TipNut (via Lifehacker) has four recipes for Homemade Febreeze. They mainly involve mixes of water fabric softener and maybe vinegar, baking soda or rubbing alcohol. Some of the commenters pointed out what a toxic dump fabric softener is (and undoubtedly so is fabric deodoriser too), so some healthier suggestions from the site included a number of recipes for Lavender Vinegar which could be used as a deodoriser. I’ve collated a few more from TipNut…
Easy Homemade Deodoriser: Fill a spray bottle with water or vinegar with around 12 drops of essential oils.
Multipurpose Herb Vinegar: Take a glass jar and put into it, 1 cup of chopped herbs (eg mint or basil – she also suggests chives and parsley). Heat 2 cups white wine vinegar and pour over the hebs. Seal the jar with the lid and leave to sit for 3 weeks. Shake the jar every other day. When the three weeks are up, strain and decanter into a spray bottle for deodorising goodness! As a bonus, apparently it can also be used on pets, in salads, to clean glass and for sunburns. Talk about multipurpose.
One of the readers also recommended a 1:1 mix of water and cheap vodka. I think adding some helpful essential oils like lavender or tea tree (if you’re not allergic to it!) would make that even better.
Tipnut also has some very nifty Homemade Herbal Cleaner Recipes. I’m going to have to try out at least one of them because the last time I used the commercial cleaner at work to clean my desk, it gave me such a painful headache, I was knocked out for the night.
My little blog has been uncharacteristically very musical of late…
I’ve recently set up my computer with speakers – just regular computer ones but sure beats the hell out of my awful tinny old laptop ones. So now I actually feel like listening to music when I’m working at the computer but I have been too slack to set up my music collection on my hard drive properly (I still haven’t decided which program to go with!) so I’ve just been trawling the internet (legally) for music to play in the background. And because my blog is also my links collector , a lot of it has been ending up here of late.
This time though, I wasn’t looking for something to play, just searching for gossip. You know when you read a piece about so-and-so going out with so-and-so, but you don’t know anything about the second so-and-so so it’s off to Google which leads to someone else that leads somewhere else again. So, following a completely stale breadcrumb, I stumbled upon (should join up hey) Quiet Company on Northern Records. Unfortunately, they ain’t got no tunes to add to my last.fm radio but they do have a MySpace with some tracks off their album Shine Honesty.
I say “they” but it is really one guy, Taylor Glen Muse, and “a little help from his friends” from the bios:
As Taylor takes the Quiet Company show on the road, with Thomas Blank (guitar/keyboard) and Tim Robbins (drums), it will become apparent that these honest sentiments scream loudly in the face of the pains of the past, and proclaim the beauty of love and music to all who will give ear to his voice. Is there a band called Quiet Company? “Yes, I am he.”
???… Ah, musicians.
The album doesn’t seem to be available here yet but can be found through their label or trusty old Amazon.
Scarlett Johansson is working on her debut album with members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek. This news comes on the heels of her reported Tom Waits cover album and her Coachella performance with the Jesus and Mary Chain. As reported by the Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, La., the “Lost in Translation” star spent 33 days recording at Dockside Studio. Owner Steve Nails described the album as, “a theater, big screen. Lots of heavy bass tones in it. Without a bass guitar, we used all kind of different instruments to create these sounds. It was a great experiment. Very avant-garde. She sounds like Marilyn Monroe.”
Poor Marilyn. She could actually sing. Lets hope Scarlet’s talented friends and lots of studio re-engineering magic time make it a little less painful than the Coachella performance mentioned.
You can check it out one with better sound here (embedding was disabled) where her off tune-ness is very apparent.
Saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs some time last year I think when they played the Enmore Theatre. Karen O was great and wearing some sort of lizard costume from memory.
Well I remembered, just the other day, that they did this really lovely acoustic version of Maps. Nicely prompted by this review on the Rolling Stone site.
So I went off to see if I could find a copy. There are plenty of them but most are pretty ‘orrible (sorry still have Fleur de la Coeur still in my head – thanks JK Rowling!). This was the best one I could find:
I can only but link the official video as embedding has been deactivated. Boo! Oh and here’s another version of the acoustic onefrom McCarren Pool, Brooklyn – should check it out for Karen O’s interesting costume. And a video interpretation from some UCSC film schoolers.
A friend’s father makes the most amazing fruit wines and since trying them out, it’s been a “someday” goal to be able to do the same.
Perusing the Viddler blog, they featured a home winemaking show called TintoTV started by Nico Sanchez and his wife. Here’s an episode on making strawberry wine! YUMMY! The accompanying blog post has some notes if you are tempted…
Oh I forgot to mention in the previous post, Lily Allen did a kick-arse cover of Blondie’s Heart of Glass. Couldn’t find a copy of that particular rendering on YouTube, which is surprising because the whole of the dancefloor lit up with every second person recording it on their phones or cameras.
But there are plenty of others to be found on YouTube… what follows is actually only a small selection.
My favourite is the one from SXSW2007, unfortunately it ends part of the way through (there’s another copy that’s longer but the sound quality was ‘orrible).
Here’s a more complete live version from the Aladdin Theatre that’s more like the one I saw.
This is an awfully shaky/noisy version but I think she just looks so cute and I want to make that dress!
Oh I also forgot she whistled!
And finally, she’s does it with Blondie. It’s the worst version – but I love her candy striped dress.
Just installed a last.fm widget for my last.fm radio station on this blog. It’s on the right hand sidebar if you scroll down a bit. There are only a few randomly chosen songs at the moment, but it’s very cool (having the widget, not necessarily the songs – that’s your call!).
From the makers of the extremely fun Comic Life for Macs (a Windows beta 2 has just been released – woot!), plasq have released an invite only beta (stupid Google and Gmail making that so popular…) of a new screenshot grabbing/sharing tool called Skitch. Screenshot grabbers are nothing new but Skitch’s built-in integration with sites like Flickr and blogs and the lovely plasticity of its (apparently) lossless stretch and drag and drop-ability make it pretty damn amazing.
Anyway, good to see that the CEO and a few of the team members are from Australia.
