Showing signs of fatigue and frustration amid the upheaval on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill, the rich stated publicly for the first time this week that they were considering stepping down and turning the nation over to some other class.
How many times has this happened to you? You’re engrossed in something on TV, and suddenly it’s interrupted by a plug with some lug taking a slug from a mug? Welcome back to the world of “ug.”
When you live 10 miles to the nearest town, plenty of your parenting is done in the car. On any given day, you might catch me tooling down the highway doing a rundown of the ABCs, singing the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or — during summer construction season — offering my vast knowledge of the inner workings of skidsteers and forklifts.
Dressing appropriately at work will not necessarily help you, but not following your company’s unwritten dress code norms can hurt your upward mobility. Certainly there are general business rules that define what is and is not acceptable to wear in the workplace. Every company is different, so be careful when adapting this advice to your specific work environment.
As the moon fades to last quarter on Aug. 3, dark evening skies prevail giving us a deep window into the starry heavens. This time of year, the Milky Way Band is most prominent for evening watchers. If you have a good deal of light pollution in your sky, alas, the Milky Way will be difficult to distinguish. A sweep with binoculars or a small telescope, however, will reveal an abundant increase in stars as your scan takes you over this far away band of light.
“Three times is a threat,” to quote Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
According to several newspaper accounts, extremely rich people are spending their money on something that surprises me: theme parks. It just goes to show how out of touch I am with the ultra rich. I thought that those who have an extraordinary amount of money might treat themselves to things like putting an extra stamp on an envelope "just in case," showering for as long as they want or splurging at the car wash and getting that carnuba wax.
The story of Shirley Sherrod, the USDA bureaucrat upended by journo-hack Andrew Breitbart, is perfectly reflective of a culture whose collective attention span for the thought-provoking, the nuanced and the complicated is wearing dangerously thin.
The Shirley Sherrod story is slipping to the bottom of the news barrel and with it another teachable moment in the never-ending non-conversation on race. Take race out of the deck, though, and we begin to see the Shirley Sherrod story demands much more than a national dialogue on race. It calls for a lesson on lies - the lies that take hold, the lies that don't and the lessons we don't want to learn.
Here are some "different" ways to earn a college scholarship.
The tension between the freedom of the press and the government’s and military’s need to operate with privacy to hash out policy and with secrecy in matters of national security has always created a complicated dance. The WikiLeaks publication of 91,000 classified documents concerning the war in Afghanistan, some as recent as December 2009, blows that dance apart.
How to protect yourself from unusual economic conditions.
Back in the day, we lived in small clans or tribes of loosely related people, usually ruled over by whoever had the strongest leadership skills, or the strongest arm. Everybody else grew, gathered or hunted food. About the only specialization in existence was perhaps the healer/spiritual leader. Other than the chief, most people were roughly equal in status.
If the American people want something enough, our democratic government delivers it. The trouble is that when we want contradictions, pandering, and self-destruction we get that too.
Weekly financial Q&A, with advice on when to buy a house and being in debt to family members.
I have often written about my mishaps and unfortunate interactions with suburban flora and fauna. In addition to my encounters with poison ivy and other nasty weeds, I have come up against grouchy uber-woodchucks, manic squirrels and psycho wild turkeys, to name a few. Although I have taken it all in stride, my husband thinks I have an unusually high rate of unpleasant nature issues for one stay-at-home mom suburbanite. I am quick to point out that since he works in the city, he doesn't really have as much of an opportunity as I do for run-ins with wildlife ... at least the four-legged kind.
This may shock you: Al Gore did not invent the Internet. But this may shock you more: The Internet actually dates back to the mid-1860s.
Like most people, I spend much of my time trying to determine whom I should blame for all my various problems. It can be tough, since there are so many options to choose from, such as the government, Wall Street and/or Mel Gibson. All are tempting, but I’ve decided to pick Google.
I feel a little bit sorry for my son. With me, everything can become a lesson. I believe in teachable moments. You can learn a lot by being told how things work. But in my opinion, there is no substitute for actually seeing those words applied.
I’m having recovered memory with the return to TV of “Mad Men” on AMC. I feel a tingle of recognition just looking at the dress, the cars, the interiors seen on that series.
