November 7, 2009 archive

WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT

Fifty-three students at the Takanawa Kindergarten in Minato-ku performed a dance that “encourages children to thoroughly wash their hands to help prevent infectious diseases such as the new swine influenza.”

A 26-year-old policeman in Kobe was being held for supposedly “stealing undergarments from a 14-year-old girl while visiting her house to question her about a crime she had witnessed.”

Sentence of the Week: “The carcass of a firefly brought to Japan from Central America about 150 years ago has been found among the property of a ranking government diplomatic mission official of the Tokugawa shogunate who visited the United States in 1860, the Yokosuka City Museum announced earlier this month.” (via The Yomiuri Shimbun)

Police found the bodies of three men who went missing while jet skiing on a lake in Fukushima. Curiously, the three were all wearing life preservers when they drowned.

In response to a hoped-for increase in long-haul flights from Europe and the US, as well as direct flights to the UAE, Narita Airport unveiled a new 2,500m-long runway.

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

Recently I’ve engaged in and stumbled upon various things all over the internet that, when pieced together, have potential that is endless if not restricted by certain factors.

Sometimes it’s our laws that restrict the access to the information we seek, other times, it’s our inability to use the vast array of programs and applications that can allow us to carve our own little place in the world wide web.

In respect to the latter, there have been a number of places that have attempted to make the internet easier to customize your own little space on it, “cookie-cutter” platforms that allow you to customize the appearance fairly easy, but you’re still chained to the platform’s format (Wordpress, Soapblox, etc.).

Outside of those, you usually need to learn javascript, CSS, or html to get what you want made.

However, there are “open-source” platforms (not commercial and for use by all) developing that are trying to bridge the gap between full customization of your own personal professional-grade website and the skills you have (or more likely don’t have) to use it.

For example…

Teaming with the liberal Brave New Films, a former Blue Cross pitchman is now pitching against Blue Cross.

Andy Cobb, who once tried to sell Floridians on a Blue Cross health insurance plan, says he’s fed up with the industry.

“I was a spokesman for BlueCross and Blueshield of Florida,” Cobb says. “Call me a spokesjerk. People who make money [by selling you] things you don’t need. And we’re telling you lies.”

“They, by which I mean I, make money by standing in the way of reform,” Cobb says in the ad, which appears as a spoof of something like a freecreditreport.com ad. “It’s time for change.”

“That’s why I’m calling on leaders from the spokesjerk industry,” Cobb continues. “The freecreditreport.com guy. The Shamwow dude. And Senator Bill Nelson, recipient of big money from insurance companies — to lead us. To walk away from their cash cows and tell American people the truth.

“And us spokesjerks, we’ll be fine,” Cobb adds. “There’s plenty of room in entertainment for people who tried to sell you the worst product in American history. Private health insurance.”

RawStory posted this, this morning…

  Despite every effort from Washington, the American consumer continues to repair his/her balance sheet. The federal government has repeatedly gone back to what it knows and teased us with goodies (like cash4klunkers) in an effort to get us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, but those days appear to be over.

 (Bloomberg) — U.S. consumer credit fell in September for an eighth straight month, the longest series of declines on record, as thousands of Americans lost their jobs and banks tightened access to loans.

   Borrowing fell more than economists predicted, declining by $14.8 billion, or 7.2 percent at an annual rate, to $2.46 trillion, according to a Federal Reserve report released today in Washington. Credit dropped by $9.86 billion in August, less than previously estimated. The consecutive declines were the most since records began in 1943.

 The optimists, who are already predicting that happy days are here again, fail to mention how the economy will rebound without the American consumer. Consumer spending is 70% of the economy. So how will the economy grow when the consumer is paying down debt rather than buying junk at the mall?