Listen free to the Martha Stewart Thanksgiving Hotline today, till 7pm ET, at the SIRIUS satellite radio site. Famous chefs are answering Thanksgiving-related questions.
Also, you can download for free the Martha Stewart Living Thanksgiving Hotline Cookbook.
Even through your Internet connection, you can smell the classiness…
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the House and Senate health care bills. Online, they have posted a “Health Care Toolkit” consisting of talking points, suggested emails and letters, videos from their national ad campaign, and other material for those who’d like to stall the current push toward reform.
But here’s an extract from a short animated Chamber film from 1954. Although melodramatic in the style of the times, the anti-government, anti-tax rhetoric isn’t much different from that of today.
Related post: When the Yes Men strike
From the author of Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!, Help! Mom! Hollywood is in My Hamper! and Help! Mom, The 9th Circuit Nabbed the Nativity!, now comes…
Makes a perfect stocking-suffer for any junior Fox News viewer…
Kevin Barbieux of Nashville writes a blog called The Homeless Guy. Barbieux describes himself as “chronically homeless,” as defined by HUD. “I became homeless for the first time in February of 1982,” he writes. “I have been in and out of homelessness ever since, experiencing about 13 years worth of literal homelessness.”
In this post, he gives advice to a Nashville religious organization that administers to the homeless, offering a trenchant first-person account of the homeless life.
• When the homeless arrive at your church, they are tired.
It may seem that being homeless means being without things to do… Nothing could be further from the truth. While on the street, there is no place for a homeless person to get real rest. Being constantly in the public sphere prevents homeless people from achieving the kind of rest that only comes with privacy. When you are in your own place, you can let down your guard, and you don’t have to entertain anyone or anything. In your own place you don’t have to worry about what you look like, what other people are thinking of you, or if the police or other “concerned citizens” will find fault with you and decide to investigate your actions. The other 30 to 50% of the homeless population will have spent the day working, mostly in labor-intensive jobs.
More dramatic video on YouTube from the student protests at the University of California regents meeting at UCLA. Students are angry that in response to a severe state budget crisis, the regents have voted to raise fees at the public university system 32%, which pushes tuition to more than $10,000. The first video shows students being maced.
Related post: EconomyStory: Tackling tuition
Yesterday we highlighted one man’s poignant and self-reflective post on his one-year anniversary of being laid off. But the guy is also very funny, as evidenced by his blog’s Layoff Tracker, a catalogue of corporate job cuts annotated with sarcastic comments. Some of the bitter bon mots:
3M (1200 layoffs) – Who will make the tape to wrap the presents I can’t afford to buy and give anyone?
Adobe (600) – Rest assured your computer will still download updates at the most inopportune times.
Aetna (1000) – Their health insurance policies no longer cover doctor visits or prescriptions. The good news is that every policy comes with a complimentary WebMD membership and a tourniquet.
Agilent (3800) – The “premier measurement company” apparently miscalculated how many employees they really need.
Allergan (460) – You have drugs. We need drugs. What’s the problem again.
American Century (270) – With that name, no wonder they’re downsizing.
The blog Jobless and Less documents one man’s experience looking for a job in this brutal recession. His bona fides:
Here’s a post, written on his one-year anniversary of getting the boot, that is poignantly evocative of the long-term unemployment experience.
I just passed the one-year mark of unemployment recently… My unemployment insurance will run out by the end of the year. The work landscape is still bleak, as the country is enjoying a jobless recovery. I’m planning a huge party without food, drink, entertainment or people to celebrate it. I’d invite you, but you can’t come, and it won’t be any fun anyway.
I continue to network and send out resumes. Most of my job inquiries are ignored, though people are still receptive to networking requests. They want to help, and are willing to offer their time, expertise and contacts. They just don’t know of any openings. Networking may be the best way to find a job. But it hasn’t worked for me yet.
Remember our post on the blog Repaired Things? You do? Well that is quite flattering, thank you so much.
Anyhoo…as we wrote at the time, many people these days don’t have the dough to replace their broken stuff. Where Repaired Things catalogues more-routine home solutions, There, I Fixed It goes one better, documenting “epic kludges and jury rigs.” What’s a kludge? From the blog’s About page:
So here are some great examples of man’s inhumanity to things in his or her quest to inventively save a few bucks. Click on an image to see it full size.
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More popular kludges here.
From The Awl:
What a Blowout Year! Wall Street Rocking Without All Those Pesky Former Employees. Profits and net revenues are back up for Wall Street firms. Can bonuses be far behind?
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