For a while now, the political arena has been trying to figure out how to deal with the internet, e-mail communication, and most recently blogging. Everytime, they seem to screw up and miss the point (or drop the ball). Just a few years ago, political candidates had really nasty looking webpages and couldn't even get their mailing lists working properly. These days, their webpages are a lot cleaner (realizing that the web is an important source of research/information they decided to spend some of their hard earned money on decent web designers) but their forays into blogging often come across as disingenuous and sound more like a speech-writer than a blogger. Now, according to this article, Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, Yahoo!, and Slate will be hosting two online debates (one for Democratic candidates and one for Republican). It sounds like Yahoo! will be doing most of the heavy lifting (getting the video technology set up). The people involved in this say the web-only debates "will be substantively different than televised debates that appear online" and Yahoo's director of news and information services "compared the debates to the first televised forums between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960". To me, the only difference is that the debaters won't actually be in the same room as each other, but will basically be performing a video debate (like participants on Larry King Live from different coasts). I don't see how this will be as significant as the JFK vs. Nixon radio/television debate.

I really like strawberries. I might even love them. But, like most things we love, when you look closely, you realize that although you love them, they aren't perfect. Strawberries are deep red, juicy, sweet, flavorful, and soft (and yet firm - not mushy) — except when they aren't. Actually, more often than not they have one of the following defects:
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Strawberries

While doing some research on corn production for my latest article on Cooking For Engineers, I found this site operated by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. There are some surprising revelations about who produces what food commodity and in what quantities. For example, I was not surprised that African countries lead the world production of Ass Meat, but I was surprised that Spain was the sixth largest producer. I also thought for sure the U.S. would lead in game meat production (we do love our game) since we lead in chicken, pork, beef, and turkey - but Papua New Guinea leads by a sizable margin. And having mentioned chicken, the U.S. leads world production of chicken (and China doesn't even show up in the top 20 chicken meat producers), but China leads in chicken egg production - producing more chicken eggs than the U.S. produces chickens, by weight!

In response to my post about sore throats, Papa (David Papandrew, co-founder and chief product officer of Fanpop) suggested a website of some home remedies. The top remedy on the website is the Cayenne Pepper Sore Throat Cure with 167 people writing in to say it works and 9 dissenters. So, I thought, "Why not try it?"
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Cayenne tisane… is insane

I've been trying to get wp-cache working with WordPress 2.1.3 and it just doesn't seem to be doing anything right. I uploaded the wp-cache plugin (version 2.1.1) to my plugins directory and activated it. The first time I enabled it under Options-WP_CACHE, it did nothing. It made the cache directory and properly set the symbolic link as well as the permissions, but none of my pages were being cached and none of the pages had any info added to the HTML source as expected. The second time I tried installing it, I ended up with a blank page and had to go into my wp_config.php to remove the define('WP_CACHE', true); statement. Anyone else have issues with wp-cache on wordpress 2.1.3?

The New York Times reported today that the social security number of 30,000 people "who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations". The first question that comes to mind, is why does this stuff keep happening?
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More Social Security Numbers Publicly Available

Before I can tell my dentist story, I'll have to tell you something personal about myself. I have a gag reflex. It's really bad. Sometimes I gag while brushing my teeth - and I use a Sonicare Electric Toothbrush so I don't even have to move it back and forth (I just hold it in place!). I used to gag while taking pills (not Benadryl, those guys are small), but after a doctor told me to practice by swallowing pieces of scrambled eggs whole while drinking a lot of liquid (apple juice did the trick), I've been able to swallow pills. Anyway, I have this horrendous gag reflex and there's no way those ginormous x-ray plates the dentist sticks in the back of your mouth is going to result in good times. So, I don't go to the dentist - at least not too often.
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Dental Appointments

Sore throats suck. When I get sick, it usually starts with a sore throat. It begins with a slightly uncomfortable ticket in the back of my throat - usually a day before the throat begins to really hurt. This day is filled with worry and anxiety - am I getting sick, or is it a false alarm? For me, the beginnings of a sore throat can mean many different things.
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Sore Throats

This week we were all shocked by the tragedy at Virginia Tech where Cho Seung-Hui gunned down and killed at least 33 people. I don't really want to blog about the events or the manifesto or how crazy Cho Seung-Hui must have been - but I do want to talk about getting upset over an interview with Karan Grewal (Cho's "roommate") and Chris Matthews.
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What's wrong with Chris Matthews?

The other day I was thinking that so much of my life revolves around food. I mean, there's the obvious - I write a food website, dine out a lot, try tasting new things, am obsessed with the idea of trying every soft drink in the world - but it goes further than that. I realized that my prime motivation for going to the gym three times a week (or trying to) is not actually to lose weight or be healthy. It's so I can build a little more body mass so I'll have a higher resting state metabolism so I'll be able to EAT more (without having to buy new clothes, etc.).