I think John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a novel about this—benefiting from a recession— in The Tenured Professor.  A good read. 

Maybe the decrease in gasoline prices has helped me a little.    That and one can find great sales if you have the money to buy.  Even though I was predicting that there would be some sort of housing collapse a few years ago, I had no idea it would be this bad, that it would infect the banks and stifle the whole economy.  

Absolutely, Mugsy!  Let her sing.  People who don’t want to look at her can look at pictures of their favorite songless bird while they are listening.   I think it is interesting how people always have hundreds of more ideas on how other people can change [whether they want to or not] and less interest in improving themselves. 

I do not know why physicians who prescribe medications that cause osteoporosis do not warn their patients about it.  Just because the danger may be twenty years off is no reason to give advice on how to mitigate the danger.  Such drugs include prednisone and similar medications, anticonvulsants, SSRIs, lithium and more.  One reason these drugs cause bone thinning is that they interfere with the body’s ability to absorb Vitamin D.  If one knows about this and is taking such a medication, taking additional D and getting D levels checked regularly and doing other things to strengthen bones can all help.

It is true that men and women alike can get osteoporosis.  [My father got it from taking prednisone for asthma.]  But something like HALF of all American women over fifty have it.  Bone density scans are essential beginning at forty for those who have more than a few of the risk factors.  The risk factors include things like having taken certain medications, being of Asian or European ancestry, spending your teens and twenties in mostly sedentary pursuits, or being thing as a teen or young person, having a thyroid disorder, a history of smoking, a history of drinking alcohol, or having various medical conditions such as Cushings or MS or other things.  And of course, more than one fracture should be investigated for density issues. 

The first time I bet on a horse race, the horse won.  I reasoned that this was very unlikely to happen again, and didn’t gamble again.  I have seen too many people get into a lot of trouble with gambling.  I do love to watch them race though. 

 Why is the Derby [which takes ninety seconds] taking forever to get to?  I usually just watch the two minutes and get on with my day, but it seems to have been made into a five hour documentary on horse racing today. 

The way I see it, if Nader actually had a prayer of winning, he would not have run.  He was running in order to make the point that the existing two parties are not the whole story.  A good point.  Still, everything I know about Ralph Nader tells me he would be miserable actually living in the White House and having cabinet meetings.  I think he would get a kick out of writing executive orders and appointing judges, but most of the practical politics would make him miserable. 

I like and admire him too, but I could never see him running the government.  He was running more to have a podium than run the government.  And since I prefer practical politics, I voted for the other guy, the one Nader probably would have voted for if he were not running himself.  

I have never switched party registration, but I have occasionally voted for a candidate from a different party if she was the better candidate!

I have what I thought was a bad habit of eating about six walnuts, a tablespoon of chocolate chips and a tablespoon of dried cherries together as a snack.  Now I am finding that this is actually a healthy [if calorically rich] snack, what with the healthy fats in the walnuts and the antioxidants in the cherries and the substances in chocolate that keep plaque from sticking to artery walls.  I don’t know why I crave this combo, but I eat it a few times a week.  I have not had breast cancer, but I will recommend the walnuts to friends.  Who knows?  Maybe it works as well in people as it does in mice.  Far too many of my friends have been afflicted with breast cancer. 

One of my favorite cookbooks, Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies, is out of print.  It is such a good book, that it is selling used for over $80 a copy!  I actually have a first edition of it, but I have used it so much that it is literally falling apart.  I would replace it if it were not so expensive to do so.  I wish the publisher would wise up and re-issue it!  [And this time with a more sturdy binding, maybe a spiral binding, reflecting the likelihood that it will be used a lot.]  It is not a big book, but it has such good recipes, with many variations, and there is not a dud in it.  One of the recipes, the chocolate chip cookie, is on the Scharffenberger’s chocolate website.  But I think my favorite recipe in that cookbook is the almond macaroon. 

That sounds wonderful; I don’t think that cookbook can be found in the U.S.  I wonder if she published it with a different title here?  Oh well, I have more cookbooks than I need.  

No Senator is an island entire of itself; he is a piece of the Senate, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by a recount, the Senate is the less, as well as if CSPAN were, … so do not ask for whom the roll calls, it calls for thee.

 Franken will be a U.S. Senator; he will represent us all.

Personally, that delights me.  He is very intelligent and thoughtful, and a sense of humor is a good addition to any elected body.

These media culture is making jury trial difficult if not obsolete!  A lot of people do not think this fellow matches the pix in the surveillance cameras.  What if he is innocent?  I think we should let the courts do their job, and stop hounding people who are merely arrested and charged. 

I do admire the infamous Julie Powell, who battled back against boredom and stress by embarking on cooking every recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking—and then blogging about it here: http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/ and writing a wonderful book about it, which Nora Ephron managed to write up a script from [impossible!] which will be a movie soon.

Myself, I am nervous when I pick up Mastering the Art.  Some of the recipes seem so intimidating.   Some are not, but even so.  Some of the recipes are for things I would never eat, so I wonder about how Julie got through cooking things she was not so crazy about. 

I think I learned to cook from the food section of the New York Times, but I soon moved on to the New York Times Cookbook and Joy of Cooking.  But I don’t really have a favorite cookbook.  I have over a hundred cookbooks, way too many, but I enjoy them all.  Ones I use the most often include Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Beard on Pasta, The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, Pasta Fresca, Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking, and whatever I check out of the library.  I used to do a lot of cooking out of the Silver Palate and the New Basics.

Recently I have made a set of three ring binders with plastic sheet protectors.  Into those, I put recipes I get from my family, the internet, the newspaper, wherever.  It is useful because I can organize it into sections that work for me.  I have a section on holidays, a section on family recipes, a section on low calorie cooking, and many more.   Sometimes I put notes in these sections that lead me back to a recipe in one of my cookbooks. There are a lot of great recipes on the Internet, but this binder section helps me make them more accessible to actually cook from.

You know, I see why you would want to call yourself that.  But are you against war?  Are you against the death penalty?  Are you in favor of universal health care and financial aid to low income families?  If not, I do not think you can really call yourself pro-life.  Anti-abortion or anti-choice are more accurate terms.  You really think you are in favor of liberty?  Whose?

There are women in this country who needed to terminate pregnancies to protect their own lives or health, and a woman in that situation is hardly against life.   Go to a video store and find the movie The Cardinal from the early sixties.  

 Medical situations can be complex, and not suitably reduced to a slogan posted on a picket sign.