An overdue update

And now, two months after my last post, it's time for an update.

The holiday season (which technically just ended, on the feast of the baptism of Our Lord - thanks, Sarah) treated us rather well. We spent much of it in PA eating ourselves silly and taking a couple of destructive children through an art exhibit at Phipps Conservatory, where millions of dollars of glass artwork was on display. The sculptures, by the way, are the work of Dale Chihuly - yes, the same man who created the Giant Blue Toilet-Bowl Brush by the University of Akron's very own Goodyear Polymer Center. All in all, it was a good time.

I started classes again yesterday. I'm taking two this semester: Advanced Management of Information Systems, and Management of Operations. I don't know anything about the latter yet, but the former seems interesting; it's possibly the most interesting class (at least to me) that I'll take, and although it seems like it'll be a fair amount of reading and writing, there isn't a group project. I've had just about enough of group projects, thank you.


Now, with all of that said, I'll start going through my collection of articles that I wanted to comment on:

1. Hot off the AP newswire, there's a story about rising birth rates in the U.S. This is undeniably a good thing, but I take great exception to the way that AP spins the story.

Right there in the fourth paragraph, we get the usual drivel from so-called experts: " Experts believe there is a mix of reasons: a decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty." Or in other words, Americans are having more babies because they're stupid, irresponsible, or Catholic, and besides, it's Bush's fault.

Only after that do they point out that Americans, as a culture, just seem to value children more than people in other industrialized nations. This has been true for almost twenty years, but apparently, this chance to lash out at their opponents was too much for the "experts" to pass up.


2. Canadians, especially, take note - your beer fridges are killing the planet, according to Popular Mechanics. I'm not one to give into global warming hysteria, but I thought it was pretty funny that this article even existed.


3. No specific article here - but does it concern anyone else that Obama and Clinton keep claiming that they'll take on the drug, insurance, and oil companies? I hadn't heard that the oil companies had declared war on us - if anything, the EPA declared war on them. I'd much rather take on the real enemies, like the tax code, and those guys with missiles pointed at us.



Well, that was fun. I hope to do this a bit more often this semester.