*blend

While I have received exactly 42 emails concerning the Cookies and Dignity Challenge, no one has guessed the source, nor have they entered the writing contest. So…was the quote too obscure? Too short? Did it not strike anyone as funny? I found the phrase hilarious. Cookies and dignity just don’t seem to go together, and I thought we’d get some very interesting uses of the two. But I guess not. OK. I learned a little from this, and the next challenge will be different. In the the meantime, here’s another hint: (The first hint can be found in the comments to the original challenge)

The author is Rene Guttereridge.

Art Buchwald died at the age of 81 last night.

He turned his wonderful wit onto his own failing health in his last book, Too Soon to Say Goodbye, and had me both laughing and crying at a talk he gave in DC late last year. I recommend you watch the program over at CSPAN’s Book TV. I have to admit I never really gave him much thought, and by sheer chance was able to see his talk. It only took a moment for him to capture my attention, and he’s someone I won’t forget.

So, goodbye, Mr. Buchwald, I’m glad to have met you, even if I was little late to join the parade.

“…yelling something about cookies and dignity.”

I love it when I come across a series of words in a book that make me smile, or laugh, or start thinking about things way off from the topic of the book. Another example is a line in Dean Koontz’s novel Brother Odd: “… my brain is someone else’s TV, and they won’t stop channel surfing.”

It’s time to put your *blending skills to the test: I challenge you to name the book the “cookies and dignity” quote came from. While you’re at it, come up with your own sentence or short paragraph where “cookies and dignity” is the central theme. I’ll put all of the entries to a vote and send the winner a prize. The first person to name the book will also get a prize. Use the web, call your friends, ask your kids. Take advantage of all that technology you’ve been letting go to waste!
Ah…I bet you won’t enter until you know what you’ll win…. fine….:

First person to name the full title of the book, author, and chapter will get a cool fridge magnet.

Winner of the writing challenge will get this lovely journal, featuring a beautiful image of the west Texas sun on a rural road, complete with wind mill.

And if you answer the quote challenge before noon (US Central time, -6:00 GMT) on Friday, January 19, 2007, you also get your choice of either a men’s or women’s tee, PLUS your magnet.

Rules (yes I know, rules suck, but you gotta heed ‘em)

• Answers must be posted as comments to this article
• You must use a valid email address or I won’t know how to contact you when you win
• Obscene, racist, or just plain rude comments will be disqualified. Keep it PG, guys.
• The time stamp on the comment will the final ruling as to who answers first.
• Friends and family of the author will be disqualified (like I’d know!)
• The author may enter, but can’t win :)
• And, no this is NOT some obscure book you’ll never see…the author has 9 books to his/her credit, and your public library probably has most, if not all, of them. Hint: It is genre fiction.

And now, just to tease you, are the prizes in all their glory….

Having a conversation with an angry teen is not something for the squeamish. Add the step-parent dynamic to this, and you have a whole new level of anger and blame. Even though my teen step children have lived me for quite a few years now, there is still quite a bit of tension between us. With one in particular, we seem to have hit the worst time of our relationship. I know many of you in blended families are in the same situation, or will find yourself in it soon, and today, I have found a way that helped us both to have a conversation about something that usually ends up with her screaming, and me so mad I can’t talk through my tears. Involve a 3rd party that is known to both of you. This has to be someone you both you both respect, or it won’t make a difference. Let me share with how this dynamic made the biggest impact on a reoccurring sensitive topic in my home. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a great example of *blend. “Rock the SAT”, a study guide that includes a CD of songs that most teens will enjoy, with the added bonus of improving their vocabulary…hopefully leading to higher scores on the verbal section of the test. When I first heard about it, I thought “My kids won’t listen. They want cool music”. But I was wrong. The songs were catchy, and no more corny than what they listen to every day. I also thought the songs would not be able to actually teach them new words, because teens are notorious for not understanding contextual use of words. But the lyrics go beyond just using the words in context, they actually define them without hitting you upside the head. It was impossible for my girls to listen to the songs and NOT know what the new words meant or how to use them.

You can sample two of the songs at the January 6 Weekend Edition on NPR. Listen to track one at the official web site for the Rock the SAT study guide. Or go ahead and buy it: it’s only $10.17 from Amazon

This one from Booking Through Thursday

Keeping it Simple
Let’s keep it simple today:
What are you reading right now?

