Kelsey Timmerman's Blog, page 87

Spirit of Soccer

After seeing Spirit of Soccer operate first hand in Cambodia, I’ve become a big fan of their work. Here’s their latest video:

Is America ready for Fair-Trade?

Starbucks is going Fair Trade in the UK, so is Cadbury. Their U.S. counterparts aren’t. What’s up with that?

This piece in CS Monitor by Eric Marx pretty much sums it up:

…more than 70 percent of the British populace recognize the fair-trade mark, whereas consumer recognition in the United States is only 28 percent, according to recent surveys.

And as I pointed out here, environmentalism and organics tend to trump fair-trade. The article confirms that:

TransFair USA, the nonprofit that licenses p

We don’t follow the trends, we set them

Rocker Dave Grohl names his daughter Harper Willow.

Soon rockstars will be dressing like us!

We care about the footprint, let’s not forget the foot

Today my feet are nice and cozy in a pair of Merrell slippers. Like 90% of shoes, they were Made in China.

This is going to be a brief Where Am I Wearing Wednesday because today I want to talk about feet more than shoes.

The Shoe:

Merrell’s corporate code of conduct – I couldn’t find one on their site. Contact them and join me in asking them what’s up with that:

The environment and labor practices both factor into my shopping decisions. I scanned your website for your corporate code of conduct

My Bro’s Bite airing on the World Vision Report

My essay about my brother coming down with Malaria after our excursion into the Honduran jungle is airing on the World Vision Report this week. He’s fine now. I’m just glad that I could get a story out of his suffering.

One of the folks at WVR contacted me looking for a funny piece – I believe they said quirky – about malaria and wanted to know if I had anything. “Boy, do I,” I told her.

It’s not easy to do Malaria quirky, but it is easy to have fun at my brother’s expense.

The story is par

The good folks at the Wandering Educators who reviewed WA...

The good folks at the Wandering Educators who reviewed WAIW? and named me as their photographer of the month in February are giving away boatloads of cool prizes today, including an autographed copy of Where Am I Wearing? Here’s all you have to do to enter:

1. Register at www.WanderingEducators.com - it’s free and easy and keeps our site spam-free.
2. On April 20, leave a comment on ANY article on our site - you’ll be automatically entered.
3. Check in every hour on April 20 for prize upd

A book that has changed the way I buy mushrooms

I’m not quite done with “Poorly Made in China” by Paul Midler, but it has already changed my life, specifically what type of mushrooms I buy. Paul is kind of the “cultural grease” that smooths business relations between factories in China and international importers.

One of the projects he works on is a bottled soap that depending on its packaging is hand soap, body wash, or bubble bath (the contents are all the same). Anyhow, after Paul sees the lack of standards and corner cutting that goes

Pentagon using Tactical Garbage in pursuit of alternative fuels

The way I see it there are 3 ways that technology rapidly advances:

1) Greed - Somebody is going to make oodles of money if…

2) Space - “How the heck are we gonna win this here space race?”

3) War - “How do we kill more of them and save more of us?”

Let’s think about this in terms of our quest for alternative fuels.

Since we’re not launching poop-powered rockets into space…yet. And the green revolution has yet to fully evolve. War might be our best hope. (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever

Sedaris on recapturing travel experiences

David Sedaris is at it again in the New Yorker. And here I figured that it would probably be awhile before he wrote for them again due to the intrusive nature of their fact-checkers.

When you’re young, it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy, it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you travelled alone to Europe this summer you could surely do the same thing next

WAIW Reviewed in the Key West Citizen

I just stumbled upon a review of WAIW in the Key West Citizen.

Do you know where your clothes were made, by whom and under what conditions? Do you care? Should you care?

There’s at least one journalist and travel writer out there who thinks you should.

In his non-fiction debut “Where Am I Wearing,” former Keys resident and Ohio native Kelsey Timmerman contemplates the tag in the back of his favorite T-shirt (it reads “Made in Honduras”) and decides to visit the places where his clothes were made in