Three Cheers For Succinct Writing

Facts and figure overload, gossip, rumour and speculation - the downside of having access to so much media. But I'm grateful if we have access to up-to-the-minute information.

This week, there has been looting and rioting in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. My head is full of hours and hours of news coverage and social media chatter but some writing has been so impressively to the point, I've wanted to cheer.

After I'd cheered, I posted links to it on Twitter @projectsimple. Thank you to everyone who does the same, this is what Project Simple is about.

Blogging Fail - Keeping It Simple Win

There is much written on the internet about how to get your blog read, rated and voted for. One rule is blog freqently.

I'm coming clean right now - this isn't going to happen. I do not see this blog as a periodical. I see it as a place to post pieces which celebrate ideas which may make life simpler.

I know I'm shooting Project Simple in the foot as a newbie in the blogging community - but there are many people whose blogs are a work of art.

So I don't feel this is worthy of the BLOG title, I think it's a LIS (Linkable Information Store).

Keeping it Simple.

@ProjectSimple on Twitter is, however, very active and here are my Project Simple badge winners so far.

I'd love to hear your suggestions for additions. Please email: diana(at)sprismatic.com

Beauty Made Simple

At what point do we decide that the world really has gone so mad that the majority say no more?

Well I've got the fear now!
Apparently teenagers are asking for botox. And there's a dating site especially for "beautiful people" so that they can reduce the likelyhood of producing an asthetically imperfect child. Hitler must be cheering in his furnace. The perfect race.

Meanwhile, those of us who listened to our Grandmother's and have started to see the truth in "it's what's inside that counts", are beginning to sound quaint.

I've already resigned myself to being paraded in public as an example of what aging looks like because everyone around me will have had surgery, laser removals, implants and/or botox.

I have gone from being mistaken for my daughter's elder sister to my mother's younger sister. So what next? My daughter's generations' grandmother and great grandmother to teenagers?

Maybe I was born out of time, but I like to see the ordinance survey of a person's life on their face.

What is considered contemporarily beautiful changes. The Georgians poisoned themselves by caking on the lead-filled makeup to disguise the smallpox scars, so powdered white complections were fashionable. Rubens and Botticelli painted deliciously voluptuous women who were considered healthy, whereas we equate slimness with healthy eating and 'obesity' with bad eating habits so our catwalk models have been  the extreme size zero. Skin tanning used to be a sign of peasants working out of doors so the English Rose complection was encouraged. Then deep brown skin represented the wealth needed to travel overseas to hotter countries. Now we are encouraged to frown to avoid the 'skin damaging' sun.
Well I'm waiting patiently for wrinkly faces to come back into fashion as a celebration that we have lived. I shan't hold my breath though because youth represents healthy and fertility in any community but
I'm not alone. Kaya Cheyanne is campaigining to Keep Beauty Real. 

With any luck there will be a lot of examples of "what aging naturally looks like" and I won't be featured in the scientific text books of the future as a rarity, because one day, the world will wake up and say enough is enough.

What is important is a healthy body. Isn't it?

Tandem Touring or Inspirational Packing

Thinking of touring Europe by tandem? No, I wasn't either but I still managed to read the majority of Farewell Burt blog in one go (and apparently with a stupid grin on my face if my aching cheeks are anything to go by).

Two British cyclists covered 4,450 miles in two and a half months by tandem. They blogged (from their tent on a solar powered laptop) enroute.

Image: copyright: tootandcarmen

There's information to satisfy serious cyclists and enough dry humour to keep the non-cyclist entertained.

Project Simple Will Be Launched in October

Here's a preview. Film made for Project Simple by Tom Piercy:

To Twitter or Not To Twitter - Simple

Love facebook? Do you Tweet? If you don't, please read this article in Don't Panic.

Facebook is fine but how many bank/credit cards do you have? How many pairs of shoes. Hopefully more than one and if you don't, you are probably intending to have a second as soon as you can afford them? It makes sense to have a spare doesn't it?

Well it makes sense for us to have a spare social networking link. Again, an old wives tale has an origin of sense: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Yes, Facebook is great but in many ways, Tweeting is greater. The new wives tale is "Facebook is for the people you were at school with and Twitter is for the people you wish you'd been at school with."

There is some level of truth to that at the moment and Facebook is charging up behind Twitter to have a similar connection but right now Twitter has the lead. You have a level of communication with people you would love to meet and it's also a good networking site.

This month I've been able to link up an artist in Wales with a developer in Holland and someone who had spare back-drop fabic with a designer who needed some. They live in the same town but their paths may never have crossed.

The frustration being that they didn't all Tweet so I was the go-between.

So many creatives do not Tweet yet. They have enough to do without PRing themselves and they are not always as handy with a computer as their own tools.

I'm running quick workshops which help the interested, but overwhelmed, to get a basic presence on Twitter. If you Tweet please take a Twitter nervous creative to their laptop for half an hour, and do the same.

It's a little confusing to the non-computer savvy but it's worth it. And for as long as Facebook doesn't own Twitter. It makes independent sense.

The Simplest Words Can Be Multi-Talented

Why use big words when the small ones have enough meanings to keep us going?
This beautiful video from RADIOLAB takes us through nine words and illustrates some of their everyday usage. All variations of each word are spelt the same except break/brake.

There's a melt between words as a new word is introduced. 

Clever. 

It took me a few viewings, and a quick scroll through the helpful comments below the video, to get it but you may get it in one! 

The English language, aren't the short words illustrative enough?

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