Sri Lanka's impressive rag-makers, operating in high-value niches, may find China a more reliable source of fabric than corrupt, rowdy Pakistan.
Here, in this community of Stanford students, awesome hugging is commonplace; job assignments include granola maker, rag launderer, and general entropy-reduction enforcer; and smoothies are processed outside, on the bike blender, a kitchen blender mounted on the front of a stationary bicycle and powered by pedalling.
McNish rhythmically described the feelings of being described as "so-and-so's mum" and the idea of mothers being "underpaid, overworked" as "snot rags" and "milk makers".
Food and offal were sold for manure, linen rags went to paper makers, broken crockery and oyster shells became hardcore for road makers, and old iron was sold to trunk manufacturers who used it to make corners for their products.
Germany's biggest utility, E.ON, is in negotiations that may give control of Degussa, the specialty chemical maker, to RAG, a European coal company, E.ON's co-chief executive, Wilhelm Simson, said at the company's annual meeting.
It's home to cowboys, quilt makers, kids in do-rags driving dirt bikes, guys in roll-ups fishing for catfish and hip-hop coming out of small, fairytale shacks in the woods.
To help with the selection the stock maker has a wet cotton rag that he swipes over the wood.
NECX's biggest competition is a rag-tag group of gray-market operators and deal makers in the Far East and Silicon Valley.
When the trend-setting fashion designers Marcus Wainwright and David Neville of Rag & Bone wanted a top-of-the-line men's wear maker for their hip brand, whose door did they knock on?
The Russian maker used some old clock and electronic parts found at a "rag fair".
"Heart and Hands: Musical Instrument Makers of America," through June 4 at the Georgia Mountains History Museum in Gainesville, Ga., features 85 framed color prints on rag paper, showing craftsmen in a heritage drawing upon American Indian, European, African and Asian influences.
