FQ1: Share a health or beauty tip!

Mental health tip: make time for your brain. Don't give all your time away to other people and activities - save some space for your brain to just *be*. Let your brain sink into that space and let it go where it wants without reining it in. It'll work better for you at other times knowing it gets a break too.

Beauty tip: It's pretty obvious that I don't *have* any beauty tips or I'd be better looking. Having said that, I can recommend a range of skin care products that deliver even, soft good looking skin that are a pleasure to buy and use. Origins. And they smell devine. Their hair range is good too.

FQ2: Share a computer or electronic gadget tip!

Computer tip: it's not a tip so much as a reminder. Working in an office with a certain person who shall remain nameless due mostly to the fact she annoys the living crap out of me no matter where in the world she is: save your work. Save it when you open the file and get into the habit of ctrl+s'ing after every few minutes. You won't get RSI and I'll never have to hear the "Word just crashed and took all my work with it." I think that's right up there with "the dog ate my homework".

Again, not a tip but I'm in love with iPhoto. I love that it opens when I connect my digital camera to the computer, sucks all my photos down and saves them in chronological folders, and deletes the photos from my camera's memory. It does a lot of other stuff to and it's such a great tool.

FQ3: Share a travel or transportation tip!

meh I don't have any tips. I am tipless. This reminds me though - I don't know about you but I always seem to end up on an flight in the seat in front of a small kid. Oh yeh, there are crying babies on the flight too, but they're in the seat in *front* of me. The annoying little kid who likes to kick his feet against the my seat is behind me. Ask my kids, they'll tell you how I much I hate that - they'll also tell you how i can deliver a stinging slap to the legs of anyone kicking the back my seat without having to stop the car.

One long flight and in the dead of night while his parents slept soundly/had passed out beside him, this young boy kicked my seat until I woke up. And kept kicking it. I leaned over the seat to see the 7 or so year old boy slouched and bored in his seat banging his foot against the back of my seat and I asked him, in my very nicest voice, if he could please stop. And he did, for the 30 seconds it took for me to settle myself back into my seat. I turned around and asked him again, this time, a little bit firmer but still being kind to please stop kicking my seat. Again he stopped until I was out of sight and back in my seat, just long enough to be lulled into a false sense of security when he started again. kick. kick. kick. kick. kick. kick. This time the face that came at him from over the seat made him shrink down flat and wide eyed "DO WE HAVE A PROBLEM??" my very best not-loud-but-my-temper-just-snapped voice. His eyes were *huge*. "STOP.KICKING.THEFUCKING.SEAT". Success. I think I heard him crying but I was too busy drifting off to sleep.

FQ TIPSTER: Got a tip for a classic or vintage CD, movie, TV show, or book we might have overlooked?

Last Friday night I watched the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers and, it's bloody strange. Factor in the fact it was made in 1930 and it becomes positively bizarre - especially Groucho's asides to the camera.

"We must remember that art is art.
Well, on the other hand water is water isn't it?
And east is east and west is west.
And if you take cranberries and stew them like applesause
they taste much more like prunes than rubarb does.
Now uh...now you tell me what you know."

"quote, unquote, and quote."

"Tell me, what do you think of the traffic problem?
What do you think of the marriage problem?
What do you think of at night when you go to bed,
you beast."

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks. That's not so easy to say. Tusks.
You try it some time. As I say, we tried to remove the tusks. But they were embedded so firmly we couldn't budge them.
Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about."