ColumnNeed to look good on Facebook? Ask an editor.

Presenting yourself as the envy of everyone’s Facebook wall comes down to editing (that we’d want to do this is a foregone conclusion). As a colleague said recently, “Editing is the skill of the century.” Your digital life, unedited? So MySpace. This is Facebook, where the savvy Eye of social discernment is a requisite. You’ve got walls. Subscriptions. Integrated tweets. Photo albums. Friends tagging god-knows-what (probably your arm from the fat side). It’s a borg on there, and you’ll need to practice some serious curation of your life to be perceived like-ably. You want the highs to be high, the lows to be slightly less high, and the ex to know your arms are still skinny. As every good editor knows, the product is all in the packaging. Present your life from the most pleasing angle, and don’t forget the witty caption! Here’s how.

Lolcats

IRL: You’ve got guests in town. Your cat cannot handle the den of estrogen that your flat has become and meows – bleats, really – all night long, keeping both you and your guests in the other room miserably half-asleep well into sunrise. The cat settles in for slumber, of course, right at the time you all have to wake up for work on Monday morning. You find yourself wondering if your cat would even notice if you gave it away.

How to Facebook it: Cheezburger it up and put a caption on it. Lol all the way to the likes. Cats are hilarious, always! Suggested captions:

IM IN UR SLEEP, DISRUPTIN UR ZZZ

MEOWS-ON-REPEAT: EVEN MORE ANNOYING THAN DUBSTEP

HOSTESS KITTEH: TEH GUESTS HAZ OVERSTAYED TEH WELCOMEZ

Workaday Wonderful

IRL: You’re stuck in the worst-of-the-worst conference on earth, the kind for corporate types in need of the downlow, or lowdown, on how to do the Twitter. You sneak out of the “You Need a Social Media Strategy!” session with the Arial Powerpoint slides about engagement and channels delivered by the woman decked in menopausal jewelry wearing highwater gabardine trousers. You race to catch the de Kooning exhibit at MoMA for 30 life-giving minutes before heading back in for the rest of the sessions. At the break, you’re fed stale grocery store bagels slathered in Kraft cream cheese, and hi, you are allergic to gluten and also really prefer organic dairy. You’ll have to catch up on all your work that night where you’ll eat string cheese, also not organic, and alternate cans of Illy and Freixenet from the corner deli because you don’t have time to go to dinner. And, you did not bring enough pairs of underwear, because it’s suddenly your time of the month.

How to Facebook it: Snap and post a shot of the de Kooning sign in the lobby (angle: casually askew; interest point: allow single corner pop of color). Prepare for the “You have such a fabulous jet-setting life!” comments. You’ll need that validation to retain consciousness through “Is Your Website Sticky?”

Being Informed

IRL: Your teetering stack of unread New Yorkers threatens to knock a tooth out in your sleep any night now, you’re only halfway into the novel your best friend gave you for Christmas (and neither one of you even celebrates the holidays!), your bookmarks are so clogged you’re getting warning emails from Xmarks, and you still haven’t finished the latest Seth Godin bestseller.

How to Facebook it: Post the Portlandia “Did You Read?” clip below and caption as follows: “Funny because it’s so true!” You need to outsource your reading at this point. You just need to look like you read, except not so much that it looks like your career isn’t on fire.

Dining Out

IRL: The bread is a burnt offering, the hipster waiters do not approve of your lack of facial hair and you’re pretty sure there was just a shooting outside the vintage Ray Ban and ski sweater shop.

How to Facebook it: Just post a picture of the mussels and Cava, cropping out the bread and beards. Appropriate caption: “Just another night of foodie fun in the Mission!” #nofilter (#liar #andyouliveinPacificHeights #byachurch #notthecoolchurch #becausethatsintheMission)

Being Popular and Successful

IRL: No one shows up to your event except your staff and that one weird guy who always comes to your events. Your dad.

How to Facebook it: The bartender and most attractive bar patrons will never notice you’re taking pictures of them and claiming them as your own. Jen, right? She looks like a Jen.

Your Love Life

IRL: You’re being pestered by no less than six suitors you could care less about and the one you want (the cute one, of course) is totes noncommits. Or, you haven’t had sex in over a year and you’re 28 and even your mother who waited until marriage thinks there is something unhealthy about this. Or you’re using Facebook to stalk your ex. When he finally blocks you, you resort to pleading with your friends to let you comb his photos for signs of a new girlfriend via their accounts. So, you’re still stalking your ex. Any way you work it, the picture isn’t pretty. Or is it? No need for the cutting room floor: we can so save this content!

