Help Me Help the Hungry, or, About That Head Shaving Thing

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ShaveMyHead
 At the day job we're making a final push in our food drive.  We've collected food at apartment communities, we've hosted food collection drives at the Winston-Salem Dash and Greensboro Grasshoppers games and in general we've worked our rear ends off to raise food and cash for the hungry.  The drive ends August 24, and as some of you may remember I agreed a couple of months ago to shave my head if people would donate $1,000 for that purpose. Well we're still short (although my mother has made a valiant effort to see her oldest son's hair lopped off) so we've put together a little campaign to get us there.  If we make it I'll be getting my head shaved on the 24th at a little shindig we're hosting to recognize our largest food contributors.  Contributing is as easy as sending a text, so please take a moment to help feed the hungry.

And yes, our promotional concept was a total ripoff of the cute girl quitting via whiteboard hoax from earlier this week.

I Think I Know What to Get the Oldest for His Birthday

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Our oldest son has always been into fancy writing instruments.  Since my wife and I have had home-based offices his entire life he's always had access to a multitude of pens and pencils, and if my favorite pen ever went missing I had a pretty good idea where it ended up: his room.

That's why I think the following will be a pretty cool gift for his birthday (and it's a helluva lot cheaper than a car or name brand shirt):

Sharpie Liquid Pencil

For those of us who can happily spend hours browsing the aisles at Office Depot, this is big, big news.

"A game-changing liquid graphite that eliminates broken pencil leads forever."

• Writes as smooth as a pen

• Erases like a pencil

• Becomes permanent like a Sharpie marker after three days

Quality of Death Index

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After my post last week re. dying with dignity you might think I'm on a death kick here, but really it's just coincidence.  Just read this post at BookofJoe about an article in The Economist about an attempt to assess the dying process throughout the world:

Britain tops the table. For all the health-care system’s faults, British doctors tend to be honest about prognoses. The mortally ill get plentiful pain killers. A well-established hospice movement cares for people near death, although only 4% of deaths occur in them. For similar reasons, Australia and New Zealand rank highly too.

Some countries, such as Denmark and Finland, that normally score higher than Britain on human-development indices rank lower on the quality-of-death index. They concentrate more on preventing death (which they see as a medical failure) rather than on helping people die without suffering pain, discomfort and distress. America scores poorly because of the health insurers’ rule that they pay for palliative care only if a patient relinquishes curative treatments. 

Spencer Needs Help Getting His Face Out of the Mud on Farmville

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Bad: Your personal assistant quits.

Worse: She does so in a creative white board slide show emailed to about 20 of your co-workers.

Worser: She lets everyone know you called her a HPOA – hot piece of (use your imagination) – on the phone with someone.

Worst: She reveals how you spend time online, and the majority of that time is spent on…Farmville?! 

Spencer, Jenny's got your number.

Shocker: Teens are Dense

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Anyone who's the parent of a teen will read this story and say, "Well, duh." An excerpt:

Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

Just remember folks, just because today's teens grew up in a world where the internet has always existed doesn't mean that they miraculously grew a gland that gave them more common sense than the generations that preceded theirs.  Heck, they're just as dumb and narcissistic as we were, but now they're armed with the means to show the world what idiots they are.  In our day the only people subjected to our idiocy were our parents, neighbors and teachers.

Mayor Bloomberg’s Speech

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New York City's Republican mayor steps up and explains why the "Mosque at 9/11 Site" story is important, and why it would be wrong to prevent the mosque from being built.  He really hits the nail on the head here:

“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

"For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right.

"On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, 'What God do you pray to?' (Bloomberg's voice cracks here a little as he gets choked up.) 'What beliefs do you hold?'

"The attack was an act of war, and our first responders defended not only our city, but our country and our constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked."