One day Miyamoto was tending his garden.  He was in awe at the process of planting, growing and harvesting and the general admiration of the beauty that can arise out of the garden.  This is when the crazy idea of making some sort of garden-influenced game came to mind.  As cheesy and boring as it may sound, he did not end up with a design reminiscent of literally watching grass grow on your TV screen.  The end result was Pikmin, a title where the player plants and harvests little flower creatures.  You play as Captain Olimar whose job is to keep all the Pikmin alive, safe from the large bugs and animals that inhabit the planet.  Quite a far cry from the shoot-to-kill mentality, eh?

A few years after bringing an evolved sense of gardening to gaming, Miyamoto oversaw the advent of Wii Fit, a new interactive way to bring health into the fold of non-traditional gaming.  So instead of playing a version of creation on screen, the player would literally be working out, which in and of itself isn’t new or innovative, but bringing it into the fold of interactive games is more than admirable.  Even the joy of playing music is made simpler, a-la Guitar Hero or Rock Band, in Wii Music - a simpler way to enjoy the beauty of making music than even the aforementioned blockbusters.

I have carried a reprint of John Lasseter’s seminal paper on computer animation, “Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation,” for the last 18 years. This hardcopy document has been to Japan, both coasts of the US, and has really been near/dear to me and is yellowed from age and embarassingly food-stained and so forth. It occurred to me today that maybe this paper might be available online, and I just found it in excerpted form here. I’m not sure what to call it … but maybe I had a kind of myopia when it came to this one document in my life. I felt that unless I held onto it in print, that I would never be able to handily access the information. Discovering that the content is available online right now seems truly freeing to me. And yet oddly enough, I am still hesitant to place my tattered reprint into my recycling box before I leave to my next engagement this evening.

There’s always the “just in case” when it comes to any information around you. Even in this digital era we know it’s easy to lose information forever. Nothing is truly permanent. But I’ve carried this paper around for 18 years — hmmmm, as old as an RISD freshman. Ah. The power of perspective. Looks like this paper will be sticking around me for many more years to come. Dilemma resolved. Paper wins.

The goal of the creators of The Big Chart, The Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America (CICINA), is to find the single best thing in the world through an NCAA basketball tournament-style bracketing system. This video explains their plans.

“Is the Bilbao Guggenheim better than McDonald’s french fries?Are penguins better than Miracle Grow? Can anything beat heated seats on a cold November day?”

(via design observer)

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population.

For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants?

That’s a question they must now ask. Last spring, this small Alpine nation began mandating that geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a plant’s dignity.

“Unfortunately, we have to take it seriously,” Beat Keller, a molecular biologist at the University of Zurich. “It’s one more constraint on doing genetic research.”

Dr. Keller recently sought government permission to do a field trial of genetically modified wheat that has been bred to resist a fungus. He first had to debate the finer points of plant dignity with university ethicists. Then, in a written application to the government, he tried to explain why the planned trial wouldn’t “disturb the vital functions or lifestyle” of the plants. He eventually got the green light.

The rule, based on a constitutional amendment, came into being after the Swiss Parliament asked a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians to establish the meaning of flora’s dignity.

“We couldn’t start laughing and tell the government we’re not going to do anything about it,” says Markus Schefer, a member of the ethics panel and a professor of law at the University of Basel. “The constitution requires it.”

In April, the team published a 22-page treatise on “the moral consideration of plants for their own sake.” It stated that vegetation has an inherent value and that it is immoral to arbitrarily harm plants by, say, “decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason.”

On the question of genetic modification, most of the panel argued that the dignity of plants could be safeguarded “as long as their independence, i.e., reproductive ability and adaptive ability, are ensured.” In other words: It’s wrong to genetically alter a plant and render it sterile.

