Well, even with the unemployment rate so high, we know at least some people are working. How do we know? The web site Overheard in the Office, where people send in quotes they’ve actually heard in their workplace. Start with these… Product development guy: I just got an e-mail in Chinese… What do I do? [...]

There are more than 150 cash strapped communities throughout the US that are making their own money. I mean that literally, they are printing their own currency to be used locally. The bad news is you can’t use it at Wal-Mart. The good news is you can’t use it at Wal-Mart. And surprisingly, this is not illegal. It’s all in an effort to keep money circulating exclusively in the local economy when the federal currency is too busy being locked up in a bank vault. WAMU’s Rebecca Sheir has the story.

Another moving student piece from Curie Youth Radio, a Chicago high school radio workshop: In My Plate Full, Yours Empty, a student thanks his mother for sacrificing her own meals while her children ate.

Things are tough out here in Recessionland, but let’s take a moment to check in with how things are going in the Armed Forces, through their own words. Assorted posts from American soldiers, found while looking through the Top 100 Favorite Milblogs on Milblogging.com: From Afghan Quest Just returned from another wretched trip to Pogadishu, [...]

Curie Youth Radio is a workshop at Curie High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side in which students write, record, and produce their own radio pieces. Many of these can be heard on PRX and some have been aired on Chicago Public Radio and NPR’s All Things Considered. A sampling: Prison Visiting Hours – a teenager [...]

From the Torontoist, via Boing Boing: “Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing elimination of copyeditor jobs.” A copyeditor at the Toronto Star greeted the news that union copyeditor jobs were being eliminated in favor of freelancers by heavily editing the publisher’s memo announcing same, pointing out all the ways in which the publisher could benefit [...]

…listen to it! The entire Affordable Health Care for America Act, aka the House health care reform bill, read aloud by different volunteers. From HearTheBill.org.

On Saturday the House passed H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act–1990 pages long and not a photograph, cartoon panel, or dirty limerick among them. We did count, however, 182 mentions of the word “subsection” in the first 300 pages alone, a pretty good ratio.

As you may have noticed, the length of the bill has been generating a lot of snide comments and critical remarks, (see above paragraph) mostly by those who oppose it.

Computational Legal Studies, however, a blog that “attempt(s) to disseminate legal or law related studies that employ a computational or complex systems component,” points out some interesting facts about the bill’s length.

I’m way into Smigley. This one, called The Stimulus Package, is about as concise an indictment of late-2000s America as you’ll find, and the lead character’s obliviousness in the face of such a decline is almost chilling. More Smigley below ↓ or here.

Smigly is–unknowingly–having a bad day at the big bank. More Smigley below ↓ or here.