Man.... I just got home from some serious Christmas shopping. I always have a couple of things that I need to get right before Christmas, so inevitably I am running around close to the holiday. My trip after work today consisted of a few stores and then the dreaded final stop....Briarwood Mall. Just to give you a reference here is an aerial view of what getting into the mall was like today. All of this was in the supposed crappy economy around here. I know that we have a higher unem...

Christmas cards should not be this hard. Not only do you have to go out and purchase the cards, you also have to come up with a list of people to send them to and take time to fill them out. Then there is the postage and the mailing. Quite a process just to spread some holiday cheer. Unfortunately for JD, the process of figuring out who to send cards to is a bit byzantine. JD and Wife sit down and go through the address book, then there are deletions, additions, maybes. The whole process ...

Ron Paul is the kind of guy you want to cheer for. He is the proverbial underdog who has caught a huge wave of young energetic support. He is the Howard Dean of the 2008 campaign. In fact I sincerely admire the man and the fact that he has stuck to his convictions over his 20+ years in public service. For those of you who don't know who this Ron Paul guy is, he is running for a the Republican nomination for President. He has run in the past under the Libertarian banner. He is a strict con...

So one of my goals in this blog is to point out the amazing variety of useless products that get presented to the American public every year. I pointed out a great product called Colonblow in a blog a while ago. Now I bring you the latest and greatest to hit our store shelves: Odor Alert Cat Litter. Yes, that is correct, this is cat littler the alerts you to the fact that there is an odor by turning color. Now pardon me if I just don't see the point, but one would think that the fa...

Well folks, the Canadian Dollar is worth the exact same as the US dollar. Is this scary or what? For all of us Michiganders, we used to make fun of our neighbors to the north for having such a laughingly cheap dollar. When I was in high school, you could routinely get $1.50 Cn for $1 US. So this idea that it is all the same is quite strange. The reported reasons for this vary from the recent interest rate cut here, to the value of Canada's oil and gas reserves. I am going to go out on a li...

Quite a while ago, I watched a movie about an apple farmer in Washington titled " Broken Limbs: Apples, Agriculture and the new American Farmer. " This was an excellent documentary that pointed out the plight that many apple farmers face from new stiff overseas competition. It also dove a little into agribusiness, and how hard it is for these guys who have 20-200 acres to even get their fruit to market. They have to go through packer, who then goes through wholesaler, who then sells it to t...

I have to admit, I have been unmotivated to blog as of late. It is not for lack of interesting or weird things taking place in these United States of ours. It is strictly the same thing felt by many American's this time of year... a midsummer lull. It has been so very hot up here in MI (take that global warming skeptics), that all you feel like doing after work is coming home and laying around on the couch. The flip side is that when it is nice outside you want to be...outside! So there has b...

On the 19th of July, the Senate Finance Committee voted 17-4 to reauthorize and expand the CHIP Program. This is a program that allocates monies to help low income working families get health care for their children. It now heads to the full Senate for debate. A similar bill was vetoed by President Bush last year. This is exactly the kind of work that the Congress needs to be doing for the people. What kind of country is this, the richest in the world, where a low income WORKING family can...

Well talk about a evolution of an idea or concept. I was over my brothers apartment last week and we were playing Guitar Hero 2 for Xbox 360. Now I had never played this game before, but let me tell you... it is a blast. I am not the best fake guitar player out there, and I still had a great time and made my left hand nice and sore. Anyway, one of the songs on this game was Cherry Pie by Warrant. I had head this song before, but after attempting to master in on Guitar Hero, I had to downloa...

I was over helping my parents pack for their big move to Arkansas. Now why they are moving to Arkansas could possibly fill a novel the size of War and Peace, but I am not here to write about that. I am here to write about a giant spider that we found in the garage while moving some stuff. Now some people who read this might be from down south where this size spider is commonplace, but not up here in Michigan. This has to be the largest spider I have ever seen here. I don't know what kind o...

America has lost it's global imperative. It is not hiding around the corner, or on vacation, it is completely MIA. It went on permanent leave when the Communist bloc fell, and suddenly we were the sole superpower in a world accustomed to two ideologies going toe to toe all over the world. The problem with this is that America likes to have the moral high ground, and this we did when were leading the world to freedom and democracy against those dirty commies. But afterwards all we had was our ...

Let's just say that JD was always raised as a meat and potatoes kind of guy. There is Polish in my blood, so there was always a steak or sausage at our dinner table. In the spirit of branching out to try new things, and in the quest to get back down to the college fighting weight, JD has agreed with the Wife to try some vegetarian dishes. Now of course I laid down some ground rules:1. No fake meat - If we are going to have soyburgers, lets just have a burger. There is no reason to try and fak...

I wanted to write a little blog tonight about the romantic power of water. The wife and I were Downtown for the Detroit River Days (see last blog), and it seemed to me that every time we took a second to walk up to the river and pause, my arm just naturally went around my wife. We were instantly drawn together so we could look out over the dancing water at the ships going past. so we came up with a term for this "instasnuggle." Basically there are things that can bring upon this state of bei...

So on Saturday afternoon the wife and I decided to head Downtown to check out the inaugural Detroit International River Days . We arrived about 6pm, and parked just East of the Rencen. First I want to say kudos to the people who put this on. It was well run and there was tons to do. We first watched the Airdogs display, which featured dogs jumping for height and distance. Then we headed over to check out the Ste. Clair (Boblo Boat). After taking a break in Tri-Centennial State Park we headed...

Yes, I am talking about that Chrysler 300-C. The ones that you see in all the rap videos and in all the movies. This car has been a huge success for Chrysler, but it has often been pigeonholed as appealing to the urban crowd. Well Chrysler's marketing team should be proud, because there I was cruising down I-94 on my way to wrk when I see a silver 300C up ahead. It looked a lot like the one below. So here is me, at 6:45am, thinking to myself: Self... I wonder who is driving this car. I bet...