My response:

Severance: Stories by Robert Olen Butler
Boo by Rene Gutteridge
and
Cell by Stephen King

oh, and on the non-fiction side: CSS, DHTML, & Ajax by Elizabeth Castro

My question…how many books are YOU usually reading at any given time?

The Big Tech News this week: Apple introduced the iPhone at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

This beautiful little device is an mp3 and video player, cell phone, 2 mega pixel camera, and fully multi-tasking Internet device using Wi-Fi or EDGE connections.

It runs OSX (Apple’s powerful operating system) and uses only a touchscreen interface (no keys). Watch your videos and view your pictures on the 3.5″ display. View web pages while downloading email.

• 3.5 inch widescreen display featuring the highest pixel density ever shipped in a portable device.
• 2 megapixel camera.
• Proximity sensor which switches between modes and screen orientation based on how a user holds it.
• 11.6 mm thick.
• Syncs with iTunes
• GSM/EDGE; Wifi; Bluetooth
• Visual voicemail - shows a list of your voicemails like you see a list of emails.
• Error correcting on-screen keyboard.
• Mail; Safari web browser.
• GPS
• 5 hour video battery life; 16 hour audio battery life.

Cingular will be the service provider for this phone, but don’t rush down to buy one just yet. They won’t be available until June, and you might want to know the pricing before beginning to drool: the 4GB costs $499 and the 8GB $599 with a 2 year Cingular contract. I think cell phone contracts are a rip-off to begin with. Add that to the fact I hate phones of all kinds, and I seriously doubt I’ll be getting one, no matter much I lust after it.

To read all about it’s features, go to the Apple iPhone web page.

I love technogadgets. Love them, want them, can’t have enough of them. Same goes for chocolate. And while I don’t really wear much gold jewelry, having plenty of that sure wouldn’t hurt. but…

Cell Phones: The war-torn [Democratic Republic of the Congo] is home to 80 percent of the world’s coltan, which is an important mineral for constructing circuit boards found in cell phones and other electronic devices, like computers and TV remote controls. Coltan is the best mineral for storing and conducting electrical currents on circuit boards. The DRC is also home to large amounts of tin, which is increasingly replacing lead as the material for solder on circuit boards. During the past decade, local warlords have used profits from the resources to fund an ongoing civil war.

Chocolate: Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa (and most of the United States’) comes from West Africa, where nearly 300,000 children under the age of 14 toil in dangerous conditions on cocoa plantations. In the Ivory Coast, where more than half of the region’s cocoa is produced, more than 100,000 children work in near slavery, subject to both injury from the machetes used to harvest the plant and from toxic pesticides that are banned in the United States and Europe.

Gold: Gold ore is often sprayed with cyanide after extraction to separate the gold from the host minerals. The cyanide-contaminated leftovers, 20 tons of which are used to produce one gold ring, are often abandoned or dumped in nearby water sources. Moreover, gold mines from Indonesia to the DRC have notoriously poor labor standards.

This is from Foreign Policy: The List: Killer Products.
And, on the suggestion from mental_floss, next Christmas I’ll ask for three organic, free-range French hens.

at least my PJs aren’t a lie. :)
thank you, Scott, for more ways for me to waste my time and self-analyze

Superhero personality quiz results:

You are Supergirl

Supergirl 77% Superman 70% Robin 69% Spider-Man 65% Iron Man 65% Batman 55% Hulk 55% Wonder Woman 52% Green Lantern 50% The Flash 50% Catwoman 35%

Lean, muscular and feminine. Honest and a defender of the innocent.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Imagine that you get a scratch in your beautiful brand new majestic blue Nissan Armada. The shopping cart hell found in front of most grocery stores is your worst nightmare. But soon you won’t worry about that scratch, because in 2005 Nissan announced that they had enginereered a self-healing paint that will actually fill back in the scratch overnight, or in a matter of days. The paint is an elastic, urethane-based resin, that acts more like “wet glue than dry paint”. Heat from the sun or warm water helps speed along the ‘healing’ process. We could see new self healing paint on new Nissan models in the US sometime soon. It debuted in Japan in December of 2005 on the Nissan X-Trail model. Read more: Nissan press Release, Scratch Guard Overview,