Another Reason to Hope to See a Naked Person When the Door Opens

Yahoo! News - Pizza survey offers up fresh slice of Americana: "Nudity, for example, demonstrated a surprising link with largesse, as nine percent of people who answered the door naked gave a tip of more than 20 percent, compared to only two percent of those wearing pajamas."

Women Find a New Arena for Equality: Prison

Women Find a New Arena for Equality: Prison: "But, Ms. Richie said, there is strong evidence that more women going to prison are addicted to drugs than male inmates, and some drugs, including crack and methamphetamine, may have a more powerful affect on women." (emphasis added)

Did I mention this all-too-common error was found in the New York Times? Funny they don't mention grammar/spelling errors in their commercials selling the paper as the news source for the educated.

Some Sort of Cold

Since the day after Christmas (really, since Christmas night), I've been sick with a cold (I think). It was worst on the 26th, when I felt fatigued all day and had a few odd spells of lightheadedness. My only major cold symptom is the congestion, which led to a sore throat, runny nose and full ears. Yuck.

But resting in bed for a few days, with the humidifier keeping the postnasal drip at bay, has left me with some severe cabin fever. It's not helped by the fact that with Christmas being over there's just not much left to do. The post-holiday blues are the worst. New Year's isn't a big enough holiday to make up for losing the fun of anticipation.

What do I have left to look forward to now besides snow, cold walks and schoolwork? Joy. I wish it was Christmas again.

Complaining of the Obvious

The Center for Consumer Freedom, a coalition that includes mainstream restaurants and food producers, says the Organic Consumers Association is run by "radical social activists."

"These activists are clearly hoping to drive U.S. shoppers away from the grocery meat counter and toward more expensive organic and so-called 'natural' options," said David Martosko, research director for the center.

Well, duh. You don't expect people promoting the sale of organic beef to tell consumers to buy nonorganic beef, do you?

What I want to know is where this reporter is finding ground beef for 68 cents a pound. At Jewel I have to pay $3 a pound for the same stuff. Not that I'm all that interested in buying it anymore.

Newsday.com - Organic Beef Industry Expects More Sales

"Ultracompetitive Yuppie Enclave"?

It seems that the movie that should never have been made, "Cheaper By the Dozen," is set mostly in Evanston as, presumably, the dad is called up to be Northwestern's new football coach. And this is his dream job.

(Pause to laugh in disbelief.)

Much as I am curious to see how Evanston is translated on the big screen, I cannot put myself through so much time watching Hilary Duff and the rest of the "Bakers" (baker's dozen -- get it?) getting involved in syrupy hijinks. Not to mention the people behind this movie have totally jettisoned the book (and even the previous movie) it's based on: Aside from both families having 12 kids, you probably couldn't find any similarities between this family and the Gilbreths, with their famous efficiency-expert parents who ran the home like a factory.

Movie Review | 'Cheaper by the Dozen': Mining the Sanitized Mischief of Sitcomland

Merry Christmas!

The title says it all.

Oh, Crap

First Suspected Case of Mad Cow Disease in U.S.

Wal-Mart is Scary

"People ask, 'How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' Sure, it's held inflation down, and it's great to have bargains," says Dobbins. "But you can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs."

The Wal-Mart You Don't Know

So many articles have been published about Wal-Mart recently, describing everything from their incursions into Japan (with scary descriptions of their relentlessly outgoing corporate culture) to their dominance in holiday toy sales (pushing traditional toy stores such as F.A.O. Schwarz into bankruptcy), that I've found that lately, Wal-Mart seems to hold a far more frightening future than even Microsoft.

With Microsoft, at least, there appears to be a figure behind the Evil Empire -- Bill Gates -- and that lends the hope that, should he be locked away on a deserted island somewhere, his kingdom would crumble in his absence. But Wal-Mart is more than the brainchild of a madman -- it's a philosophy, a culture -- a brainwash.

It's like Big Brother's come to roost in a parking lot.

More Cookies (Surprised?)

