Google on Your Cell Phone November 30, 2006March 5, 2017 BILL MOYERS ON . . . . . . ‘the great divide that has opened in America between those who advocate war while avoiding it and those who have the courage to fight it without ever knowing what it’s all about.’ His speech at West Point. Long, but worth it if you have time. TED KOPPEL ON . . . Jim Maloney: ‘Ted Koppel’s report on Iran will be repeated on the Discovery Channel Monday 12/4 at 9PM and again on Tuesday at 12AM.’ ☞ Boy, how I hope Vice President Cheney will not attack Iran. It’s unthinkable – but if Sy Hersh is right, it’s being thought about. Maybe we can get the VP to Tivo Koppel’s report. If only we had known a little about Iraq before we went and attacked it. (Seriously; wouldn’t that have been a good idea?) MORE HOLIDAY GIFTS FOR YOU I tried to give you an early gift last week (the magnifier at the bottom right corner of your Internet Explorer 7.0 browser) – and at least a few of you were thrilled by the discovery, as I was. But a lot of others of you gently mocked me (‘Why bother with the thingy in the right lower corner – just hold down Ctrl and move the scroll wheel to make the print any size you want. This feature has been available since the initial browsers of the mid-nineties. Really, Andy!’) – never mind that my Thinkpad has no scroll wheel – and others of you one-upped me (Dean Reinemann: ‘I have been using Opera as my web browser for several years. You can zoom the contents of any Web page from 20%-1000% using the zoom drop down or the + and – keys.’ Randy Kirchhof: ‘In Firefox, you can do a CTRL-+/- to adjust font size.’) . . . and so I’m back with more gifts. Actually, these come straight from David Pogue in the New York Times, so I’ll let him tell you himself. Suffice it to say, I’ve started text-messaging Google from my cell phone to get all but instant answers to just about anything. How cool is that? I texted Google ‘Reservatrol grapes’ – which is to say, I typed that into my cell phone ‘compose message’ screen and then sent it to 466453 (which is GOOGLE on your phone keypad) because I was wondering whether you needed to drink red wine to live forever, like the mice recently in the news – or whether it would it be enough to eat unfermented red grapes. Half a second later Google texted me and asked: ‘Did you mean RESVERATROL and grapes?’ Well, yes. I had misspelled it. That’s what I meant. (But no, Google had nothing to offer my cell phone on the subject, though it quickly confirmed for me that, yes, Jacques Chirac is president of France; and, when I typed in WEATHER and my zip code, it gave me a forecast.)
Michael Moore, Sy Hersh, Ted Koppel Let's Not Attack Iran, Shall We? November 29, 2006March 5, 2017 MICHAEL MOORE He was vilified for opposing the war; and I’ve never suggested I agree with everything Michael Moore says or, always, the way he says it. But Farenheit 9/11 is probably worth another look – as is his latest Internet missive, in case you somehow missed it: A Liberal’s Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives November 14th, 2006 To My Conservative Brothers and Sisters, I know you are dismayed and disheartened at the results of last week’s election. You’re worried that the country is heading toward a very bad place you don’t want it to go. Your 12-year Republican Revolution has ended with so much yet to do, so many promises left unfulfilled. You are in a funk, and I understand. Well, cheer up, my friends! Do not despair. I have good news for you. I, and the millions of others who are now in charge with our Democratic Congress, have a pledge we would like to make to you, a list of promises that we offer you because we value you as our fellow Americans. You deserve to know what we plan to do with our newfound power — and, to be specific, what we will do to you and for you. Thus, here is our Liberal’s Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives: Dear Conservatives and Republicans, I, and my fellow signatories, hereby make these promises to you: 1. We will always respect you for your conservative beliefs. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us. 2. We will let you marry whomever you want, even when some of us consider your behavior to be “different” or “immoral.” Who you marry is none of our business. Love and be in love — it’s a wonderful gift. 3. We will not spend your grandchildren’s money on our personal whims or to enrich our friends. It’s your checkbook, too, and we will balance it for you. 4. When we soon bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq, we will bring your sons and daughters home, too. They deserve to live. We promise never to send your kids off to war based on either a mistake or a lie. 5. When we make America the last Western democracy to have universal health coverage, and all Americans are able to get help when they fall ill, we promise that you, too, will be able to see a doctor, regardless of your ability to pay. And when stem cell research delivers treatments and cures for diseases that affect you and your loved ones, we’ll make sure those advances are available to you and your family, too. 6. Even though you have opposed environmental regulation, when we clean up our air and water, we, the Democratic majority, will let you, too, breathe the cleaner air and drink the purer water. 