Author: nell-boeschenstein

Before I begin, let me make the disclaimer that this is not a plug. I am not playing favorites here; I am simply giving props where props are deserved. With that out of the way, it seems that Migration: A Gallery has a fun little blog out there in the big Internet. The online journal, artPark, is partly a public relations tool that (quite effectively, in my estimation) promotes the latest from Migration (and hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little self-promotion), but that’s not all: It is also full of tidbits about the local Charlottesville art scene, as well as fun news items from the national and international scenes.

The site is run by Rob and Laura Jones, owners of Migration (which is located a block off the Mall on Water Street). I’ll be honest: I find a lot of artsy chitchat a tad yawn-inducing and (at least in terms of the specific language often used when discussing art) too five-dollar-word heavy. Judging from the tone of the blog, however, the Joneses are chatty and accessible and fun, and thus they miraculously succeed in charging through my closed mind and reminding me that art can be fun! Shocker! In addition to giving well-deserved shout outs to shows at local galleries such as Second Street and the C&O, there are posts about things like the Stephen Colbert portrait hanging in the bathroom of the Smithsonian and a link to a site that allows you to explore your inner Jackson Pollack.

I laughed, I cried…well, not really, but I was inspired to write 270 words.

There are some things that I am just really bad at. These things include applying blush, keeping an eye pencil steady, keeping my shirt reasonably unwrinkled and blow-drying my hair. I believe that some people are genetically programmed to look put-together and some people are destined to look as if they are perpetually falling apart, and I fall into the latter group. Us girls whose hair needs help five minutes after we’ve brushed it and who always manage to smear our mascara onto some random part of our face where it doesn’t belong need all the help we can get.

Granted, we are probably not the audience that websites such as We Love Beauty are aiming for; their ideal reader is probably a woman who can easily master the tips the site offers and act as living advertisement. But We Love Beauty can at least point girls like me in a helpful direction when it comes to those occasions when messy hair and wrinkled shirts simply won’t do.

It’s not deep, but the site has plenty of makeup tips and brand recommendations from professionals in the celebrity styling world. So, if you’re going out to Mas and you feel like you want to look the way Jennifer Garner did at the Oscars, then you’re in luck, because her hair and makeup people divulge their secrets to this site. Or, say you’re making a trip to Harris Teeter and you think that it’s an appropriate time to pull a Lindsay Lohan-as-Marilyn Monroe; check out the steps to achieve that look on We Love Beauty. I jest, I jest, but only sort of. If you need a hand (like I do), this site isn’t a bad site to check out, if only because it’s a website and thus doesn’t require that you utter the words, “Um…I need some help, here.”

First thing’s first: Did everyone see Tina Fey’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton on “Saturday Night Live”? Booya! I’m having t-shirts made that say “Bitch is the new black” on the front, and “Bitches get things done” on the back. But if you missed Fey’s endorsement-as-comedy-routine, it’s not too late to catch it on the Internet because, as with most funny Internet videos, you can still find it at Funny or Die. And I would recommend doing so because it’s hella funny…and true.

Phew. Now that my political views are out of the way, a word or two about this Funny or Die website. Started by the cool kids of the comedy scene (Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Chris Henchy), the site is a comedy site that hosts videos submitted by users and posts more that are exclusive to the site itself. Users then vote on which videos are worth watching and which videos are going to be sent to that video home in the sky, the idea being that this eliminates the picking-through-shit-to-find-diamonds aspect of Internet videos (and everything Internet, for that matter). In other words, if you don’t like wasting time on YouTube searching for the funny stuff (or if you don’t like waiting around for your friends to send you the funny stuff), give this site a look-see and you’ll probably get hooked.

Just a couple of my favorites that are currently featured on the site are the classics “What’s It Gonna Be?” and “Everyday Normal Guy Rap Song.” Of course there’s also newer stuff along with the classics, and most of it is worth at least a wry smile—a remedy for the blues that I, for one, might need after the votes are tallied in Ohio and Texas.

Any course in “Websites 101” includes a certain education in the basics, the foundations—Google, Craigslist, Slate, that kind of thing. And if this space is my introductory course, then I sometimes think that I must be a real a failure of a teacher, because it’s these basics that I often forget to praise sufficiently. Case in point: Project Gutenberg. A staple of “Best Of” website lists and, indeed, a pretty amazing resource, this site is bookmark-worthy for pretty much anyone with a brain and half an ounce of curiosity when it comes to the written word.

