Fer Real: a rat on a cat on a dog

I saw this in person last night in Union Square, SF. The best thing was watching the reactions of everyone who came by. Foreign tourists, local shoppers, the urban underclass, you name it. Everybody who came by didn't notice at first, then did, then stopped and stared and commented in awe. I had immediate conversations with otherwise-aloof strangers about our takes on the comparative enthusiasm of each creature. One couple felt the cat was getting the rawest deal. Best comment, and typical: "Now that's something you don't see every day." This is the kind of thing that really makes your week.

Posting for polymaths

I seem to post on a completely different area of life every time...so be it. Walt Whitman and so on. Here's the deal. I have found the perfect new iPhone game. It's called DoodleJump and it looks like this:



It's about jumping. It's super fun to play. It's 99¢. Kinda like Q-bert, from back in the day, but upside down, I think. Let's take a close-up look at that little feller, shall we?



If you are a person who plays games on an iPhone or an iPod Touch you can get it here and you should!

Various awesome

There's a lot of awesome going around, despite the grim clouds rolling around. Here's one: Jacqueline Novogratz was talking about her Acumen Fund on the equally awesome Diane Rehm Show podcast the other day. I ain't an expert, but setting up systems in Africa, India, and Pakistan to employ thousands of local people in doing stuff like providing cheap clean water to their neighbors for the first time—sounds pretty excellent to me. Her set-up is a bit like Kiva in that it allows us first-worlders to invest in the enterprises of people in desperately poor areas. Novogratz has a new book out called The Blue Sweater, referring to a piece of clothing from her own adolescence that she had put in her family's GoodWill pile one day and that turned up, decades later, worn by a random boy she ran into in the streets of Rwanda (I think). She said she grabbed him and checked the inside collar of the sweater—her name was still sewn in there.