Light pollution may be the bane of astronomers, but they are art to photographer Blake Gordon. In his photograph series Cloud Projections, Blake captured patterns of lights from buildings in downtown Austin, Texas:
"I captured defined patterns of light above the city when atmospheric conditions were right," he explained in an email. This is part of a larger interest in seeing "the clouds as a surface." For instance, Gordon mentioned that he had also produced "rough images from a plane flight in Minnesota where I saw the reverse: low winter clouds gave light pollution a medium to mark upon, and towns broadcast their cluster signals to those above." About these "broadcasts," Gordon asks: "Some of them were so precise that it's hard to conceive that they are just afterthoughts of a lighting design. Would it still be called light pollution?"
BLDGBLOG has the story: Link | Gallery at Blake's website
Wow, what a day! Unless you've been living under a rock, you all know that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. History is made today, as Americans welcome their first African American president.
You don't have to go far to find fascinating stories behind
some of the world's most famous logos. Just take a look inside your kitchen
cabinets ...
Morton Salt: The Morton Umbrella Girl
Morton Salt, as its name clearly states, makes salt. The company got
its start as a small Midwestern sales agency in 1848. In 1889, Joy Morton
bought a major interest in the company and in 1910, he changed its name
to Morton Salt Company.
The Morton Umbrella Girl got her start in 1914. The logo was produced
as part of a series of ads in Good Housekeeping. The concept
was that Morton Salt - unlike regular salt of the day - poured without
clumps, even in damp weather. The company added magnesium carbonate as
an absorbing agent to ensure that its table salt poured freely (it had
since been changed to calcium silicate).
At first, the advertising agency suggested "Even in rainy weather,
it flows freely" as the company's motto. Morton felt that it was
too long, and the motto was changed to the catchier "When it Rains
it Pours."
Did
you ever wonder why Heinz Ketchup bottle has a label that says "57
Varieties"? (Photo: williamhartz
[Flickr])
Well, it turns out that while riding a train in New York City in 1896,
Henry John Heinz noticed an ad for "21 styles of shoes." He
thought that it was a clever way to advertise the great number of choices
of canned and bottled foods that his company sold. Back then, the company
already sold more than 60 items but Heinz put together "5" (his
lucky number) and "7" (his wife's lucky number) to get "57
varieties".
That number must be really lucky, because H.J. Heinz Company grew to
be a behemoth in the food industry. It currently sells more than 5,700
varieties in 200 countries and territories.
Oh, and by the way, Heinz' first product wasn't ketchup. It was bottled
horseradish made from his mother's own recipe.
Sources: Snopes
(a very interesting history on the life of H.J. Heinz) and Heinz
Jolly Green Giant: The Logo that Became the Company
In 1925, Minnesota Valley Canning Company wanted to market its canned
peas (a particularly large variety of peas, actually), so it came up with
an unusual mascot: a grumpy grey gnome, wearing a scruffy bearskin, stooping
and scowling. If that doesn't seem like a mascot that would induce you
to buy products, you'd be right.
So the company hired an ad agency to revamp the mascot's image. A young
ad man named Leo Burnett (who later became a legend in advertising) was
assigned the task and he revamped it into a smiling green giant wearing
a skimpy tunic, wreath and boots made of leaves. He also named it "Jolly."
(Source)
The Jolly Green Giant was such a successful marketing ploy that in 1950
the company changed its name into Green Giant.
The company's first TV commercial in 1953 featured the Jolly Green Giant
as a puppet (in a stop-motion animation) roaming the valley and saying
"fo fum fi fe." What they didn't anticipate was how scary he
turned out to be to children! Needless to say, they didn't continue the
ads ...
In 1978, the town of Blue
Earth, Minnesota, put a 55-foot (~ 17 m) tall fiberglass statue of
the Jolly Green Giant to welcome visitors to the local Blue Earth Green
Giant plant. Every Christmas, the townspeople put a red scarf around its
neck, so it doesn't get too cold!
