This time it’s The Beach Trees. Go check it out!
In Closing: The Burger Economy; bang; Amen; Social Security; Dodd-Frank; hold on to your hats; credit; thank goodness somebody is telling the truth; it turns out that “green” technology employs more people than the oil or gas industries; nudie scanners getting less nude (still bombarding you with radiation!); and tea ceremony.
This time, the BlogHer book event is A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. My version is right here. Next up will be Terry McMillan’s Getting to Happy.
In Closing: Ezra; Beetles; Faux-pas; finances; debt; wieners; banks; speculation; carbs; demand; testing; Reich; and free books.
I have got to get into the habit of little posts throughout the week. Today’s items are a little mind-blowing.
On Taxes and Debt: Two graphs.
On Inflation: Core rate is crazy.
Explains the Popularity of Certain People: Most people just don’t read books.
I wonder if they’ll remember this come fall: Americans want to nearly double fuel efficiency standards.
Danger, Mistress: Alert the Doctor, Sarah Jane has been traveling solo.
Sadly, probably not a world record: One man eats 25,000 Bic Macs over 13,800 days. I feel bloated just thinking about it.
Speaking of bloating: 513 illegal immigrants in 2 trucks.
Sure, that’s your money, but you can’t have it! You’d just spend it on food and shelter: The Senate wants to “save” you from spending your own 401k funds in an emergency.
Record Used Car Prices: and it’s not just “Cash for Clunkers” that got us here, but the recession and Japan’s earthquake/tsunami issues.
“Banks Say Simpler Mortgage Form Could ‘Stifle’ New Products”: by “stifle“, they mean “make it harder to trick you into getting a mortgage that will gradually strangle your finances.”
On living within your means: If it weren’t for credit cards, the American economy would suck even worse.
On Bid Laden’s Security: It involved about 100 flash drives.
Millenials Have No Clue: They think that they are precious snowflakes that deserve jobs, despite reality.
If you’re going to be out of town for a while, make sure somebody is watching your place: you never know when somebody might set up a brothel inside.
Reid Dares Them: Yeah, go ahead and vote to gut Medicare. Do it. I dare you.
Huh?: Obama says Israel needs to go back to its 1967 borders and like it?? Oy, that will put some people in a tizzy.
Here’s a Hint, Janet: Stop treating us all like criminals. Enough with the nudie scanners. Enough with the probulators. Enough with confiscating our water bottles while letting real threats through. Enough with the Do Not Fly list and other shit that doesn’t keep us safe.
That is all.
If you’ve noticed that a bunch of your favorite blogs that usually update every day don’t have new posts, there’s a reason. I have it on good authority that Blogger is down. This good authority goes on to wonder how “fun” it would be to have a cloud computing outage when trying to get work done.
In Closing: Nat Geo decides they don’t want any trouble with the Yakuza; dead terrorist; happy; reality; new thing to do in Vegas (no gambling or drinking required); homeless in Vegas; scrutiny; states‘ rights; McCain regains sanity; awwww; reading; kids are capable when we let them be; on immigration; Social Security; and does Michelle Bachmann know more than a high schooler?
It took University of Nevada researchers 20 years to figure out that kids who live in homes where they own books — as few as 20 books — have higher academic achievement. The shocking realization was apparently that it had little to do with the parents’ educational level: “Books in the homes of even the barely literate were found to further a child’s education by an average of 3.2 years. In fact, children of parents with less education had more to gain by having books in their homes.”
Well gee whiz.
You don’t suppose it could be that when parents own books, they are showing that reading is a valid activity and education is a valuable thing? Even if those books are all picture books, even if they are all religious books, even if they are all trashy romance novels, the precedent that they are worth having around influences what the kids will think is important by the time Kindergarten rolls around.
Sorry, sending a box of books to the families of “at risk” kids isn’t going to magically make their test scores better.
In closing: Tropical disease hits Sub-Tropical Florida (but no, global climate change is a hoax! All that snow last winter proved it!); the Social Security system is at risk (remember, it has never ever been a savings program so anybody who talks about “returns” on it is an idiot or a thief); just a few miscellaneous oil spill items; miscellaneous medical items; some choice financial “reform” items (Banking index didn’t crash? We’re still screwed then); unemployment and mortgage delinquency (gee, whoda thought those were related??); why we can’t take true libertarians seriously; and help out an animal shelter.