For posterity's sake, I am going to record the full list of cookies I have baked for this Christmas. In order of creation:

1. almond snowballs
2. frosted sugar
3. gingerbread men
4. snickerdoodles
5. loaded oatmeal
6. thimbles
7. chocolate chip (with mini morsels)
8. spritz
9. cocoa-mint sandwiches
10. jam thumbprints
11. pizzelles
12. chocolate-peppermint pinwheels
13. coconut macaroons
14. coconut cookies

I also made cocktail meatballs tonight. Don't you wish you were having Christmas dinner with us?

The Deathmobile

I haven't seen the ad myself, but it does indeed seem to confirm everything one can justifiably hate about people who drive Hummers.

Your Cheatin' Cart - The problem with Hummer's new ad.

I have seen the Hummer commercial that takes place on the cruise ship, though, and it definitely is abhorrent. "I love off-roading," the beautiful woman says in her husky accent, as she sits behind the wheel of a Hummer -- a Hummer parked on the deck of the ship. What I don't get is whether that commercial's supposed to make us all want Hummers or merely confirm our opinion that a Hummer is a pointless waste of money, fuel and roadspace (or perhaps, deckspace).

Site Updates

I corrected all the links on the rest of the site, so they no longer link to colleenfischer.bloggedup.com. I also fixed a few broken links while I was at it, and I removed the search boxes. Maybe if I'm lucky, people who knew my site only through randomly coming across it will be able to find it again through the old pages.

You can check them out using the links to the right.

Cookie Count

In honor of yesterday being the only full day I've spent here and not baked a cookie, I give you an update of what I've done since my injury Wednesday.

Thursday: Baked chocolate wafers for "Oreo" cookies.
Friday: Made peppermint frosting for wafers, sandwiched the cookies and baked some jam thumbprints. Discovered the jam thumbprints were really shortbread cookies with jam. Excited to have shortbread to eat, but concerned the cookies will fall apart.
Saturday: No cookie baking today, remember?

If I get to it, I'll make pizzelles today. Those are the ones that look like waffles and are often anise-flavored. Beyond that, I still have ambitions to make a coconut cookie, and I'm considering making a recipe that turns out cookies with ribbons of chocolate and peppermint (with candy-cane pieces baked right in).

And of course, I need to start getting the other stuff ready for Christmas day. I want to try cocktail meatballs this year. And maybe I should look into getting shrimp or chicken wings, too. But then, I don't want everyone to fill up on appetizers and not eat dinner. Hmm.

Another Update

I have updated the link to Scott's site down on the sidebar. He's currently in the process of importing his old entries into Blogger as well. Fun stuff.

Anyone Surprised?

Arnie's declaring California's government to be in a state of "fiscal crisis" (well, that's stating the obvious). But apparently this means that he has the power to slash spending on state programs without the input (or restraining influence) of the Legislature. The Democrat-controlled Legislature, that is.

So much for checks and balances.

But anyway, this latest crisis apparently has come about because the Governator personally ended the unpopular car-tax increase, something that contributed largely to Grey Davis' removal (it seems Californians -- like all Americans, perhaps -- are cheap) and something that Arnie promised to remove during the campaign. Thus, Schwarzenegger singlehandedly nearly bankrupted California's municipal governments.

It seems to me that Arnold's not making any friends in the government by stepping on the Legislature's toes, and he's likely going to make quite a few more enemies among Californians when they realize that, while they may have a bit more cash in their pockets, it's going to end up being spent on getting themselves the services they'll be losing when the governor slashes $150 million's worth of programs.

Because we all know we should be getting everything for nothing, right?

Schwarzenegger Declares Fiscal Crisis

On another note, has anyone seen the new Marshall's commercials? I just saw one with a woman singing about all the international-vintage presents she'd bought (to the tune of "The 12 Days of Christmas"), and until the Marshall's logo popped up at the end, I could have sworn it was another one of those eBay musicals.

Purple Heart

I have been injured in the line of duty. After my third straight day of holiday cookie-baking, my cookie-sheet-holding shoulder finally gave. Rather than baking more cookies, I spent the evening out of commission on the couch, ignoring all the dinner dishes that caused stabbing pains to think about.