La Vache qui Rit: The Laughing Cow
1921
photo credit: Illustration de Benjamin Rabier, ProLitteris Zurich;
1949 red cow via Les
Arts Decoratifs; current logo via wikipedia
At the end of World War I, a French cheesemaker named Léon Bel
had a lot of leftover comté, gruyere, and emmental cheeses and
decided to melt them down to create a new type of cheese.
In 1921, Bel saw a traveling meat truck nicknamed "Wachkyrie,"
after "Valkyries," the creatures in Norse mythology that determine
the victors in the battle, and thought that it would make a good name
for his cheese. Well, actually a pun of the name: La Vache qui
Rit ("The Laughing Cow"). Bel commissioned Benjamin Rabier,
who later became a famous cartoon artist, to draw the laughing cow logo.
The original La Vache qui Rit wasn't laughing. It also wasn't red and
it didn't wear the tiny cheese earrings. Bel asked his printer Vercasson
to make the changes - but that's not all that Vercasson did: he also trademarked
the "Red Cow" design. Bel was later forced to pay for the right
to use his own logo! (Source)
If you look closely at the cow's earring, you'll see that it's actually
a package of La Vache qui Rit cheese, with a picture of the red cow on
it. And yes, that cow has earrings of cheese, which have another
picture of a red cow ad infinitum. (It's an example of the Droste
effect, if you must know).
But why is the cow laughing? (Indeed, that is the motto of the cheese)
Well, given that the Laughing Cow cheese is now sold in more than 90 countries,
with 125 portions of the cheese wedge eaten every second around
the world - it seems that the cow is laughing all the way to the bank!
Aunt Jemima
In 1889, Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood developed a ready-mixed, self-rising
pancake flour. All they needed was a name. One evening, Rutt heard a song
called "Old Aunt Jemima," sung by a black-faced vaudeville performer
clad in apron and a bandana headband, and so "Aunt Jemima Manufacturing
Company" was born.
A year later, the duo sold their business to R.T. Davis, who brought
Aunt Jemima to life - literally - by hiring Nancy Green, a former slave
to play her. Green portrayed Aunt Jemima for 30 years till her death in
1923. Davis' campaign was so successful that people thought that Aunt
Jemima was a real Southern cook who came up with the pancake mix recipe.
Since then, six more women had portrayed the jovial cook (Source)
(Photos: Nancy Green via African
American Registry; Anna Robinson via NY
Times/Bettmann/Corbis; Edith Wilson via Redhotjazz;
Rosie Lee Moore Hall via RTIS;
Aylene Lewis via Stuff
from the Park; not pictured: Ethel Ernestine Harper and Ann Short
Harrington)
In her book Aunt
Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus
, author Marilyn Kern-Foxworth calls Aunt Jemima "the most battered
woman in America" - and the portrayal of this character certainly
reflected the societal change that America went through over the years.
In the 1950s, the black "Mammy" in kerchief look was criticized
as being an outdated and negative portrayal of African-American women.
As a result, Quaker Oats Company (which bought the company and brand in
1926) modernized the image of Aunt Jemima: for her 100th anniversary,
the company transformed her into a younger, thinner woman, all dressed
up with a pearl earring and no kerchief. The bright warm smile, however,
remains. (Source)
Betty Crocker
The story of how Betty Crocker came to be is quite interesting. In the
early 1920s, the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis (a big milling
company that later merged with other companies to form General Mills)
got a lot of mails from its customers asking baking questions.
In 1921, the company thought that it would be better to sign the responses
personally, so they combined the last name of its director, William Crocker,
with the first name "Betty" (chosen because "it sounded
cheery, wholesome, and folksy.") (Source)
The famous Betty Crocker signature was penned by a company secretary who
won a contest.
The whole Betty Crocker persona was carefully engineered to appeal to
women:
A group of college educated women were hired to develop Betty’s
persona. Her picture and signature appeared in print ads. Cooking demonstrations
were organized showing off Betty’s “solutions to domestic
woes.” [...]
On the radio, Betty could speak to her loyal followers. Cooking
and Gold Medal Flour were central to the script. But so were housekeeping,
time management, friends, family, and husbands. “If you load a
man’s stomach with boiled cabbage and greasy fried potatoes,”
Betty once told listeners, “can you wonder that he wants to start
a fight, or go out and commit a crime?” But she also reminded
women that their role as homemakers was important, and that their aspirations
could be “as great as woman could have in any occupation.”
