First up is Susan Alameda holding up A Cold-blooded Business in front of the theatre sign in Ashland, Oregon. A gorgeous place with a great Shakespeare Festival, I’ve been there myself a couple of times. Once I saw a production of Titus Andronicus scary enough to freeze my blood, and another time I saw The Tempest with an Ariel who talked with his feet. Might have been her feet. Didn’t really matter.

Next is, hmm. Well, the photographer suggested the caption, “Even artichokes read Dana Stabenow.” What’s puzzling me is why artichokes would like Blood Will Tell, specifically. One never knows what’s up with vegetables…

Also, the audio interview from the CD version of Prepared for Rage is now a podcast on Dana’s Odeo page.

Okay, here’s something to do with nothing else, but I think it’s tres kewl. I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about cell phones maybe ending global poverty, where this Nokia guy goes around to third-world countries and watches people live and figures out what they need to make their lives better (I want that job). It’s a fascinating story, or rather stories–the guy who got the Nobel for funding microbusinesses has started a cell phone company in Bangladesh where women buy a cell with a special battery for $150 and then set up in business as their village’s telephone service, and a guy in Nairobi has figured out how to send money to his mom back home in the village using a prepaid cell phone card. Nokia sponsored a contest for some of these folks to design their dream phones, and Business Week wrote a story about it and you can see pictures and descriptions of them here. The Nokia guy also has a blog here. The one that really gets me is the cell phone the 11-year old designed to keep track of her mom.

Whenever I think we’ve had it as a race, somebody like Jan Chipchase (and a business like Nokia) comes along and proves me wrong.