7. Should a mass murderer ever kill 3,000 people on our soil, we will devote every single resource to tracking him down and bringing him to justice. Immediately. We will protect you. 8. We will never stick our nose in your bedroom or your womb. What you do there as consenting adults is your business. We will continue to count your age from the moment you were born, not the moment you were conceived. 9. We will not take away your hunting guns. If you need an automatic weapon or a handgun to kill a bird or a deer, then you really aren’t much of a hunter and you should, perhaps, pick up another sport. We will make our streets and schools as free as we can from these weapons and we will protect your children just as we would protect ours. 10. When we raise the minimum wage, we will pay you — and your employees — that new wage, too. When women are finally paid what men make, we will pay conservative women that wage, too. 11. We will respect your religious beliefs, even when you don’t put those beliefs into practice. In fact, we will actively seek to promote your most radical religious beliefs (“Blessed are the poor,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies,” “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” and “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”). We will let people in other countries know that God doesn’t just bless America, he blesses everyone. We will discourage religious intolerance and fanaticism — starting with the fanaticism here at home, thus setting a good example for the rest of the world. 12. We will not tolerate politicians who are corrupt and who are bought and paid for by the rich. We will go after any elected leader who puts him or herself ahead of the people. And we promise you we will go after the corrupt politicians on our side FIRST. If we fail to do this, we need you to call us on it. Simply because we are in power does not give us the right to turn our heads the other way when our party goes astray. Please perform this important duty as the loyal opposition. I promise all of the above to you because this is your country, too. You are every bit as American as we are. We are all in this together. We sink or swim as one. Thank you for your years of service to this country and for giving us the opportunity to see if we can make things a bit better for our 300 million fellow Americans — and for the rest of the world. Signed, Michael Moore IRAN, THE NEXT ACT And while we’re talking about horribly misguided military adventures, this Sy Hersh New Yorker piece is must reading. If he has it right, Vice President Cheney may not much care what Congress thinks about attacking Iran. At the same time, I wish I could as easily link you to Ted Koppel’s report on Iran. Here’s the website, but I don’t see a link to the actual program, nor a schedule of when it might re-air. It was a fascinating portrait – very different, I expect, from what you imagine it to be – and showed dissidents, who hope to overthrow the government, saying that a U.S. attack would be exactly NOT what would help achieve their ends. Coming soon: More Free Holiday Gifts for You
Ben Stein Gets It Right November 28, 2006March 5, 2017 MY LATEST PROBLEM Here’s my latest problem. I finally capitulated and gave my old cell phone to the Smithsonian. It was so old it didn’t even have a SIM card. Instead, I got a Motorola RAZR V3i. I can take a picture of myself and send it your phone. I can say ‘CHARLES’ and it will call Charles. I blew $2.50 to download a new ring tone – just to see if I could do it – and chose ‘Joy to the World.’ (I was inspired by the recent election results.) Now I can be walking off an airplane or sitting at dinner and suddenly a choir in my pocket will begin singing ‘JOY! . . . to . . . the World’ – and here’s my problem: it’s so surpassingly beautiful, I don’t want to cut it short by answering the call. So if you get my voice mail, just a wait a minute. I’ll call you back. A CONVENIENT DVD Jim Busek: ‘Not only did someone make a movie about MY HOUSE, it just became available on DVD. I am suggesting it as a Christmas gift to anyone who needs ideas.’ ☞ Me, too! Dennis Soohoo: ‘I just finished watching An Inconvenient Truth on DVD, literally, just minutes ago, and I wonder how an intelligent man like Al Gore was not elected President (I guess actually he may have been elected, but just was not allowed to serve). I wonder what kind of difference he could have made had he been our president for the last 6 years.’ ☞ All the difference in the world. ANYONE? ANYONE? Ben Stein, best known to some for his role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, is a conservative. Writing in Sunday’s New York Times, he makes the case for higher taxes on the wealthy. Have I mentioned lately that the National debt will be around $10 trillion by the time Bush leaves the White House? EIGHT trillion of which will have been racked up under just 3 of our 43 presidents – Reagan, Bush, and Bush? Have I mentioned that annual interest on the debt already amounts to 40% of all the personal income taxes we pay? AOL ESCAPE Click here if you feel trapped. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but inch ever closer. FIGS Michael Irwin: ‘The only bad thing about figs is that if you recommend them to someone you have to know how to spell prosciutto, which, when combined with a fig, is how they taste best.’ ☞ Word’s spellcheck suggests it’s spelled ‘prostitute,’ but I think you have it right. (‘Prah-SHOOT.’)
