World Wildlife Fund was on the warpath September 1 after a tasteless ad exploiting 9/11 appeared online bearing its famous panda logo. It showed dozens of planes diving at lower Manhattan with the tag line: "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it." The ad surfaced--days before the eighth anniversary of the attack--when it won a best of 2009 award from The One Club, a nonprofit that promotes "excellence" in advertising. The image was presented by admen from the agency DDB Brasil to WWF officers in Brazil and quickly rejected. You hear a lot of concepts in meetings, and WWF assumed it was dead and gone. But it appears now that someone submitted it to a competition. Officials at The One Club, the Manhattan-based group that named it the best public service print ad of 2009, did not respond to messages asking them to explain why. See picture at:
http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/09/02/2009-09-02_wwf_appalled_by_911_terror_ad.html

In the 2009 edition of the UNESCO’s Atlas of World Languages in Danger, Manx was listed as effectively dead. Chief Minister Tony Brown wrote to UNESCO claiming the language was still flourishing on the island. The classification will now be changed to 'critically endangered'. Government minister Phil Gawne, who is a fluent Manx speaker, added that as well as Mr Brown's letter there were many others sent by Manx speakers. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/isle_of_man/8210192.stm

EPA Announces New Steps to Protect Americans from Lead Poisoning
EPA website on Lead in Paint, Dust, and Soil: News release: “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced a series of steps to increase protections against and raise awareness of lead-based products in our environment and communities, particularly to prevent lead poisoning in children. EPA announced that it will grant a petition to initiate regulatory action to address lead hazards associated with the manufacture, processing, and distribution in commerce of lead wheel balancing weights ("wheel weights") According to a U.S. Geological Survey study in 2003, 65,000 tons of lead wheel weights were in use in the United States and approximately 2,000 tons of these weights were lost from vehicles into the environment. Voluntary actions on the part of U.S. auto manufactures and an European Union ban on their use has reduced the number of lead wheel weights, but they continue to be the predominate product in the tire replacement market." EPA intends to strengthen requirements it issued in 2008 to protect children from lead-based paint poisoning associated with renovation and repair activities in homes and schools. EPA will propose to expand lead-safe work practices and other protective requirements for renovation and painting work involving lead paint to cover most pre-1978 housing, and after certain renovation, repair, and painting preparation activities are performed to require renovation firms to perform quantitative dust testing to achieve dust-lead levels that comply with EPA's regulatory standards. Renovations on the exteriors of public and commercial buildings will also be proposed to be covered and EPA will evaluate whether renovations in the interior of these buildings create lead-based paint hazards.

Long Island's windmills were called smock mills because settlers thought the skirted towers resembled baker's aprons. Two renowned builders, Nathaniel Dominy and Samuel Schellinger, designed and constructed most of the mills from white oak. Inside, millstones ground grain (one type of millstone imported from France ground baker's flour, and a different stone brought in from New England ground cornmeal and animal feed). Soon, communities sprang up around the essential facilities, and a sort of flour hierarchy developed: Unlike local farmers, magistrates or ministers could grind their grain for free, according to Richard Barons, executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society. For decades, a group of villages on Long Island have worked diligently to preserve the 11 mills here—the largest collection of wooden windmills in the United States. Thanks to their efforts, seven have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. "They tell the story of technology in the Wooden Age," says Hefner. "They're irreplaceable." http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2009/september-october/form-function.html

Richard Neutra (1892-1970) moved to Los Angeles from his native Vienna in 1925 and became one of the foremost proponents of Modernism, a style that embraced simple, rectilinear forms and shared social space. The Modernists broke down the barriers between interior and exterior, taking advantage of a house's natural setting while introducing new, often industrial materials. All this at a price most everyone could afford. http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2009/september-october/living-with-neutra.html

Ken Wilkinson knew that he wanted to open a chocolate boutique, using recipes and techniques he had learned in Europe, and that his present hometown of Houston wouldn’t support the scenario he envisioned. So when Wilkinson came across a deteriorating 1874 bank building along Main Street in Calvert, Texas, a Victorian town that boasts one of the largest historic districts in the United States, his entrepreneurial wheels started spinning. Calvert, he soon learned, enjoyed great prosperity in the 1870s as a rail link for goods headed to and from Galveston. By the 1950s, though, when the area’s cotton plantations were mechanized and work grew scarce, the town settled into a rhythm of languor. Many of Main Street’s historic buildings lay vacant. Wilkinson, a self-described “exacting bastard with a low tolerance for compromise,” bought the bank building, restored it, and opened CocoaModa. http://www.texashighways.com/index.php/component/content/article/49-dining-a-tastes/5959-th-taste-calverts-cocoamoda

Google "cob" today and you'll find numerous references to a marvelous mix of dirt, water, and straw, which has been used for centuries to build beautiful, comfortable homes--warm in winter, cool in summer--even in cold, wet SE England, where there are tens of thousands of cob homes, some of them 500-700 years old! In Devon, they say "give a cob house good boots (foundation) and a good hat (roof), and it will last forever!"
In the U.S., in the past 15 years, there has been a huge revival of interest in cob and other traditional, earthen materials (like adobe, from the Arabic, Al-toba, meaning "the brick"), rammed earth, light-straw clay, and the modern hybrid straw-bale, which is, at best, straw protected with a thick layer of mud plaster. It makes sense. We all know how to make mud pies, and when you work with mud, architecture reverts to its traditional roots, which are sculpture and playful nest-making. For more info, try digyourhandsinthedirt.net, or look up The Hand Sculpted House, at chelseagreen.com, or just look up "cob" on the web! A mud house won't burn down, the bugs can't eat it, and it's dirt cheap (if you make it yourself)! Mine took just 700 hours, and it cost me less than a thousand bucks. Kiko Denzer (potlatch cmug.com)

On September 2, 1901 at the Minnesota State Fair Teddy Roosevelt (books by this author) gave a speech and uttered his famous phrase, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." He said that it was a West African proverb that he had always liked. He probably picked it up from his wide reading—he often read a book a day, even after he became president, and he wrote a total of 40 books during his lifetime.
On September 2, 1666, at one o'clock in the morning the Great Fire of London broke out at the king's bakery on Pudding Lane. The king's baker was named Thomas Farynor, and it was his house that caught on fire. There wasn't a centralized method of fire control in London. People usually took care of fires themselves, and if the danger was serious enough, they tore down adjacent buildings to make a fire break. When the Great Fire broke out, people in the neighborhood called in the Lord Mayor of London to ask permission to tear the buildings down. He didn't think it was a big deal—in fact, he said, "A woman might piss it out." A lot of the information we have about the fire comes from Samuel Pepys, who kept detailed diaries about his personal life and the events going on around him. The Writer’s Almanac