't want to be without such scrupulously preserved "museum houses" as Taliesin, Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob in Pennsylvania, or the Pope-Leighey House in Alexandria, Va.

They are no less central to Wright's legacy.

But just as an old-master painting never looks better than when it hangs in the home of a private collector who gazes at it lovingly each day, so are Frank Lloyd Wright's houses meant to be experienced, not merely visited.

Wright himself said that the Schwartz House was "a house designed for utility and fecund living... in which there is no predominating feature, but in which the entire is so coordinated as to achieve a thing of beauty."

Now more than ever, I know what he meant.

********************

SCHWARTZ HOUSE
Two Rivers, Wis.
• Sleeps eight.
• Rates: $295/night, Sun.-Thurs.; $350/night, Fri.-Sat. Two-night minimum; 50% deposit due with reservation (circlenr.com/schwartzhouse or 651-222-5322).

SETH PETERSON COTTAGE
Lake Delton, Wis.
• Sleeps four.
• Rates: $275/night, April-November; $225/night, December-March (sethpeterson.org or 608-254-6551).

PENFIELD HOUSE
Willoughby Hills, Ohio
• Sleeps five.
• Rates: $275/night. Two-night minimum; 50% deposit due with reservation (penfieldhouse.com or 440-942-9996).

Uneeda Pup

Or, as they say on the product's website — "You need a PUP!"

What's a PUP?

Hey, funny you should ask because the very first sentence following the boldly declarative statement on the website is "What's a PUP, you ask?"

Carl Jung, call your office: your synchronicity is here.

But I digress.

From the website:

It's the modern accessory for everything and everyone.



The PUP is so versatile it's perfect for men and women, kids and adults, business or leisure.

With the PUP's adjustable strap you can wear it 3 different ways: over the shoulder, around the waist or across the chest.

Convenient, stylish, light–weight in 6 designer colors, the PUP holds everything you need for "hands free" living.

"In your choice of six designer colors" — Black, Red, Burgundy, Royal Blue, Navy or Tan.

I noticed that the inventors, realtors Jean and Jim Newell, flogged it on QVC last year so it must be good.

I see where Kelly Ripa said she loves hers so it must be really good.

I see where it says people in the medical field use it — hey, wait a minute, that's me!

The Washington Post's Andrea Sachs reviewed it in yesterday's Travel section and said she liked it, calling it "a fanny pack without the geek factor."

She cautioned, however, that the outside pouches have no closures

so valuables are not secure when placed there.

Still, I think it's worth a shot to see how it compares to the beat–up Patagonia fannypack I've been wearing in the O.R. since the 19th century.

$19.95 here.

A question: Exactly what makes a color a "designer color?"

Just wondering....