Brad Pitt’s “Make It Right” project of rebuilding houses in the Lower 9th Ward has gotten a lot of press since December, when he announced it, but this is a bandwagon well worth jumping on, so I’ll add another tribute article to the list.

According to the MIR website, after spending considerable time and effort in New Orleans trying to help and talking with leaders, citizens and victims, “Pitt realized that an opportunity existed to build houses that were not only stronger and healthier, but that had less impact on the environment.” He got a group of experts together and they came up with the Make It Right project, with a goal of constructing 150 homes in the Lower 9th Ward, and emphasis on affordable systems that could be replicated.

The group chose 13 accomplished architects and tasked each of them to design a real-world home solution. All of the designs are to the building codes of the area, designed with various green and sustainable materials and practices, fit within a very tight building budget ($150,000), and have designed in flood precautions. Each house is raised off the gound, they all have some form of escape hatch to the roof, and they all have waterproof safes for valuables.

Billes Architecture, New Orleans: 2 homes to start building in March

“Make It Right” helps Katrina victims in the Lower 9th Ward get a house by providing the difference between their assets and the cost of rebuilding. Each homeowner chooses any of the 13 provided design options. Pitt and Hollywood producer, Steve Bing, together contributed an initial $10mil, and a lot more has been raised since then. According to the website, as of today, they have enough to build 80 of their goal of 150 houses, and the number increases as more people contribute.

The best part is – it’s REAL! According to Metropolis Magazine, they are breaking ground on the first five homes this month.

Graft, LA and Berlin: 1 home to start building in March

See pix of all the home designs, an incredible installation called The Pink Project, information about the Lower 9th Ward, all the details on the MIR project AND how to contribute at the Make It Right website.

There is also a great article in the March issue of Metropolis magazine.

Search 1, Google.
“blog success”
results: included a disconcerting yet fascinating series of phrases like “monitize” and “optimize” and “leverage the power of the internet.”

Search 2, Google.
“writing a business plan?”
It was at this point that my friend and I started twitching with discomfort…are we really researching “business plans?”

Fortunately for us, another friend briefly visited. She whisked in and immediately dropped a philosophical bomb on us: “Isn’t it crazy how time flies and how it’s so hard to do the things we used to do, like work a full day, go out for dinner and drinks, go see a band, and still make it to work on time the next day?” She then abruptly left saying “I gotta go! I’ve got something in the oven…not in my oven…. ha ha ha!”

That quick conversation, encompassing the passage of time, youthful energy (or lack thereof) and the very idea of parenting made us wonder…Didn’t people 20 years ago look older at our current age than we do? We’re aging better now than they did 20 years ago, right?

Search 3, Google.
“xx year old woman in 1987″
“xx high school reunion of the class of 19xx”

results: not helpful. Hmmm, well, people are having children at older ages than they used to, soparents have to have more energy, and thus stay younger looking, right?

Search 4, Google.
“Having children later in life”
“Older Mothers”

results: Mommy-Come-Lately, a site with lots of pics of happy families where the parents are older. They all look great, which does kind of prove our point that people look great today, but it still didn’t help us with what the same ages of people looked 20 years ago.

While we were perusing this site, we were, of course, singing “Johnny-come lately…the new kid in town…” Who was that by anyway? Oh yeah, wasn’t it the Eagles? Yes. When was that song?

Search 5, Google
“New Kid in Town, Eagles”
results: Wikipedia. New Kid In Town was on the Hotel California album and hit #1 on Billboard charts in February of 1977. And did you know that the Eagles got together in 1971 as a group to back Linda Ronstadt? When they later created their own band, the name, The Eagles, came as a nod to The Byrds. All of the Wikipedia infoand history of the Eagles is quite interesting. We probably could have spent the rest of the night doing VHI-ish “Behind the Music” Googling, but in this one instance, we decided to consciously come back to our original distraction on the exploration of aging.

We decided TV history might have some answers (it always does).
Search 6, Google
“TV women over xx in the 1980’s”
results: “Between Friends,” a 1983 HBO flick starring Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor as middle-aged divorcee friends. I have to admit, I found it a bit unnerving that these two actresses even knew each other, let alone liked each other and starred in a movie together. We couldn’t find any really good pictures from this movie, but we did find a LIFE magazine cover “Liz Taylor is 40!” from 1972. She looks good, but 40-year-olds today look younger than that, I’m sure of it.

What about the TV show, “Roseanne?”
Search 7, Google
“Roseanne, TV show”
results:There’s a a great pic of the cast on the Oxygen website here. Check out Roseanne – she looks pretty darn good, and she doesn’t really look very old either.

How old do you think she’s supposed to be in this part of the series anyway?
Search 8, Google.
“how old was Roseanne in the TV series?”
results: Wikipedia. The character was born in 1952. Becky, the oldest kid, was born in 1975, and she looks to be about 18, so that means the character Roseanne is about 41 here.

Becky looks way different than I remember her…like completely different. Yeah, do you remember there were 2 Becky’s, but they never actually said anything about the fact that the actresses changed? Oh yeah!

Hmmm, She looks familiar for some reason.
Hey, isn’t that the chick on Scrubs?

Search 9, IMDB
“Scrubs.”
IMDB click: Sarah Chalke
Sure enough, it’s her! She apparently got the part when the other Becky, Alicia Garanson, left to go to college.

Anyway, her face looked different the last time I saw Scrubs. Like her lips looked different. Did you notice that? Yeah. Search 10, Google:
“has Sarah Chalke had lip implants?”

Another diverging Google search result immediately caught our attention:
“Tara Reid opens up about botched plastic surgery.”

You’ll have to search that one yourself, because it was at this point that my friend and I realized just how far we had strayed from our quest of learning more about blogging. And we didn’t really learn anything that interesting, except that content really does affect ads – look at all those plastic surgery ads to the right! (And the trivia that the second Becky is the chick from Scrubs is bound to be useful somehow)… sometimes it’s the ride rather than the destination that makes the internet fun.