Patriotic Sales Technique

I won't add much to this, and will keep the event where I saw this unidentified, but food (or candy?) for thought!

Let's start a "Bring Back Buttons" campaign!

We don't see as many buttons as we used to. I remember wearing several each day, and I remember a large collection of buttons pinned to the headliner in one of my old vans! These days I wear my handmade wooden Obama 12 pin most of the time, or one of my other wooden political pins - "Yes We Can", "Mr. Obama", or "That One" ..... The "Mr. Obama" design was born the first time I heard him called that on the radio - it turns out that NPR has a system - "President Obama" is used the first time he is mentioned in a news story, and "Mr. Obama" is usually used for subsequent mentions of our president in the same story.

"That One" is a reference to the time when John McCain in the October 7, 2008 debate with Barack Obama referred to him as "that one." John McCain was referring to Barack Obama's vote on an energy bill in the senate. McCain said it was "loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney. You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one." McCain pointed at Obama as he said the words "that one."

I think we should "Bring Back Buttons". They are a good way to start a great conversation. We don't need to agree with each other's buttons, but we do need to talk to each other! Maybe bring back bumper stickers too?

Feeling a little political today!

Click the image above to read more easily.

Latest design - Mechanical Card / Surprise Box

This is my latest mechanical card - also directly related to the Surprise Box - except that this one just operates with the little lever on the right - not spring activated. Press lever on the end to raise our hopes for victory in 2012!
Available as a business card version, or we can attach a pin back so you can wear your politics on your chest! Business card size. Price = $25

our Shopify site or our Etsy shop

As always, we'd love to design a custom piece for you!

Video of this new piece.

Untitled from Don Olney on Vimeo.

Budding Artist

A little while ago, Maya noted that the Obama 12 pin that Grandma Cheryl was wearing was not completely painted. The letters on this pin had been left the natural wood color, and Maya very much wanted to paint them! We told her we would bring her some parts that she could paint herself, and make her own Obama 12 pins! We knew better than to forget, and brought a few blank parts the next time we were there for "Grandkids Wednesday"!. Maya had a great time carefully painting the parts! She was a bit impatient with the idea of waiting for the paint to dry, but after lunch she declared them dry, and we glued them together. Above are two of them. Grandpa wears one all the time now!

Inspired, I have gone ahead and set up two places to buy "Obama 12" handmade wooden campaign buttons, and help contribute to the re-election of the best president ever.... oh I know .... you probably don't all agree, but that is one of the great things about this country! We don't all agree, but we usually manage to get along fairly well!

To get your handmade wooden "Obama 12" buttons, go here or here for some of our work.... 75% of the $ goes to the 2012 campaign - the balance offsets our cost of making them. We even have a pin promoting the re-election of Bo as "First Dog"!

Maya's work is not available to the public.

A good tale!

Warning - the following is political. If you are one of my liberal friends read on. If you are one of my more conservative friends - and yes I proudly have some very good friends who do not share my views on everything! - read on only if you are in a forgiving mood!

This was just too long to put on Facebook!

BY ALEX SANDERS | HOLIDAY 07 | FEATURES

Life After Politics

After losing a senatorial election, the writer finds redemption in monks and fruitcakes

In election year 2002 I ran for the United States Senate. I was the Democratic nominee from South Carolina to succeed the legendary J. Strom Thurmond (R-SC). The venture was quixotic at best. As every schoolchild knows, the states are divided for political purposes into two groups: The red states are the Republican states, and the blue states the Democratic states. South Carolina is easily the reddest of the red states — redder than red, crimson, fuchsia, magenta. A color all its own. Unsurprisingly, I lost.

Soon after losing the election, I trudged burro-like back home to Charleston. With me were Zoe, my wife of forty years, and our two surrogate children, a small gray kitten named Maggie Pennington, and Neil Diamond, a ten-year-old canary. Within days of our arrival, little Maggie escaped and was run over by a car. Her short life ended in Zoe’s arms. The next day, Neil Diamond fell from his perch like a stone and expired without a chirp. I, myself, was rapidly closing in on my biblically allotted threescore years and ten. For all practical purposes, I was broke, unemployed, and homeless. Near the end of the campaign, Zoe had said that if I lost the election I would have to move to some other state. I couldn’t help but notice she had said I would have to move — not we would have to move. I was enveloped with the dread of becoming uninspired. Who would ever have imagined I would find redemption in, of all places, a Trappist monastery?

