Congratulations to Akron’s own LeBron James for winning the NBA MVP award two years in a row!!!

To be honest with you, working on a beautiful spring day sucks.  Immensely.  Stepping out every half hour or so to catch some sun doesn’t help much- it’s just a tease.  So as I sat pounding away at the keyboard entering products, uploading photos, etc, etc, I looked up at the window & saw a great site- two Goodyear blimps- one it the store and one in the sky.  My day of work was made much better…and it gave me a much needed blog topic.  Enjoy!

"Sorry Chicago, we've got this one"

Thursday’s Game 3 in Chicago was pretty rough for every Cleveland fan that watched it.  Down 20 points a good majority of the game, and then to bring it so, so close in the last few minutes….definitely an edge-of-your-seat-er.  Games  4 & 5 are ours…sorry Chicago.  Nice try though…just stick to deep-dish pizza and memories of Michael Jordan.

I’ve been wanting to go up to the Cleveland Art Museum to see their new Art of the American Indians exhibit, but this week they added some new pieces to the outdoor collection….GO CAVS!!!!

I was very pleased to see good news & a familiar face on Ohio.com today.  My textiles professor, Dr. Jennings-Rentenaar is featured for her silk spinning talent.  She has woven some beautiful fabrics & these scarves are the latest example of her craft.

Silk lover is wrapped up in her work

Professor spins yarn of Appalachian moth

By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer

POSTED: 10:38 p.m. EDT, Apr 22, 2010

Three years ago, Teena Jennings-Rentenaar wanted to learn the little-known art of harvesting wild silk.

So she experimented on her own and went to the island nation of Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa, where women harvest silk the same way their ancestors have for decades.

Now Jennings-Rentenaar, an associate professor of family and consumer science at the University of Akron, is the point person for a new cooperative that sells silk products made by the women of Madagascar.

And she’s using what she learned from the native women to fine-tune a procedure for harvesting silk fiber from the cocoon of America’s largest moth, the giant cecropia, with the goal of launching an industry on this side of the Atlantic.

”I’m not aware of anyone else who has done this,” said Jennings-Rentenaar amid a heap of the brownish-beige scarves spun in Madagascar from silk from the wild boracera moth. ”It’s tantalizing.”

Jennings-Rentenaar long has been interested in the touch and feel, the color and use of fabrics.

She started weaving as a teen. By the time she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Queen’s University, Canada, she was convinced she wanted her hobby to be her livelihood.

After studying fabric and textiles for a master’s degree at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a doctorate at Ohio State, she was hooked — and believes that there is more than enough work for students who share her love of fabrics.

They can be designers, weavers, spinners, silk specialists, store owners, quilters and educators, she said.

”This line of work can absorb every student that we have,” she said amid piles of alpaca, silk, cotton and synthetic yarns stuffed into reed baskets in her office. ”It has a rhythm to it that feels really nice.”

Jennings-Rentenaar parlayed her love of silk into a quest to harvest the wild variety from the cecropia moths that are common east of the Mississippi River and especially in the Appalachian foothills.

She spent years looking for a way to remove the sericin, or gluey wax, that stiffens the cocoon while keeping the fiber intact.

Finally she settled on a process: After the adults had emerged from the cocoon, she dips the cocoons into a homegrown brew of boiling water, washing soda and dishwasher detergent, then stretches them on a wet turntable studded with spikes to dry.

Then she spins the silk into yarn. Twenty-five moths produce enough silk for a skein of yarn — enough for a lacy collar, for instance.

This wild silk is less lustrous than the cultivated variety produced in China, India and other countries, where insect larvae are boiled, baked or frozen while still in the cocoons to prevent them from emerging as adults and breaking the single filament of silk. It is that single strand that gives silk its glossy appeal.

”This would be a more ethical and sustainable way to develop silk,” Jennings-Rentenaar said, as the moths would live from year to year to produce more offspring and more silk.

The wild silk can be dyed but the color will be variegated because wild caterpillars eat a variety of leaves that affect the color of their silk. Cultivated caterpillars feast exclusively on mulberry leaves to assure a uniformly whitish silk.

Jennings-Rentenaar believes her cecropia silk is of interest to others seeking to work with new fabrics and who appreciate that larvae aren’t exterminated in the production process.

He goal is to make her process common in the United States by finding ways to reduce the labor costs that come with raising and processing moth silk. The bottom line: Maybe someday the cecropia silk industry may become a cottage industry in the Appalachians, where the moth is readily available and crafts are prized.

”There are a lot of specialized hand spinners in the South and they’re interested in contributing to something with a story attached,” Jennings-Rentenaar said.

To buy a scarf made from Madagascan boracera silk, contact Jennings-Rentenaar at tj9@uakron.edu. She returns the proceeds to the native women and does not profit from the sale.

GAME 1, BEAT DA BULLS!