How to Facebook: Go out to dinner every night with a string of your 100%-just-friends male friends and check in to the restaurants anyway. “Lisa has checked into Gary Danko with Joe.” That’ll learn those pestering suitors, all right. To alleviate Mom’s concerns, post updates like “Yet another crazy night! Can’t wait to get some sleep tonight!” and let her find relief in her own conclusions. For everything else, post a humble brag about the neighbor spotting you naked through the kitchen window, tee-hee! Leave out the part about him being 99. Or gay. Or blind.

Family Fun

IRL: Your grandmother dies on Christmas Day, a cousin reveals the Alice-in-Wonderland extent of his mental illness to you over too many eggnogs, your aunt announces she is getting divorced because she’s actually lesbian and your uncle is also out – of work (again). You develop a raging yeast infection. On your face. Probably from all the bourbon you’re drinking to cope.

How to Facebook it: “Feeling so grateful despite life’s challenges this holiday season!” and bask in the approving likes.

Simply leave off the “to be alive…I guess” part.

Conclusion to Column

IRL: Love, loss, hipsters, hashtags. We’ve covered it all.

How I’ll Facebook it: As if I’d post this to Facebook!

This is the latest installment in your editor’s column, The Insider’s Guide to Life.

Image: Francisco Vargas

ColumnSurfin’ USA.

They say the internet is a radical tool for changing the world. Often cited in this lofty claim are Wikileaks and Twitter. The Internet-capitalized is also a scapegoat for the people with excess ear hair to blame the Websites for all that is wrong with The Youth, a disappointing step up from sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. For the inexperienced and Glenn Beck, the internet is a scapegoat for assigning blame for pretty much everything in general. For real journalists working in print media, the internet is a cesspool of aggregation and amateurs in pajamas – but then, we’ve already touched on the people with excess ear hair.

For everyone else, the internet is a sparkling tool of infinite practicality. It’s just not a sparkling tool of infinite practicality for the things you would assume, like online banking or changing your seat assignment. Useful is nice, but, like mayonnaise on a cheese sandwich, pointless is better. The internet serves only one purpose that truly matters, and that is that it is the most effective way in the world to avoid working while at work.

People like me who make internet for a living know that this is why the pageview exists and also why you get the most of them between 9 and 5. You have to entertain all the people manning the companies that don’t have the money to advertise on your website. Far from being the glamorous racket my friends in more respected professions like law and investment banking are convinced it is, media is really kind of a thankless gig.

In between their conferences and hearings, lurking behind their Powerpoint decks, the truth comes out: cute puppy pictures on Tumblr; ex-stalking on Facebook; browser-window shopping on Jcrew.com. They do not make the connection that while they are tremendously busy at work forwarding chain emails exposing the truth about that dangerous chemical compound that develops when cheese is placed on a saltine cracker in certain states during the months of August and September only, I am slaving over their next viral time-waster. Like this column, for example. But have they thanked me even once?

In a fit of jealous rage after my third sugar-free Hazelnut Vanilla cream latte yesterday afternoon, for which I’m sure there’s a chain email, I decamped for the other side of the screen. Wasting your day on the internet seems to be working for everyone, in the sense that no one’s working. (Which should anger no one. I cite the much-Facebook-liked fact that we are the most productive people on earth as argument. Google it.) It was time for me to give it a go. But where was I?

Oh yes! Here are the things I did on the internet instead of writing my column. I was careful to take scrupulous notes so you can experience the experience for yourself.

7:30 a.m. As the French press steeps my coffee, I stare bleary-eyed at my Facebook wall. A friend’s status update incoming! Something about his cat. Task put off for another time: checking work email.

7:35 a.m. Today I decide I’ll actually open all the email newsletters I subscribe to, and read them.

10:03 a.m. Amazed at the amount of time wasted, I sign up for 17 more daily deal newsletter services. There are more, but I decide I only need one yoga group discount offer a day. Taking a break after the first nine for a bit of aimless scrolling through The Sartorialist and Desire to Inspire, I am inspired to reorganize all my bookmarks into boards on Pinterest, but then I lose interest and decide to check out Facebook again.

10:40 a.m. After updating my Netflix queue and friending three new friends in the Flickr group Bacon Porn, I settle in for an hour of tearing through 30 tabs at the Huffington Post. I feel dirty and liberal afterward.

