On the same theme as the young/old photo project at Color Wars, here's a woman dancing with a video of herself as a girl.

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This Lauren Thompson is quite a choreographer, actually. Even more entertaining than her self duet to Huey Lewis is this 5-minute (the whole thing's worth it!) video of walking down the street in New York City, to the tune of Queen's forgotten gem "Body Language."

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Like many people, I received my electronic deposit from the economic stimulus package this week. Not that it will do me any good. Nor should it.

I forgot, when I set up the terms for this challenge, that I had pre-planned a vacation to Boston and Rhode Island for Memorial Day weekend. The flight and lodging are already taken care of, but obviously it should cost more than $2 a day to sightsee in New England, right? My friends and family all assume that I'll either abandon the experiment for the duration of the trip ("It's a vacation, from everything!") or use the stimulus check of $300 as fun money for that purpose. No way. That's exactly what the feds want, and right now, I don't think they should get what they want. I figure if Santa Cruz, the second-most expensive place in America, can be done on $2 a day, so can New England.

Kind of. Here's the full explanation: 

Artist Ranjit Bhatnagar has proposed an art installation that takes the ambient noise from a room or a recorded piece of video and translates it into music with found objects. The demo video shows a simplified version learning the 'song' beneath a clip from Citizen Kane. The final project will loop each improvisation it learns and create compositions from it, and the artists promises that when he puts the installation in, he'll use found objects for the instruments from whatever location he's at.

So: Anyone in Santa Cruz want to make an offer on this, stat? 

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I spent nothing yesterday, and it felt great. Of course, one day is easy to skate through without spreading around money. But first, you have to avoid parking tickets.

The most embarrassing financial confession I make during this project might just be how many parking tickets I've paid in the last year. The lot near the GT office is free for three hours, and most employees here make do with going outside and moving their cars twice a day. It's not exactly what the city intended when it set up this law, I don't think -- that's a lot of unnecessary pollution -- but there you go. My problem is I get into these absent-minded professor zones where I lose track of time, and then four hours pass, and then I go downstairs to find a friendly pink slip in the windshield.

It's all about the Jeffersons. I went to the bank yesterday and made the most fun request I could of the teller: "I'd like $62 in $2 bills, please." To their credit, they never asked why, even when digging up that amount required filling out mysterious forms and entering the actual vault. (I imagine bank robbers running out of there with a bag of $2 bills slung over their shoulder.)

But why, besides being quirky, insist on $2s?