With characters like these on their album cover and judicious use of the xylophone in their song “Be Gentle With Me” - I just want to eat them. The band is “The Boy Least Likely To“.
I was just telling people here that there is something wrong in the Universe today. I was in Bruegger’s behind two burly, older construction workers. One of them orders and he says no to coffee and that he’d like a tea. What? Tea? Then he asks for some ice because sometimes it’s hot. What? Hot? Look pal, you order coffee and you take it as hot as it comes. That’s just what you do, not just as a construction worker but as a man! Then the other one gets a tea too. I don’t know what’s going on but it doesn’t bode well for the future of our society if men are going to start asking for what they want and getting it.
Armed with a five-year, $750,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Land O’ Lakes aproached HealthPartners in 1997 to help dairy cooperatives in rural Uganda establish sustainable, prepaid health care delivery programs…We’ve also helped these local leaders learn to develop a benefit structure appropriate to the level of members’ contributions. Through the collection of dues — an average premium is about $1.98 per month for a family of four — members receive the health care benefits that they decide as a group to buy. Sixty percent of the group must participate in the scheme to ensure a strong base and avoid adverse selection…
The group-decision process helps members determine the price of the prepayment scheme. Through this process, the extent of benefits is determined for each group. For example, some groups support hospital maternity stays, while others view delivery as something that can occur at home…
In Uganda, providers frequently are not paid for their services. For example, Ugandans often leave the hospital in the middle of the night to avoid payment or register under false names so their family members can simply slip away if the person dies. By creating a system where providers have a stronger assurance of being reimbursed, our work has supported the addition of a new hospital maternity wing and two new clinics to serve prepayment members. And we’ve helped to organize the Uganda Community-Based Health Finance Association, composed of the 12 prepayment programs in Uganda. This is a voluntary association for sharing information and experiences to improve outcomes of care.
I’ll adapt a Kissinger quote here (no, he’s NOT a hero of mine) and say that 90% of Americans give a bad name to the other 10%.
Here’s a look at one in those 10%.
Through P&G’s global corporate cause - Live, Learn and Thrive, which focuses on improving life for children in need around the world, P&G provides PuR® sachets in the developing world via its signature program—Children’s Safe Drinking Water. P&G has worked with a broad range of partners including the USAID, CDC, UNICEF, Johns Hopkins, CARE, Population Services International, AmeriCares, Samaritan’s Purse, and the International Council of Nurses. Through this effort, 500 million liters of safe drinking water have been provided in Africa and Asia in the last two and a half years. For more information, please visit: http://www.pghsi.com/safewater
What is also exciting, and much more so than simply donating water, is that P&G scientists have come up with a technology to purify water on the fly. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes you find a photographer that captures those images where you wish that you could simply sit in front of those still moments for hours and live inside the beauty. Here is one, Nick Brandt.
wondered what it would be like to interview Patrick Stewart and Peter O’Toole at the same time? I would think it would be difficult. I would think most of their answers would get very long and nonsensical as they both try to outdo eachother’s version of the regal English accent. I see Patrick breaking out the Shakespeare in response to something banal like “What is your favorite fruit?” as a last ditch attempt to assert his superiority. They must compete regularly. There’s probably a club for them, let’s say The League of EXTRA Extraordinary English-Sounding Gentlemen.
So I have decided to buy a home, and as I weave my way through this process and the emotional rollercoaster that is inherent with such an exciting prospect, I have come to one conclusion. House hunting for me is alot like dating. When I find a house that I like, I start to daydream about it. I dream of what it would be like to live there, what would need to be changed, and how invariably perfect it would be one day. In some respects, very much like dating, although I’m not into dating “fixer uppers”, just buying them.
Anyway, alot of these homes end up being a far cry from their pictures, and their descriptions turn into studies in poetic license. It’s a lot like a guy who says he is “independent”, but means he has moved out of his mother’s house a few weeks ago and he still calls her everyday to ask her what he should have for lunch. Needless to say, the disappointment is palpable.
I’ve taken to doing some programming at home. I’d like to say that it is for extra dough, but much like my step mother, I do most things for free. Silly me. Eventually that will stop… I think. Anyway, I have taken to working on this at my kitchen table and now a desk in my living room. Living alone, I didn’t really think it mattered where I work, and it doesn’t, but it DOES matter how much and how much it interferes with my cat getting attention.
Much of my time is spent encouraging my cat to share me with my computer and invariably giving in to his notion that I should share myself with him, instead.
One of my biggest agita decisions is my web hosting service. I have had SO many problems in the past with providers - usually email related, which is usually what I care about most. I’m always hesitant to stick with one host or to sign up for an entire year because I have had such problems and it just becomes money down the drain.
Right now, this blog is hosted on DreamHost and actually was an offshoot of a little experiment with cheap hosting (DreamHost has fabulous deals with referrals and such). For $20 for the first year, I thought, “Why not?”.
I have yet to use DreamHost for any email accounts at all, much less accounts of value to me. Over the summer I started getting all these notices about email servers being down, other servers being down, etc. etc. I thought, “Thank God I don’t use them for email. Oh well, $20 for a year of playing around isn’t so bad.”
I became a bit skeptical of DreamHost… but I did like their features.
Well, I wasn’t the only one it seems, and here is a pretty good blog entry from someone who had started to reconsider DreamHost, as well, and it includes a link to a very open entry on the DreamHost blog that explains alot of what happened this summer. It’s worth a read, especially if you’re considering DreamHost. If nothing else, you can see that they are, in fact, human and certainly not fly by night. I’m not sure if I am ready to make the plunge to an email address with them that I depend on, but we’ll see. Every leap of faith starts with one step… or at least I think that’s what the bumper sticker said.
Why Do Catholics Do That? by Kevin Orlin Johnson