Noon. I check Facebook again. I am rapt to see my friend has posted three more updates about his cat.

12:03 p.m. Have deleted my first Reddit account after getting into a flame war about doughnut holes. Intense. Going to caption lolcats now. My submission: Kitteh Litter.

3:30 p.m. Facebook. Again with the cat. Of course. It all makes sense now.

3:36 p.m. Phone in to conference call with writers late, blame slow internet. Omit the part about it being slow because of the three browsers, 78 tabs, two streaming episodes of 30 Rock and (what else?) cat video I am watching. I hear the words “Find your own hyperlinks for a change,” which I say out loud in real life. While pretending to listen, I post my scrupulous day-of-surfing notes to the anonymous WordPress blog I built and launched during lunch.

3:49 p.m. My kid brother instant messages me a video about a guy with a bike, which I post on Twitter, where I learn that Jackie Chan has died.

4:00 p.m. The day has simply flown. With an hour left in the workaday, I tuck in for some more Huffington Post but am interrupted by a text from our managing editor: “What the hell was that tweet?”

4:20 p.m. Perusing Reddit, this time under the name surfinusatoday, I notice a reference to 4:20. I look up the meaning on Urban Dictionary.

4:47 p.m. An email from a physician friend who has just saved two people’s lives with her afternoon and wants to grab dinner. “What did you get done today?” she writes. “Oh, you know, the usual,” I reply.

This is the latest (quasi-fictional) installment in your editor’s column, The Insider’s Guide to Life, exploring topics such as media, culture, sex, politics, and anything else. Cheers and spellcheck!

Image: Aine D

ColumnWhen health issues get in the way of a Type A.

In case you were wondering, I spent last week in bed. Let it be noted that this isn’t about going green in style, but rather, this is about your editor going bedridden in style. Abject, miserable style.

The bed rest is owing to what my doctor calls an “isolated spastic event” and I call hell. (He is so diplomatic.) A sudden and severe back spasm well before the AARP years is insulting enough, but try not even having a good reason for it. There is no exotic escapade involving clowns or swings that I’ll take to the grave, no tragicomedy about the ladder and the nosy neighbor’s roof with which to regale dinner party guests into the next decade, not even a “We’ll laugh about it someday” sigh owing to the thing with the omelet and the Pergo. Nothing offends quite like acquiring a spasm for simply getting out of bed in the morning. I like to think I hold myself to high standards, health maladies included, so you can imagine the disappointment.

Also, a week in bed isn’t as decadent as it sounds. It isn’t even a good value. You would think you could find a lot to do while lying flat on your back, but you would be wrong. For one thing, sleep really begins to lose its luster when you realize you can have all you want of it. For another, you still have to get up to pee. Dispatches from the pillowtop soon go ignored as your friends lose interest in your boring injury. There is no competing with Lou, who sprained her neck while blowing out her forty birthday candles, the bitch, or Tom, who sustained sixteen paintball welts dashing across the shooting range and still found the strength to rescue yet another “orphaned” bunny. “Don’t you think it’s a little odd that this is the third baby bunny he’s rescued during paintball?” you ask, quickly adding, “And my back is like, level 6 right now, but could be up to 6.5 pretty soon if I don’t take another pain pill. It’s called Flexeril but the generic is…Hello? Katie? Hello?”

Despite the lack of support from both my lumbar and my friends, I was determined to keep calm and carry on for the green internets. With my faithful feline companion, Roo, beside me, I propped up my head on pillows and perched my laptop on my belly. I wouldn’t call this exactly ergonomic, nor the drugs exactly organic, but then beggars can’t be choosers. That’s why, when my hands would go numb from incline typing or I’d find myself slurring my emails in yet another prescribed cyclobenzaprine-and-ibuprofen bender, I took to long, so very long, episodes of gazing out my bay window at the San Franciscans walking by. It is thus my great hope that my pain can be your gain. Welcome to EcoSalon: Semi-conscious culture and fashion.

The first thing you will notice is that San Franciscans are inconsistently helpful. They are happy to inform you that the world is melting and how much they pay in rent or how many badges they’ve earned on Foursquare, unless of course they are anti-geolocation because they’re suffering from app fatigue. But when it comes to the weather, you’re on your own, cupcake. San Francisco weather is fickle; in the course of a day the city will rain, fog itself, sun itself, and rain again. But looking outside at the variously-clothed city passersby (mostly-clothed if you live in the Castro) to determine what you should wear in the event you ever walk again will only leave you more confused than before you took the pain pill.