(Source)
In 1924, Betty Crocker debuted on the radio (on the nation's first cooking
show). In 1936, Betty Crocker got a face: artist Neysa McMein brought
together all women in the General Mills' Home Service Department and created
a composite face. Over the next eight decades, Betty had several makeovers
to update her look to fit the times!
(If you're interested in finding out more about Betty Crocker, Susan
Marks wrote the definitive book, Finding
Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food)
Chef Boyardee
Legends have it that Chef Boyardee was named for the men who created
him (Boyd, Art, and Dennis), and given the other made-up food mascots,
you'd be forgiven if you believed it.
Chef Boiardi appearing in his own TV commercial, c. 1953 [YouTube
Link]
But in this case, there actually was a real-life Chef Boyardee! His name
was Ettore "Hector" Boiardi (1897-1985). Boiardi immigrated
to the United States when he was 16 years old and worked himself up to
head chef at the Plaza Hotel in New York. When Chef Boiardi opened his
own restaurant, so many of his customers asked for extra portions of his
spaghetti sauce to take home that he opened a factory to keep up with
orders. To help Americans pronounce his name correctly, he named his brand
Chef Boy-Ar-Dee (later the company got rid of the hypens).
Sara Lee
In
1932, Charles W. Lubin pooled his money with his brother-in-law to purchase
a small chain of bakeries called the Community Bake Shops. When he came
out with a new line of cheesecakes, his wife Tillie told him that he should
name it after their daughter, Sara Lee.
The Sara Lee cheesecakes were so popular that in 1950, Lubin renamed
his company the Kitchens of Sara Lee. When his company was bought out
by Consolidated Foods, that company also renamed itself Sara Lee Corporation!
The real Sara Lee Lubin never held management position in the company,
though she did appear as a spokesperson in some ads. Today, Sara Lee Lubin
Schupf is a philantrophist and devotes her time to support the advancement
of girls and women in science. (Source)
Quaker Oats
Quick: what does the Quaker Oats cereal have to do with the religious
Christian denomination The Religious Society of Friends, better known
as the Quakers? Turns out ... nothing - only clever advertising.
In 1877, Henry D. Seymour and William Heston founded a mill in Ravenna,
Ohio, and named it the Quaker Mill. There are conflicting stories as to
how the name came to be. One legend has it that Seymour chose the name
after reading an encyclopedia entry on the Quakers:
"The name was chosen when Quaker Mill partner Henry Seymour
found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities
described — integrity, honesty, purity — provided an appropriate
identity for his company's oat product." (Source)
Another story said that Heston was walking on the streets of Cincinnati
when he ran across a picture of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania
and a famous Quaker (Source).
In whichever case, later that year the company trademarked the Quaker
Man, described as "The figure of a man in Quaker garb." It was
the first US trademark ever registered for a breakfast cereal.
The original 1877 Quaker Man was a full-length picture of a Quaker holding
a scroll with the word "pure" on it (just in case the integrity/honesty/purity
point didn't get across). In 1946, graphic designer Jim Nash created a
black and white head portrait of the smiling Quaker Man and in 1957, Haddon
Sundblom made the full-color portrait. The last update to the logo was
in 1972, when Saul Bass created the stylized graphic that still appears
on Quaker Oats product packages today.
Gerber Baby
In 1928, Frank Daniel Gerber and his son Daniel Frank Gerber (yes, I
know) of Fremont Canning Company wanted to promote their new product:
baby food. The company had been a small packager of peas, beans, and fruits
in rural Michigan. Daniel convinced his father to manufacture and sell
strained baby food (at the time, preparing food for infant was a tedious
chore of cooking and mashing things).
The
Gerbers wanted a baby face to brand their new baby food, and held a contest.
Amongst the many drawings and paintings submitted (including some elaborate
oil paintings of baby portraits) was an unfinished charcoal sketch by
Dorothy Hope Smith of Boston. Dorothy drew a five month old baby with
tousled hair and bright blue eyes, using her neighbor's baby as a model.