Project Gutenberg, which began in 1971 as a research project at the University of Illinois, is now the oldest and largest collection of free electronic books. Its catalogue of titles numbers over 20,000 and even a cursory browse of the “eshelves” (my term, not theirs) makes it clear that these titles aren’t self-published missives from the Ted Kaczynskis of the world. Nope, Project Gutenberg offers a good dose of the classics online, everything from Alice in Wonderland to The Bible to Roget’s Thesaurus. What’s more, some of these titles are also available as ebooks that you can download as mp3 audio files and then listen to at you leisure, should the actual act of reading be too taxing or inconvenient for whatever reason.

I know it’s a little Pollyanna of me to say, but sites like this really just make me go, “Wow! The Internet is so cool sometimes!”

Local computer geek Waldo Jacquith has many tricks up his sleeve when it comes to showing Charlottesville the ropes of the Internet (ah, the joys of mixed metaphors). Seeing as I was stuck at work in New York as the primaries were unfolding in Virginia, I relied on one of those tricks—Waldo’s Virginia Political Blogroll—to keep me updated on what was happening at the polls in my beloved home state. Anyone familiar with Waldo’s other blogroll (www.cvilleblogs.com) will immediately recognize the format here: headlines from different sources all over the state that give a reader an overview of all the news that’s fit to print apropos Virginia politics.

Taking posts from sources ranging from The Mason Conservative to The Richmond Democrat to The Virginian Federalist to Consortiumblog, the many—and contradictory—voices that are Virginia politics come through, and by scrolling ’em you can maybe begin to try to understand what is going down on days like February 12. Of course, being a Hillary supporter, I can’t say I was happy to see what was going down in Virginia on February 12, but I was happy that I knew where to find what I was looking for.

After former Atlanta Falcons (and Virginia Tech) quarterback Michael Vick was convicted last year of felonious dog fighting, 47 pit bulls were seized from his property and spared euthanasia. Rather, the animals were distributed to various rescue groups that were then charged with either rehabilitating the dogs or caring for the animals for the rest of their lives. There has been a rash of newspaper articles about the pit bulls in recent weeks, because some of the rescue groups are now ready to introduce the dogs they’ve been caring for to the public.

One of the rescue groups that took a number of Vick’s dogs is Bad Rap, a San Francisco Bay Area-based rescue organization devoted to pit bulls and to rehabilitating the breed’s public image. The website for Bad Rap now has three videos up of Vick’s dogs (“The Evaluations,” “Home to Heal” and “See Them Now”) and, if anyone needs proof of how amazing dogs are, these videos offer proof positive. The animals have been abused, starved and beaten and yet, thanks to Bad Rap, there’s still hope for them to have happy and fulfilling lives with loving, stable homes.

I’ll admit that as a pit bull owner myself, I’m a particular sucker for sites like this (and dog videos that make me cry), but this kind of website is really for lovers of all animals, great and small.

I recently attended a panel discussion entitled “Crafting Protest,” where I heard four amazing women speak about the work they are doing in fields traditionally considered “craft” (as opposed to “art”). One of these women was new media artist and activist Cat Mazza, the woman behind microRevolt. MicroRevolt is an online protest of sweatshops that has a real-world presence in the form of a large, knitted blanket depicting the Nike Swoosh. The blanket acts as a petition against sweatshops; it has been made collectively by people all over the world who send in individual squares that Mazza adds to the blanket. Each square made by each person also represents a signature on the petition.

Besides serving as an online activism hub, the site is also just a cool place for knitters to explore, chiefly because it offers a link to another project of Mazza’s called knitPro. This application makes possible any and all designs you could possibly want to create with yarn and two needles. All you have to do is upload the image that you want to knit and knitPro will digest this information and, within moments, offer a pattern that you can follow that will give you the design you desire. If you want to knit a Mickey Mouse head, go for it; if you want to knit a pastoral country scene, no problem; if a photocopier is your favorite image, go right ahead and try it out with the knitting needles.

Now, truth be told, I’m no knitter. I’ve done a few scarves in my day, but nothing complicated. This site, though? It’s inspiring. I might give another scarf a go.

The review as a form of literature is, I think, a natural way of thinking. I truly believe that it is part of our human nature to have opinions about the things in which we come into contact (books, movies, art shows, fashion shows, food, service, etc.) and to impart those opinions to those around us (friends, family, the guy sitting next to us at the coffee shop). So when a friend pointed me in the direction of the blog Starred Review, not only was I delighted to have a whole new set of reviews to read, but I immediately thought, “Why don’t people review random shit more frequently?”

Starred Review takes the review model (sanctioned by The Academy only in regards to books, theater, food, art, movies, television and the like) and applies it to any and everything. In other words, as the site itself puts it, “We review random stuff, randomly.” If you are looking for a consumer review of a Faux Brown Open Top Media Storage Unit from Bed, Bath & Beyond, or a review of the male phenomenon known as “Beards,” then look no further than Starred Review.

Moreover, I have always been a fan of a point system (it probably has something to do with the reason I was obsessed with my grades in high school, too), and Starred Review uses a point system! The storage unit got 56 stars, and beards nabbed 66, which is helpful because now I know that I should grow a beard before I go buy a Faux Brown Open Top Media Storage Unit from Bed, Bath & Beyond.

I really want to see my carbon footprint get smaller, but when faced with a pile of paper to recycle, my thoughts tend to run a little something like, “How do I recycle paper again? Does brown paper go with glossy paper or newspaper? Or does newspaper go with white paper? Or is newspaper its own thing? Or is white paper its own thing? Or is…” You get the point. So sometimes—not often, and I’m not proud when it happens—I end up throwing a piece of paper away because I can’t figure out what pile to put it in; I mean, I don’t want to screw up the entire town’s recycling efforts by throwing some piece of paper into the wrong bin!

It’s for the recycling-challenged (and everyone else) that local do-gooder Teri Kent maintains her website, Better World Betty. With the tagline “Green living made easier,” the website makes reducing Charlottesville’s collective carbon footprint easy by leaving the city with exactly zero excuses. Aside from helping with recycling basics (say, how to divide up that paper) Kent offers everything from a directory of local businesses that swing green (for example, Mudhouse for your coffee and Terra Bella for your dry cleaning) to a blog of her sustainable living-related thoughts to a search tool that allows visitors to plug in whatever it is they want to reuse or recycle; the site will then tell visitors where they can accomplish this goal locally.

This last feature has proved the most useful to me. I’ve had an old PDA lying around the house for a while now, not wanting to just throw it away, but not wanting it to add to the general clutter. I plugged my dilemma into Better World Betty’s search feature and I know now that I can take the thing to Crutchfield and they will recycle it for me.

After reading Doug Nordfors’ contribution to a recent C-VILLE cover story—a few hundred words pondering the lackluster literary scene in Charlottesville—I began pondering the same question myself, specifically regarding the under-35 literary demographic. Being on break from my own MFA program, I decided to investigate ways to get the local, under-35 literary demographic off their asses and collaborating on something (a webzine, perhaps?). Of course, my first step was to somehow locate some local, under-35 literary types.

My friend Julia (a poet) was on board from the beginning, but I turned to the Internet to find other possible young, local wordsmiths and came across One Star Watt, the blog of local writer and editor Wistar Watts Murray. I scrolled through her various posts and immediately e-mailed Julia the link to Wistar’s site saying, “I want this girl to work on ‘Protagonist.’” (“Protagonist” is the working title for our vague project.) Julia e-mailed back a few minutes later: “Yes, definitely.”

Wistar is funny. And smart. And funny. And smart. And so is her blog. While the superficial content of the blog is the same general stuff of most blogs (i.e. blahblahmeblahblah), she makes blahblahmeblahblah fun to read and that, I think, is the sign of a really good writer. My favorite recent post is entitled “I Am Most Brilliant When I Am Sleepy.” Wistar writes: “It was about 3 in the morning when I woke up with an exciting new perspective on human pollution. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be weird if people had special habitats for yawning and sneezing in the same way they have special habitats for peeing and defecating?’ Like if someone was sitting at a dinner table and had to hiccup, she would have to excuse herself to the hiccup room and everyone would judge her if she didn’t wash her hands afterwards.” OMG, TOTALLY, Wistar! I SO agree!!! Seriously, call me. We’ll tawk.