I tried some massaging-shower head therapy, which helped at least while I was in the shower. Then I took to my bed, but that made no difference. At last, my mom returned from shopping and strapped one of those heat patches onto my shoulder, which, after a few hours, seems to be having an effect. Not using the shoulder for several hours might be helping, too.

The cookie-variety tally is now up to a whopping eight. Today's projects were chocolate chip (with mini morsels) and spritz, my personal favorite because I get to use the cookie press. After two days of using cookie cutters, it was a welcome respite.

" . . . the presidential panel said public services other than schools also have been affected by militancy, with hospital corridors used as prayer rooms, men refusing to let male doctors treat their wives, and women fulfilling national defense duties refusing any rescue operations with men."

And banning head scarves is going to change all this?

Why not just order the daughters of conservative Muslims not to go to school at all? France is so busy being afraid of immigrants from its former colonies that it's not realizing that for many Muslim women, the head scarf equals freedom to leave the house. Maybe in France the Muslim community isn't quite that conservative, but still, banning head scarves (and other religious symbols, such as skullcaps) from schools is a violation of religious freedom. Honestly, it's not like French Muslim girls come to school obscured by burqas -- how is a scarf a threat to national security?

You can praise Western Europeans as much as you want for their social-welfare bent, but they're still way behind the times when it comes to tolerance. In many ways, the treatment that ethnic minorities get in Europe makes America look good.

On this issue, there's room for compromise on both sides. But let's try to be a little more enlightened about others' cultures in the future, no?

French Leader Calls for Ban on Relgious Symbols in Schools

Disaster

It seems Bloggedup.com has decided to pull the plug on free accounts for good. The site has wavered on offering small accounts for free over my time using one; sometimes you could sign up, sometimes they said all the free space was taken. But still, they never went about simply removing all the active free accounts.

That changed today. Scott called me this evening and asked if I'd checked my site at all today. I hadn't -- I haven't done much with it since getting home. So he informed me that pulling up our site addresses only brought up this: "There is no website configured at this address."

Great.

I have a backup copy of my diary, but it only covers up to September 2003. That's three months' worth of entries vanished. Fortunately, I remembered that the wonderful Google caches a copy of each site it crawls, meaning that there was a second "backup" of my site available. I managed to download my archives from October and Novemeber from Google, as well as the most recent entries for December. I'm still missing the five days' worth of entries made between December 1 and December 8, but I don't think there's any way to get those back short of Bloggedup deciding to restore my site.

Anyway, since arriving home basically all I've been doing is baking cookies. I've now made frosted sugar, gingerbread men, "loaded" oatmeal, thimbles (very small butter cookies), almond snowballs and snickerdoodles. My back is killing me from cleaning the kitchen so much. I blame the stone floors.

That's not to say I didn't get a nice welcome the evening I arrived. I would have gotten a better one at the airport, but my plane was delayed so many times because of the snow that everyone gave up on waiting for me except my parents. When I finally did arrive at my grandma's, everyone had already finished dinner. Oh well. At least as soon as I walked in the door Gracie lit up and told me, "I missed you so much! I thought your plane was never going to land!" Awww. I even got a hug from one of my little brothers.

The other event of recent days concerns my dog Oscar. The poor puppy has some sort of infection on his ear that has been there since I left for school in September, I think. On top of that, he seems to have injured his foot somehow, as he keeps licking it and crying.

And then there's the gas. Yuck -- I have to stop giving him cookies. Whew. (Waves hand in front of nose.)

Like Camping

Here I am, coming to you LIVE from underneath a blanket!

I've created a tent for myself using a quilt with my knees and head serving as supports. My feet and elbows are keeping the fabric tucked under so that NOT ONE BIT of heat can escape from my refuge.

Scott's apartment might be best compared to a mutant appliance -- on top is a convection oven, baking you until lightly browned as you sleep, and on bottom is, oddly enough, a chest freezer.

