»News & culture Community blog

This article was in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, June 13, 2010. It helps to remind us of the gravity of these spills.

This article is about telling you how to get $1000 electronics and other products for pennies on the dollar and then to explain why it’s a big sham you should avoid at all costs (unless you like playing the lottery).

A good friend of Trader Dan is Mike Kohn who won a Bronze Medal in the four man Bobsled event in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake. Mike is in the National Guard’s elite athlete program and was going to retire this past December. He is now our candidate for comeback of the year.

We’ve all played with an Etch-a-Sketch . Like the yo-yo and the hula hoop it seems to be a staple in the American array of classic toys that have spanned the generations. And like Lego’s this little “toy” has become a popular form of “outsider” or “folk” art and apparently it’s own cottage industry.

Want to know where fires are breaking out around the country? The US Forest Service maintains coordinates of active fires that you view in Google Earth.

In the village they can guarantee your privacy because there are no computers.

Apart from being a fantastic “parody”, using one of Lily’s songs as the basis for this letter, Dan Bull is helping to bring to light the fact that what we call digital piracy isn’t as simple as people make it out to be.

We often want more in our life. More happiness, more friends, more free time, more things. More. Be careful what you ask for and how you go about achieving it. That is the topic of this video from Happy Product and Mark Osbourne.

This promo video for the European Association of Electrical Contractors (AIE) explores the potential and possibilities of electricians in the 21st century and the advancements in technology that are changing this industry and modern life.

Are you aware that nearly every photo see in magazines are retouched? This video shows how it is done and discusses the implications of this altering of reality.

In this report they explore the novelty of perhaps the most unusual stimulus plan.

This WGN broadcast showcases how one Chicago woman turned a $200 a week grocery bill into $50. No generics in her cupboards and a lot of the stuff is just free!

Google Chrome is now 1 year old and it looks like add-ons might be just over the horizon. Earlier this week Google turned on extension support in Chrome for development releases of the browser.

I was just reading the news and came across this doozy over on the ABCNews website: $18M Being Spent to Redesign Recovery.gov Web Site

One man kicks his marketing up a notch and offers what the modern car owner wants most. How to choose?

Spending 4 hours a week she finds free items and then what she can’t get free she stacks coupons. She even has a consulting business helping families and moms do it themselves.

The second part of a video exploring the effects of photo manipulation in media and on society. See part 1 here

I agree.

Yeah. Apparently no one can produce a law that says wage earners pay income tax. There’s a law for capital gains income, but no wage law. It just doesn’t exist apparently. Can anyone find it?

Get ready for this inspirational video by Jill Bolte Taylor, an amazing neuroanatomist telling about her experiences of what happened when she had a stroke…absolutely brilliant!

I live in San Diego and am also a talk radio enthusiast. I listen to it all just to hear what everybody is thinking regardless of their viewpoint. My own worldview tends to be drawn from so many sources it is often difficult to find media that I completely agree with. Often I find myself listening to hotheads and megalomaniacs spewing radical statements from their own world view, that I tend to suspect is mostly entertainment value anyway.

But I take it all in stride and attempt to be informed to more than one viewpoint on any given subject. Which is why I found it so shocking that I would be at first baffled and ultimately incensed by a “fluff promo piece” on a local San Diego AM Talk station, AM 600 KOGO .

Hmmmm….I can hear it now…the kids of the future using the term “round up ready” to talk about any and all trees, just the way we use the terms Xerox or Kleenex. Mega-corporate owned forests! John Muir we need you now!

I discovered that a lot of people are taking this laughing yoga thing quite seriously. According to this AP story at MSNBC laughter yoga is,”a sidesplitting new fitness fad that’s part traditional yoga, part improv and all silliness…”

People, and even the media themselves, often assualt ‘the media’ for being too liberal, too conservative, or even puppets for an international conspiracy. Sometimes I agree with all of those statements, feeling as though our news sources cover too-little-too-lightly, often popularizing corporate and government agendas as the only reality. But these same agendas seem to be at the cause of the so-called economic crisis creating the need for bailouts and swift action in the first place. But if things are that bad, maybe we shouldn’t be bailing out a bad system. Maybe it’s time for a revolution.

Duct tape, or as it was originally nicknamed, duck tape, has been around since just before World War II. Invented by Permacell, a division of Johnson and Johnson as a way to keep moisture out of ammunition cases and came in an army green color. Being waterproof and manufactured with cotton duck inpsired the original ‘duck’ name (which became a Manco brand name – now Henkel Consumer Adhesives- for the ubiquitous adhesive in 1984).