Last night, the application went live in the iPhone store and now I can tell you all about Galvanize, the way to hide and find real gifts with your friends. (Our Twitter and Tumblr)

Please know that the Galvanize application is really in alpha, but we are opening it up so we can make it better faster! We need your feedback as we decide what to build into it next and how to make the game more fun.

As with all alpha (and most beta) projects, things will break and sometimes look a little wonky. We will be working to fix things just as quickly as we can, as we so appreciate your patience and specific thoughts as we improve the game and the overall experience.

And please forgive the length of this post—I have much to tell you about and some amazing people to introduce.

This is how big my smile was last night when I heard that the app was up in the store:

I was with my friends Sloane and Taylor (who is a very good photographer) in line for Ignite NYC when Taylor took the picture.

Thank You

This personal project would never have been possible without amazing friends who cheered me on as I leapt, once again, into the unknown, all of whom are pursuing inspiring personal projects and new directions of their own. Margaret Rosas, Kevin Slavin, Karen Barbarossa, Ethan Zuckerman, Catherine Bracy, Clay Shirky, Laura Hertzfeld, David Sasaki, Solana Larsen, Dave Coustan, Jessica Smith, Brian Oberkirch, Tricia Wang, Andrew Hyde, Nina Walia, Fil Vocasek, Keryn Gottshalk, Sarah Graalman, and my sisters Kat and Kass—thank you more than I can say.

UPDATE 9/28 6:15p: I knew I forgot someone important in the list above, and that would be Lisa Williams, who also gave me a wonderful piece of advice; “You can’t see the final destination with the headlights, but leave them on and you’ll see far enough ahead to make it all the way there.” (The other best advice I received was from Ethan, who encouraged me to do the thing that was scariest when I left my job.)

How Galvanize Works

Now, let me walk you through what Galvanize does right now, starting with the home screen:

There are two big things to do: hide a gift and find a gift. Both have notifications attached—e-mail for now, SMS as an option later, that arrive in your inbox when you have joined Galvanize, when someone adds you as a friend, hides a gift for you, and when you have new points in the game from finding a gift or when someone finds a gift you have hidden for them.

For hiding, choose your style of map (street view, satellite, or hybrid from the buttons at the bottom), go to your hiding location, secret the gift (be sneaky!), and then hit the “hide here” button.

The next screen (that we’re making more beautiful even as I write this) lets you title the gift, choose the recipient, and leave a hint.

When someone leaves you a gift, you will receive a notification, then be prompted to join Galvanize if you’re not yet a member, and after that, be taken to a map. The present icon marks the spot of your gift.

After you have located your gift, take a picture. There will be ways to share the story of how you found the gift soon.

For now, when a gift is discovered, both the hider and the finder are awarded points that show up in your dashboard. You can give these points to one of three featured organizations that are doing truly awesome (and serious) work making the world a better place.

Right now, we are featuring three social good organizations that I met through my time at PopTech as their Director of Community. Each of these orgs is part of the PopTech Social Innovation Fellows program; I so admire the work of Erik Hersman and Ory Okolloh at Ushahidi, Josh Nesbit at Frontline SMS: Medic, and Tevis Howard at Komaza.

Expect more in this part of the application after we work through a few wrinkles in sponsorship; ultimately, Galvanize points may become support from outside sponsors to these organizations and others that we feature. We want to reward your attention and effort with a gift you give to one of the featured organizations.

Who Made It Real

And now, let me introduce the really incredible people behind this first version. Galvanize is a bootstrapped group right now, and I’ve funded it out of what I have saved the past few years.

I cannot say enough about how Jason Wolfe of Technicolor Grayscale made the ideas and wireframes real. All the code is his, and I am so impressed with his passion for making things work and bringing the rest of Technicolor Grayscale into the project. If you’ve ever wanted a developer to stand beside you and be supportive of your strange and wacky ideas while figuring out how to code them, this is that guy. (I also know that the app is lightweight, all kinds of things are cached and others stored in the cloud, and other smart technical things to tell you more about in future posts.)

