Food Forward, gleaning the neighborhoods
On a recent weekend morning, sunlight lit up a band of eager workers in jeans and T-shirts who had ventured into a backyard at a home in Northridge. They were there to pick oranges.
No, these were not the usual laborers who toil daily in the region’s orchards. These were San Fernando Valley suburbanites willing to volunteer a few hours of hard work gleaning the ripe fruit of heavily laden trees so that it could be transported to food banks. While some of the workers set up ladders and then climbed up to begin picking, others used long wooden rods attached to baskets to gather the bright orbs, dropping the bounty into cardboard boxes or stuffing it into canvas bags slung across their bodies.
All of the volunteers came on behalf of Food Forward, a local nonprofit that Southern California homeowners can call to get their trees harvested for free, with the provision that all the fruit is then donated by Food Forward to hunger relief organizations. It’s a win-win proposition.
An annoying piece of fruit may be ripe for prime time
LOS ANGELES — There is little doubt that Dane Boedigheimer has created an online sensation that struck a pop cultural nerve. The “Annoying Orange” Web videos he’s been rolling out for the past two years have racked up more than 800 million views on You Tube, where the threshold for a runaway hit is about 50 million.
Sprint and Dole have paid to use his wise-cracking cartoon creation in marketing campaigns, and Toys R Us, Radio Shack and J.C. Penney are rolling out related merchandise for the Christmas season.
But TV channels and movie studios have yet to bite on Boedigheimer’s videos, which feature the kitchen adventures of an animated orange with a sinister smile and his buddies from the fruit and vegetable bins. And Boedigheimer, 31, isn’t waiting for their courtship. After receiving lukewarm responses to his informal overtures for an “Annoying Orange” television show, he opted for an alternative route: He’s made his own pilot, financed not by a studio or network, but by the management company representing him.
They had 'small monkeys have eaten oranges.' I made this shirt that started a dialog with everyone that I met when I was wearing it -- in another continent, a place where there were hardly any other white people there. I liked the medium of the T-shirt
