In the spirit of the “25 Random Things” that is currently “sweeping” Facebook and which I will probably feel obligated to do at some point, I offer a teaser:

Random Thing #1. Curling

When I was a small child, I was a member of the Schenectady Curling Club. We trained every weekend and competed in bonspiels all over the Northeast. I collected and traded curling pins.

For years I avoided divulging this information like a good skip shooting for two in the ninth end without the hammer.

Well don’t throw in the hammer on curling just yet. It turns out that there are people all over the world, even in places without purpose-built curling ponds, who want to achieve international glory on the curling sheet. Meet the Jamaican bobsled team – oops, just kidding – the Brazilian curling team.

The Brazilian team is so serious that they have challenged the US team for their berth in the 2009 world championships of the sport. (Read the full article here.)

Who knows – if Brazilians make curling cool again (which I don’t think it’s been since about 1855), I may just have to head over to the Barcelona Skating Club and take a refresher course. Yes, there is curling within a fifteen-minute walk of my apartment in Barcelona.  The similarities between Barcelona and Niskayuna are simply stunning.

Samba bonspiel, anyone?

I don’t know about you all, but the financial crisis has forced me to take a stern look at my personal finances in recent weeks. We all have to tighten our belts. Some of us will have to buy fewer six packs. Others may need to cancel the season’s final aerial wolf hunt in the interest of saving fuel (and bullets). These are extraordinary times, and they call for extraordinary sacrifice.

As for me, I feel like Rosie the Riveter, tending my Victory Garden and salvaging my scrap metals to help get our economy back on track.* And yet I want to do more. So I combed the family budget, line by line, to see how we might save a few precious euros this October. After a deep and careful analysis, I now know what I must do.

I must make all decorations for my upcoming “Haunted Housewarming” Halloween-slash-Housewarming party out of tampons.

Yes, tampons. Something I already have on hand in good supply. These puppies have been languishing in my medicine cabinet for three weeks out of the month for YEARS. No more. This year, I’m putting my tampon investment to work and creating these fluffy fantasms:

If I am feeling especially daring, I may also attempt the tampon bat, although the pipecleaner requirement might put me over budget. (Also, I find these bats inexplicably disturbing. Maybe it’s the tampon applicator head. Even I have to draw the line somewhere.)

For more ideas on how to turn your tampons into Halloween multitaskers, visit MarthaStewart.com (hint: this is actually a link to TamponCrafts.com – I don’t know that it’s actually affiliated with Martha.)

After receiving the nth iteration of this Facebook ad, I am official disgusted with the state of online targeted advertising. We are officially living in a scene from Minority Report.

I realize that this sort of targeted advertising is not new and that it’s far from accurately pinpointing my interests as a consumer (and they might be scanning my Facebook profile, but I don’t think they’re scanning my eyeballs…or are they…) But someone without my lack of self control in the face of chocolate might see this barage of manipulative ads and start to seriously consider clicking on this damn banner ad.

But what happens when a web service becomes a part of your daily routine, and then implements an advertising campaign that you don’t like? Or any other policy for that matter? I’m not going to stop using Facebook because of this, and they’re not going to stop doing it simply because I send them a well-reasoned complaint email.

The internet used to seem like the great equalizer – instead of three news networks and four major newspapers, we had access to thousands of viewpoints, scores of high-quality blogs, and the decision-making power to determine which ones were quality enough to earn our loyalty. Now it seems like power is being siphoned back over to the companies – many of which are “tiny startups” that have grown into giant corporate machines.

Maybe it was naive of me when I happily signed up for Facebook, and surely in the future I will not allow a web application to insinuate itself so neatly into my life. I’m now stuck with “diets for the bride on a deadline” for the foreseeable future. Unless I change my relationship status to “In an open relationship” or the hilarious “It’s Complicated.” Who knows what new and exciting ads could find their way into my news feed…