Dispirited and despairing, soon after we arrived in Charleston I awoke early one morning on the second floor of the diminutive carriage house we were temporarily renting (in less elegant environs than Charleston, carriage houses are called garage apartments). The weather matched my melancholy mood. Unseasonable frigid temperatures gripped Charleston. A freezing rain was falling. I stumbled outside, found a nearby vending machine, and bought a copy of the Post and Courier, the local newspaper, which had enthusiastically endorsed my opponent in the campaign. In fact, I got two copies of the newspaper, one for me and one for Zoe. I find, when buying newspapers from vending machines, that you can get multiple copies for the price of one. No point, I thought, in maximizing the profits of a publication that had supported my opposition.

That particular morning, the Post and Courier contained a mildly interesting feature story about Mepkin Abbey, a Roman Catholic monastery forty-five miles west of Charleston, where twenty-nine Trappist monks live a communal life in prayer, poverty, and solitude. The property is historic. Mepkin was the plantation home of the early American patriot Henry Laurens. His ashes are buried at Mepkin in a picturesque cemetery overlooking the Cooper River, which, as all South Carolinians know, flows together with the Ashley River at Charleston to form the Atlantic Ocean.

Like other South Carolina plantations, Mepkin fell into the hands of Yankees after the Civil War. The property was ultimately purchased by Henry Luce, founder of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, and his distinguished wife, Clare Boothe Luce. In 1949, they donated a large portion of Mepkin for the founding of a monastic community. The Trappist monastery was established there the same year.

According to the Post and Courier story, the monks of Mepkin Abbey, in an unprecedented departure from their life of solitude, had undertaken an uncharacteristically worldly endeavor: They were making fruitcakes, and one of their number had been designated to meet visitors at the gates of the monastery and converse sufficiently with them to sell the fruitcakes for the modest sum of eight dollars each. I immediately sprang from my lethargy, determined to find Mepkin Abbey and buy a fruitcake from the monks. I have never much liked fruitcake. Actually, I hate fruitcake. For me, it is the rare Christmas gift I can never bring myself to re-gift. But now I had a purpose in life. Perhaps that’s a little overstated. At the least, for the first time since the election, I had something to do.

I departed on my doubtful pilgrimage, driving endlessly through the bowels of the South Carolina Lowcountry, stopping at every country store and crossroads to ask directions, and trying hard to forget election year 2002. My progress was substantially impeded by the terribly inclement weather. Clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens. The freezing rain continued unabated. Fog shrouded the swampy landscape. The tangled branches of towering live oak trees on either side of the road wove themselves together to form tunnels for me to pass through. At last, the stone gates of Mepkin Abbey loomed before me. Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher was never more imposing, or should I say spooky? Just as the Post and Courier had reported, the designated monk was waiting for me, as if he had been anticipating my arrival for his whole life. Perhaps he had been.

He was dressed in the traditional habit of a monk, a simply constructed garment of rough brown sackcloth, with a floppy hood and a rope sash tied loosely at the waist. I imagined him to have once been a titan of business or industry or, perhaps, one of the Masters of the Universe described by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, now determined to repent and forsake the world and all its mortal pleasures. I could scarcely see his face. His eyes seemed to glow like smoldering embers in the scant illumination beneath his hood (or maybe that was my imagination). I got out of my car and handed him a five-dollar bill and three singles. Silently, he handed me back a fruitcake, wrapped in brown paper. I did not speak. Nor did he. Somehow small talk seemed inappropriate. Then, just as I was about to leave, he leaned so close to me I could feel his warm breath on my cold face. He spoke.

“We all voted for you,” he said.

“I’m amazed,” I stammered. “I had no idea y’all voted.”

“Oh yes, we always vote,” he said, “and we voted for you.”

“That makes me think God is a Democrat,” I said.

He leaned even closer and whispered in my ear, “God is a Democrat.”

At that very instant, the rain stopped, the skies opened, and the sun shone forth. On the way back to Charleston, with the redeeming words of the talkative monk ringing in my ears, and his fruitcake on the seat beside me, Johnny Nash’s timeless lyrics played on the car radio: “Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind / It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day.”

