Good morning Hank, it's Thursday, September 11th, and I can think of no better day to think about ways we can make the world suck less. So here's a video about videos.

Video number 1, Shawn's collaboration with Save the Children in Bangladesh. Hank, this video is a video response to a video make by Shawn, who as I'm sure you remember is a Nerdfighter who lives in Bangladesh and works full-time to help decrease world suck among the world's poorest kids. A few months ago a bunch of Nerdfighters came together to send Shawn some money to help people in Bangladesh. He's already used a lot of that money in made-of-awesome ways but now he wants to use the rest of it working with Save the Children to do something awesome. But here's the problem that Shawn faces, and indeed the same problem that lots of charities face when they're working in the developing world: there is just not enough money to do everything that needs to be done. So you end up having to choose: do I do vitally important thing A or vitally important thing B? What matters most, clean water, the health of infants, education? It's a very difficult calculus. So what Shawn has done is he's given us an introduction to a variety of different things that we can do. And this time, everybody has a voice in that conversation. We can go and vote on what we think is the most important thing, the thing that should be done first with our money, and then Shawn will do it. Now of course I know a lot of you are saying, why don't we just send Shawn more money so he can do everything? I'm all in favor of sending Shawn more money, but that still won't solve the problem. I think it's a profoundly difficult and complex question and we shouldn't try to get out of it just by sending more money. Instead, we should all have to make some of the tough choices that Shawn makes every day.

Video two. Hank, at the tail end of our amazing night in Chicago with many, many Nerdfighters on 8-8-08, we met Amy Krause Rosenthal at the Bean. Amy Krause Rosenthal of course being the author of many critically acclaimed and best-selling books including Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Little Pea in Your Pants. What I love so much about Little Pea in Your Pants is that first you think, "God, that would be a disaster," and then you think, "Although, if I'm going to have an amount of pee in my pants other than none..." So we all went and met Amy Krause Rosenthal at the Bean, hundreds of us, and we had no idea what she was planning. All we knew was that she had a yellow umbrella. Well it turns out she was planning to make a movie and that movie stars a ton of Nerdfighters, including me! And the movie she made is only the first part of the project. The movie is called The Beckoning of Lovely and now that lovely has been beckoned we can all go make and do lovely things and send them to Amy for her to make and do something really lovely. I'm very excited about this. It's the kind of thing that's right up my alley. More info about it in the sidebar.

Video three: wynflete. You know Hank, sometimes the world can seem like it's not a very good place to be, and like the human experiment maybe isn't worth it, and gosh I wish that particle accelerator would just create a black hole and get it over with? But our biological impulses aside, I think there's something sort of beautiful about bringing someone into the world and promising to take care of them and to make the Earth as good a place as you can for them. Our secret siblings Debbie and Stu have just done that. They made me a funny birthday video in which they also introduced their new kid... Eli. A link to that video is also in the sidebar. I thought it might be helpful if we all went over and said, "Hello Eli, welcome to the world! We're gonna do everything we can to make it suck as little as possible for you."

Videos 4 and 5, an extended Question Tuesday I did with Worthington Libraries. I guess it doesn't really decrease world suck that much except that libraries are awesome but I did like twenty minutes worth of Question Tuesday with the Worthington Libraries. The questions were awesome. It has everything that you would ever want to know about me and my books and more. Arguably much more.

Hank, Willy is whining behind me which means I have to go take him out. I will make a video about the tour on Saturday and I'll see you soon.