Case in point, Monday, 8:30 a.m.: Sun peeking out, tall man in t-shirt and shorts and Tevas. If, like Lazarus, I depart my cave, I shall leave the coat inside it. Nevermind, that very fashionable woman is wearing a hideous puffer and looks upset. Clearly it must be freezing. The tall man is a masochist, or perhaps he is in the throes of euphoria from his Blue Bottle cappuccino. Then again he may be rebelling against his mother who always admonished him to take a coat, and he’s probably on his way to discuss it with his therapist right now. And this slight girl, how is she not shivering? In her tank top and American Apparel jeggings through which I can see her wedgie, or is it a thong, dammm thess Flehzexerelle druhgz, and yet her friend is wearing a Prairie Underground jacket from Clary Sage Organics with an awning of a hood. That thing could support an avalanche. Scratch the weather assistance, then. It’s fine. It’s not like I was going to walk anywhere, anyway. Stupid hills.

By Tuesday the ennui is unbearable. How’s the back, my writers ask, hopeful that they can stop hearing about it once and for all. How many more New Yorkers have I not managed to read? Back to staring through the looking glass. There are the compact, blond Pacific Heights wives in needlessly fattening mom jeans and diamond rings perpetually sliding around their spindly fingers, directing their imported nannies to direct their becurled offspring to direct their shizapoos and cavalieradors and chihuahauxers.

But wait! There’s more! Pay dirt: a couple right out of a Long Island summer catalog, he in khakis and a pink polo, she also in khakis and a pink polo. Then they turn and take pictures of my house, of me peering sideways out the window from the place where the magic happens, meaning the Icy Hot self application, one bedhead of the human variety and one furry head of the cat variety. Tourists. So much for that. I note Roo’s apathy in my journal. I am meticulous, or something.

Wednesday. I’m contemplating changing my email signature to: “Apologies for all of this, I’m on muscle relaxants and painkillers.” At least I think it’s Wednesday. I complain to a friend about my inefficient plight. “Find the Zen,” she says. “Isn’t that what it’s all about, consciousness and reflection? Maybe you got this because your body wants you to slow down and just be and you were ignoring it.” I draw a measured breath. “If you tell me to ‘have a heart’ for my back spasm, I swear to you I will hang up this phone.”

How often do I take the time to explore thoughts and feelings in a meditative, uninterrupted, conscious way? Not often enough for my back’s preference, evidently, which is why it would be great to get over this spasm so I can actually put that on my to-do list. In honesty, I suppose my friend is right: how very un-eco to assume restful breaks don’t fit into the fabric of a sustainably lived life. Whatever.

Thursday. Pretty sure I have bed sores. What is the purpose of this sentence, universe? And by sentence I mean being sentenced to bed rest, not the words preceding the question mark, although that would be both admirably meta and naively humble. I call my mother. I text my kid brother about my dating life. He indulges me and then asks if I have life insurance. I ask my father to send me a juicer. I don’t know why.

Friday. I’ve emailed the office so many days in a row about my continuing vertebrate drama, I only have to type the letter “w” and the subject line autofills “working from home again; back still bad; call if you need me”.

I am weary of the grown men parading past my window like bipedal crabs in their hipster skinny jeans with bottoms so saggy it looks as if they are wearing ill-fitting diapers. I want to throw eggs at them but broadcast my sentiment on Facebook instead. Plus, my back hurts too much. I decide today is the day I will sort and clear and assign stories and delegate tasks from my fresh folder of 497 bookmarks for February; I get to 11 and fall asleep. I wake at 6:42, pleased that I’m up earlier than usual, and realize after a full half hour has gone by – which involves frying up eggs for breakfast – that it’s the evening. Also, I am frying up goat cheese, not eggs.

On the weekend, I give myself mini-projects to do, hobbling around my apartment rearranging the orchid twenty times, reading fascinating entries about SEO and HTML5. I decide to take up meditation and lucid dreaming. I decide to forget about them. I Skype with our writer Mike Sowden in York, who tells me about his new kidney ailment and I tell him about my new back ailment. We quietly feel relieved that the other is worse off. Another writer is concerned that the spasm is lasting so long; I phone a physician friend for his thoughts. He promises to check in on me in another week. Another week! Listen to me, back, and listen good: it’s been fun being in the sack with you, lazing about like a slug, but I am better. Hear me? I am better!

