I'm so HAPPY!

I made Dave giggle on his birthday! He giggled like a little girl. It made me happy!

I must be cranky today

I blame the excessive St. Louis heat. Some headlines from various places really had me all atizzy and aflutter today.

Viagra offers help to some women
I'd like to know how much money we spend aiding men in getting off versus how much we spend on helping women and their sex and reproductive issues. Anyone with data? How many years did it take before even the pill moved on to a next generation? And don't we know that excesses of estrogen cause cancer? Yet here we are, still using estrogen or synthetic estrogen based drugs. And the companion article, More Sex for Today’s Seniors. TMI first off, but I love the numbers: more married men are having sex than married women. But wait, isn’t marriage a one to one ratio? The men must have been dipping in the Viagra but who are those 70 year old tarts?

Grocers stop selling jalapeno peppers after salmonella discovery
Time to move out, buy you own land and farm your own food. If you can't buy a jalapeno pepper, what's the world coming too?

Fight Breaks Out During Shock-Sparks Game
Well, call me SHOCKed! I guess it's news because it involved women, but really, nothing is a surprise any more these days.

Health Plan From Obama Spurs Debate
OMG! Is this really how they calculate stuff?!

Why InBev needs A-B
Sadly, another St. Louis bastion has taken the corporate tumble. After InBev gets through with A-B, I'm sure they will have many fewer people and a lot less of the perks that make this company one of the last great places to work in our city. I don't expect them to close any breweries because I really believe InBev is looking for the increased capacity to position their move into expanding overseas markets. But no more monthly free beer, SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, onsite barber and shoe shines, fitness, etc. GAK! InBev Stadium? Even the generic flavor of all those international company names is irritating. I suppose they will at least still sell beer at the ball games.

Oh and hey Shannon? You aren't the only one. See this link and chuckle. At least you caught it.

Copy Machines and .pdfs

I have wasted so much time today trying to get a copy machine to send my documents to me as reduced pdfs. It seems like it should be simple enough. My original is a nonstandard size and reducing by 90% gets it to fit on a standard 8 1/2 by 11. Yet somehow, this doesn't work with pdfs. The file does not reduce. It does, however, save as a screen percentage of 90% so that all my edges are chopped off, and lo, I can expand to a chopped off version at 100%! YAY! To make it (me) sound even whinier, the A/C is out in the building all this week and I have to traipse back and forth, upstairs and down, through the whole building to keep trying different things. I'm a computer literate person. I can operate any number of expensive, technical pieces of analytical equipment. Copy machines and office telephones are my bane. This should not be so difficult.


Ya, so you know those people that have to sing along but never know the lyrics? Like, when CCR supposedly sings, "there's a bathroom on the right"? Now you can help those misguided inDUHviduals with the following pages that list the lyrics to all their favorite songs and TV shows.

Commercials

I suck at associating brands and commercials. I'm an advertiser's nightmare. I do enjoy watching commercials but only for their entertainment value. I rarely remember what the commercial was for. For example, I know I enjoyed the phone commercials that turned the traditional parent/teen argument around but I sure couldn't tell you which company it was for. That and I don't watch a lot of TV anyway. (However, this last week or two, I've been sucked into watching an anime series that I've really enjoyed, so much so that I bought it. Ask me about it if you are interested.) Anyway, because of my hopelessness at brands, I found this link interesting. Especially clicking their link that shows how each logo has been tagged by others.

Pringles

Sadly, the inventor of the Pringles can died recently. I will share with you my fond memories of Pringles cans. Many moons ago, way back in like the 70s, the cans had a corrugated paper liner, I assume to cushion the tender chips and prevent breakage and hence a canful of crumbs. My friends and I used to make candles (fad) by pouring melty wax in the cans and tearing them apart when cool. After of course, eating all the chips. And everyone who knows me knows how I love chips.

Universal Health Care

Scary version...which congress do you want to make decisions about your health, the democratic one or the republican one? And have it flip every few years to boot. I guess it depends on where your political tumbleweed rolls. Personally, I don't want the bloated, red-tape filled feds choosing my treatments. I'd die before they could decide what treatment is the most inexpensive, ineffectual one to give me anyway. If HMOs are any indication of what federal health care would be like, no thanks. HMOs have already devalued the practice of medicine so much that the really talented don’t want to study medicine anymore. Physician salaries have steadily declined since HMOs started really rolling in the 80s. Less skilled doctors and lower salaries did not mean lower cost health care like we were promised, in fact, it skyrocketed and all that money filled the HMO's coffers. They are middlemen, health care distributors. A distributor’s only purpose is to make money and make money they do. And they do it partly by controlling what care you can have and what medications you can have. It is almost to the point of "these are the allowed treatments and no special ones for anyone". Hmm. Scary. Does anyone truly believe the greedy, self-centered, partisan, corporate driven, special interest group run, federal government can do this better? I'm sure it would be a huge success, like federal education or federal social security.

These should make kitty and owner happy.