Matt Benson of TS directed design, iterating wireframes and solving for a way to make sure adults and kids both know this is an application for them–not an easy task. I asked Matt to make it feel fun and snazzy without being slick and he delivered.

Stephanie Ross of TS smoothed out userflow and used her background in social good (remember Hands Across the Sand this summer? That was Steph.) to think through how points in Galvanize roll up into support for featured organizations. We hope later this area will be sponsored and those points will become incremental donations, making everyone in the game a microphilanthropist.

The wonderful illustrations are Chris Bishop’s work. Chris is one of my favorite illustrators, a former colleague at PBS HQ, and I am so delighted that characters he drew show you how to hide and find gifts in Galvanize. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen his work recently, it might be in his recent illustration in Longshot Mag (more on the illustration and the prints in his Tumblr post).

Another former PBS colleague of mine, Cameron Nordholm, is also helping out in his free time on product development as we plan for the next builds; more about Cameron’s work in future posts too.

When I first had the idea, I met with my friend Aaron Taylor-Waldman, who came up with the original logo and first set of wireframes. I like Aaron’s tidy design sensibility, and I think his initial sketches are one reason we’ve being able to simplify some of the intricacies of geocaching and focus on the fun. (And a contact of Aaron’s, Adam Varga, did a proof of concept using a shared SMS service and some Symfony in the spring too.)

What’s Next

We are already hard at work on the next few updates for Galvanize and planning some exciting events in the coming months. If you have an idea for how to use Galvanize and/or you think it would be great to host a Galvanize gift hunt in your neighborhood, let me know! Let’s make those ideas happen.

I would also love to know your thoughts and questions as we begin to test Galvanize.

Thank you again for supporting me in this new adventure…

rating: 4 of 5 stars

About a month ago, online buzz surrounded a “gender analyzer” tool designed to determine whether a Web site was written by a man or a woman.

I was reminded of the flurry of indignation and amusement caused by the tool (on my personal site: “We guess http://kthread.com is written by a man (58%), however it’s quite gender neutral. Is this correct?”) in the review my friend David posted of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex the other day:

Despite the fact that the author of the book is male – as is the narrator – I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself – like Cal – somehow transcended the very concept of gender.

For me, the story’s gender play nestles in poignant details–the unexamined mention that Uncle Pete’s suspect chiropractic practice in a 1959 Detroit wasn’t for clients “to free up their kundalini,” that the narrator’s grandfather chooses Sappho’s glyconic poetry to translate for decades.

Less playfully, the narrator observes restrictive male desire:

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Eugenides channels earlier, Italian postmodernism to write an epic novel that undercuts the epic, grandiose authorial fashion of recent years. Middlesex is, at moments, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius because the reader watches as grandparents Lefty and Desdemona create their genealogical fictions (as the narrator “dutifully [oozes] feminine glue”).

Piscine metaphors stream through the text, schooling Callie/Cal in gender assertion–key scenes include bathing suits, sea anemones in locker rooms, battles between gravity and bodies of water, faked menstrual cycles marked by catacomb fish symbols on a calendar.

While the protagonist’s childhood years are charted by a procession of family Cadillacs (the ‘boys & toys’ model), the novel scolds Dr. Luce (and by extension, the reader) for wanting to read straight toward one event in Callie’s life without the greater familial context.

The future is in bed in Schöneberg, but that’s not the end of the book. There must be a return to the matriarchal line first, a presentation of self in a book about self-presentation. The scratchy intercoms in the Middlesex house without walls reconnect mother and child: outmoded technology delivers comic relief.

And harkening back to the reverberating rustles of her silkworm chorus, the reader joins the vindicated Desdemona in the last spoken word of the text, as she looks at Cal and says, “Bravo.”

View all my GoodReads reviews.

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On my way to the University of Virginia this morning, I paused at a small outgrowth that held up a canopy of interlaced threads, much like I was about to do for a small audience of colleagues in the faculty lounge of the English department.

For my dissertation presentation, I talked about food interactions and shifting patterns of consumption in online networks.

These are the slides from today’s talk,

and I’ve posted the working draft from the presentation on a new blog where I will, from time to time, post new working drafts and ideas.

The title of my project is Culture Modding: How We Play With Our Food, Money, and Beds in the Twenty-First Century and the blog is culturemodding.com.

After the talk, Dana and Will whisked me away to lunch (how I adore these two beautiful people), and then I walked back past the dewy webs to Ben’s, where the debris of a long night spent discussing theory, interventions, and counterpublics spread over the coffee table, my sense of gratitude renewed for this network of startlingly smart friends.

Here’s to a weekend of old friends, new areas of critical inquiry, and intriguing, flexible networks—

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looking at the dew,

laughing as spider webs swayed out of focus…

and this afternoon, digital scholar of note danah Boyd Twittered from the Knight Commission gathering in Aspen; “listening to madeleine albright talk about her pins. today: a spider since we are talking about the web. powerful women make me drool.”

I Skyped my boss Marc, who then took a video of Ms. Albright and said pin, posted it on Vimeo and Knight Blog, and I thought I’d share it with you:

Spiders often align with powerful, supernatural bodies, and I wonder what the spider means Ms. Albright’s mood was today. While Ms. Frizzle remains my fashion icon, Ms. Albright now joins her as my accessory role model.

All of which is to say, I’m a bit starstruck today and readying for the Perseids meteor showers tonight… (find your local star chart here)…

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As most of you know, I was hired three months ago to architect and implement a large community area that will span many the multiple project categories that Knight funds; I’ll share more about that closer to launch (likely late this fall).

For the past month, though, I have been working on another project that we’re calling the Garage. A brief overview:

The News Challenge is the contest most people associate with Knight Foundation; it’s a yearly contest that awards up to $5 million for ideas about local news delivery mechanisms.

This new Garage site is to help potential News Challenge applicants think through their ideas with the people in the best positions to advise them: past contest winners and expert mentors.

It’s an “incubator” site, and we (the Knight News Challenge team) hope it will be a place where ideas mature and strengthen, emerging from the Garage raring to apply, win, and implement.

Though an intentionally simple Drupal (an open source content management framework) site, this is an experiment that may serve as a model for how foundations can stage grant applications and help proposed notions solidify into ideas with longevity.

And I jumped at the chance to work with Susan Mernit, who continues to mentor me, and who let me lead the project.

An ambitious timeline, the chance to work with a tech diva I admire, projects that connect those who can improve local information chains for all of us—can you tell why I’m happy to dodge those Miami grates on weekday mornings?

The Garage lives at garage.newschallenge.org, and you should come have a look.

How can you pass up a chance to talk strategy with the venerable Brian Oberkirch, implementation with Mr. Messina, social media with Beth Kanter, video with Ryanne and Jay? And that’s not even half of the cool kids in Garage ready to mentor you.

Come hang out, and let’s see what kind of awesome local news ideas we can think up together…

p.s. The Garage stays open until November 1st for project mentoring–

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I bought a camera on eBay, I told her, opened the box, attached the lens, and went outside. The first thing I saw was a spider’s web, and I developed that first image of the first roll in a dark room later that week as part of a photography workshop.

Soon after, kthread was born, in May of 2004 (I started blogging later, so we celebrate those anniversaries in January). That first spider image became the background of the first kthread, a conceptual Flash site where a spider figures heavily in the navigation. More details on kthread design and cyberfeminism in the colophon.

Another spider hovers in the current header image of this blog, and the universe continues to place webs in my path.

With so much still to learn about photography, I’ve found webs difficult to capture (perhaps it’s the challenge I enjoy so)—the strands are too slender for the camera’s viewfinder, and it all dissolves into a beautiful blur.

(Read the rest after the jump.)

Late afternoon sun often throws webs into focus, though, and Ziggy-zaggy (yes, that should explain my profile image and Halloween costume) patterns dazzle while the spider continues her work, climbing up to patch a section,

back down to command the center of her strung architecture.

Behind and beyond the web, I now attempt to make the background into colored bokeh circles (swimming to the right in the image below).

