Make Your Car Or Truck More Fuel Efficient Without Spending A Penny!
It seems as though all we hear about today is fuel efficiency. We hear about the latest advances in hybrids, electric cars, ultra-efficient “city” cars, and all manner of complaints about conventional gas and diesel automobiles and trucks, and how terrible their “poor” fuel economy is for the environment. We had a huge government subsidy to get “gas hogs” off the road (albeit actually designed to help auto dealers get rid of surplus stock in a bad market).
That’s all well and good. I applaud all the efforts to recommend, encourage and produce more fuel efficient vehicles — especially since it looks as though no one is going to bother taking the issue really seriously until, to paraphrase Edward Albee, the last petroleum executive is hung with the entrails of the last energy CEO. The fact is, no one really wants to produce efficient energy until the last drop of profit is wrung from the petroleum, gas and bogus biofuel markets.
In the meantime, we poor consumers are hung up on high fuel prices, high prices for newer, more efficient cars (with a few exceptions), and all sorts of confusing promises that are worth nothing, compared to what they’re costing us by stonewalling the real — and ultimately the only — thing that will save our butts in the long run: solar energy.
Anyway, here it is folks — for free, gratis, bupkis — your chance to save money and stick it to the oil and energy cartels at the same time. read more…
- 2 large sweet onions, chopped
- 3-4 skinless, boneless chicken thighs, chopped into 1/2″ cubes, with most of the fat removed (unless you’re into cholesterol).
- 1 4-inch hot sausage if you have it, chopped fine. The fruit-flavored turkey sausages are even better.*
- 2 pkgs of Herb-Ox Sodium-Free Chicken Bouillon powder
- 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 tbsp low fat butter
- 1 tbsp grated ginger root (preferable) or powdered ginger
- 1 tbsp powdered garlic, or two grated garlic cloves – more if you like garlic
- 1 tbsp Italian seasoning
- 1 large or two small bay leaves
*Black, Cayenne and White Pepper in equal quantities to taste (be gentle) if you have no sausage.
*********************
Put the oil and butter in a 12 in. skillet and heat over MEDIUM heat. (Never go over medium, you’ll burn the olive oil.)
Add the ginger and distribute it throughout the oil. If using grated garlic, add it with the ginger. Otherwise…
Pour in the onions and sprinkle the garlic powder over them.
Saute the onions over MEDIUM heat until they are partially caramelized. Pay attention and keep them moving so that you don’t scorch the ginger and garlic.
Transfer the onions and a bit of the oil to a 2 qt. pot with a lid.
Add the chicken, sausage, bay leaves, Italian seasoning, bouillon powder, peppers and enough water to cover the whole thing, with about 1/2 cup extra. Go easy on the water. Better too little than too much.
Bring to a simmer, stir well, and simmer with the lid on for 30 minutes. If I have it, I like to put a gob of mashed potatoes in to thicken the soup. Make sure the potatoes are broken up and thoroughly stirred in, otherwise they’ll stick and scorch.
Serves 2 large servings, OK for a meal with a big salad added. Pretty good on cholesterol and sodium, but a bit heavy on fats — mostly unsaturated, though, so it won’t kill you this once.
Would we listen to nature if our lives depended on it?
PEOPLE WHO READ MY WORK often say, “Okay, so it’s clear you don’t like this culture, but what do you want to replace it?” The answer is that I don’t want any one culture to replace this culture. I want ten thousand cultures to replace this culture, each one arising organically from its own place. That’s how humans inhabited the planet (or, more precisely, their landbases, since each group inhabited a place, and not the whole world, which is precisely the point), before this culture set about reducing all cultures to one….
Playing for Keeps | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine
For most of us, sports signal fun and excitement, but a clever sports scam can quickly put a stop to that.
The advent of the Internet has significantly increased the incidence of the sports betting scam and the sale of bogus memorabilia.
But you might just as easily encounter the sports scammer at your front door. So today’s issue focuses on the most common current sports scams — both online and offline.
Healthcare provision seeks to embrace prayer treatments — latimes.com
Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The placebo effect is powerful…
AP IMPACT: Clunker pickups traded for new pickups – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – The most common deals under the government’s $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road, replaced old Ford or Chevrolet pickups with new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by The Associated Press.
The auto maker lobbyists demanded that there be no restrictions except “better gas mileage.” You reckon they wanted to get rid of all those pickups moldering on the lots?
Cold remedies: What works, what doesn’t, what can’t hurt – MayoClinic.com
There’s no cure for the common cold. But what about cold remedies that claim to make you feel better faster? Find out what’s effective — and what’s not.
Another chapter in the ongoing saga entitled, “Will Micro$oft Ever Catch On To The Realities Of The Web?” — and will Pamela Anderson ever get reduction surgery?
I just find this whole thing too amusing for words. Huge companies that would rather criticize the competition than change (let’s hope Windows 7 is, indeed, an exception) tickle me. Wonder how long until Google buys Zoho and really begins to kick Redmond ass?