I most definitely had my groove back.

Don't be afraid!

Borrowed from the web. No further comment!

Have we got a great First Lady or what?

During the Healthy Kids Fair on the White House South Lawn, the First Lady managed an impressive 142 hula hoop rotations.

I'm sure there will be detractors - there always are, but I can't imagine any other First Lady even trying this in public, let alone doing 142!

She also did some Double Dutch!

Just in case you think I've forgotten??

I am so proud of our president!

Thank You Mr. Obama, and Thank You also to all those who work so hard with you!

And Thanks to Michelle, the girls, and Bo for giving you moments when you can just forget and enjoy the moment!

These photos are from the White House Facebook
page, and are available for use by anyone as noted below.

This official White House photograph is being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way or used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Eighteen and a new voter!

A lot of kids think of other things on their first day as adults, but Maeve has been planing for registering to vote since she was about 10? With her friends Jess and Danielle as witnesses and photographers - taking pictures all the way, they walked down to the local government offices to do the deed. It was a bit of a let down, as the clerk just handed her a form to fill out and mail in? Not to be deterred, Maeve filled out the form right there in the office, and mailed it on the way back home. Someday she will have these pictures ready for her campaign posters when she runs for Senator, Town Council, or President?

Where do politicians get those pictures from the early formative years?

Remember you saw Maeve here first!

She got raised right! (Left? - Correct?)

That's my neice Maeve, right in the center, phone banking before the election.

2012

Thought I'd get to work today on the first campaign button for 2012!

Yes We Can!

Voting Day

Cheryl, Dad, and I walked over to the polling place today.

Results not in yet, but we did our part!

How lucky we are to live in a country where this is the way we do things!
Two stories from the voting line. The woman behind us in line told us about a patient of her's who had signed herself out the the hospital "against medical advice" in order to vote. Another guy at the other polling place in the room, was talking to the inspectors about how he could get his Mom from the hospital across the street over to vote!

Vote!

If you don't have any other reason to vote, you can share mine!

O Bam A

Another collection of miscellaneous Obama Pins. I couldn't get the couple with the McCain/Palin baseball caps to stop for a picture? That one would have been cool because the woman also had on a floor length coat covered with colorful elephants! Oddly, both the woman above, and the one immediately below asked me if I was photographing their politics or their chest? Seemed like an oddly liberal thing to say?

Glowing for Obama

The woman below with her daughter, gave us a Glow In The Dark Obama button!

It really does glow, and my camera actually got the picture!

Glow Barack!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Massachusetts is definitely Obama country. I could have filled the camera with images of pins, yard signs, bumper stickers, etc. I'm hoping my birthday present arrives on Nov. 4!
My old friend Peter Handler.
Seen on the bag of one of our customers.
Laser cut from plastic by a student at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Audio of Cheryl and Don

When we were in the paper the other day, there was supposed to be an audio link too, but I couldn't find it until tonight. Click on the link below and then click on our picture toward the middle of the row of pictures near the top of the page between Barack Obama on the left, and John McCain on the right. We come across OK, and there are three nice pictures. If you missed the newspaper article, just click on the "Read More" link under our name, or click here.

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20080909/MULTIMEDIA/309100003/-1/MULTIMEDIA

There are 4 McCain supporter interviews, and 4 Obama supporter interviews. All 8 seem thoughtful and reasoned.

I've got a nice link to the Obama web site over to the right below the Flickr pictures.

We do better under Democrats!

A friend sent along this chart he worked up from statistics on growth in family income under Republican Presidents and under Democratic Presidents. The top 5 percent seem to do about the same under both, though even they do a bit better under Democrats. The rest of us are a lot better off under Democrats.
Source: Alan S. Blinder’s “Economic View” (NY Times, 8/31/08), derived from Census Bureau data by Larry M. Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy. Two major points emerge: Over these 58 years, (1) Income inequality has widened substantially under Republican Presidents, and (2) Under Democratic Presidents, all groups have done better, on average, than any group has done under Republican Presidents. The implications of the effectiveness of each party’s economic policies should be clear to most, though surprising to many. Similarly, differences emerge in annual real GNP growth per capita (1948-2007) of 1.64% under Republican presidents vs. 2.78% under Democratic presidents.