Dirty Dancing November 27, 2006March 5, 2017 WHAT IF YOU VOTED FOR YOURSELF – and THE MACHINE SHOWED YOU GOT NO VOTES? From the Miami Herald: Tiny town could be Waterloo for vote machines BY FRED GRIMM fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com . . . Randy Wooten, owner of Randy’s Karaoke Bar out on Highway 14 and one of three mayoral candidates, received no votes. Not even his own. ”He voted for himself. I watched him,” said Roxanne Wooten, the candidate’s wife. ”I was standing right behind him. And then I voted for him,” she told me Monday. Neither vote registered on the ES&S machine. Poinsett County election official insisted that their touch-screen machines were working just fine, that Waldenburg’s improbable undervote was due to “operator error.” Not hardly, said Roxanne Wooten. She said, “I noticed that the machine was acting jumpy.” But she made sure she voted for her husband. It was the one vote that mattered. Randy’s two opponents split 36 votes. He came up empty. HAZARDOUS SITUATION Voting officials in Poinsett County, Arkansas, have the same problem as their counterparts in 15 of Florida’s largest counties. They’ve spent a huge amount of taxpayer money for unreliable voting machines, and now they’ve got to defend the damn things or look like fools. ”Imagine if the 13th congressional race [won by 360 votes – with 18,000 votes missing] had been as important as the Virginia Senate race ended up being. The country would have had a major crisis,” said Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Brave New Ballot, The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting. In January, civic activist Kindra Muntz started a petition drive toward a referendum to force Sarasota County to revert to a paper ballot system. (Not a paper trail or a paper receipt linked to the same wormy touch-screen software, she insisted, but a paper ballot system.) She succeeded, despite a lawsuit filed by Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb, who has demonstrated more interest in protecting the voting machine vendors’ reputation than voters’ intent. NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE The referendum passed with 55 percent of the vote. This week, Sarasota Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent, up to her ears in this voting mess, said she would comply with the voters’ wishes to junk touch-screens. Maybe Sarasota’s uprising will inspire voters in Broward, Miami-Dade and other Florida counties stuck with touch-screen machines. At least two voters in Waldenburg have lost their confidence in high-tech voting. ”If Randy had received just two votes, instead of zero, nobody would have said anything,” Roxanne said. What would have happened, I asked, if those dubious machines had given him just one vote. She laughed. ‘Well, then I’d be in trouble. I’d probably have been divorced by now.” ☞ Click here to tell Congress to make election reform a top priority. Congressman Rush Holt’s bill, HR 550, requiring paper trails and other safeguards, needs to be made law. I KNOW – IT WAS 20 DAYS AGO, ANCIENT HISTORY But look at this sampling of dirty deeds: Handing out a flier in black neighborhoods labeling the Republican candidates “Democrat” and showing them endorsed by black leaders who had, in fact, not endorsed them. This was for a Senate race – it could have determined control of the entire Senate, had it succeeded – and its cynicism was really kind of breathtaking. As the Washington Post reported, black homeless Philadelphians, desperate to earn some cash, were bussed to Maryland, and given campaign T-shirts to wear and these fliers to hand out – for the “Democrats.” Phoning Virginians registered elsewhere as well (which is legal so long as you don’t vote in more than one state) to warn that they would be charged criminally if they came in to vote. Claiming that Illinois Democratic Congressional candidate Tammy Duckworth, who had lost both legs in Iraq, favored extending Social Security benefits to illegal aliens. Untrue, of course. But this mailing – sent out by the National Republican Congressional Committee to appear to be from the Social Security Administration – helped beat her by fewer than 5,000 votes. ☞ In Chicago, a half century ago, dead people voted for Jack Kennedy. But one really gets the sense that the dirty dancing, and Watergate bugging and the rest, are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum.
