Several years ago, I began cataloguing a "shop or don't shop" list- places where one could get fair trade or handmade stuff- things guaranteed not to have been made by 5 year old chilren in sweatshops. There were holiday gift buying guides and reviews of natural products. I published my finds in a monthly newsletter.

Shopless.MarshmallowheadDesign.com is the extention of that list. It includes compilations of the materials I gathered before and many new things. I plan for it to be a repository of links, recipes, shopping guides and how to lists.

Please leave comments, add your own links or email me (lyndseraefaba @ gmail.com) with ideas.

And please remember, "If you can't do any good, at least don't do any harm."

HUNTER S THOMPSON, “Song of the Sausage Creature”

On my tombstone they will carve, “IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.”

HST has always been one of my favourite writers. When I first discovered Gonzo, I rejoiced that there had been others. Much of my life has been Gonzo. It’s been a weird shit life, but boy has it been fun.

Ialso love thompson’s work covering motorbikes. he seemed to have a real grasp on what we enthusiasts are after.

I am spending this week being a road person. Though I began my riding career in the dirt, the road is probably where I will end. Here’s some of what Hunter had to say about people like us:

“Balls,” I said. “Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Café Racers.”

The Café Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Café Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Particularly, this is true of my northern bretheren. We have to ride 100 miles just to get to the beginning of the good roads and then ride all day after that. As hard and fast as we can. It’s probably dangerous; it’s definitely illegal. In our defense, we try to get to the track as often as possible, where safety and legality aren’t issues… but those roads… they call to us- we can’t stay away. Who would want to?

I get a little bleary-eyed over cafe racers, having one cafe Monster myself and all the ducatisti devotion to the machine that comes along. I like the torque, the speed, the hairsplit maneuvers. I like that I can climb all the way off the bike until I’m only holding on with my knee and toss the bastard sidewise in a turn. I like when the back wheel breaks loose, just a little. I don’t feel fear I only feel the vibration of the bike. I don’t hear the cocophany of sounds usually in my head, only engine.

Revving too high: shift.

Revving too low: shift.

Revving just right: hold on, hold on, throw bike into turn, accelerate, push down, shift.

It’s only physics when I’m on the bike and I spend my time in the seat grasping for those few perfect moments when time stops. Trust me, it does. In the dirt, when you go airborne and your feet come off the pegs, everything stops. On the road, when you slide through a turn perfectly one with the machine, time stops.

And you breathe.

That one breath of alive.

The one those stuffy zen masters are always talking about.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

I recently decided to order some new business cards. Foremost, I got a new phone number. I change the look of my sites often and am always adding new services and products, so I didn’t want to go with the 500 card minimum that most cheap printing services require. A friend suggested I check out Moo Cards because they offer packages starting at 100 and the vaunted “mini-card” size.

Moo allows customers to choose one static “info” side (in my case, below, it is the black and white image on the upper left side) and up to the number of your total order for the “image” side. For someone like me, with at least eleventy-billion image possibilities this amount of choosing was a little daunting. Once I settled on my “info” image, I had to decide what my most important stuff was going to be. Obviously, I wanted one that I could hand out at clubs and shows, showcasing my music and one for Renegade Zafu but what to do about Marshmallowhead Design?

After a ton of hand wringing, I settled on a series of cartoons and bright colours that would be similar, but not too repetitive. I figure I’ll go through 80 cartoon cards pretty quick, so my next batch can contain even more ‘toonages. Unless I decide to change my site layouts again…

I ordered my cards on a Monday and had them the following Friday. Printing was fast, quality fantastic, packaging adorable and I especially loved my keyring card carrier.

Mucho kudos, Moo! Now, if you’ll just start offering Moo Stickers in the U.S.!

My telecaster adventures continue. After trying in vain to re-produce the amazing quality of the SCN pickups by plugging the guitar straight into my macbook, I took a chance and recorded my amplifier with a microphone.

I have a ratty old analog mic from Radio Shack that my computer won’t even recognise if it’s plugged in directly. Luckily, I also have a Line 6 Pocket Pod, which is a little kidney bean shaped amp modeling device. It’s got a whole pile of crazy settings on it but mostly I use it to make my VOX sound like an old British tweed. It had a clean channel for “vocal” on it, so I decided to give it a shot.

Both audio samples are the theme from a jazz composition I’ve been working on. The first is what happens with just a microphone:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And the second is with the addition of the pod:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

So, problem solved. You can check out a flange distorted version as well as the other tests at my YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/lyndseraefaba

I’m on here sometimes harping about doing a random act of kindness. The way I see it, we’re all made of the same stuff, part of the same family. We all deserve love and support. Reaching out to your fellow being feels good- it was programmed into us to care.

Here’s a great opportunity to try it out and see what it feels like. Visit Ronnie’s Tender Heart on Etsy and buy a random act of kindness: etsy.com/shop/ronniestenderheart

I don’t know Ronnie or her friends, so i’m just going to reproduce their shop information here, to help convince you that this is a good idea:

Thank you for visiting. This is a non-profit shop. I am Chante’ from junkyardglitter.etsy.com. I am one of hundreds of friends helping Ronnie to fight the horrible disease called Leukemia. She has conquered Leukemia for the 3rd time in her young life of 22 years. She is a fighter but has a lot of weight on her shoulders. This shop is benefiting Ronnie’s many medical expenses along with the other expenses that have piled up.

Thank you for your help and support!

Even if you like this, PLEASE DON’T FLATTR. I would rather you buy a bracelet from Ronnie’s store. You can leave a comment here at the blog or you can comment on my Flattr account, if you’d really like. Or just copy this entire thing and repost it!

What’s FLATTR?

It’s a cross between “flatter” and “flat rate”!

From Flattr.com: Flattr is a social micropayment platform. Help support the people you like – and enable them to continue to do what they do! And add your own things to Flattr and receive support from others.

Basically, it’s social site rating, like Digg, but each Flattr you give someone gets them a little bit of cake. You have to pay to play, 8 euros a month minimum, but each time you “flattr” (or “like” for you FBer’s) a site, page, photo, bit of code (anything, really, with a Flattr code attached to it) the creator of that item gets a little payment. If you put in $10 and click 10 Flattr buttons throughout the month, each creator gets 10% of your monthly payment. (Flattr takes a little off the top.)

The Flattr site has a great video explaining how things work:

I decided to join because I genuinely like the idea of people who create great digital content getting a little kickback and I hope this project succeeds. If you believe in voluntary payment for the great stuff you find on the internet, I highly suggest joining. It would truly be awesome to see the internet “paywall” torn down by an anarchist market!

You will find a Flattr button at the bottom of each post and page for this site. There is also a button at my portfolio site: marshmallowheaddesign.com on each of the pages.