To own a truly authentic bar T-shirt you should have a connection to the place or a great adventure story about it. “Back in ’96 when we did a spontaneous trip to Nantucket…” But at the end of the day, a cool T is still a cool T whether you bought it at the bar or not. This is where Dive Bar Shirt Club comes in. For $20 a month, this service will send you a genuine T-shirt from some of the most unique bars in America. There’s no minimum order required and you can cancel anytime.
Courtesy of CanvasPop
While professional photographers have long had the ability to print their high quality prints on canvas, those of us armed with digital cameras and minimal knowledge of pixels and zoom lenses have been left collecting memories using one-hour labs. CanvasPop is a new service that allows you to feature your best shots as wall art, on canvas. The company will take digital, mobile and web art images of any resolution, allow you to tweak the photo and customize it to your liking, and then print it on any size canvas you wish. Free digital proofs are emailed to buyers before the image is stretched on canvas, and pricing, even for the framed prints, is affordable. This is a simple way to add a personal touch to your home’s art collection and is a good gift idea for parents, grandparents and significant others.
Remember that time you found out that your favorite band was playing at the Fox – except that the show was the night before? Songkick wants to help you prevent this kind of music misfortune. A free web service that tracks bands and artists, Songkick lets you know when they’re touring in Atlanta, and can send you e-mail recommendations for other shows you might like. It also shows you options for comparing prices and buying tickets, concert-related blog posts, and you can research music history from past concerts. Once you sign up, you can select the bands you want to track and even track certain venues. There’s also a social media element to Songkick in that you can share your experience with other “gig buddies” by adding posters, photos, videos, set lists, and reviews. Not every show is in their database yet, but with more than 1 million concerts so far, it’s a promising way to keep up with what’s ahead and relive shows from the past.
So much has been reported about the controversies of mass-produced, corn-fed beef (read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan or watch the documentary Food Inc.) that boutique butcheries specializing in all-organic, grassfed cattle have grown in popularity. Grassfed beef is widely praised for its health benefits (most are higher in healthful Omega 3s than conventional beef), its food safety standards, its lack of contaminants and its minimal environmental impact.
White Oak Pastures, a company based in Bluffton, Georgia, delivers delicious, hormone-free, grass-fed steaks, roasts, short ribs, and ground beef by mail. The company’s plant manager has a master’s degree in meat science, White Oak’s cattle roam free on private land and the company has made it to the top of an extremely competitive market – its beef can now be found in some Whole Foods stores. Order the meat by the pound or give a grassfed gift basket.
For those with more adventurous tastes, visit Anshu’s Exotic Meat Market and peruse their list of unusual sausages (alligator, anyone?), unique birds, black bear, elk, kobe beef, venison patties, boneless python meat and other choices that are bound to stoke a creative cook’s fires while also providing curious dinner table conversation.
Verizon’s MiFi – a pocket-sized gadget with the power to create a personal wi-fi cloud everywhere from taxi cabs to wooded lanes – has floored tech reviewers with its speed, ease of use, practicality and connectivity. The battery powered device homes signals from cell towers to bring users a smooth and strong 3G network. The Mi-Fi’s “bubble” is completely secure, thanks to a discreet pass code on the gadget’s underside, but it can be shared among five computers/devices, enabling spontaneous collaborations as well as unique opportunities to befriend strangers. The device, which has a battery life of four hours, is priced at $100 (1-year contract / $50 for 2-year contract), but in order to tap into the wireless cloud, users pay an additional $40 to $60 per month. You can also buy the device outright for $270, but only pay $15 for 24-hour access when you need it. MiFi