(No offense, Carl.)
Microsoft calls Zoho the “Fake Office”, so does that mean Bing is …
by Sridhar Vembu
At Zoho, we have been banging the drum on the coming new era of competition, thanks to the cloud, in software and how that is going to pose a serious threat to the stratospheric 90% operating profits that Microsoft enjoys on its Office suite. And sure enough, the news that Microsoft Drops Prices of Cloud Apps caught our attention. Some excerpts (emphasis mine):
Microsoft has lowered the subscription prices for its cloud computing applications, and has announced new customer wins and broader geographic availability for the apps.
The software giant has lowered the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Office Live Meeting, from $15 a month per seat to $10 a month.
For Exchange Online alone, its email software-as-a-service, the price drops from $10 to $5. Microsoft also has increased its standard e-mail storage per user from 5 Gbytes to 25 Gbytes …
Still, are Microsoft’s cost cuts enough? Google Apps, by comparison, which includes apps for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, in addition to email, costs only $50 per user per year. Markezich’s response is that Microsoft offers a scaled-down version of Exchange Online, designed for employees who aren’t frequent PC users, for $24 a year, and a scaled-down version of BPOS for $36 a year. What’s more, “we’re not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office],” he [Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online] said.
Wow, wow, wow — Fake Office! That is indeed a badge of honor for us. We just have a polite suggestion to Microsoft: to be perfectly consistent, Microsoft should also label their Bing “Fake Search” — fair is fair, right? For the record, we actually think Bing brings a welcome dose of competition and we certainly don’t think Bing is by any means fake, but with Microsoft marketing terming the entire competitive landscape to their number 1 cash cow “fake”, we have to wonder if that would apply to their own effort at competing with the other dominant vendor.
While Zoho and Google are happily doing update after competitive update to our respective Office suites, Microsoft, with their “real” web office, is not actually making their web offering generally available.
Seriously, the whole “fake office” designation illustrates the main problem Microsoft faces. In their world view, with their quaint “Release to Manufacturing” rituals, the fact that a Zoho user has no CD or DVD to buy, no bloatware to download, nothing to install, simply just visit a web site, log-in (using Google or Yahoo accounts, if they must), and they are on their way to Work.Online, must all feel a bit, well, fake. But take it from us Microsoft: there is nothing fake about browser-based applications, no matter how you wish to keep the world on your “manufacturing” world-view of software, with your proprietary lock-ins and your 90% operating margins.
It is a new world now — I have called it the Google Era of Computing a while ago. At Zoho, we fully grasp this fundamental reality. That is why we are excited about today’s other announcement, this one by Google: Single Sign-on to Zoho, Tripit, SocialWok and more from Google Apps.
As the Google announcement illustrates, cloud vendors are moving aggressively forward to establish a new competitive landscape. While Google is an existential force and a major competitor for Zoho, this new “Google era” also means tremendous opportunity for us.
Thank you Microsoft, for the “Fake Office” moniker. Please await our real launch of FakeOffice.org soon.
Regards,
Sridhar
Sridhar Vembu
CEO of ZOHO Corp.
Feel free to post or publish this commentary in full or in part. If you would like to talk about this in more detail, please reply to this email, and Marisa Lam will help to arrange a meeting.
Warren Buffett, on being asked why he bought the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad for $34 billion:
Because my father wouldn’t buy me a train set when I was a kid.
List of assets owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s investment company. Apparently his dad wouldn’t buy him a Dairy Queen, either.
I was watching the sun set a while ago, and musing about that magical time of day that
exists from the last rays until time for young ‘uns to go in for dinner — or “supper,” if you grew up in the South.
I don’t suppose kids today notice it all that much, what with soccer practice, computer games, and other distractions, but back in the days of black and white TV (two channels available, if you were lucky, and nothing but news in the early evening) us kids were almost invariably running around the neighborhood at twilight, for the last few minutes of fun with our friends before settling in with the family to eat and watch “Lucy,” or “The Ed Sullivan Show.” 
This was, among other things, a time when it was OK to converse with girls. I’m not sure why, but the “girls/boys have cooties” tabu seemed to be suspended for that period. Social interactions with older kids were less likely to end in teasing (or worse) as well. It seemed as though everyone, in trying to squeeze those last few minutes of freedom out of the waning daylight, had not only a heightened sense of immediacy, but of tolerance as well.
Younger kids were more likely to be permitted to join in games of hide ’n’ seek, for instance. This was pretty cool, because at that time of day, hide ’n’ seek took on a different dimension. There were more shadows. Perceptions were strained. A kid could hide practically in plain sight – - perhaps gaining the edge that less speed or cleverness denied him or her at other times. A bush at the side of a house became sanctuary. If you climbed a tree (no one ever looked in trees) you could watch as the others crept around and sometimes keep your hiding place through another “it,” if time permitted. Sometimes — oh joy, oh horror — you might even find yourself sharing a hiding place with a person of the attractive gender, a level of intimacy to remain unmatched until the first fumblings in a parent’s car some years later.
