Interesting: Robot Rock

"Around the World," Daft Punk

I dare you not to dance!

Interesting: What we do for family

Make face available for paper mache...

Interesting: Twitter

Between Facebook, Twitter, and this blog, there are all sorts of avenues for people to not listen to the nonsense I have to say! Yay science!

Watch this space for more photos.

Helpful: Open sign

I really liked this at my parent's church. Clever. Old church buildings like ours can be so foreboding sometimes.

Interesting: Small town auction

Spent the weekend with my folks in Kansas. We checked out an antiques auction in Douglass, KS, a small town that my high school used to whoop in football, tennis, and especially Scholar's Bowl and debate. Ha!

Lots of furniture, odds and ends, Mom was looking for potentially valuable china and other dishes.

Very interesting to see someone demonstrate a frog "gigger," as well.

Interesting: Liver

Apparently, my body is making its own fois gras.

Helpful: Small groups

Our church just started another round of small groups. I hadn't been a part of one for a long time due to the campaign work last year, so I'm excited to try it again. This group is a men's group, which should be fun. Reminds me of old days, our church when I was a kid had a men's group; all I saw them do was make pancakes and go on mission trips to Appalachia. I'm looking for more than that out of my friendships, although more pancakes would be fine.

Helpful: Resolutions for 2009

2. Run at least two races, starting with the 8K Shamrock Shuffle in March.

3. Lose __ pounds, enough to take my BMI back down to "normal."

Interesting: The times we're in

One lesson from The Wire is that we're all interconnected. Our actions, our kindness, our unkept promises, all of them can make a huge difference in someone's life. In this time of economic turmoil, more people will be living on the brink. We don't have a housing bubble to depend on to bail us out. We don't have a stock bubble to bail us out. In these times, we need to play defense. And to me, that means taking care of each other. Reducing risk. Emotional risk, physical risk. Take care of each other. Be good to each other.

Merry Christmas.
MK

Helpful: Resolutions for 2009

1. Learn the accordion.

Helpful: Write something

I looked down at my todo list just now and realized that "write blog post" was on it. Normally, this would be a project, requiring a topic, insight, or at least a picture of my cat.

Instead, I'm just posting this:

It snowed yesterday, about five inches. I needed to go to the corner store, so I waited until evening, when the snow had gotten pretty deep. I went out the back alley to take out the trash, it's amazing how even alleys can be beautiful when a few inches of powder cover everything. I walked out of the alley and down the sidewalk, sliding in the snow as shopkeepers shoveled their front walks. I looked both ways, no cars at all coming from either direction as far as I could see. I took a deep breath through my nose and crossed.

Not helpful: Rick Warren

In a nutshell--

Sean Hannity: War is in the Bible, so it's OK right?
Rick Warren: As long as the other guy is evil, you betcha!

Not Helpful: Blogging from iPhone

It's not easy to use Blogger on iPhone. That is all.

Helpful: Gratitude

It's Thanksgiving, and I just want to say that I'm incredibly grateful for so many things in my life. My wife and family. My friends. The city I live in. My health. My work. My faith. It's an amazing time to be alive, and each day is a new adventure.

Thank you. All of you.

Interesting: The Onion and liking the Onion

I was going to blog about a recent story from the Onion, but was distracted. I ended up at another favorite website, Stuff White People Like. Then I found an interesting coincidence.

I&H: The 61

I love new music, but I am impatient when it comes to sifting through the crummy tracks to find the jems. Luckily, the magical computer interwebs arrive again to save the day. thesixtyone.com lets you (or everyone else) do the sifting, then the songs with the most votes get bumped up the list, so you can tell which songs are more likely to be good.

Combine it with emusic.com or another download service and you've got yourself some great free/cheap music action. Thank you Internet!

Helpful: Speechifying well

I don't have a profound way to say it, but it is really amazing to have a president again who is intelligent and makes sense when he speaks.

During the campaign, people mocked Obama for being "eloquent," or just "a guy who can give great speeches." What they ignored (or pretended to ignore) is that words matter. Speeches matter, because the performance and the language can convey much more than just ideas. Here's this week's video address from the next President. Doesn't it seem like he knows what he's doing?

Helpful: Amazon wish list!

What do you want for Christmas?

Helpful: Ban all the meetings

I went to a meeting this week that was completely unnecessary. It was nice to see people I had not seen in months, and I met a few new people, but for 90 minutes, we had a meeting with no decisions being made and no assignments given out for the next meeting which is in three months.

Not only that, most people at the meeting had to drive between 1-1.5 hours each way to attend.

So, whoever you are, whatever you do, if you want to be helpful, don't have a meeting if there isn't a decision to be made or assignments to carry out, or at least some kind of problem-solving that requires face-to-face interaction. If you have one scheduled and you fear that there isn't something important to discuss, cancel the meeting. If you have to have a meeting of some kind, have a brief conference call instead.

Interesting: Health Insurance deabate

Insurance companies seem to have figured out that Americans are sick of going bankrupt over medical bills, and that they want a change. They know Obama is serious about getting it done. And with 58 Dems in the Senate and Tom Daschle running Health and Human Services, they see that Congress might actually get it passed. So they are floating a compromise.

This passage, from Ezra Klein, starts it off:

Health insurance is fundamentally a collision of information. We know whether or not we're sick. The insurers do not. If the game stopped there, the economically rational act would be to wait until we were sick to purchase health care coverage. But then the insurance pool would be solely composed of the ill (and, arguably, the stupid), and it would [be] inaffordable for everyone, and unprofitable for the insurers, and that would be the end of that.

But insurers are perfectly aware of this. So they run the opposite play: They gather data on whether or not we're sick, or likely to get sick, and then use that to refuse to sell us care. The individual health insurance market, fundamentally, is incoherent: Insurers try to deny coverage to those who want it and to sell to those who don't. That's because the most profitable customer for an insurer is one that never gets sick, and the least profitable is one who falls very ill. But that's not how you want your health insurance market to work. We want sick people to get care. That's the point.

Interesting: Rumors

It's hard to believe, and I'm sure you will be quite surprised, but today, I was the subject of a political rumor. Nothing scandalous, unfortunately, but the thought that my career path would be rumored about is incredibly exciting, gratifying, and ridiculous, all in one.

How was your day?

Helpful: Recession Cleaning

It's like Spring Cleaning, but for tough economic times. As I look for my next job opportunity and get ready for a national downturn, here's what's on my Recession Cleaning Checklist:

1) Deposit all loose change (now THAT'S Change that you can believe in!)
2) Look through the back of the closet and bins for all the clothes that fit and are wearable to keep from needing to buy new ones
3) Cut back on automatic subscriptions, especially web-based services that haven't been used in a long time
4) Scale back the cell phone plan
5) Review automatic savings plans, don't run out of cash in the checking account
6) Make sure that when buying gifts, support friends who own small businesses. They will be the hardest hit.
7) Keep things locked up. Crime naturally increases around the holidays, but in a recession, it can get even worse.
8) Eat soup. It's cheap and good for you.

Helpful: Pad Thai

It's delicious. I modified mine from this recipe:
http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Pad_Thai.htm

Helpful: YouTube and Obama

The weekly address will also be by video. Awesome.

Interesting: New church website!

Love it. Great job Cindy!

Holy Covenant UMC