There is a big issue that is hitting Northeast Ohio. No, it’s not on the May ballot, nor is it really a democratic decision. Rather it’s fingers crossed and knocking on wood that our beloved LeBron will stay in Cleveland. Since last year after all of the Obama/Palin (you never here about the guy that ran with her, who was it?) presidential hoopla ended, Northeast Ohioans began a grassroots effort to show King James just how much he means to this area. Countless websites (and seemingly even more t-shirts) have popped up- everyone wanting a little piece of the action and to convince LeBron to stay. So will he? Is a t-shirt or a Facebook group enough to save this area?

I can think of many local companies (primarily t-shirts), us included, that do pretty well off of the “LeBron Mania” that has swept the area. If he were to leave, no doubt we would all be absolutely devastated. Merchandise companies would fall out, bars & restaurants that run Cavs promos would lose business, and no doubt the attendance at Cavs’ games would rival the early years of the Gund. We all witnessed last month the sheer upset over Z’s one month “vacation” from the Cavs, but he doesn’t have too many years left; same with Shaq (who I really hope once he retires returns to that incredible film career he started mid-90s); there is certainly hope with Mo Williams and Antawn Jamison- but let’s be honest- it’s LeBron that makes it all worthwhile. So LeBron, please do this area that has watched countless Browns’ losses and the curse of Rocky Colavito riddle the Tribe a favor, and Just Stay. Please Don’t Leave #23. Or #6, as will be the case next year- merchandise sales rejoice!

This may sound a little sad, but one of my (Sarah) favorite parts of the week comes on Friday evening (unless I just DVR and watch later) is E!’s The Soup with Joel McHale. I hate reality TV, but absolutely love dry witty commentary of 10 second clips of ridiculous people. I was quite excited last week when my beloved Joel (no man wears a skinny tie quite like him) played a clip from a show on Tru TV called Over the Limit, a show about belligerent drunks. The clip aired was filmed in Akron. Not only are we one of the biggest meth-producing cities, but now all of America can see us for our drunks. Quite classy. Well, last night there was yet another clip of an intoxicated Akronite. By the arrest occurring on Wheeler St, we’re assuming this is a UA student. If that’s the case, he should probably quit wasting his money on education, because so far its done him no good. And he’s kind of gross. Well, hopefully this exposure can teach some Akronites to behave and know when enough is enough. Laugh and enjoy!

Join The Happy Trails crew at the Akron Public Library on Wednesday, April 14th, at 6:30pm, for a unique (and free) animal-related presentation…

By Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times

Published on Tuesday, Apr 06, 2010

WASHINGTON: Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: ”Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. ”That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast. We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity — and to generate the rising incomes and wealth we need to pay for existing entitlements, as well as all the new investments we’ll need to make. It was just reported that Social Security this year will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes — a red line we were not expected to cross until at least 2016.

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: Grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers.

”Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

That is no surprise. After all, Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, asks: What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — ”we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-IQ risk-takers.”

In addition, because of our vibrant and meritocratic university system, the best foreign students who wanted the best education also came here, and many of them also stayed. In its heyday, our unique system also attracted a disproportionate share of high-IQ risk-takers to high government service. So when you put all this together, with our free markets and democracy, it made it easy here for creative, high-IQ risk-takers to raise capital for their ideas and commercialize them. In short, America had a very powerful, self-reinforcing engine for growing innovative new companies.

”When you get this happy coincidence of high-IQ risk-takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-IQ risk-takers, you get these above-average returns as a country,” argued Mundie. ”What is common to Singapore, Israel and America? They were all built by high-IQ risk-takers and all thrived — but only in the U.S. did it happen at a large scale and with global diversity, so you had this really rich cross section.”

What is worrisome about America today is the combination of cutbacks in higher education, restrictions on immigration and a toxic public space that dissuades talented people from going into government. Together, all of these trends are slowly eating away at our differentiated edge in attracting and enabling the world’s biggest mass of smart, creative risk-takers.

It isn’t drastic, but it is a decline — at a time when technology is allowing other countries to leverage and empower more of their own high-IQ risk-takers. If we don’t reverse this trend, over time, ”we could lose our most important competitive edge — the only edge from which sustainable advantage accrues” — having the world’s biggest and most diverse pool of high-IQ risk-takers, said Mundie. ”If we don’t have that competitive edge, our standard of living will eventually revert to the global mean.”

Right now we have thousands of foreign students in America and one million engineers, scientists and other highly skilled workers here on H-1B temporary visas, which require them to return home when the visas expire. That’s nuts. ”We ought to have a ‘job-creators visa’ for people already here,” said Litan. ”And once you’ve hired, say, five or 10 American nonfamily members, you should get a green card.”

We need health care, financial reform and education reform. But we also need to be thinking just as seriously and urgently about what are the ingredients that foster entrepreneurship — how new businesses are catalyzed, inspired and enabled and how we enlist more people to do that — so no one ever says about America what that officer says to Tom Cruise in Top Gun: ”Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.”