Culture
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Health Care food for thought…
I have a Facebook friend who I sort of knew via High School. He was a really great guy, and we had several friends in common, but he was a few years ahead of me, and he graduated before I started HS. Anyway, through common friends, we became Facebook buddies. He’s been talking once in awhile about the Health Care issue, one that he clearly feels passionately about, as do many people on both sides of the argument. I’ve made my admittedly emotional points already, but since A doesn’t have a blog, I thought I’d let him guest post here. He sent me several emails full of his thoughts on…
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40 Years Ago Today
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B882w2gC22s[/youtube] My mom wrote about the moon landing a couple of years ago, on another moon landing anniversary. I love her story about my Grandpa and his calling it “Wizard of Oz” to believe that man would ever go to the moon. And his graceful recovery for his pig-headedness, 40 years ago today. Click the link and enjoy.
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Love is the Answer
(graphic found here) Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald Ted and I watched a very interesting episode of Bill Moyers Journal (you can watch the entire episode by following the link…it’s about an hour) the other day, one which dealt with Faith and Social Justice. The panelists were Cornel West, Serene Jones, and Gary Dorrien, three heavy hitting scholars and members of the social gospel movement. They were discussing what our ethics and values say about our society, most specifically how our system encourages greed and immoral conduct, and the culture of indifference in which we find ourselves. They argued…
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The Cola Wars Continue
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgq4knffRKc[/youtube] We’ve been hearing a lot about High Fructose Corn Syrup vs. Sugar lately, and we decided to do a very low-tech cola taste test on Saturday. I went to my local grocery store, where I procured one Pepsi, one Coke, one Mexican Coke (aka, Coke with sugar), and one Pepsi Natural (aka, Pepsi with sugar). Ted wanted to try some other cola brands as well, but at $7.80 for four sodas, we decided that four were enough. We decided that a blind taste test was best, so I marked the bottoms of some paper cups with the four varieties, and we each had a sample of all four. We…
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Great American Food & Music Debacle
One advantage of Ted’s job is that we sometimes get free tickets to local events. One such event was yesterday’s Great American Food & Music Festival, held in Mountain View. This was the first (perhaps last) year for this event. The idea was to take iconic dishes from around the country and bring them all to one venue, bring in some big names from the Food Network, and pair it up with some good music and make a day of it. Sounds good on paper, right? Unfortunately, something fell apart in the execution. I’d be interested to read a newspaper account of what all actually went wrong, but one major…
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What’s Wrong in this Marriage?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9bsu5CqMBY[/youtube] I saw this video the other day, and I was horrified. Here’s the story: A family with a husband, wife, and daughter. The husband was laid off, and hasn’t been able to find work. His wife increased her hours at work to compensate for their lost income. So he’s staying home and caring for the home and their child, and she’s working. Guess what? They both resent the hell out of each other. She has lost respect for him, because he’s not working, and because she doesn’t feel like a woman in this roll. He doesn’t feel like she respects what he does around the house, and wants to…
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Farewell, Natasha
I was saddend to hear of the skiing accident of Natasha Richardson. It reminded me of when Princess Diana was killed in that car accident. The first reports that were reported to the press said, “She has been in a car accident, and has been injured”, which is right and correct and as is should be, to protect the privacy of the family. This was what we learned before I went to bed that night, and in the morning, I learned that she was dead. Horrible. So Natasha, who I remember first and foremost as Offred from “The Handmaid’s Tale“, was skiing, and fell on a beginners slope, with a…
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Apostrophe Abuse
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but parenting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Which makes it difficult sometimes. For example, a few years ago we went to a somewhat upscale French bistro in San Francisco for dinner. Maya wanted to wear jeans, and we told her that was inappropriate, that at nicer restaurants, people wore nicer clothes. Of course, we were the only diners that evening who were not wearing jeans. Thankfully, she learns more from us at this point than the world around her, and does pay attention to what she’s wearing and whether it’s appropriate to her surroundings. Another example of parenting not happening in a vacuum is grammar…
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Feelin’ Spendy?
(Mr. Spendy found here) I know that many people are feeling like they shouldn’t spend as much this year on Christmas/Hanukkah, because the economy is bad, people are worried about their jobs, etc. Certainly gifts will be primarily inexpensive/homemade in our household. With Ted not working, and the overall economy as it is, it just makes sense to not go out and buy a bunch of things that no one needs anyway. Besides, making something for someone you love is an investment of time, which is valuable as well, correct? I’ve heard, though, that some people who have not experienced any change in income, who can easily afford to spend…
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Paradox of Thrift
(image found here) Have you heard of the term, The Paradox of Thrift?  Simplified, it means that what is best for the individual may not be what is best for the collective. If you decide to tighten your budget during difficult times, and if you’re unwilling to spend money on unnecessary items, that’s good for your household budget. It’s smart to not let yourself spend more than you make, and it’s smart to save money and be careful with what you do spend. The overall economy, however, is based on growth, which means consumers buying more each year than they did the last year. If you spend exactly the same…
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Supply and Demand
If you drive, you’ve surely noticed that the price of gas has fallen lately. Here in the Bay Area, gas was about $4.70 or so at its highest, and now it’s closer to $3.25. (That graph there shows that the price of oil has fallen by 50%…so why hasn’t gas fallen as drastically?) (Cherry said she got gas the other day for $2.99, at Costco) The reason for falling oil prices is lower demand. It’s not that there’s suddenly any more oil out there, it’s just that with fears of a global recession, the demand has fallen. And, of course, people are conserving a lot more than they used to,…
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Kids These Days
Slide show from El Hogar de los Ninos website. One of Maya’s electives this year is a class called Teens Around the World, in which they learn a bit about geography, but mainly about the issues that face children and teenagers all around the world. Sort of like a class I took in High School, Global Studies, but also different. They study issues like immigration, hunger, child labor, and what they as children and teens can do to help. The teacher is on the board of directors for an organization called El Hogar de los Ninos, which works to help very poor children in Managua, Nicaragua. From their website: In…
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Tough Times
You know times are tough when Sunday morning doesn’t find me with my face in the funnies, but instead in the ‘newsy’ part of the paper, trying to suss out the facts between all of the opinions on the bailout. When instead of my hilarious “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” podcast, I first need to listen to “Planet Money” and see what the hell is going on. When I talk to Grandma and she starts railing about the stupid bailout, and how much money it’s going to cost. It’s not that I’m not usually political, but I’m not usually that involved in economics. There’s something about never having much money…
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HPV for Boys
We’ve all seen the commercials, right? The ones that say, “I want to be one less”, the girls who don’t want to become a statistic, to get cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine prevents a few varieties of the virus that causes cervical cancer, so while it isn’t a cure, it could be a step in the right direction. Well, Maya is 12 now, and not really acting interested in boys. We’ve been deciding whether to vaccinate her now or later. It’s not a matter of whether to vaccinate her or not…if we can protect her from the possibility of dying from cancer, wouldn’t we want to do so? And HPV…
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Back to School
The other night was ‘back to school night’ at Maya’s middle school. The evening started with speeches with the Principal, the Superintendent of the district, and the head of the PTA. They talked about how lucky we are to have such wonderful kids, how our district is in the top 95% of the state in test scores, and how parent involvement and dedicated parents help to make this the case. They talked about how raising healthy, happy children was about much more than these test scores, but still, yay test scores! Then we went and sat in each of the classrooms that our child attends for 10 minutes each, and…