Anyone who knows me well knows that I’ve been living with diabetes for the last 10 years. One of the great sources of information for me about this disease has been Kerri Sparling’s great blog Six Until Me. Kerri is a tireless diabetes advocate, the mother of the adorable little Birdie, and the wife of screenwriter Chris Sparling (who wrote the wildly disturbing Ryan Reynolds film Buried).
Most people who think about the perils of diabetes think about the dangers posed by serious low blood sugar (myself included). But I recently suffered a severe high blood sugar episode that was scary in a very different way. When I contacted Kerri looking for more information on highs, she asked me to write a guest post for Six about it. My post – Thai High – ran over at Six Until Me today, and if you know anyone living with any kind of diabetes, I would encourage you to stop over and take a look.
The Harrisburg Patriot-Newsran a front-page editorial on Tuesday calling on Penn State University President Graham Spanier to resign over his failure to “do what is right – for his school, or more importantly for the alleged victims of coaching legend Jerry Sandusky.”
The breaking news about Brewer led to one of this blog’s readers requesting that I relink to a story about how Jan Brewer first came to national attention back in 1990. At the time, Brewer shared the spotlight with Donny Osmond and the alternative newspaper New Times. So here’s a link to the story about Brewer’s first brush with fame, based on research I did back in 1990 when I lived in Arizona.
The Pew Foundation has a new report out on how people are using their tablet devices. According to Pew (and what do we learn about the media these days that doesn’t come from Pew Foundation studies…), here are few things we know:
11% of US adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. (That’s me!)
Half of tablet users get news on their tablets daily. (Me, too!)
77% of owners use their tablets daily. (Me again.)
Top activities on a tablet:
54% – Consuming news (me)
54% – E-mail (me)
39% – Social networking (me)
30% – Gaming (nope, own Angry Birds but haven’t fired them up, yet.)
Many more examples from other movies at the links. Thanks to Nezeka Pfeifer for the link to the composite illustrations. I fear I’m the one responsible for coming across the link to the evil versions…..
As you may know, Apple has just released its new iPhone 4s. Analysts and the stock market were not impressed, with Apple’s stock taking a pretty significant hit in the days that followed. And then Apple reported selling 4 million iPhones in the three days that followed…
One of the key features of the new iPhone is a program called Siri that is a voice-activated personal assistant that will respond to natural language inquiries. So if you ask Siri “Do I need a coat today,” it will respond with a weather forecast. Apple has labeled Siri as “beta” software, which means it’s still in the testing phase, not completely ready for prime time.
Tech bloggers are having a great time experimenting with how Siri will respond to various questions. One of the most popular tests is using the great request from the movie 2001:
In fact, Siri has multiple responses to that question. And it is certainly familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:
If you’d like to see a nicely curated collection of Siri answers to unusual questions, pay a visit to the S*&% Siri Says Tumblr blog. Great stuff. Hint about the content – the blog name is actually NSFW at some places….
Today, center-right commentator David Frum stepped down in his role as a commentator for American Public Media‘s business radio news show Marketplace.
Frum, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, has represented the right/conservative/red point of view on the show in counterpoint to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on the left/liberal/blue side of things.
Frum writes that in many ways he was able to fairly represent the mainstream right when it came to topics such as “green jobs or NLRB regulations or immigration.” But when it came to other issues, such as “healthcare reform, monetary policy, social spending to aid the unemployed, and … the American response to the euro crisis,” he found it difficult to represent his views as being that of the conservative mainstream.
Because Frum felt, correctly, that he could not serve as a spokesperson for the right, he resigned as a commentator for Marketplace.
And the world of political/policy commentary is worse off for his decision. Why on earth do we need to have a pair of commentators who will give us reliable party talking points? Don’t we have political press secretaries for that? One of the first concepts I teach my commentary students is to avoid the DTPs, the Dreaded Talking Points. And by this I mean parroting back the same tired rhetoric we get out of left/right balance. This is making the assumption that we can learn something significant about a topic by having a lefty and righty say the same things over and over again. The two will never actually respond to the others point of view, and heaven forbid that they ever see a common ground.
David Frum is one of my favorite commentators because I never know exactly what he’s going to say. And whatever he does say, I know that it will come from a well-reasoned place. I don’t care whether I will agree with him. What I want is someone who will say something thoughtful and interesting.
How do we expect to learn about a purple world when only primary colors are allowed?
Jon Stewart had it right when he was on Crossfire back in October of 2004:
Washington Post: Loving the Warrior
A Yale honor student in love with a wounded platoon leader. How the wars we are in connect with those who are usually a long ways away from them.
New York Times: Dealing With Aging Prisoners
With long, mandatory prison sentences the norm, states are having to deal with an aging cohort of lifers. A Rick Bragg story from 1995. (Pulitzer winning story)
Most people, when they think about the perils of being diabetic, think about the dangers of low blood sugars - myself included. But high blood sugar episodes can be scary in their own right.A couple of weeks ago I had a major high blood sugar episode, and Kerri asked me to <a href=)