This may be the funniest and best-smelling work of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published. Some may respect the hint of Elmer’s glue in recent printings of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.), or the faint traces of burlap and cocoa-bean that linger deep in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, or even the fume of indoor swimming-pool that clings to the paper-bound decolletage of Slang!: The Topic-By-Topic Dictionary of Contemporary American Lingoes. But a single deep draught of J. E. Lighter’s magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang (volume I, A-G) is a higher order of experience: it smells like a high-ceilinged bare room freshly painted white - clean and sunlit, full of reverberative promise and proud of its mitered corners, although with a mildly intoxicating or hyperventilational ‘finish’…

But for the jury I’m chairing to have the maximum delight, we need some really good submissions—and the deadline for initial entries is Wednesday, 15 October.

So, are you, or someone you know, thinking about a project that demonstrates the integration of faith, learning, and practice and that in some way shows “how the academic disciplines and professions can contribute to human flourishing”? And are you, or someone involved with the project, actively affiliated with an institution of higher education or a 2008 graduate of one? Then get yourself on over to the Web site for the prize and send off an executive summary by the deadline, followed by the full submission no more than a month later. (By the way, in additional to the cash prizes for the winners, 26 semifinalists will receive free registration for the Following Christ conference.) I’d love to help recognize your work and vision for cultural creativity, so do apply and—unless your innate competitiveness hasn’t been properly sanctified!—spread the word to others as well.

Bonnie Erickson designed and built the inimitable Miss Piggy in 1974 for an early “Muppets” television special, produced by Jim Henson.  Puppets, props and storyboards from Henson’s prolific career are featured in the traveling exhibit ”Jim Henson’s Fantastic World.” Anika Gupta spoke with Erickson.

You’ve been designing muppets and mascots for years. What attracts you to them?
The creation of worlds—the whole process of designing characters, putting together a back story, giving the characters an environment in which they can thrive and casting performers who can bring them to life.

Why do puppets appeal to adults as well as children?
They’ve been a tradition across the world for thousands of years as a form of storytelling. But, until recently, they have’t been appreciated in the United States. Now, however, puppetry is finding a niche in the arts—dance, theater and even opera. I think people appreciate the performers’ skill as well as the artistry of the puppets themselves. We owe a lot of that to [Muppets creator] Jim Henson’s vision.

Who inspired the character of Miss Piggy?
My mother used to live in North Dakota where Peggy Lee sang on the local radio station before she became a famous jazz singer. When I first created Miss Piggy I called her Miss Piggy Lee—as both a joke and an homage. Peggy Lee was a very independent woman, and Piggy certainly is the same. But as Piggy’s fame began to grow, nobody wanted to upset Peggy Lee, especially because we admired her work. So, the Muppet’s name was shortened to Miss Piggy.

Cooking is universal among our species. Cooking is even more uniquely characteristic of our species than language. Animals do at least bark, roar, chirp, do at least signal by sound; only we bake, boil, roast and fry....

Few advances comparable in importance to cooking have happened since [its development]. The most important have been more quantitative than qualitative. We began not simply to harvest but to adopt certain palatable plants and animals as aids and conspirators. By 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, we had domesticated all those that have been central to our diets ever sense—barley, wheat, rice, maize, potatoes, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and so on.... We have domesticated nothing more significant than strawberries and reindeer since.

—Culture Making, p.110

In the moments when I can attend one of my children’s soccer games, I find great pleasure from sitting in a field of grass. Since I was a child I have been making little sculptures out of blades of grass … as I did so just this last weekend during a match. Coming off of the inauguration, it made me think of our Provost Jessie Shefrin’s phrase, “Thinking is a kind of making, and making is a kind of thinking.” I make. Therefore, I think. I hope you make something interesting today.