She offered to finish the sketch if she won, but the judges decided to
use it as it was.
The Gerber Baby turned out to be so popular that over a decade later,
the company changed its name to Gerber Products Company.
Oh, and who was the original Gerber Baby? Her name is Ann Turner Cook,
a mystery author and former high school English literature teacher. You
can find out more about Ann and her three published mystery books at her
official website.
If you enjoyed this article, you'll love the rest of the Logo series
on Neatorama:
Hooray! It's time for our collaboration with the ever-awesome What is it? Blog. This week brings us this strange lookin' object. Can you guess what it is for?
Place your guess in the comment section - no prize this week, so you're playing for bragging rights only.
A tool used to remove carbon deposits from the gooves of a piston, patent number 1,768,692. Text on it reads: "Owatonna Tool Co. #840, Made in Owatonna, Minn. USA".
The following is a guest post by Charles
Horn, Emmy-nominated writer of Robot
Chicken and author of The
Laugh Out Loud Guide: Ace the SAT Exam without Boring Yourself to Sleep!
Whenever I tutor for the SAT, I invariably see either a boredom factor
or a stress factor come into play. If they’re bored, they just won’t
put in the effort, and if they’re too stressed, their learning ability
becomes impaired. Comedy helps in both regards, because it reduces stress
and keeps them interested and engaged. The other remarkable thing about
comedy is that it actually increases recall as well, so they’ll
remember the information better on test day (and apply the same concepts
to the more boring SAT questions).
I won’t lie – Robot Chicken is still way more fun than studying
for the SAT. But I figure if they’re going to be forced to take
the dreaded test, at least they deserve to have a little fun along the
way.
The Laugh Out Loud Guide: Ace the SAT Exam without Boring Yourself to Sleep!
uses comedy to prepare students for the dreaded SAT. Here
are a few sample questions. How would you do?
1. Yo Momma so _______, when you mail her a letter, you need two zip
codes.
2. At a Saks Fifth Avenue store, Winona Ryder examines four distinct
blouses, five distinct dresses, and two distinct handbags. How many different
combinations of items can she shoplift if she takes exactly one blouse,
two dresses, and a handbag?
3.My parents, Brad and Angelina, went
to Vietnam and all they got me was this lousy brother.
(A) went to Vietnam and all they got me was this lousy brother
(B) went to Vietnam, all they got me was this lousy brother
(C) went to Vietnam, this lousy brother was all they got me
(D) went to Vietnam; and all they got me was this lousy brother
(E) went to Vietnam; and this lousy brother was all they got me
4. On a scale of 1 to 10, Warren’s hotness can be expressed as
a ,
where a and b are positive integers and ab.
If Warren’s hotness is equal to 2,
what is the value of a – b?
(A) -10
(B) -1
(C) 0
(D) 1
(E) 10
5. Loading The Toddmeister
onto a gurney, the emergency
A
medical technicians, who happened
to be Kappa Omega
B
Kappa brothers themselves
and the winning team of the
C
2000 Chug-a-thon, was relieved
to see that the
D
championship drinking trophy was still out on display.
No error
E
6.
In the figure, if x = 5 - y, what is the value of y2 + 25?
(A) 7
(B) 32
(C) 39
(D) 56
(E) 64
7. After a _______ investigation, the inspector _______ that faulty wiring
was foshizzle the cause of the fire that burned down Snoop Dogg’s
hizzouse.
Charles
Horn is the author of The
Laugh Out Loud Guide: Ace the SAT Exam without Boring Yourself to Sleep!
He is an Emmy-nominated comedy writer with credits including Robot Chicken
and the Robot Chicken: Star Wars special, as well as The Tonight Show
with Jay Leno. He also has a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Charles
writes a blog and a comic
strip. You can also check out his education-themed
and other fun t-shirts.
-----
Are you an author and would like your book featured on Neatorama? Please
email me about a possible guest blog
post just like this one!