Burp November 24, 2006March 5, 2017 GO OGLE James Musters: ‘If you are tired of using your existing search engine, try this for fun. You will need your sound on.’ ☞ Hard not to smile. And she even seems to perform searches. THREE GOOD BRIT FLICKS There’s the Bond, of course, ‘Casino Royale‘ – great fun. And ‘The Queen,’ about Her Majesty’s response to the Princess Diana tragedy – unexpectedly fascinating. And ‘The History Boys,’ which for some will be the best of the three. MY EARLY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU So here it is, for those of you who, between the resolution of your computer screens and the condition of your eyesight – find some web material hard to read. Ready? Take a look at the lower right corner of your browser window. I’m not sure if it’s in yours, but in my Internet Explorer (the latest version), there is a little magnifying glass with a plus sign that you can click . . . beside a little pulldown menu that lets you choose your magnification. Oh, happy day. (Speaking of which, Charles cooked for 37, ages 2 to 93. and it was the best.)
Thanksgiving November 22, 2006March 5, 2017 It wasn’t easy telling my parents that I’m gay. I told them at Thanksgiving. I said, ‘Mom, would you please pass the gravy to a homosexual?’ She passed it to my father. A terrible scene followed. – Bob Smith To say I have a lot to give thanks for barely begins to make the case. I could never adequately express it. So let’s talk about auto insurance. (If you want a Thanksgiving column, see Monday’s. Or the this one. Or, with a touch of unintended irony at the end, this one.) AUTO INSURANCE Jeff: ‘I have considered upping my liability insurance from the standard 100/300 to 500/500, so as to cover my entire net worth. But my insurance agent just told me that he has never seen anyone sued for more than their coverage. In other words, if you have $100,000 liability coverage, they settle for that. They never go over that amount and invade your savings. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I always figured everyone would go for as much money as possible. Do you think it wise for me to up my coverage to 500/500?‘ ☞ If 500/500 doesn’t cost much more (and it shouldn’t), why not?* You’ll sleep better. Consider financing the extra cost by shopping around for a new carrier. (I’m not going to refer to talking reptiles, but I’m sure you’ve seen the ads. And Progressive will give you price comparisons also.) I say this not to hurt the feelings of your agent, who I expect is a nice guy, but because his advice was incomplete. Even though he hasn’t seen anyone sued for more than the limits, it certainly happens. Most people are ‘judgment proof’ – the cost of a lawsuit is not justified by what might be recovered. But even as we speak, a friend of mine, hit by a car, is suing a driver – who owns a gas station – who had only the required $10,000 coverage. It’s unclear who will own the gas station after the lawsuit. If you own something valuable or have presumed earning power, it’s wise to take the higher limits – and a cheap umbrella policy on top of that. The other common misconception you seem to harbor, and of which your agent seems not to have disabused you, is that the limits of your policy should somehow correspond to the size of your fortune. Not so. Whether you have a net worth of $300,000 or $11 million, if you injure someone to the tune of $2 million in a jury’s estimation, that’s roughly how much coverage you would hope to have. *Note to those who do not speak auto insurance: ‘100/300’ coverage means $100,000 of liability coverage per person you injure, $300,000 per accident. So if you negligently plow down a Girl Scout troop, your insurer would cover up to $100,000 in damages to any given trooper, up to a maximum of $300,000 even if all 24 of them sued you. With 500/500, the maximum for any given victim – or all victims together – is $500,000. Further note: miraculously, none of these Girl Scouts was hurt. You’ll find no ghoulish hypotheticals on this web site. But it was scary and they are suing for mental distress. Happy Thanksgiving! Click here (and then, ‘preview this card,’ at right, allowing a little time for it to load).
