the illustrated Saleema

The illustrated Saleema has a better fashion sense than I do, right down to coordinated jewelry!

I think this lovely little drawing was based on a photograph in which I'm wearing red shoes and a blue dress, but now I wish I had a green polka-dotted dress like this in real life.

by a. minzhulina

Thanks to Anna for the picture!!

Things We Like

Building on Rebecca's list over at Rose-Coloured, to try to get to 1000.  (If you want to add to this list, leave a comment or a link over at the original post at Rose-Coloured.) 

Whistling in chorus with somebody else

Allongés with milk

Making lists

Bouncy castles

Cream cheese icing

DIY nail art

Bunting banners

Earl Grey green tea

Girls on HBO

Radiolab

Lime and juniper berry doughnuts from Cafe Sardine

Finally getting rid of clothes that don’t fit properly

Learning how to purl

Chocolate with sea salt

Red shoes

Voting

Cakes decorated with fresh flowers

LUSH Gorilla perfume solid scents

Joanna Newsom

Kir Royales

Mark Bittman’s bean burgers

Vinyl

Headphone jack splitters

Ataulfo mangoes

Margaret Atwood on Twitter

Save-the-Date bookmarks from my wedding in all the books I’m reading

The Political Compass

While surfing a fellow Tweeter's blog, I found a link to a great site. The Political Compass explains itself as "a case of a journalist and an academic working on the inadequacies of simple left-right political identities." It's great --- a political site with scholarly understanding, historical accuracy, AND Canadian spelling! Click here to go take their questionnaire.

Here's where I fell on their spectrum:

Clockwise from the top right (Authoritarianism), it makes sense to think of the points of the cross as Fascism, Neo-Liberalism, Anarchism, and Communism. The vertical axis is the social dimension, the horizontal axis is the economic scale.

Here's another chart they have of international contemporary leaders:

Neoliberalism, and the rise of curtailed civil liberties, is responsible for the fact that most major political parties in North America would fall into the upper right quadrant. The site also plots the major parties in the Canadian elections of 2005 and 2008 --- and it's interesting to see how they've shifted.