There’ve been a couple articles about gender & children’s clothing that recently got me thinking. One of my sisters has 4 boys and one girl (the youngest). Her boys all wear hand-me-downs (as I remember doing, myself), but the girl has new clothes. New, pink clothes. Sometimes not pink but instead lavender and frilly. I’ve […]

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I just have to post this to all and sundry: perhaps Fry’s is trying to make a new image for itself. Perhaps this is one lone, respectful employee. Perhaps the stars were aligned or the interaction was so short he didn’t have a chance to insult me. Perhaps the Fry’s in Woodland Hills is different […]

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Microfinance is the lending and borrowing of (relatively) small amounts of money. Generally, the lender is a (relatively) rich Westerner and the borrower a poor citizen of a developing country. And I don’t mean relatively poor; I mean abject poverty, where $25 to buy a goat means the difference between being able to feed your […]

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I know I’m not the only one to whom this has occurred before, but the Pope thinks secularists are too materialistic (unlike the Church, of course). Some great comments on this over at Pharyngula.

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Here. I’ve heard the argument represented in the graph before but, as they say, this is worth 1000 words.

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It’s been a while since we had any tea-related postings although tea has been on my mind of late. My good friend, Onigiri, has taken to calling me a tea snob, which I readily admit to, but how did I get that way?
My step-mother-in-law got me into tea big time, while at the same time […]

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“Hypermiling” has become all the rage in the media sources I frequent (in order of its appearance: Wired, NPR, and GroovyGreen), but it’s always seemed too dangerous and requiring too much thought. I learned to drive on the Autobahn, where there is no speed limit, only a minimum, and a posted “recommendation” of 120kph (about […]

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