I go to sleep and wake up Monday morning feeling much better. Pain scale: 3. Zen of the spasm: Check in on me in a week.

This is the latest installment in your editor’s column, The Insider’s Guide to Life, exploring topics such as media, culture, sex, politics, and style. Cheers and spellcheck!

Image: Madeline Louise

ColumnIf you can read this sentence without corrective lenses, you are pre-disposed to eco-activism.

Let me make one thing clear: I am not old. Although, to be perfectly honest, I am not exactly young, either. On the continuum of age, I happen to fall at the precise numeric midpoint between Miley Cyrus and Betty White – a piece of pop culture trivia which somehow strikes me as deeply significant. If I had to guess, I would say that I am also somewhere between those two women when it comes to my wardrobe, my taste in music, and my bong habits. But when it comes to recycling, I feel like I belong firmly in the ranks of the elderly.

Recycling, much like computer skills, comes organically to those in their 20s and younger. Being planet-friendly is natural to them, since they have never known a world where newspapers could be carelessly thrown out, along with banana peels and tuna fish cans. For young people, recycling is easy and automatic – it is embedded in their DNA, along with Facebook and an endless fascination with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But the biggest eco advantage for young people is that they can easily read the teeny tiny numbers inside the teeny tiny triangles on the bottom of plastic recyclable goods. Whereas I – squinting, in full daylight, and holding the item as far away from me as my arms will allow – cannot.

Those numbers tell you what a particular item is made of: a number 1 means the container is polyethylene terephthalate, and a 3 signifies the presence of polyvinyl chloride. Items with a number 1 or 2 are the most likely to be recycled, but for anyone over the age of 40 these numerals – especially when imprinted on clear plastic – are almost impossible to read. My friend, Pat, solves this problem by waiting until her kids come home from school before disposing of anything plastic. My own solution is to be constantly surrounded by a ginormous collection of reading glasses.

I used to think of glasses as fashion accessories –  like an extremely functional pair of earrings. When I was young, and didn’t really need glasses to see, I enjoyed the “smart girl/sexy librarian” vibe I thought they lent me. If I liked a pair of frames, I would buy the glasses and wait for my eyes to deteriorate into them. Then came a near catastrophe, when misreading the directions on a medicine bottle almost caused me to give my daughter an overdose of Robitussin. At that point, glasses were no longer an accessory, but a necessity. Today they have become something of a fetish. I have glasses that I keep upstairs and some that stay downstairs; there is always one pair in my car, one in my office, and another in my purse. This past week alone I discovered forgotten glasses in my junk drawer, the pocket of an old winter coat, and under the dog’s bed. And there is one massively strong pair I keep around just for texting.

But the numbers on the bottom of jars and bottles are so ridiculously small that even plentiful access to reading glasses doesn’t necessarily help.  This strikes me a galling example of ageism. The Boomers invented ecology – we are, after all, the generation that dreamed up Earth Day. We should not be carelessly shoved aside by a youth oriented eco culture.  Recycling information should be printed in a font size that even mature adults are able to see. It’s bad enough that people my age can’t wear skinny jeans or two-piece bathing suits anymore – at least let us recycle our Activia containers.

Editor’s Note: Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

Image: e-magic

ColumnA new web series hilariously mocks the foodie movement.

When the Portlandia trailer hit and all my Portland-based friends had it posted to their Facebook profiles within minutes of each other, I had no idea that four weeks down the line people outside of my bubble would be asking me, “So is Portland really like Portlandia?”

Some find Portlandia hilarious (me) and others cock their heads and raise their eyebrows, because why would anyone find the reality of Portland funny? But that’s the thing about going viral: the message has to strike a chord. And so when Portlandia makes fun of book shop owners ogling the zine section, or restaurant goers overly concerned about where their chicken came from, it’s hilarious because there’s an element of truth. It’s a lesson in not taking yourself – or where you live or what you eat – too seriously.

In Foodie Underground, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about organic food, DIY markets, and underground trends, which I am sure that many of you are very interested in. But when was the last time you brought all three of those topics up at a dinner party and didn’t get a look of disapproval? When we take ourselves too seriously, it gets much more difficult to get our message across.

Which is why Foodies, a new web comedy series, premiering March 9th, should get a good laugh.

Mockumenting “a group of L.A. culinary enthusiasts whose passion for food spills off the table and into their personal lives,” the series is all devoted to poking fun at the smugness that so many love to point out comes along with loving good food. That assumed pretension some people think is inherent in the foodie movement may or may not be a valid argument, but in poking fun at it, Foodies is actually giving the movement more street cred.

