Category: Bits and Pieces

WHAT A deal!! The President gets higher corporate taxes……but only if he gets to spend the extra money on his own priorities!! Who could turn down such a deal? Not the GOP, I suspect. Please surprise me, Mr. Boehner!

….on Twitter. My daughter sent me this, bless her….if you’d told me yesterday that Twitter could be beautiful, I’d have scoffed (to put it politely). I’m still not going to be doing social media any time soon (if ever), but my attitude has been adjusted by reading this. Twitter is

I give you Jaime Herrera Beutler and her husband, Daniel.   She represents a district in Washington state, and on June 3 announced that their baby had been diagnosed with a bad disease, Potter Sequence….a disorder of the kidneys that leads to insufficient amniotic fluid and damages the lungs.  The disease

“AS THE COACH AT A HIGH SCHOOL NEAR CHICAGO, MIKE POWELL HAS DONE MORE THAN CREATE STATE WRESTLING CHAMPIONS. HE’S TAUGHT BOYS HOW TO BE MEN AND PROVIDED AN EXAMPLE OF COURAGE UNDER THE MOST TRYING PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES” I’m warning you to get a hankie before reading this story…and understand

Today was a less tiring day than yesterday, so I feel equal to writing about both Dublin and the Waterford/Kilkenny area. I’m still fairly tired, though, so I’ll be briefer than usual. We actually saw very little of Dublin, since we took a very concentrated tour. A graduate student at

After another 24 hour Internet blackout, I’m online again, although G*d alone knows for how long. I finally got to check out the Bookworm Room home page and saw, to my delight, that Earl has been keeping things lively. I also saw the WordPress had cut off half my Loch

Kidding…..kidding. But Michael Pollan MAY have a stroke, when he reads this NY Post article by Kyle Smith: The greatest food in human history Forgive me the headline – but it *is* the New York Post!!  🙂 Anyhow, here’s the greatest food in human history, and to see why, go

….and that should NOT evoke the thought “tastes like chicken”. Shame on you! NBC is planning a four-hour miniseries featuring the former first lady, former Senator and former Secretary of State. That’s Diane Lane, who’ll be playing the WoB….she’s 48 this year (46 in the photo), and will play Hillary

Transit police officers on the NYC subway locked themselves in the motorman’s car a few feet from where a citizen was taking down a knife-wielding quadruple murderer and getting himself all cut up at the same time…..because the police officers were afraid the criminal might have had a gun! The

Contra Costa County in California got a political and economic plum earlier this year – the right to have an Obamacare Call Center sited in Concord, along with over 200 jobs for people who will help citizens navigate the shoal-waters of The Affordable Care Act. Imagine the chagrin of local

What happens when you press the brake pedal and the car doesn’t even slow down? Forbes tells the story of two guys with an $80,000.00 grant from the Pentagon who have hacked the computer systems on some new cars, and you will have bad dreams after reading about what they

I borrowed the first part of the title from a somewhat surprising post from Reason Magazine.  The author says you can put a fork in Detroit (it’s done) because every mayor since the 1960s has stomped on small entrepreneurial businesses in favor of the big and the flashy.  There has

My daughter just sent us a fascinating piece entitled: “Wired Love”: A tale of catfishing, OK Cupid, and sexting. Since it’s 1880, the wires are those of the telegraph, and the two lovers are both telegraph operators who communicate using Morse Code. “I don’t want to give too much of

I finally got a few minutes of free Internet, so I was able to upload a few Skjolden photos. I took them with an iPhone, so the quality isn’t great, but you’ll get an idea of its beauty.