Even from the side, as I stealthily draw closer to a still and silent web,

it begins to dance, gifting light,

industriously sending vibrating lines of work down, up, and out—

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I resisted for a long time, but in the end, I had to know why everyone has been Twittering this spring. It is an application in search of a purpose, I thought to myself, and invited a dozen friends to join me in finding that purpose.

I work in an Interactive department, so my work colleagues gave me a smaller amount of grief and signed up, two academic friends who moderate XML (for the Rossetti Archive) joined without giving me grief, and two whip-smart political friends embraced it and invited their colleagues. I was unable to convince either of my lovely sisters to join, but I learned after joining that quite a few c00l kids of digerati fame were still actively Twittering (a concern, as a late adopter), and I decided to
set it up on my phone and IM.

I’m thinking more and more about portability in apps these days. Perhaps because I’ve spent weekends in airports lately, it seems to me that the apps smaller than three ounces that can easily be placed into and plucked out of a transparent bag win. I want out with my small pieces loosely trailing me, thanks. Make it simple to join, simpler to add profile details and invite my friends, and, as Brian Oberkirch argues pervasively undo (and export). The 2.0 user in me wants, not an easter egg, but an ice cream, in the Cameron Crowe Elizabethtown sense (“Here’s a little something to make you happy. Something sweet that melts in five minutes”).

To clarify the reference, there is one reason why Elizabethtown merits renting, and that reason is Susan Sarandon‘s solo tap dance at her husband’s funeral. Sarandon’s character had never tapped before, and I never updated my Facebook status; we were both soft-shoeing our way toward life streaming.

Two weekends ago, I woke up to rain in Cambridge. Determined to explore before the MiT5 conference registration began, I walked down Memorial Drive without an umbrella,

and was inspired by the message on this telephone pole. A good beginning to a weekend about media in transition, the full name of this conference started by Henry Jenkins,

I paused to watch someone feed the ducks and thought about how fantastically garish bright flowers look in the rain.

The English nerd in me thrilling to literally walk over and around bridges while metaphorically thinking about the fact that I had only one real link at the conference: Scott Rettberg, the digital scholar, Grand Text Auto blogger, and brother of a colleague of mine at the University of Virginia, Eric Rettberg (who grills a mean brat, as I blogged a few weeks ago).

The first conference day passed quickly, and I was sitting in the Bartos Media Lab Auditorium before the second plenary session that night when, as I quickly checked my Facebook feed and noticed that Eric was now listed as friends with someone I didn’t know, I heard, “Is that Eric Rettberg who has a brother Scott?” asked by woman’s voice over my left shoulder.

I turned to meet Jill Walker, a blog researcher who lives in Norway. “Scott’s right here,” she said, and I turned to deliver Eric’s greeting. I was flattered when Jill twitterfriended me during the plenary and suggested that I friend one of her friends who was also at MiT5, Luca (he has also blogged about twittering at MiT5). Then one of his friends, Fabio Giglietto, also sitting behind me, friended me, and suddenly, I was in a small MiT5 Twitter circle.

Though at times I was guilty of overTwittering (one Twitter defriending over the weekend), I used Twitter to take notes and carry on conversations with fellow attendees—my tweets had more “@”s, indicating they were directed at specific Twitter users. It was like being able to sit in on multiple panels at once, and reading back through the Twitters gives me a better sense of where I was (in a fuzzy intellectual sense) than the Gmail notes I was writing at the beginning of the conference. Jill was even liveblogging in addition to Twittering, a new goal for me. Maybe at MiT6.

The best and worst thing about Twitter is its shallowness. Tweets are 140-character moments that describe state, often emotional state, rather than plotted geographical location (the reason why I left Plazes and why Twittervision is a fascination tweet aggregation, not conversation).

That purpose I was looking for in Twitter? Emotive mapping through tweet self-tagging. Maybe emotagging follows geotagging. Cheer up, emo kid. Whiny tweets are tedious.