The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Sometimes, tragically, in the middle of shooting a movie, an actor dies. It's actually happened many times. So what's a director to do? Turns out they have quite a few options:
Actor: Oliver Reed
Movie: Gladiator (2000)
Story: Reed had a well-earned reputation as an extremely heavy drinker and partygoer, and he died the way he lived. While shooting Gladiator on the island of Malta in 1999, he went to a bar and reportedly drank three bottles of rum, eight bottles of beer, and several shots of whiskey. At the end of the night, Reed, 61, dropped dead from a heart attack. Most of his scenes had been shot, but for the few that weren't, director Ridley Scott used a body double and then, using digital technology, placed Reed's face on the stand-in's body (they were fight scenes). Cost of the re-creation: $3 million. Gladiator was released in 2000 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Photo: The Big Picture, who has more on the CGI trick used in Gladiator Link: Gladiator DVD
Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz, one of five roles he played in the movie. Photo: herbynow [Flickr]
Actor: Frank Morgan
Movie: Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
Story: Morgan (best known as the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz) was cast as Wild West legend Buffalo Bill Cody in the screen version of this Broadway musical. Just days into filming, Morgan died and was replaced by Louis Calhern. But in the scene where Buffalo Bill first rides into town, when the audience sees Cody from a distance, the actor on horseback is Morgan. The actor in the close-up - and from then on - is Calhern.
Link: Annie Get Your Gun DVD
Actor: Heath Ledger
Movie: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Story: Ledger died at the age of 28 in 2008, under the influence of a range of sleeping pills and antidepressants. At the time, he was on a break from shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a fantasy about a magical theater show. Director Terry Gilliam decided to keep going. The movie's premise, in which Ledger's character travels through different worlds, was adapted so that the character's appearance could change as well. Ledger's friend Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell split the role between them (and donated their salaries to Ledger's three-year-old daughter, Matilda).
Story: While filming the comic western in March 1994, the 43-year-old actor suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep in a hotel in Mexico. Almost all of Candy's scenes had been completed, so director Peter Markle used a body double for the remaining footage. Wagons East! was released later that year and bombed with critics and audiences.
Story: Plan 9 is often called the worst film ever made, but Director Ed Wood was able to hire horror movie icon Bela Lugosi because the actor was 73, past his prime, addicted to morphine, and up for anything that paid. Wood cast Lugosi as "the Ghoul Man." After compiling just a few minutes of footage (with no dialogue because Wood hadn't actually written the script yet), Lugosi died of a heart attack. Not wanting to lose out on the publicity from having a recently departed screen legend in his film, Wood shot the rest of Plan 9 with Tom Mason, a Los Angeles chiropractor, standing in for Lugosi. To account for the two men looking nothing alike, in all of his scenes, Mason held a black cape over his face.
Link: Plan 9 from Outer Space
Actor: River Phoenix
Movie: Dark Blood
Story: In the fall of 1993, Phoenix (Stand By Me, My Own Private Idaho) was shooting Dark Blood, portraying a man who lived alone on a nuclear testing site and spent his time making strange dolls. With 11 days to go on the production, Phoenix, then 23 years old, overdosed on cocaine and heroin, and died on the sidewalk outside The Viper Room, a Los Angeles nightclub. There were too many pivotal scenes left to shoot, so producers completely scrapped the movie.
Story: In a horrific morality tale, Morrow played a vicious racist who has the tables turned on him and suddenly finds himself in the jungles of Vietnam, being hunted down by American soldiers. While filming a scene involving gunfire and a helicopter, the pyrotechnics used for the gunfire exploded prematurely, causing the helicopter to crash. The helicopter's blades decapitated Morrow, 53, and also killed two extras, both of whom were children. The movie was released anyway, but it didn't do as well as expected at the box office - probably due to distaste over the accident. Director John Landis was later charged (but acquitted) with involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment.
Link: Twilight Zone - The Movie
Actress: Natalie Wood
Movie: Brainstorm (1983)
Story: Wood, a star in her childhood and early adulthood with films like Miracle on 34th Street, Splendor in the Grass, and West Side Story, died in 1981 while filming the virtual reality-themed Brainstorm. While partying on a yacht off Catalina Island with her husband Robert Wagner and Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken, Wood disappeared. It was later discovered that she had tried to leave the yacht on a dinghy but fell into the water and drowned. She had one scene left to shoot in Brainstorm. Paramount Pictures debated for nearly two years about what to do, ultimately completing Wood's final scene with a body double and dubbed dialogue. Brainstorm was quietly released in 1983.