Then, too, there was the simple mystery of its being almost dark. In today’s world of light pollution it is difficult for a person living in a city — or even in a small town — to imagine what the night was like in the days when street lights had 150-watt bulbs. Even in town, it was dark! Familiar places ceased to be so. Kids raised on an oral tradition of ghost stories and a diet of Robert Louis Stevenson and other less literate, but equally adept, chroniclers of the creepy got p-r-e-t-t-y imaginative not too long after the sum went down! Not that we believed all that stuff, of course…. Nonetheless, many a kid got creeped out if he had to pass, too long after dusk, a cemetery or the house where the crazy old lady lived.
At that hour, it was possible to suspect that perhaps those weren’t just “lightning bugs” out across the field toward the edge of the woods. The hoot of an owl or the whistle of a whip-poor-will sounded completely different when you were out in the dark with them. The dog across town that chased sticks when you threw them in the lake took on a whole new dimension when he barked. And that moment of delicious terror when your best friend jumped out and scared the bejeezus out of you was a thrill that many may have sought in later years, but few (I think) have found.
We weren’t all that naïve, in many ways. By age ten or so, many — if not most — of us were more or less convinced of the excellent chance that we could someday end up as part of a radioactive cloud in the stratosphere. (None of us, mercifully, were aware of how close we came on a few occasions.) We knew of broken homes and abused kids, although perhaps fewer, and certainly less talked-about, than today. Just about every kid of my generation knew another who had been crippled by polio. We had pressures to conform, to succeed, to do well, just as kids do today. But we had one thing that many kids today may never have: those magical moments before supper, and the certainty that a warm meal and our loved ones were just a few minutes away.
No matter what the final outcome, the NY-23 race has changed the game for Republican primaries. Conservatives across the country are now in a search for the next Dede Scozzafava, the establishment GOP nominee Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman was able to defeat by convincing rank-and-file Republicans to leave the candidate their party’s leaders had chosen.
In Florida, Marco Rubio’s campaign says conservatives have found their new Dede in Gov. Charlie Crist.
Is Charlie Crist The Next Moderate GOPer On Right-Wing Hit List? | TPMDC
Just How Risky Are Public Wi-Fi Hotspots?
Ever wonder how safe all your personal information is when it’s beamed through the air over Wi-Fi ? If you haven’t, then chances are, you haven’t taken the right precautions to keep that information safe, either
100 World Lawmakers Agree to Take Climate Action Now
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, October 26, 2009 (ENS) – Legislators from 16 of the world’s major economies and most major political parties have agreed on key guiding principles to enact climate change legislation in their home countries that will drive the move to a global low carbon economy. Meeting this weekend, the lawmakers agreed to act right now in their own legislative bodies, even before the key UN climate deal in Copenhagen, now just six weeks away.
Gay-Rights Battle Brewing Over 2010 U.S. Census | Newsweek National News | Newsweek.com
For the first time in the centuries-long history of the census, the number of same-sex couples who self-identify as married—license or no license—will be tabulated and released to the public. The move is seen as both a friendly nod to the gay community—which had pinned its hopes on President Obama and has, at least in some quarters, been frustrated by a perceived slow response to gay-rights issues—and a boost to policy fights, from challenging laws that limit gay adoptions to the nationwide legalization of gay marriage.
Each year, more than two million Americans enroll in for-profit colleges, also known as proprietary schools, and their popularity has only grown since the financial crisis. While traditional four-year colleges are struggling with dwindling student bodies and budget gaps, proprietary schools are reporting record enrollments as the newly unemployed try to retool their skills so they can wade back into the job market. Some of the largest for-profit chains say their numbers have doubled over the last year.
The students who are flocking to these schools are mostly poor and working class, and they rely heavily on student loans to cover tuition. According to a College Board analysis of Department of Education data, 60 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients at for-profit colleges graduate with $30,000 or more in student loans—one and a half times the percentage of those at traditional private colleges and three times more than those at four-year public colleges and universities. Similarly, those who earn two-year degrees from proprietary schools rack up nearly three times as much debt as those at community colleges, which serve a similar student population. Proprietary school students are also much more likely to take on private student loans, which, unlike their federal counterparts, are not guaranteed by the federal government, offer scant consumer protections, and tend to charge astronomical interest—in some cases as high as 20 percent….
Why vaccinate girls but not boys against HPV? – By William Saletan – Slate Magazine
Why vaccinate girls but not boys? The authors cite several factors. First, HPV is more likely to harm girls.
Second, the vaccine is more effective in girls. Third, the rate of viral transmission depends on the virus’s prevalence “in the opposite sex at any given time.” If girls are routinely vaccinated, there’s nothing for boys to catch or transmit.
In other words, boys don’t have to get vaccinated for the same reason they don’t have to wash dishes, do laundry, buy birth control, or think about other people in general: Girls will do it for them. …
Heather is my grandniece.
