NEAT

Two down, eight to go. That’s our progress bar for shooting the web series we’re making with AOL about successfully crowdfunded businesses.

A few weeks ago, we went up to East Harlem to visit Aurora Anaya-Cerda, owner of La Casa Azul Bookstore. It’s the only independent bookstore in East Harlem and, somehow, the only independent bookstore with a focus on Latino culture on the East Coast.

Aurora was great, and it wasn’t hard to understand why people followed her and ponied up $40,000 to get the store started. Here’s an action photo of Brian “producing.”

Actually THIS is what producing looks like w @BJanosch at @LaCasaAzulBooks #FUNDED pic.twitter.com/gnWK58dxax

— Cultivated Wit (@CultivatedWit) June 30, 2013

Then this past weekend, we went out to Long Island to the site of Nikola Tesla’s last laboratory. With major thanks to web comic rockstar The Oatmeal, Tesla’s lab and the land on which it rests have been saved from yet-another-Long-Island-strip mall. We met and joined with teams of volunteers cleaning, digging, and building to honor someone temporarily overlooked by history.

Tesla’s research is largely responsible for things like alternating current electricity, wireless communications, transistors, and remote controlled robots, to name a few.

Oh, were you expecting an explanation of the lead image in this post? Why am I dressed in full hazmat suit and respirator mask? Have I been using Breaking Bad as a small business tutorial? Not quite. You see Tesla’s lab became home to some photo processing plants for a few decades and that means is it’s a bit dangerous, so I had to put on the meth suit to avoid asbestos and possible laser-beam-shooting robot flies.

We’ll be on the road a lot these next few weeks, knocking out more episodes. Follow us on Twitter for almost real-time highlights.