(Photo: IMDb) Link: Brainstorm
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. The Bathroom Readers' Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.
UK artist Olly Moss is currently conducting a Guerilla Sloth Propaganda, in which he reworks Shepard Fairey's iconic Obey André the Giant posters. I quite like the smiley sloth! - via Super Punch
Like its name said, DogsInOutfits.com is a website about dogs wearing things nature didn't intend them to wear. This one looks like a greyhound wearing some sort of a psychedelic pajama. One look at its face should tell you that it's planning on how to kill its owner in her sleep for such a public humiliation. ;)
Mental_floss blog has a very entertaining post about the 10 strange fashion of yore. This one to the left is the motoring hood, which people used to wear to go driving!
Other gems include a steel collar (gorget), transparent ruffles (which exposes quite a bit of the wearer's chest), lovelock and pattens (strange, strange precursor of the high heel): Link
I've always wanted to visit New Zealand ever since I saw The Lord of the Rings movies, and this feature at the New York Times by Robert D. Hershey Jr. just added a lot of fuel to my wanderlust fire:
IN 1908, The Spectator magazine called the 33.5-mile Milford Track through Fiordland National Park in New Zealand “the finest walk in the world,” an honorific still credible to knowledgeable hikers — one fan was Sir Edmund Hillary — a full century later.
The park, part of the Te Wahipounamu Unesco World Heritage Site, is of jaw-dropping beauty, a rare combination of rain forest, rushing rivers and glacially carved alpine heights that yields vistas that make you think you’ve stepped into a picture postcard. What’s more, novices as well as hardened trekkers can fully enjoy the delights of the Milford, which offers as much solitude as you could want and ambient water so pure you’re actually encouraged to drink whatever you can reach.
Wow. Just Wow. Has anyone ever been there? What's your experience? Link
In the Clan Kincaid DNA Project, 140 people with the surname Kincaid (or variations thereof) have taken DNA test to find their ancestors and trace their family tree.
But among the cool stuff (like finding out war heroes and survivors of the Irish potato famine as their ancestors), they've also opened the Pandora box of lies and secrets:
They have also stumbled upon bastards, liars and two-timers.
Much of it is ancient history, long-dead ancestors whose dalliances are part of the intrigue of amateur genealogy. But sometimes the findings strike closer to home.
In one case, two brothers were surprised to discover they had different fathers. They confronted their elderly mother, who denied the most obvious possibilities -- that she had been unfaithful to her husband, the man they had always known as Dad, or that one son was adopted.
"It has been traumatic for some to discover their true lineage through the DNA tests," said Don Kincaid, a 76-year-old Texan who oversees the Kincaid surname project and witnessed the brothers' ordeal.
As genetic testing becomes more widespread for medical information, forensics and ancestral research, more people are accidentally uncovering family secrets. Among the most painful are so-called "non-paternity events," cases in which Dad turns out to be someone else.
Alan Zarembo of the Los Angeles Times has the story: Link
Is Facebook isolating its users socially? Or does the popular social networking website actually enhance social interaction?
Those are the questions that Lisa Selin Davis of TIME magazine is asking:
Jenny has not returned my calls in roughly a year. She has, however, sent me a poinsettia, poked me, and placed a gift beneath my Christmas tree. She's done all this virtually, courtesy of Facebook.com, the online social networking site where users create profiles, gather "friends," and join common interest groups, not to mention send digital gifts.
Though Jenny has three children, ages 4 to 14, and rarely finds time for visits, phone calls or even e-mail, the full-time mom in upstate New York regularly updates her status on Facebook ("Jenny is fixing a birthday dinner," "Jenny took the kids sledding") and uploads photos (her son in the school play).
After 24 years, our friendship is now filtered through Facebook, relegated to the online world. Call it Facebook Recluse Syndrome, and Jenny is far from the site's only social hermit.
I don't use facebook so I have to maintain my social hermitude the old fashioned way! Link