“She’s still into me, cheese puffs prove it.” This is good humor for anyone who has a food obsession.

Click to view: Foodies

Even the recipes have a certain tongue-in-cheekiness that’s easy to appreciate.

Example: Moose’s Classic Gougères

The fun thing about gougères is that they sound really impressive for a little work. You can say things like, “Oh, these gougères? They’re nothing. I just whipped up a pâte à choux, threw in a little gruyere and called it a day” and still have time to enjoy wine with friends. Because really, it’s just a cheese puff with a fancy name.

So, put the DSLR down and stop uploading last weekend’s food photos to Flickr. Take some time to find the humor in the movement that we’ve created. Because, after all, food should be fun.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, taking a conscious look at what’s bubbling in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Green Acres was the place for me in the sixties, light years ahead of its time as a green comedy. A savvy businessman is fed up with the rat race of the concrete jungle, flees Park Place and whisks his dilettante wife to Hooterville to grow their own food, befriend local yokels like con man Mr. Haney and Arnold the pig and live a simpler, yet more abundant life. It was a hoot. Who in the Camelot era wanted to live with such sacrifices?

Years later, the earnest eco revolution has spawned a new brand of humor (it’s just that hip!) as we parody the seemingly all-consuming agenda, as in the Audi Green Police ad shown during the Super Bowl. It lampooned the campaign for reusable bags, keeping water consumption down and using low energy appliances. I thought it was poignant because we have gone to extremes at times with the monitoring of consumption. It takes extremes to save the planet, and if humor works, make em laugh!

In addition to the Audi ad, eco humor has seeped into various sitcom story lines and entertainment specials. Among my faves: Saturday Night Live’s Chewable Pampers (all great taste and no waste in eco-friendly containers); and F*ck The Earth Day with old coot Jack English: In the spoof ad for celebrating the day after Earth Day in April, he tells us to ignore the hippie alarmists and do what makes us feels good – like leaving the lights on, driving a hummer and pouring oil on a duck.

And then, there is the new breed of stand-up comics, finding unlimited material in the green lane.

Take Bob Hirschfeld, a self-described business satirist-turned eco satirist, who offers his Funny Green Business presentations at corporate conferences held by Forbes, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Cox Communication, Honda, and IBM to name a few.

Bob makes audiences laugh at the inconsistencies woven into the eco agenda pointing to well-intended solutions aimed at lowering our footprints. “I was at a bookstore where I got the book, 100 ways to Save the Planet,” he recalls. “Number one was buy less paper! So I returned the book.” He also takes harmless stabs at LED bulbs (how many dollars does it take to screw in a lightbulb?); the complexities of sorting plastics for recycling and the embarrassment of low-flow potties not really doing the job of flushing waste in just one flush – especially at dinner parties where your hosts question why you’re taking so long. You can watch his spiel here:

Convention Connection in Malibu, CA which books Bob and other acts, says it gets many requests for green speakers for events, and stand-up brand humor is an added bonus. “Any speaker or entertainer tries to look at the trends, and green is certainly in,” observes booking agent, Kiela Hine. “Humor for all times has tried to make light of things that are difficult and that is a good thing.”

Brings to mind the song Smile, Charlie Chaplin’s theme music for his last silent picture, Modern Times about a tramp struggling to live in modern industrialized society. The song asks, what’s the use of crying? If you light up your face with gladness, you will see the sun come shining through. If Chaplin only knew to what extent we have screwed the divine paradise we have been gifted. I can laugh about it here and there, Charlie. But it is hard to hide the sadness and just smile.

Images: Sitcoms Online, Edna Purviance

Oh, this is way too cute. The “Help, I Need Help” folks are at it again.

First they charmed us with clever little (eco-friendly!) packages labeled “Help, I have a headache,” and “Help, I’ve cut myself,” containing acetaminophen and bandages.

Now they’ve expanded their product line – or rather their packaging line. After all, they’re really just selling ibuprofen, but in a Zen little package labeled “Help, I have an aching body,” just to make sure you don’t forget what ibuprofen is for.

Fully compostable corn-based packages, did I forget to mention?

And even though I avoid OTC medications and prefer natural remedies for my aches and pains, I can’t help but be delighted by their wide-eyed faux-naivete. Take yourself on a visit to their Help, I’m Bored page for some McSweeney’s kind of fun.