Not Thought Through

Have you seen the lovely pictures at the bottom of some bog entries?  The ones that say “You might also like …” and have an accompanying picture that entices you to read more and more and more posts.  I have.  I thought oh, oh I want something like that on my blog!

Unfortunately, if you don’t post a lot of pictures or have a picture with every entry then you just get a list of a couple of postings.  That wasn’t quite the look I was going for.  I guess I just assumed that the program could read my mind and pick the corresponding picture out of my head and paste it on the bottom of my posts.  CLEARLY, that was a LITTLE TO DIFFICULT for this program!

I know what you’re thinking … “you get what you pay for.”  Alright, I grant you I didn’t pay anything for the widget, but still!  Now I either have to 1. Stop caring that the list doesn’t include pictures (which is entirely possible) 2. Develop mad camera skills and start taking pictures (highly unlikely!) or 3. Post sub-par but, in my mind, passable pictures (also highly unlikely as that would involve cords, hooking things to the computer, downloading; oh, I’m tired already.  And since I haven’t even printed a picture since I bought a digital camera in 2002 I think I have a better chance of being eaten by a shark than I do of including *daily pictures in my posts!).

*Which is incredibly sad since I bought a SLR camera with the brilliant idea that simply buying the camera would equal knowing how to use it.  Darn it, perhaps I should have bought rock band instead!

No!  You can't tell me it actually found pictures!

Thrown for a Loop

Sometimes I make an absolute final decision about something and then suddenly something changes and my decision isn’t final anymore.  It drives me crazy!  I can’t talk about what has thrown me for a loop right now but thought that I would mention that currently I AM CRAZY!  (And yes, I mean more than usual, dad.)

Captured State

When my father-in-law was visiting he mentioned an article he had read that referred to Mexico as a captured state.  I was not familiar with the term.  In 2000, Joel S. Hellman, Geraint Jones, and Daniel Kaufmann wrote "Seize the state, seize the day": state capture, corruption, and influence in transition for the World Bank.  They found that “[s]ome firms in transition economies have been able to shape the rules of the game to their own advantage, at considerable social cost, creating what the authors call a ‘capture economy’ in many countries. In the capture economy, public officials, and politicians privately sell under-provided public goods, and a range of rent-generating advantages "a la carte" to individual firms. 

Now lest you think a captured state can only refer to something outside the US here is an article authored by Gregory Hooks from the American Sociological Review that refers to the U. S. Department of Agriculture as “an agency captured by a privileged interest group.” 

Fabulous.  Of course, I knew it went on but now I have a term for another thing that pisses me off and more stuff I should read.

Vanilla Gift Cards Suck

The absolutely worse gift it is possible to get, with the possible exception of a komodo dragon or an STD, is a gift card.  Anything the issuing company can charge you for they will.  When you buy one they charge you.  If you don’t use it they charge you.  If you lose it you wish whoever had given it to you had given something to a charity instead! 

Poor Bri got a gift card for her birthday and used it once to buy twelve dollars worth of stuff.  What happened to the remaining thirteen dollars you wonder?  Oh . . . well, that was sucked up by the company in a charming example of corporate greed -- two dollars and fifty cents a month.  Nice Vanilla, it’s just like stealing lollypops from a thirteen year-old.

I suggest an anti-gift card movement.  No one uses them up anyway.  There is always a couple of bucks left on them that the company sucks up!  People lose them, forget about them and wouldn’t we really all prefer cash anyway.  Cash we can spend anywhere.

Only in Massachusetts

I love living in Massachusetts. It’s great! There is a deep and sincere commitment to education and people with disabilities, among other things. However, Massachusetts has a few foibles. One of which is requiring, by law, policeman to work as flaggers in construction zones. On Friday, as I backed out of my driveway I noticed a policewoman standing two houses up the street. She was out there to direct the non-existent traffic on my street. Keep in mind that my neighborhood is accessed only from the south. It has no cut through traffic at all. Days could go by with anyone driving down my street!

Then I drove through another construction zone. This section of road was flanked on either side by cones, detour signs and policeman. I’m not sure why neither the line of cones blocking off the road, nor the detour signs weren’t enough on their own but apparently they weren’t. Neither of these examples are as good as Marcy’s story of construction work on her street. Imagine a street ending in a cul-de-sac, maybe 12 houses on the street, a policeman and Marcy.

Naturally, as we drove past Marcy rolled down her window and said to the policeman, “Are you kidding me?”

His response, “It’s the law.”

We know it is, but really – Are you kidding me?

Flowers and Butterfies

I just finished reading Peter Laufer’s book The Dangerous World of Butterflies. It was really interesting and eye opening. Then, last night I caught part of a show about honey bees dying out, they are estimated to be gone by 2035.

What an ugly and tasteless world we will become without butterflies, flowers and fruit.

Let Me State This As Clearly As I Can

I listened to a "momversation" on a blog that I read, Dooce (my comment is #360). I don't usually watch the momversations because they're often dull (meaning they're usually about something I don't care about) and come with a commercial and if I want to watch a commercial I can walk downstairs and turn on the TV. But, of course, because this one said the magic word "vaccination" I was compelled to watch it even though I knew it would make me crazy!

It didn't. But that's because the moms were respectful and thoughtful, which quite frankly, is as much as I can expect. The comments were full of foolish and uninformed statements like Wakefield's data was made up. Actually ... his case is in court right now. That means that it hasn't been. At least not yet ... wink. And someone brought up the Danish Study. Yes, that one. The study that was done by a pharmaceutical company that surprisingly enough cleared a pharmaceutical product. The study that the 2 of the 3 cohorts didn't reach the average age of diagnosis for autism and unexpectedly found that there weren't very many autistic kids in their study. Go figure.

Just to be clear: Vaccines are one of the environmental triggers that cause autism in genetically susceptible children.

DIY Flu Vaccine

This is a couple of years old but it's always nice to have a refresher course in a Do It Yourself project. To see a better copy of the video go to this link.

Argggg

I just read an article in Discovery Magazine online. Melissa Lafsky first calls Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) controversial and risky then says behavioral therapy has gained significant support. I'm so tired of journalists writing articles about things they clearly know nothing about!

ABA = Behavioral Therapy

An ode to Pharmaceutical Companies and the estimated 270 people they kill per day!

I’m reading Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs and it is making me crazy! I can only read so much at a time then I have to put down the book and run over to the toilet to throw up!

Here’s a New York Times review.

Here’s information about the book.

Now go read it so you too can become best friend’s with your glossy, porcelain (non-peach) toilet!