The Coffee Shop Where Everyone Pays for Everyone Else's Drinks

The main conceit of the 2000 Kevin Spacey film Pay It Forward is that if one person does a kindness for three strangers, and those three people each do kindnesses for three strangers, and so on, one person can change the world.

Rarely do we see this acted out in the real world the way it was cinematically—one scene finds a man giving away his brand-new Jaguar to a guy having car troubles—but on a smaller scale, these sorts of random niceties happen far more often than you might think. Today, it's selflessness at a small coffee house in Bluffton, South Carolina.

It all started two years ago at Corner Perk, a small, locally owned coffee shop, when a customer paid her bill and left $100 extra, saying she wanted to pay for everyone who ordered after her until the money ran out. The staff fulfilled her request, and the woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, has returned to leave other large donations every two to three months.

"People will come in and say, 'What do you mean? I don't understand. Are you trying to buy me a coffee today?'" the shop's owner, Josh Cooke, told the local news. "And I say, 'No, somebody came in 30 minutes ago and left money to pay for drinks until it runs out.'"

It took a while, but word has started to spread around the tiny coastal town, home to about 12,000 people. Now, more and more customers have been leaving money to pay for others' food and drink. Cooke says some people don't even buy anything when they come in; they just stop to donate and head right back out.

A medium cup of coffee at Corner Perk costs $1.95. That may not seem like a lot, but for a family struggling to save money in these tense and difficult economic times, two bucks saved at the right moment probably feels like a million. And a jolt of generosity is a better pick-me-up than caffeine any day of the week.

Parents Shouldn't Text

Great Signs

Lessons from Butterflies

Butterflies start off as caterpillars feeding on leaves until they finally cocoon themselves turning into butterflies.  The process of the butterfly breaking out of the cocoon is quite strenuous and can take a while to do so.  However, this process actually strengthens the butterfly’s wings and allows the butterfly to have the strength in it wings to fly away from the cocoon.

If someone decided to help the butterfly in the cocoon by removing the layers of the cocoon, the butterfly would be denied the opportunity to strengthen its wings. Once free from the cocoon the butterfly would fall to the ground and die.
 
When helping others never deny them the opportunity to strengthen their wings, so they too can fly like a butterfly.

Gorgeous Stars - Camille Belle

Camille Belle

Born in California as Camilla Belle Routh, her mother, Cristina, is Brazilian, and her father, Jack, is American. Her mother is a fashion designer and her father owns a construction company. He is building Belle her first home. Camilla is an only child.

From 2006 to 2008, she got a taste of her mother's world with some fashion jobs - she modeled for Vera Wang's Princess fragrance.

Camilla is also involved in various charities and is an international spokesperson for "Kids With A Cause".

Trivia
Speaks fluent English and Portuguese.
Likes Brazilian food: feijoada (typical plate made with pork and beans), pão-de-queijo (typical bread made with cheese) and brigadeiro (sweet made with chocolate).
Likes to watch Brazilian soap operas with her grandmother Deborah and used to visit her mother's family in São Paulo.

For all her movies: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004741/

Optical Illusions

Vertical Farming - Better For The Environment

I have been dreaming of Vertical Greenhouses and Vertical farming for almost 20 years and have spoken to numerous people about this concept.  The vision I always had was of an enclosed building that from the inside looked like a high rise parking structure.  It would be powered using a combination of solar, wind and thermal energy.  And because of its enclosed structure it would use less water and would use less pesticides. 

I am so thrilled to see that this concept has finally manifested through a Swedish company called Plantagon that has apparently been working on this concept for 12 years.  Their Plantascrapers could end up changing the age-old practice of farming using large tracts of land that are at the mercy of the weather, pests and other natural phenomenon. 

Here is the article from Good Environment:

The future of urban farming is under construction in Sweden as agricultural design firm Plantagon works to bring a 12-year-old vision to life: The city of Linköping will soon be home to a 17-story "vertical greenhouse."

The greenhouse will serve as a regenerating food bank, tackling urban sprawl while making the city self-sufficient. Plantagon predicts that growing these plants in the city will make food production less costly both for the environment and for consumers, a key shift as the world's population grows increasingly urban—80 percent of the world's residents will live in cities by 2050, the United Nations estimates. "Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide," Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle says.

The greenhouse is a conical glass building that uses an internal "transportation helix" to carry potted vegetables around on conveyors. As plants travel around the helix, they rotate for maximum sun exposure. Hassle says the building will use less energy than a traditional greenhouse, take advantage of "spillage heat" energy companies cannot sell, digest waste to produce biogas and plant fertilizers, and decrease carbon dioxide emissions while eliminating the environmental costs of long-distance transportation. And growing plants in a controlled environment will decrease the amount of water, energy, and pesticides needed. 

The greenhouse, which will open in late 2013, is already serving as a model for other cities—Plantagon hopes to install the transportation helix technology in regular office buildings around the world, eliminating the need to build entirely new structures. The tallest models even have a name: Plantascrapers.