
Please call me Bachelor Kelsey Timmerman or if you prefer Kelsey Timmerman Bachelor of Arts.
Actually, no one ever calls me that. A BA isn’t as noteworthy as, say, Dr. Evil’s PhD at Evil medical school.
I speak at a lot of universities and have the pleasure of chatting with a lot of really smart professors with PhD’s and Masters. Sometimes for some reason, folks assume that I at least have my masters.
“Where did you go to grad school?” They’ll ask.
My grad school was writing 100,000 words of travel columns cooped up in my Key West attic apartment accessed by a fold out ladder. That’s where and when I learned to write and found my voice.
So, I didn’t learn to…
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Harper is home sick today from Kindergarten. This is her first ever missed day of school. She had a good run . . . for a month. Looks like she won’t be the Cal Ripken of Royerton elementary.
Anyhow, all of this got me thinking about awards for perfect attendance.
A perfect attendance award means:
a) a kid or employee was never sick;
or
b) they were sick, likely multiple times, and exposed the other students and their co-workers to their germs.
Never being sick is highly unlikely so that means awarding perfect attendance is encouraging the spread of germs in schools and the work place. And that seems kind of stupid, doesn’t it?
I could be wrong. In high school, before I had sinus surgery, I missed a lot of school. So…
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In 1970 four Kent State students were shot to death and nine more were wounded as the National Guard turned their guns on protestors. Forty-four years later, Urban Outfitters is monetizing the tragedy by selling a blood-stained hoodie complete with bullet holes.
Of course Urban Outfitters says the red stains and holes were simply an accident. Sure, an accident that the company photographed and posted on its site for sale for $125.
You can read about the controversy on Mashable and BuzzFeed so I’m not going to recount everything that has been said, but I want to make two points.
All Publicity is Good Publicity . . . unless we act
Has H&M benefitted from the fact that their clothing labels were found in the…
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Some African cocoa farmers have never eaten chocolate even though the continent supplies more than half of the world’s cocoa.
Cocoa is a commodity, one of the world’s most volatile, and the quality of the farmers’ lives rise and fall with the cocoa prices. The money isn’t in the growing of cocoa, but in the processing of the cocoa into chocolate, the packaging, and the selling of the chocolate. This typically happens far from African soil. Hence you have cocoa farmers who’ve never tasted chocolate, and others like the ones I ate Hershey’s Kisses with in Ivory Coast who rarely do.
But one company, Madécasse, is challenging that model. Of the 500 chocolate brands in the U.S., Madécasse is the only one…
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Harper is totally going to need therapy!
I’ve never known someone who died from ALS, nor was I fully aware of how scary the disease was until the challenge. So as silly as this challenge seems, it raised my awareness.
Is it a sustainable way to raise funds or even replicable? Probably not. But it’s fun and important, and even my own parents accepted the challenge. OnPoint explored the viral campaign on a show titled “Stunt Philanthropy in the Age of Social Media.” If you’ve criticized or defended the Ice Bucket Challenge, you should listen to this show:
And of course, I hope you’ll join Harper and me in donating to the ALS Association at www.alsa.org….
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(I love this photo by Gail Werner of Gail Werner photography because it looks like I’m about to tell someone to F@#K off! For the record: I wasn’t.)
Have we met? Here’s my speaking schedule (as of 8/13). If I’m at a city near you, let’s grab a coffee or beer or come hear me speak. I’ll bring the novelty underwear and the banana. Wait? That doesn’t sound good. I mean that in the least sexual way as possible.
Seriously though, during these events I’m telling all sorts of stories, which I love to do. But do you know what I love to do more? I love to hear stories. I like to shut up and listen. It’s probably one of the…
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Tim McCollum, a former Peace Corps volunteer, is the CEO of Madecasse, a Brooklyn-based chocolate company that sources cocoa and manufacturers chocolate entirely in Madagascar. Tim joins me LIVE on Google Hangouts to discuss the African cocoa industry’s challenges and potential. Join us! Ask a question!
Here’s a promo video from Madecasse:
…
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In 2010 I traveled to Ireland to research suicides. The gap between the loveliness of the people and grimness of my topic was wider than the Atlantic. I had the world’s worst response to: “Welcome to Ireland! What brings you here?”
I’ve carried a lot of stories over the past twelve years I’ve been writing, but few have been as heavy as those stories from Ireland. They have been even heavier because the book never came into existence, and I’m not sure where you publish such stories. So for the first time, I’m sharing them on this blog and on the blog of the Facing Project.
I’m not an expert on suicides. I’ve never been personally touch by suicide. So one of the…
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Would you help share the stories of the farmers and fishermen who catch pick and grow our food? What if there was bacon and chocolate on the line? That’s right…BACON, chocolate, and some other goodies.
The paperback of WHERE AM I EATING? is coming out in about one month. I’m pumped for the stories of the farmers I met on my global farming adventure to spread even more. About 80% of the folks who read my first book, read the paperback. So a big push on the the paperback is really important.
If you’ve read EATING, now would be a great time to share what you thought of it by writing a short review on Amazon, Goodreads, or any other review site or blog of…
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Supermarkets checkout lines are filled with magazine covers of photoshopped, liposucked, and unnaturally enhanced specimens of biology and reality. But the unrealistic expectations in our supermarkets don’t end there.
We like ’em big, round, smooth, and shiny. And of course now I’m talking about fruits and vegetables.
I love big beets and I cannot lie
Forty percent of food in the United States goes uneaten. This includes ugly fruits and lumpy vegetables. The cost to transporting food to our tables accounts for 10 percent of the U.S. energy budget, uses half of our land and 80 percent of the freshwater consumed. Yet, if a potato has an extra lump or an orange a strange phalange, they get tossed without a second thought.
More than 20 pounds of food per person is tossed every…
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