Figs, Blimps, and Borealis November 21, 2006March 5, 2017 FIGS John Ebert: ‘You ask: ‘Who knew?’ I certainly didn’t. And I still don’t! Was that the whole story?’ ☞ Ah but there was an exclamation mark after the question mark. ‘Figs. Who knew?!’ By which I meant to convey a simple but exuberant truth: figs are actually worth trying. The longer version is that I was actually looking for dates. Dates are a sugary desert dessert the Canaanintes ate in place of Snickers – and I sometimes now do, too. But the biblical-fruit sector of my brain seems to have conflated the two, dates and figs, and I found myself asking the supermarket stock boy, ‘Do you have any figs?’ . . . meaning dates. And then, when he showed me, I figured, what the heck. Bought, ’em. Refrigerated ’em. Grabbed one by its little stub and ate the rest. Not half bad. The rest quickly followed. Who knew?! BLIMPS Dan Nachbar: ‘Your readers really need to stop picking on blimps. First of all, the generalization that blimps can’t fly in bad weather is wrong. It is true that several early rigid airships were lost in storms during the 1930’s. But airplanes of that era were also routinely lost to bad weather. The almost daily frequency of airplane accidents in that era is often forgotten today whereas crashing and burning a rigid airship is still a staple of Hollywood movies. It’s also true that our prototype blimp is very much a fair weather aircraft. But then, aircraft prototypes generally are. We don’t expect the same to be true of our next version. Remember, we’re just getting started. ‘In general, blimps have proven themselves capable of handling the worst weather. By the time the Navy shut down its blimp program in 1957 (a sad story for another day) its blimps demonstrated that they could fly for 11 days straight through ice, snow, storms, and other severe weather that stopped all other transportation – both in the air and on the ground. (I suggest John McPhee’s book The Deltoid Pumpkinseed for a terrific rendering of this tale.) ‘As for your other reader comment that blimps are deafeningly loud, this is also no longer true. It is true that WWII-era blimps were a very noisy ride. (The Goodyear blimps are still essentially WWII technology.) However modern blimp designs, such as the Zeppelin-NT and our aircraft, no longer mount the engines on the side of the cabin as was done in old-fashioned blimps. Thus they no longer have the same noise problems. When flying my blimp, I can easily chat with folks on the ground below me using an ordinary speaking voice. If I’m up above tree-top level, we do need to raise our voices a bit. But engine noise in the cabin is certainly not a serious problem.’ BOREALIS Yesterday, I linked to a site that reminds us we are richer than we think. But you may not be feeling so rich if you bought Borealis at $16 and saw it close Friday at $4.80, down $2.20 (31%) in a day. There are these things to say about that: First, we bought this crazy speculation only with money we could truly afford to lose (and mostly at $3 and $4 a share), knowing that, like even the best of lottery tickets, it may not pay off. Second, the 31% plunge occurred on volume of 8,400 shares. Someone, nearing the end of the tax year, may have figured, ‘Oh, well, enough already. I’ll take my tax loss and move on.’ (Or maybe he plans to wait 30 days – to avoid the ‘wash sale rule’ under which the IRS disallows the loss if the position is reinstated – and then buy the shares back even cheaper, as others sell for their year-end tax loss.) My point: if GE drops 31% in a day, chances are investors are reacting to some very, very, very bad news. If Borealis drops 31% in a day, my friend Joey may have just decided, ‘the hell with it.’ (The way Pink Sheet transactions are reported, it may actually have been a sale of just 4,200 shares. I’ve never been completely clear on this, but sometimes both sides of the trade get included in the reported Pink Sheets volume: the sale of 4,200 shares plus the purchase of 4,200 shares.) Third, this stock really may gradually dribble down to zero over the months or years ahead. But so far as I know, nothing changed last week. There remains the prospect of potentially valuable technology and a giant iron ore deposit. I’ve never sold a share. If tax-selling drives it down further, I may even buy more. But only – truly, no joke – with money I can afford to lose. Because (as is perhaps becoming increasingly evident) I really may.
Just How Rich Are You? November 20, 2006January 9, 2017 RICHER THAN YOU THINK According to America’s leading nonfinancial newspaper – which I would not want to embarrass by naming it – if you tell globalrichlist.com you make $75,301 a year, ‘you are the 49,205,295th richest person in the world, which puts you in the top 20 percent worldwide in terms of income.‘ Ah, the Innumeracy – or just complete lack of clue. Can a writer or editor at the newspaper of record (who very possibly earns $75,301 himself) actually think that 20% of the world’s 6-plus billion people earn $75,000 or more? (Or that 49 million people equal 20% of the world’s population? It doesn’t even equal 20% of the US population!) Actually, of course, the paper was off by a factor a 100. Globalrichlist.com says that someone earning $75,301 was in the ‘top .82%,’ so the writer presumably rounded it to .80% and then ignored the decimal point before the 8. If you are the 49,205,295th richest person in the world, you are richer than 99.18% of your planetary neighbors, not 80%. Obviously, there are limits to the accuracy and meaningfulness of all this – $75,000 in New York City doesn’t make you richer than someone earning $40,000 in Iowa, let alone Peru. And the Global Rich calculator doesn’t distinguish among the really fortunate: whether you make a quarter million or 50 million a year, it says you are ‘the 107,565th richest’ person on the planet, in the top one-thousandth of one percent (which would imply a global population of 10.7 billion instead of the 6.7 billion or so we really are, so there must be some rounding errors in their calculator as well). But you get the point, and it is nicely made: you are probably better off than you realize. (Certainly that’s true of the newspaperman who thinks he’s only in the top 20% when in fact he’s in the top eighty-two hundredths of one percent.) Being a site designed to encourage charitable giving, globalrichlist.com goes on to note: ‘$8 could buy you 15 organic apples OR 25 fruit trees for farmers in Honduras to grow and sell fruit at their local market. $73 could buy you a new mobile phone OR a new mobile health clinic to care for AIDS orphans in Uganda. $2400 could buy you a second generation High Definition TV OR schooling for an entire generation of school children in an Angolan village.’ We have so much to be thankful for – most of us, anyway – that I couldn’t wait until Thursday to say it: Happy Thanksgiving. Tomorrow (which, through a warp in the universe, you can read today): Borealis, Figs, and More.