Thinking about my new circle of Twitterers, I hailed a cab on Friday night and asked the driver to go to Harvard Square. “Where in?” he asked, nodding when I named Charley’s Kitchen. “Great hamburgers,” he said, respecting my dive bar decision, and we proceeded to talk about energy healing as the cab raced through side streets. I did Twitter from Charley’s, but didn’t use Twitter as Dodgeball: “Chowhound never fails–magic hat and red sox at a dive bar.” I didn’t have enough characters to Twitter the double cheeseburger and double lobster roll; good beer on tap and sitting on a bar stool watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees with Boston locals took precedence.

Saturday afternoon the weather was beautiful, and I used the lunch break and a panel session to walk from MIT to Harvard Square along the Charles.

I ordered an excellent bresaola salad and crispy half of a pizza at Cambridge1,

and then walked to my ultimate destination, the Formaggio Kitchen, where I asked to see the cheese caves, the perfect ending to Grilled Cheese Month (more on those adventures in an upcoming blog post).

I felt it would be insulting to Twitter from the restaurant or on the way to the Formaggio Kitchen, under the assumption that my new Twitter friends would be sitting in panel sessions. I did Twitter as I was hailing a taxi back to MIT, though, to indicate that I was making every attempt to return in time for Jill and Scott’s panel (with Nick Montfort): “Was just in the cheese cave of formaggio kitchen so happy now to hail cab to mit”, forgoing punctuation, but giving a specific location, albeit on my way out.

A few days ago, danah posted a list of open Twitter questions, which prompted me to think harder about my Twitter habits and my Twitter friendships.

I have been too busy to blog, but constantly Twittering in the past few weeks, and my sister Katrina mentioned this weekend that she had read the tweets on kthread to see how I was.

Adding the Twitter friend feed widget to the kthread sidebar (above right) has been an adjustment, as the Twitter widget publishes the status updates of friends (much more than a validating “I Was Here” MyBlogLog appearance). To know where I really am, though, means knowing what my friends are experiencing at the same time.

While I wrote this post tonight, I have also been upset along with Zadi that Griffith Park is burning, hoped the fire wasn’t near my friend Grant’s Santa Monica residence, looked up Loopt when danah twittered to ask if anyone was using it, raided the freezer when Zadi and Steve twittered from Cold Stone Creamery, and just now instant messaged with my friend Brian, who promised to join Twitter when he takes a break from babysitting virtual islands tonight at his night job. And the circle widens…

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In recent weeks, I have wanted to be a superhero—to rise above the sphere where trolls flamed the woman who writes in praise of passionate users, Kathy Sierra, and a mail system (even with Jedi mailboxes) that delivered a slick mainstream magazine with a cover featuring a cheesecake image of Jenna Fischer from “The Office” in a business suit and, flipping over the “radically” transparent cover sheet, without it.

Wired arrived just days before the anticipated new episode of “The Office” airing last night, where Pam (Fischer) was to watch her violent, emotionally unstable ex (he threw a glass at a wall in the last episode) potentially mess up her Ross, the much-swooned-over John Krasinski.

The magazine cover has been made into an animated .gif (so twenty-first century of them), which presides over the top of the current issue page. And, beyond exposing Wired‘s goal of pandering to readers with the sensitivity and maturity of Michael Scott, a character we can easily imagine putting receptionist Pam Beesly up to the stunt, the fluffy “Worst Practices” story about the show mentions the cover model once, in a passing connection to her relationship with Jim Halpert.

At least Playboy has good articles.

Explaining his rationale in a Wired blog titled “Underwire,” Creative Director Scott Dadich posted,

“WIRED being WIRED, we wanted a cover that was smart and showy. And as Creative Director I wanted something that hadn’t been done before. We settled on the idea of printing on clear acetate. But it had to be interactive. Now you’re in a business suit—now you’re not.

Then we wrestled with the question of how to best show the real goings on inside the modern American office. How about using ‘The Office’ as a model? And who would we like to see practicing what we’re preaching? Dwight? Ehhh…notsomuch. Of course, Pam.”

