Everyone’s worried about pesticides on their food—but since organics can really jack up your food bills, you may have to pick and choose what organic products you buy. Instead of guessing which ones have the biggest chemical load, you can download EWG’s Safe Food Guide (even to your smartphone), so you can skip the safer foods (avocados and pineapple), and splurge on the important stuff (strawberries and celery).
Or, of course, you can simply grow your own…
They often say celebrity deaths come in threes. And they often say that they follow the adage “the old, the sick and the sudden.” And this week’s losses—Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson—definitely fit the bill.
The passing of any of these luminaries would have dominated news coverage, but adding the King of Pop to the mix gave the other two the short shaft as far as headlines go. And who could blame the media for glomming onto the story, with the possibility of sordid prescription drug addiction, Jackson’s amazing glory days and his fall from grace and years of eccentric living? It’s like Elvis revisited.
The only good thing to come out of Jackson’s death is that it’s reminded many people (including me) why he was named the King of Pop…his music. The man was a consummate entertainer, and created fabulous pop songs that still stand up and sound fresh decades after they were made. If only his personal life had been half as successful.
Fairmont Turnberry Isle Resort & Club - free golf for hotel guests through September 30th, 2009
Sanyo’s WH1 Waterproof HD Video Camera
SandSac - the eco-friendly alternative to the plastic sand pail and shovel
EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis for the Wii
LG Electronics 47-inch LCD HDTV with NetCast Entertainment Access
One of the toughest challenges out there is effectively translating a book to a movie or TV show. Odds are, whichever one you’ve seen or read first ruins you for the other. For instance, I adore the show Dexter. The books, meh. And the book Twilight, however flawed, is much better than the movie.
There are a few rare exceptions—the Harry Potter movies I find just as entertaining as the books, and I know my husband, a huge Tolkien fan, loves Peter Jackson’s trilogy as much as the Lord of the Rings series.
And so I have quite a bit of trepidation about the upcoming film adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book which I loved immensely. It’s a very nontraditional love story, between an average woman and a man regularly disappears and reappears in another place and time, without any control over his ability to travel. It’s a very touching book, and one that I have shared and recommended to dozens of people.
I saw my first trailer for it today. It looks…interesting. But I’m worried that it will not live up to my vision of this wonderful book, and I’m not sure if I’m willing to see it for that reason. Would you?
Summer’s usually the time for reruns, but networks and cable channels have started stocking their hottest shows for the hottest months. Sunday’s return of True Blood appears to be the most anticipated, at least among my circle of friends—I actually reupped for HBO just so I could see what happens next in the scorching hot town of Bontemps, Louisiana. Especially since the season ended with one of my favorite characters, the flamboyant LaFayette, missing—and a dead body in everyone’s least favorite sheriff’s deputy’s car.
I’ll be savoring every moment of the season premiere on Sunday.
The officer did ask her to put her hands behind her back and she refused and in the end he tasered the 72 year old great, grandmother.
While he was trained in the use of the taser, unfortunately he was not trained to deal with stubborn grandmas. In the end, she suffered no lasting injury.
Waterboarding anyone?
MSN has been collecting some pretty heinous layoff stories, but unfortunately, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few of the worst stories I’ve heard (or worse yet, lived through).
1. A manager let her whole staff know they were likely to be laid off, a few weeks before the ax finally dropped. The day before the pink slips were to be handed out, the president of the company came in to meet with them all and spent over half an hour talking about the strength of the company, and how they’d come through the difficult time. And the next day, they received the pink slips. (The company expired soon after that.)
2. Several staffers were laid off. As they packed their boxes, the remaining staffers were meeting in the elevator lobby and were told how much better and stronger the company would be now. In order for laid-off staffers to get the heck out of there, they had to walk through the meeting.
3. Pink slips were handed out, and a few select staffers were offered a chance to relocate. One person was told by her bosses that she was not selected to have a relocation package, yet the HR department said she was. She had to argue with them for about 15 minutes before they checked with her bosses and determined that she was, indeed, fired.
What’s your story?
I grew up in the MTV generation, which meant a lot of those odd, grainy, low-budget videos from the 80s are seared into my brain. But I love the new take filmmaker Dusto McNeato took on these hoary old gems from the archives. He takes the original video and song, and adds in his own hilarious “literal video” lyrics that narrate what you see on the screen. The pinnacle of his achievements in this field is the wonderfully weird Bonnie Tyler “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video. Totally NSFW, unless you’re working somewhere where snickering and giggling is totally cool.
Conservatives are up in arms about the “frivolous” flight for the Obamas to take in dinner and a show in New York City. Which seems pretty darned silly, considering the number of long vacations to Crawford, Texas, that the taxpayers covered for the former president of the United States. I don’t remember anyone raising a stink when he relaxed and took time off from one of the most stressful jobs in the world. Are we really going to begrudge President Obama a single night on the town?
My dad is nearly impossible to shop for—especially now that he’s semi-retired. (No more ties for us!) As usual, Real Simple comes through with a fabulous Father’s Day guide. I think the “Jokes Every Man Should Know” book may be right up his alley—and allow him to replace some of his no-longer-so-golden oldies.
