Hello Crasstalk. Because of the hustle of the holiday weekend we didn’t have Photo Phriday last week, and since many of you have the day off it might be fun to play. I am going to keep it topical today. Memorial Day Weekend is the start of summer vacation season, let’s share some vacation pictures. This way not only can we engage in our usual overshare, but we might be able to give each other some great vacation ideas. Continue reading
News
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At a Friday press conference in Atlanta, Georgia Democratic State Representative Rashad Taylor showed what true courage and leadership looked like, and came out as Georgia’s first gay male state representative. Rep. Taylor is now the third openly gay legislator in Georgia, joining Rep. Simone Bell, America’s first black lesbian state representative, and Karla Drenner, the first gay state representative in the Deep South.
Taylor was already an up-and-comer in Georgia politics. At 30 years old, Taylor is Georgia’s youngest state representative, the Vice Chairman of the Democratic Caucus, and was recently named as one of the nation’s “Rising Stars” in politics by Campaigns and Elections Magazine. Continue reading
Words are interesting little things. Subtle, sometimes vague, rarely as expressive as we’d like them to be. In fact, I imagine most of us use certain words habitually without investing much thought into what they really mean to us, or paying much attention as to how we’re deploying them to communicate our thoughts and feelings and ideas.
“Service” is one of those words that’s caught my attention of late. It’s caught my attention because, as a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, I’m often thanked for my service. I’m thanked by family and friends, but even more frequently I’m thanked for my service by complete strangers when they discover that I’m in the military (and especially when they find out I’m currently deployed to Iraq). Continue reading
http://youtu.be/N3Hms3tCZXU
Oh, sure. Most of you are at the beach, dancing on the sand and drinking pina coladas and listening to the Beach Boys and feasting upon hot dogs and chips. But the news? The news never takes a vacation. Even on Memorial Day. Continue reading
If you want to be skinny, healthy and not suffer from soul-crushing loneliness, researchers say you should try living closer to where you work.
Those stressful hours spent listening to drive-time radio do not merely make us less happy. They also make us less healthy. The Gallup survey, for instance, found that one in three workers with a 90-minute daily commute has recurrent neck or back problems. Our behaviors change as well, conspiring to make us less fit: When we spend more time commuting, we spend less time exercising and fixing ourselves meals at home.
So economists who have studied commute times and how they affect us have found that we’re basically tricking ourselves into thinking we want a big backyard in the suburbs. Apparently what we really want is more free time to pursue our own happiness in an Escape From New York-esque urban hellscape.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, newly minted as the leader of a majority federal government for the first time in his life, has taken this week’s G8 summit as an opportunity to throw his weight around a little. The only problem is that his behavior is completely at odds with every other G8 leader. From the issue of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to North African aid, Harper is insisting on taking a contrarian position. Unfortunately, it is coming across as unproductive and pointlessly self-indulgent. And at a G8 summit, that is really saying something.
News! We got news! I know we didn’t have news yesterday. I’d had WAYYYY too many gin and tonics. I’m sorry.
http://youtu.be/-slZNNxk9a4
Anyhoo.
Did you know that Newt Gingrich was voted Most Intellectual in high school? This just goes to show how profoundly stupid teenagers are.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Girl Scout Cookies – especially Thin Mints and Samoas. Yum. In fact, I was the Cookie Mom for both of my girls’ Scout troops at one time or another.
I no longer buy cookies from my girls because I don’t care for the way Girl Scouts runs this program on a variety of levels. In our neighborhood the cookies are $4 a box. Of that $4, approximately $0.75 goes to the troop, the rest goes to the Girl Scout Organization (GSO), minus the cookie cost, which is pretty minimal. The GSO pimps out these kids for relatively little financial benefit to the troop. Continue reading
Shamed former vice presidential nominee and John Kerry running mate John Edwards will likely be indicted within two weeks by federal prosecutors investigating allegations that during his run for the 2008 presidency Edwards solicited campaign donations for the express purpose of trying to pay-off a woman he was having an affair with. Well we all know how that ended.