Lot’s of lovely quotes from the delightful Mr. Hodgman in an interview with a local Kansas City news blog:

Jockdom is very noble. It’s not deliberative. It’s certainly the best way to win wars. It’s the best way to motivate teams of people to fulfill a goal — not just war, but getting things done. The most important way to motivate a factory floor. But as you know, we’re not as much of a manufacturing society as we were before. China and other big industrial nations are rewarding their nerds and technicians rather than creating a culture that makes fun of them — it would be wise for us to embrace the book-smart as much as our culture has traditionally embraced the street-smart, the jock-smart. I’m not saying nerds must have their revenge; I’m just saying the time for wedgies is at an end.

On the way back from Yokohama the other night I came across two new polite behavior encouragement campaign posters by illustrator Akira Yamaguchi that stopped me in my tracks. The iPhone photos I hastily took were too blurry but here are a couple of blog postings on the two I saw:

「江戸しぐさ」ポスター – コールスロー

id:Akimbo – Akimbo – はてなハイク

I just found out about the tckid.com web site, an online community for third culture types, started about a year ago. It looks like the best online resource yet for a growing category of people who have always struggled to maintain social networks. I signed up right away.

My LBI friend Paul Johnson’s Facebook post linking to an article by Ruth E. Van Renken on all the third culture folk in Barack Obama’s emerging administration is what led me to the tckids site.

Cnet’s Elsa Wenzel posts on the “Buy Nothing Day” phenomenon:

Among the latter group are Compactors, 10 San Franciscans who pledged to buy nothing new for a year, then found themselves joined by thousands around the world, and overwhelmed by media requests.

The article includes a link to the delightfully well-produced The Story of Stuff: