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Brianne

Nintendo: 1; Me: 0

I unceremoniously ditched my gray, boxy Game Boy as a little girl. The two games I tested, "Kirby's Dream Land" and "The Little Mermaid," proved to be much too difficult for me. Kirby just wouldn't eat clouds fast enough and Ariel was unwieldy and hard to navigate. So, at 25 years of age, I'm a little surprised that the Nintendo DS™ would catch my eye.

My surprise continues, as I've realized I'm just as succeptible to a marketer's whim as the next Jane Doe. I'm a little late on this one, as Jezebel talked about this weeks ago, but I definitely priced the metallic rose model today at $129.99 and thought, hmm, not that bad!

I think this campaign was aimed at the likes of me. America Ferrera, Carrie Underwood and Liv Tyler joined the ad campaign for Nintendo DS, to say to women - "look, video games are fun!" The same women who previously had no interest in gaming, or have had to sit through countless hours of watching guys play Halo, NCAA Football, FIFA or GTA (I'm speaking from experience), and think the gaming realm is an annoyance, not a diversion.

I'm excited to learn through Nintendo DS, I can become fluent in Spanish, play with doggies, and learn new Yoga positions! However, I think I should wait on this purchase. I'm already weighing down my Michael Kors bag with a Canon Elph, iPod and Samsung Blackjack...I think I've already exceeded my personal electronic devices per handbag. Better to wait until I can afford the game/mp3/cell phone/PDA hybrid.

Carrie's Brownstone, v.2.0

There were a few audible gasps in the movie theater during Sex and the City: The Movie. Relax, I'm not giving anything away for the four of you who read my blog and haven't seen the flick yet. I'm talking about the response to Carrie's apartment remodel.

The audience, 99 percent female, lived through six seasons of "I had to wonder"-thoughts and watched her type them out on her Macbook in that apartment. (BTW - have fun on Carrie's Macbook Pro here. I'm already addicted.) But in the movie, the gray neutrals and mismatched bohemian pieces gave way to brights and grown-up clean lines.

Casa Sugar interviewed the set designer Jeremy Conway about his vision for the room, and will have more details tomorrow....I'm so hoping they give some insight on Carrie's 70s-inspired mural, which totally caught my eye. I think it says "LOVE" but I only saw the movie twice in a 24-hour period, so who can really be sure? Ha.

Thanks to Casa Sugar we do know that the walls were painted a custom blend very similar to Benjamin Moore's Electric Blue. The Chicago Tribune says the paint, Benjamin Moore's No. 2061-40, is about $45 a gallon. It completely makes me rethink blue, which I previously relegated to little boy rooms and cheesy nautical-themed living spaces.


The coffee table the gals gather around for a shower - how vague of me - comes from the always-intense ABC Carpet & Home. (My two trips to ABC Carpet & Home went like this: the first time, I had no idea there was more than one floor and thought it was full of only chandeliers and Indian-inspired rugs and on the second trip, the elevator was broken and I called it a day at the floor with the overpriced Frette linens.)

Check out the old skool Carrie suite here, where there's also some scans of the Traditional Home issue that covers the apartment remodel. I like their suggestion to find a rug similar to the one at the foot of her bed, especially since it looks more of an eggplant than black and white on second glance. Love these Thomas Paul rugs!


All in all, a great redesign, but I had to wonder...where did her kitchen go? I mean, I know she uses the stove to store sweaters, but a culinary appliance is nowhere to be found!

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from The Baby-sitters Club

Oh. My. Gawd. Pardon my randomness, but there is a microcosm of my childhood floating around on the Internet. Apparently there are people in this world that revere The Baby-sitters Club by Ann M. Martin as the holy grail of girlydom, just as myself.

As I am known to do, I was able to click-click-click my way into discovering a whole little online world devoted to the BSC that I never knew existed. I've discovered a blog solely devoted to character Claudia Kishi's off-the-wall attire (I also learned a new word, Whatthefuckery, but I digress) as described in this series of pre-teen fun. There's also BSC Wikipedia, Claudia's Room, BSC Stamped and Stoneybrookite, a blog dedicated to the "best friends you'll never have."
Wow. If I ever felt I am a reader of niche sites on the Internet, I do now. But I love that communities have grown to support the BSC books, as they basically half raised me. And look how good I turned out! I don't know about you, but every BSC book I ever purchased was the best $3.50 in the world. When a Super Special came out, it was like my birthday. Sigh. I miss the days when "boyfriends and babysitting don't mix!" spoke to me.

But in all seriousness, I think we love the Baby-sitters Club because the girls were real characters. Mallory rode horses and had, like, 18 brothers and sisters, Dawn was a "vegetarian" from "California" and wore white linen pants, Mary Anne had that boyfriend, and Claudia was artsy and painted Native American prints on her rain slicker. How weird were they?!

And yet it was okay to like them, and they were liked in the books. What a good lesson! And by another token, each book was narrated by a different babysitter. A true lesson in seeing the world for all its valid opinions. I think the entire BSC series should be mandatory reading at the elementary level. Not a believer? Let me just end with this. A book in which a girl can wear this outfit, and still have friends at the end of the day, is an open-minded, worldly book indeed:

(Claudia was wearing): "a big yellow shirt with red x-shaped buttons,
enormously baggy white pants, and big red Doc Martens double-laced with black
and yellow shoelaces. Her long straight black hair was pulled upon top of her
head with more black and yellow shoelaces braided together. Her earrings said
'stop' and 'go' - 'stop' in her left ear and 'go' in her right."

Google turned off the "light"

Can I just say I love Google? Being the festive person I am, I love when they recognize holidays Google-style. However, it's great when they can leverage their visibility to draw attention to something greater.

Today, Google put the "lights out" on their home page in order to encourage people around the world to celebrate Earth Hour. According to Google, on Saturday, March 29, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. in their local time zone. Created by the World Wildlife Fund, cities around the world will be participating in Earth Hour to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation. The U.S. cities leading the charge are Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco.

The first major landmark to go dark was the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge in Australia last night. Sydney followed Fiji and New Zealand who kicked off the blackout, and an estimated 20 other major cities and 300 smaller towns will follow suit. Sydney inspired this worldwide movement as they launched this annual "lights out" hour last year, says the Sydney Morning Herald.

So what's the affect of all this darkness on the environment? The impact this year will make is unknown, but the launch in Sydney last year involved 2.2 million people and more than 2,000 businesses who shut off lights and appliances, resulting in a 10.2 percent reduction in carbon emissions during that hour.

So, I'll think I'll participate. I have one million candles lying around the house, anyway. And I like the idea of being part of something bigger.

No idea what to do for one hour in the dark? That's pathetic.