Bill Maher’s New Rules
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lol, rofl, :-), and brb
An apple a day…
Nature’s Rx: Farmers Markets Cropping Up at Hospitals
Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience Bad Medicine Columnist
Hospitals and health clinics have pharmacies for their patients, but why not add a place to pick up vegetables and fruits, too?
After years of treating their clientele for the ravages of poor nutrition — obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke — some doctors finally are catching on to the idea that prescribing carrots instead of pharmaceutical drugs might be a better option. It’s preventive medicine 101.
The Harris County Hospital District serving Houston, Texas, and its surroundings is among just a handful of health organizations that have incorporated a full-fledged farmers market into its facilities. The reasons are many: Most of the patients coming to its clinics are poor; their neighborhoods are largely devoid of grocery stores selling healthy foods and instead are filled with fast-food outlets and small shops selling snacks; and many of those people with access to supermarkets either cannot afford fresh foods there or do not understand basic nutrition.
As a result, the poor and middle class living in these murky food swamps, where unhealthy food is cheaper and more plentiful than healthy food, suffer disproportionately from high rates of obesity and related diseases. A doctor’s advice to “eat better” is essentially useless given these circumstances.
Via: Live Science
Ahhh… so that’s what happened!
The Great and Powerful People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea is pleased to announce that, in accordance with U.N. resolutions, it has voluntarily taken action to observe the most honorable no-fly zone over its inviolable sovereign territory by shooting down the marvelous Unha 3 space vehicle immediately after a spectacularly successful launch. We took this step to demonstrate how, upon the 100th anniversary of our Great Leader, our People’s Republic is both a wildly prosperous country with superior military capabilities and a deep respect for international laws and conventions.
While shooting down such a powerful missile so soon after launch is a very difficult task, our brave soldiers fulfilled this task by firing multiple, well-timed volleys with their personal weapons from nearby mountain tops. All hail North Korea, her Army, our Great Leader, and his weanie-assed God-given spoiled brat of a Grandson!!
UPDATE: Kim Jong-Un Says “We Meant to Do That!”
North Korean leaders have just announced that they had been aiming at capitalist fish and that their launch was entirely successful. Kim Jong Un noted that the launch was merely a warning shot should Godzilla decide to leave Japan alone and attack North Korea instead.
Leave it to IKEA…
Check out this cool cardboard digital camera made by IKEA. It was included as part of a press kit at an event in Europe recently, and apparently the “disposable” camera might go on sale sometime soon in IKEA stores. It uses two AA batteries and stores up to 40 photographs in the built-in memory. Images can be downloaded to your computer using the USB connection that swings out from one of the corners of the camera.
Maya, Hindu Goddess of Illusion
She is Maya
An illusion; She hides truth from the unaware
A shadow; She reveals but a hint of truth, what is real
A glimpse; She teases with a brief look at truth, the true beauty of reality
A perception; She joys in teasing the senses, creates thirst for truth
A vision; She allows a fleeting awareness of truth’s loveliness
I long for Her reality, Her true beauty, seeking what She hides.
She opens her veil to me, my untrained eyes catching a hint of the truth She covers.
Oh, for the fog to clear from my eyes, to reveal all that is reality,
To know Her secrets, to penetrate Her enigma, to savor the reality She enshrouds.
She is Maya
~Written by James Milstid
I happened upon an article a few months ago about reality. I’m not Hindu, nor to I pretend to be at all knowledgeable about the Hindu beliefs, but the article mentioned the goddess Maya and it piqued my interest and prompted me to write the poetry above
Maya is the goddess of illusion, or as some would put it, delusion. Each of us perceive reality in a different way by putting our own spin on it. Our perceptions cloud what we see and think. Hindus strive to see the true reality, without the veil of human perception. Maya is all that we “put on” the true reality. Seeking Maya’s secrets and knowing of her allow us to see through our perceptions.
We shroud true reality every day. It’s simply a part of our nature. It’s interesting that the ancient Hindus understood this and strive to see through Maya’s veil.
Albert said the coolest things…
Food for thought…
Explaining Socialism To A Republican
April 15, 2012
By Nurse Pam
I was talking recently with a new friend who I’m just getting to know. She tends to be somewhat conservative, while I lean more toward the progressive side.
When our conversation drifted to politics, somehow the dreaded word “socialism” came up. My friend seemed totally shocked when I said “All socialism isn’t bad”. She became very serious and replied “So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?” I smiled and said “No, not at all. Why do you think socialism mean taking money from the rich and giving to the poor?
“Well it is, isn’t it?” was her reply.
I explained to her that I rather liked something called Democratic Socialism, just as Senator Bernie Sanders, talk show host Thom Hartman, and many other people do. Democratic Socialism consists of a democratic form of government with a mix of socialism and capitalism. I proceeded to explain to her the actual meaning terms “democracy” and “socialism”.
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It’s all so clear now…
How To Write Good
by Frank L. Visco
My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
- Avoid alliteration. Always.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
- Employ the vernacular.
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
- It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
- Contractions aren’t necessary.
- Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
- One should never generalize.
- Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
- Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
- Don’t be redundant; don’t more use words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
- Profanity sucks.
- Be more or less specific.
- Understatement is always best.
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- One-word sentences? Eliminate.
- Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
- The passive voice is to be avoided.
- Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
- Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
I Remember the Art of Sentence Diagramming…
A Picture of Language
The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y. [1] His book, published in 1847, was called “A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.” His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and “rhetorico-grammatical figures,” and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as “that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.”
It may have been unwieldy, but this formidable tome was also quite revolutionary: out of the general murk of its tiny print, incessant repetitions, maze of definitions and uplifting examples emerged the profoundly innovative, dazzlingly ingenious and rather whimsical idea of analyzing sentences by turning them into pictures. “A Practical Grammar” was a reaction against the way the subject had been taught in America since it began to be taught at all.
Before diagramming, grammar was taught by means of its drabber older sibling, parsing. Parsing is a venerable method for teaching inflected languages like Latin; the word itself is schoolboy slang derived from pars orationis, Latin for “a part of speech.” Sometime in the 18th century, teachers began to realize that practical skills were more useful to young people than classical languages, and that the ability to speak English didn’t necessarily mean that a student spoke it well, wrote it correctly or understood its structure. To teach it, they borrowed the concept of parsing from the classical tradition in which they themselves had been trained.
Put simply, parsing requires the student to break down a sentence into its component words, classifying each in terms of its part of speech, as well as its tense, number and function in the sentence.