(My, interactivity. Coincidentally, Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on the show, joins Jenna as a cover model on newsstands this week; New York magazine lets Wired be Wired, and features Wilson with a suite of intelligent articles about office life, including a pithy, albeit brief interview with the actor.)

And yet, recent weeks have been a lovely time to hover close to the surface as the East Coast has burst into bloom, reminding me that even with the cover sham and trollery, it is still a beautiful world.

Two weekends ago I was shopping at my favorite Charlottesville vintage store, Bittersweet, with my friend Dana, who pointed out the below tree—her favorite, she told me, near her house. Like this tree, Dana continues to branch out and fork her interests as she acquires new vintage dresses (she bought a forest green classic with a wonderful neck detail) for her verdant social calendar and increasing skills as she presses onward with her xml work at the Rossetti Archive.

Dropping Dana off, I returned to the tree to take pictures (Dana, I have high res versions for you—maybe wallpaper for your computer?) and decided to wear a vintage dress that matched the flowers to a fabulous baby shower that afternoon for my friends Angela and Nate.

Carolyn Tate, pictured in the foreground, hosted the festive celebration at Angela and Nate’s new house. Both Carolyn and Angela are colleagues of mine in the University of Virginia’s graduate program in English, and they planned and executed this event while in the throes of comprehensive department examinations.

Angela’s mom contributed unforgettable shower favors with ultrasound images of Angela and Nate’s child; while pregnant, Angela has coordinated a move, helped Nate update the house (they remodeled the kitchen), and passed the aforementioned department examinations, so I was not surprised to learn her mother could also represent.

The poised Sara Bryant (pictured at left) took notes as they opened very large presents,

and handcrafted ones, like the baby blanket Angela’s mother had indicated was for another baby when Angela noticed her knitting it—Angela admitted her previous jealousy and her satisfaction at now having a covering for her child in the correct shade of Carolina blue her father favors.

The most animated mother-to-be I’ve had the great pleasure of helping to shower with gifts, she made all of us “ooh” with her as she opened booties,

an on-trend laminated diaper bag (from transplanted Manhattanite Carolyn, of course),

and a baby outfit she decided was suitable for tapas at Mas, our crowd’s favorite restaurant.

Yeah, hipster baby, yeah.

My friend Rob gave his two favorite Dr. Seuss books (these are also my favorites—Rob’s impeccable taste in this genre another reason we are close friends), the political Butter Battle Book and The Lorax, particularly appropriate for a baby born under this administration,

and Angela could not contain her elation upon receiving a figurine commemorating her time wearing maternity clothes:

As the couple plans to name their child Stella, my roommate Ben and I wanted to give her the stars, and we wrapped a toy turtle that projects constellations through cutouts in the shell.

Rob and I went out into the dusk and watched the stars appear outside a downtown bar,

and I woke the next morning ready to embrace spring and all its culinary charms—the first radishes,

a salad with raspberries and pecans,

and the happy thought of two new recipes I made on Friday: panko pork tenderloin medallions from the April Gourmet,

and a tweaked leek and lemon fusilli (boil in cream at the end) in April’s Food and Wine, from A16, perhaps my favorite restaurant in San Francisco.

This past weekend found me in the kitchen again, making strawberry jam for cream drop biscuits, smushing avocado for guacamole to top scrambled eggs, roasting tomatillos for salsa to accompany black bean cakes, and chopping peppers for breakfast potatoes.

My favorite Brit, John, was in from London, and he declared the 31st America Day, exhorting us to action in an email written across the pond.

“Let us now praise famous chain stores,” he said, and so this past Saturday we celebrated the good and local (see the wonderful Albemarle Baking Company sticky buns Cory and Brian brought and the Spudnuts Dana brought below)

and the kitschy local, beginning with brunch food and Masmosas (substitute grapefruit juice). I dressed up slightly for the occasion.

Brian and Cory told my sister Katrina, who began filming the adventurous day at brunch, about their favorite places in America,

and after brunch the group decided to explore the neighborhood before journeying outward.

I took images of this tree in the middle of the cul-de-sac as Rob discovered a bridge a short distance away.

Rob began to take pictures, and I couldn’t resist joining Dana and John on the bridge; (the three below images courtesy Rob Stilling)

Katrina set up her shot and Ben coordinated the group’s next event: miniature golfing.

(How fantastic are Dana’s glasses?)

I hadn’t played putt-putt in a few years, but Ben took the lead, filling out the scorecard and instructing our playing rotation.

(The two below images courtesy Rob Stilling)

I have no explanation for the elephant in the middle of the course (that might mar its delightful eminence over the two courses), or the abnormally large shroom Dana posed with for this picture.

We made a joint decision to include the U-Haul truck parked behind the course in Katrina’s filming as mobility is a key American characteristic,

and then we headed to the local DQ and met up with our friend Joe,

consumed Blizzards (that, when DQ staff delivered to the table, did stay in their cups when turned upside down) and DQ dogs (Dana, admirably, consumed two),

and John and I nursed our respective injuries (John had been attacked by the Subway door, I had a bloody nose), which added to the latent violence the group discovered was at the core of Americanness,

and Katrina found a sign for a Blizzard in a flavor that was also her high school nickname, Kit Kat.

Across the street at Target, Rob had me pose next to American icons (Marilyn and Captain Jack Sparrow),

and I tested a recliner with speakers on the side before wandering over the shoes section and scaring small children. (Wonder Woman images courtesy Rob Stilling)

Katrina judged the Target Competition portion of the day; given half an hour in teams of two, the three teams sought out the most American item in the store. Rob and I felt strongly that our baseball-shaped Easter basket was a solid entry, Dana and Ben showed up with a Radio Flyer in their cart, and Joe and John swept with a frog doll that played the Britpop “Hit Me Baby One More Time” while punching the air with boxing gloves.

I purchased a sparkly purple jump rope lariat of truth, and we were off to the bowling alley, where we rented two lanes and very American bowling shoes.

Rob recorded Ben pioneering an arm-waving technique, and then Rob impressed us all with his controlled strike skillset. (Below image courtesy Rob Stilling)

Eric bowled a respectable second game and found time to fish a stuffed motorcycle eagle from the clamp game, which he gave to John.

Our new friend Buster the Eagle tagged along as we left, tearing the fiery Rob away from the arcade,

and Buster sat on the bar at Ruby Tuesday, where we stared in wonderment at the reflected faces of customers patronizing the “Garden Bar.”

We then sank lower, venturing to a Cheeseburger in Paradise location,

where I pondered how Ben could possibly order a burger with Velveeta (which is not a cheese, and is instead some sort of processed amalgamation of yellow and orange dyes). (Wonder Woman image courtesy Rob Stilling)

Things looked brighter, or maybe it was certain cheering slants of lights at X Lounge downtown, as our number grew and friends gathered to celebrate the final dregs of America Day, that made me smile as the day drew to a close. (Below image courtesy Rob Stilling)

Dana and Eric filled Keicy in on what had happened since brunch; Rob and Steph framed themselves elegantly on the couches.

I attempted to chronicle the number of people my costume had kerflummoxed during the day, including the bouncer on the other side of the windows, (Wonder Woman image courtesy Rob Stilling)

and John woke the next morning, collected his new shirt Rob had awarded him for the journey back to England, and appeared ready to return to work at the British Library.

While John was in Chicago last week, he found this doll’s shirt and personalized it with Arcade Fire buttons. It adorns my cubicle, and I have looked up this week and grinned, remembering John’s promise that he made as we drove to Dulles, listening to neon bibles (if you haven’t explored the promo site, do) and Air’s new Pocket Symphony:

though he boarded a plane back to England on Sunday, secretly, John stands at the ready—should America need him, he’ll be here. Speaking for all of us in Charlottesville, he cannot return too soon…

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Andy Carvin has named today Stop Cyberbullying Day.

I designed the badge at left for the cause; I also like the banner Rich James designed.

Join the ning; blog the issue; heed the twitter.

Trolls have no place in Web 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0.

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I have suspended, for a time, this blog in support of Kathy Sierra.

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