The president of the British Cartographic Society says Internet mapping (Google Maps etc.) is wiping away the richness of Britain’s geography and history. She says “corporate cartographers” are leaving off landmarks like churches, ancient woodlands and stately homes. And history out of sight is history out of memory. [BBC]

A photo is floating around our attic somewhere, probably in a Converse shoebox. In it, I am just barely fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school, wearing an oversized green sweatshirt, jeans, and perhaps the shoes that came in the box that now holds the photo. The setting is my school library. I am sitting at a table where I appear to be studying, but across from me is Rob, another fifteen-year-old sophomore. The look I’m giving the yearbook photographer is an exaggeration of innocence. Though our books are open, pens in hand, Rob has just finished giving me directions to his house for the party he plans to have while his parents are out of town.

At twenty-eight years old, nearly eight years in to my marriage to Rob, I can see this sly study hall meeting around a library table as a fulcrum on which much of my life story turns. I can also see tables—those ubiquitous pieces of furniture that invite gathering by their nature—as a key image for exploring where I’ve been and where I may be going.

Even in the middle of winter, when I visited, it was apparent how meticulously the gardens are maintained—unlike many other urban gardens I know, which out of season can resemble the trash heaps they started out as. Everything looked freshly groomed: the wooden fences separating individual 15-by-20-foot plots, the gaily painted casitas, tool sheds that are “artistic statements,” Ross told me, and gathering places like stoops. Several gardens had plastic-covered hoop houses, greenhouses that in the dead of winter can get pretty grungy. I didn’t detect a rip. 

“We have nine community gardens in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the city if not the country,” Ross said, “and the incidence of vandalism has been almost zero.” Joel Cortijo, a colleague along for the tour, said simply, “It’s ours.” . . .

Gardens are the heart of everything Nuestras Raíces does. Children can often be found playing in vegetable patches and in adjacent playgrounds built on land cleared of needles, broken glass, and brush that gave dealers a place to hide their drugs. Grandfathers and fathers, many of whom grew up on farms in Puerto Rico, teach schoolchildren how to grow peppers and eggplants and experiment in greenhouses on the farm with exotics like papayas and avocados, to see what they can get to grow in the New England climate. “During the summer you’ll find a dozen guys sitting on tables and benches,” Ross said, “shelling beans and telling lies about the size of their tomatoes.”

If cultivating and creating are so central to our biblical vocation, why have they been put aside?

The disenfranchisement of conservative Christians from cultural power at the dawn of the 20th century elicited strong reaction. Just two generations after evangelical Protestants had been intimately involved in building almost every major post-Civil War cultural institution, they either were kicked out or left voluntarily. People who wanted to hold on to theologically conservative beliefs thought you couldn’t do that and participate fully in mainstream culture. We’ve spent a century working our way back from the fallout of that.

Last century we also saw the rise of mass consumption as a way of life in America. When you look at newspapers from 100 years ago the principal word used to refer to Americans in general was citizen. Now the word USA Today uses most often to refer to all of us is consumers. And if we want to talk about people in their civic role we don’t usually call them citizens but voters. Think about how different those words are, how much thinner a word voter is than citizen. It’s not just Christians but Americans in general who have adopted a posture of waiting passively for cultural offerings. We think it’s our job simply to figure out what we like and buy it.

Finally, being an effective cultivator and creator requires certain disciplines—cultivating a certain awareness and willingness to work at things in the world. Consumer culture has made it easy to get along in many spheres without learning basic skills, whether it’s how to keep the garden growing or how to cook. Although technology gives us an amazing sense of power and infinite capacity, it does so by taking over all these things that our parents and grandparents knew how to do. But there is a backlash. People are starting to realize that we’ve lost some capacities that we don’t want to lose.

Your book returns us to a much older story—the biblical story—and shows where humans stand in that greater, ancient narrative.

One of the things that has hindered evangelical cultural creativity has been a nostalgia for the nineteenth century when we were dominant culturally in a way that we will probably never be again. Ancient Israel is a much better place to start because it was so small, always beleaguered, always overwhelmed by empires around them, and yet they sustained this incredible, world-changing culture. That’s a much more instructive picture than hoping that we can reclaim the kind of cultural control that evangelicals briefly had at one point in American history.