Say You Win the Lottery Or At Least Get Hit By a Bus November 17, 2006March 5, 2017 SAY YOU WIN THE LOTTERY Would you take your winnings over 20 years? Or the much smaller lump sum now? You would, of course, take the lump sum. And yet, as this site suggests, it might not end well. And won’t we be secretly pleased. Hit it, Klaus: Oh, schadenfreude, oh schadenfreude; a guilty pleasure I enjoy. Oh, schadenfreude, oh schadenfreude; I am an awful, awful boy. My spir-its soar, that I cannot deny; a deep down joy, it truly gets me by; Oh, schadenfreude, oh schadenfreude; a guilty pleasure I enjoy. But the point of this is not to get you in the holiday spirit, but rather to spread the wisdom of ‘structured settlements’ should you or someone you love, God forbid, ever get hit by a bus. JOHN BOGLE John Leonarz: ‘John Bogle is one of my favorite financial wizards. He has recently addressed the students of Immaculata College on the role of the mutual fund industry and its failings. His remarks were full of wisdom, humor and truth.’ ☞ Aren’t they always? PICKLES Pickles – click here. This is no way to save money, Lord knows, but the hot-sweets are really good, and I realized I could amortize the shipping charges and lower my average cost per pickle chunk by cutting up some fresh 89-cent cucumbers and dropping the unpickled chunks into the jar to replace the official ones as I speared and devoured them. Overnight, the fresh chunks get . . . pickled. I kept this up over several cucumbers, saving the pickle juice until almost all its heat and sweetness had been transferred to fresh cucumber chunks – and from there to the special pickle taste sensation area that resides under the bridge of one’s nose and extends up behind one’s eyes to the back of one’s eyebrows. Mmm, mmm, good.
Save a Fortune on Drugs November 16, 2006March 5, 2017 FIGS! Who knew?! BLIMPS! Jonathan Young: ‘I work with hearing-impaired and deaf students at Harvard. According to The New Yorker‘s story about blimps a few years ago, most blimp pilots suffer marked hearing loss because of engine noise. So: Vote Republican if you must, go to rock concerts without earplugs if you’re nuts, but don’t become a blimp pilot.’ ☞ You caught me just in time. DRUGS! I could take 10 minutes to put this in my own words, or you could take 2 seconds to click here and read it yourself. No wonder Wal-Mart is going to be able to sell generic drugs at $4 per prescription. They have begun rolling that out across the country. (Click here to see Costco’s prices – you don’t have to be a member to use its pharmacy.) WATCH THIS! Kathryn Lance: ‘This non-political video is about the perception of beauty and shows how a rather ordinary-looking girl is transformed into a super-model. I found it amazing. And come to think of it, maybe it isn’t non-political after all.’ World famous advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather shows you why nobody is more beautiful than you because the models they use on billboards are nobody. They don’t exist. Our perception of beauty is based on people who do not exist. Watch this 1 minute 10 second video and see how the agency turns an ordinary everyday looking woman into a super model. The real surprise is toward the end. Please show this to your daughters. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to make this a show and tell at school or girl scout meetings either. ☞ And you could bring in a few containers of figs to let the kids try them and see how good they are. (In a modest sort of way.) Tomorrow: Say You Win the Lottery