For some reason, when the heating system was installed in this flat house, the ducts were placed up near the ceiling downstairs and at floor-level upstairs. For those of you unacquainted with thermodynamics, heat causes molecules to become excited and zing all over the place, decreasing the density of matter in a given area making said area lighter -- i.e., heated air rises. Upstairs gets a double hit of heat and downstairs gets zilch.

To make matters worse, even though there is a thermostat in the apartment, it doesn't work.

My computer doesn't like being under a blanket, but my fingers become too numb to use the computer outside of the blanket.

If only this heavy sofa bed could be dragged up the stairway half its size.

Chapped Lips

I got some fancy herbal lip balm at Osco the other day to soothe my dried-out lips, a product of the ever-increasing cold here in Chicago. It feels somewhat antiseptic and it smells like lemons. But I'm afraid it's not helping me much since my lips just seem to keep getting worse.

The Internet's been down since 2 a.m. at my apartment. (Seethes with frustration.) Considering that I don't have other work to distract me now, it's an especially big problem.

Yes, I am an addict. It's probably why I can't sleep, as my mind is constantly overstimulated by the Internet.

But a bigger problem for me sometimes is that I can't get up in the morning, no matter how much sleep I've had. I feel utterly lethargic and heavy every morning. My head feels cloudy, and I begin to understand the true meaning of inertia. The only thing that can get me going (aside from fear of being late for class) is a glass of orange juice. Today I wondered if perhaps my blood sugar plummets during the night or something. Unfortunately, this seems to be one of the things where I just get hypochondriac-ish worries without actually doing anything about it.

Speaking of -- I should check to see if Searle has any flu shots left. But they probably will be closed by the time I'm out of work. Hmm.

My Life Is Over

I was reading MacAddict magazine today at work, and I identified at least three factual errors within one article. It drove me crazy for two reasons: one, that these stupid errors existed at all and why-didn't-they-have-a-copy-editor-check-this-out, and two, that I picked up the little errors and got so irritated by their presence at all. This copy editing class has ruined me for life. As if I wasn't enough of a perfectionist already.

Michigan Avenue

So the BlogRoll thing seems incapable of telling which site was updated most recently. I'm thinking about how to change this.

Scott and I swung over to Michigan Avenue after dropping off my final final project at the Trib Center. The lights were very pretty around the water tower, and Marshall Fields was highly perfumed. The coolest part was the Apple Store, and no, not for the reasons you think. Not only does the store offer wireless access, it also has its own computer lab of sorts (upstairs, next to the software and opposite the theater). There's a dozen or so iMacs, and EVERY SINGLE ONE has an iSight Firewire web cam attached! It was great. I used Yahoo Messenger to video conference with my family. Nifty.

Addition

I added a BlogRoll to my sidebar on the right here. It ranks the blogs on the list in order of freshness. Presumably, it will also expand the Link Cosmos of everyone on the list, too. Fun.

Missing Entries

I was just checking out my archives and I realized that most of the entries from 2001 and 2002 are still MIA. I guess that's a project for winter break.

I've almost finished my page layout. All the articles and pictures are ready to go, but my infographic is missing a great deal of information as I apparently did not e-mail myself the info I spent hours looking up at poli sci. Frustrating. Now I'm going to have to find my paper copy among all my notes from the class, and that won't be nearly so detailed as the raw data.

SCO Ho Ho!

I believe I've mentioned the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit on this site, oh, once or twice. For those that don't remember, SCO claims that the free, open-source operating system Linux infringes on their intellectual property rights. SCO bought the copyrights for Unix, a venerable old OS, from Novell a while back. SCO isn't making a good deal off of its implementation of Unix, so a number of people believe it's targeting IBM and Linux users through litigation and "licensing fees" simply to make money. Surely, the fact that the lawyers working the case for them are being paid either a straight fee or "a percentage of any sale of SCO in the meantime" gives you some indication of what they're after.

Recently, a judge ruled that SCO has to show IBM exactly how its contributions to Linux infringe on SCO's IP rights. But it seems that's not all SCO has to prove now . . . SCO Must Prove Existence Of Santa Claus in Thirty Days.