Koyo USA Corp. is opening a showroom in Waikiki Monday to elucidate and sell its bottled MaHaLo Hawaii Deep Sea drinking water.I'm going to wait until the brilliant politicians here put a price cap on it.
Prices for the water at Koyo's Waikiki showroom will be about twice as much as typical bottled water. A half-liter bottle retails for $2, with a 1.5-liter bottle going for $4.50. In Japan, Koyo sells its 1.5-liter bottle for $6.
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Labels on Koyo's water in Hawai'i don't make health claims but tout it as being thousands of years old, filled with minerals and free of modern impurities. The water is largely desalinated, leaving a tiny bit of sodium to give it a somewhat discernable taste.
If earnest crooning and guitar strumming over mellow grooves define Mayer's musical adolescence, he's grown into to more substantial, mature fare with his latest passions funk, soul, and most notably, the blues.Were they rationing commas and periods at the AP on Thanksgiving? Clearly the writer and editor missed the grammar lessons on run-on sentences. And in my own tryptophan stupor, I had to read this sentence several times to make sense of it:
No longer is James Taylor his model now Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles and Buddy Guy are the musical heroes Mayer hopes to emulate as he embarks on his new mission trying to make the rest of America fall as hard for the blues as he has.
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The album encapsulates Mayer's musical journey over the past year much of it spent on the road performing material like Ray Charles "I Got A Woman" and Mayer's own soulful compositions with two veteran musicians, drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino.
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"I think he's always had a love for blues and R&B; he's always been a big blues fan," Jordan says. "He became popular off a different type of songwriting a melodic soft side but still had a lot of intensity and obvious musicality."
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"Ray Charles in 1962 is the same feeling you get now because it's human it's a human emotion, not human intellect," he says.
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But Mayer is careful to point out that he's not a blues master just perhaps the right person to give it a more popular face or as he says, to move the music along.
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But ditching the kind of music that made him a household name for a genre that for many fans is the very definition of musical nostalgia might seem foolhardy.That sentence would definitely be subject to the red pen here in the PalmHouse. Would mailing one to the AP seem foolhardy?
It is good to give thanks to the Lord,UPDATE: QD at Southern Appeal offers a thanks that I echo.
to sing praises to your name, O Most High --- Ps. 92:1
And so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren't understood; they're not appreciated. And if you don't have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don't mean very much to you. You just think, well, that's the way it is. That's our birthright. That just happened. [But] it didn't just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I mean this. I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn't just to be uneducated or stupid. It's to be rude, ungrateful. And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings. ---- David McCullough
Last Friday, third grade teachers at Frank Allis sent home this letter.Like Gina, I'm amazed that not one of the five teachers saw this as even potentially controversial. It is frightening when adults - especially adults who are in a position of authority over children - display such a stunning lack of good judgment. Apparently the cluelessness also infects the administration of the school. Check out the lame "apology" offered by the principal:
It explained a project, where the students would write letters to lawmakers, other students ... even to the president ... asking for an immediate withdrawal of U–S troops from Iraq.
Fitzpatrick says they didn't expect the assignment to cause any problems, because it was part of a social studies project asking for peace.
"I don't see it as a controversial issue ... I really don't," said Fitzpatrick.
"... and I'm offering an apology if it did cause any problem or hurt feelings about this issue," said Christine Hodge, Frank Allis principal.The if doesn't belong in any apology. Just as the political indoctrination of young children doesn't belong in any public school.
Across the fast-growing South, accents are under assault, and not just from the modern-day Henry Higginses of academia. There's the flood of transplants from other regions, notions of Southern upward mobility that require dropping the drawl, and stereotypes that "y'alls" and "suhs" signal low status or lack of intelligence.I'll admit it: I use "y'all" and "fixin"-- frequently. I was born in south Alabama and raised in south Georgia, and while I have lost some of my accent, enough remains that people aren't surprised to find out I'm from the South. The PalmPilot still has a pretty strong accent, and whenever we visit the South, my daughter who was born in Maine and has spent most of her life out of the South, sounds like a born and bred belle. I love to hear a southern accent here in Hawaii, and just the other day the cashier at McDonald's drive-thru made my day with her drawl.
Georgia-bred humorist Roy Blount Jr. understands that people with strong Southern accents are often perceived as "slow and dimwitted." But he thinks it's "sort of a shame" that people should feel the need to soften or even lose their accents.Yeah, y'all. Want to hear the kind of accent I grew up around? Watch Paula Deen on the Food Network. It makes me homesick every time. That and calling home today to hear my mom tell me about the turnip greens (with Durkee sauce), cornbread dressing (actually, it's dressin'), peas, and ambrosia they're fixin' for tomorrow.
"My father, who was a surely intelligent man, would say `cain't'. He wouldn't say `can't.' And, `There ain't no way, just there ain't no way.' You don't want to say, `There isn't any way.' That just spoils the whole thing," Blount said.
"I just think that there's a certain eloquence in Southern vernacular that I wouldn't want to lose touch with ... you ought to sound like where you come from."
Books are the memory of mankind. They are one of the several important things without which our race would not be what we call "human," as distinguished from what we call "animal." This tool of education, this memory of mankind, this great legacy, this lever that lifted us out of savagery, this enables us to find ourselves. Here the aims of education and its purposes for us are made clear by the hopes, aspirations, conflicts, experiences, successes, and failures of people in time and space who are one with us. In books we become a part of the great drama which we call life. Without books education would possess no articulate spirit, and our function would be survival rather than aspiration.
Did you know that the equator runs through the United States?It gets worse:
This "fact" is among hundreds of errors in science textbooks used by students all over the United States.
Major textbook publishers care about pleasing bureaucrats in state capitals and appeasing a plethora of political groups.
But they often don't care about actual science. Year after year, they promise to correct their error-ridden books, only to release new editions with even more errors.
The Fordham Foundation says publishers employ reviewers not to check facts, but to make sure there are enough tall people, enough short people, enough people in wheelchairs, enough American Indians and Hispanics, enough single-parent families, and so forth. Textbook publishers, Hubisz said, "now employ more people to censor books than they do to check facts."This display of political correctness and multiculturalism worship makes me very glad that my curricula review committee* has high standards, no obligation to use any particular text or publisher, and no bureaucracy whatsoever.
Bennetta points to Marie and Pierre Curie, the French couple who shared a Nobel Prize for their research on radiation. Before the advent of political correctness, textbooks pictured the husband-wife team together. Soon, however, Pierre's picture was excised. And then, some textbooks -- for example, Chemical Building Blocks, one of 15 books in Prentice Hall's Science Explorer series -- darkened the skin of the Polish-born Marie, presumably to suggest she was a woman of color. This attempt at multiculturalism at the expense of fact is insulting for members of disadvantaged groups who are subtly led to think they can't be scientists in real life -- only in the fairy-tale world of textbooks.
"How's that for multiculturalism?" Bennetta said.
Walking through the halls of the Auburn football office, you can almost feel it. there’s something different about this athletic complex—something bigger than just sports.As I've watched Auburn play on television this year and last, I've noticed that they're different. They really do play as a team and encourage each other. I haven't often seen them engage in the "in your face", cocky behavior that is the norm in sports. As an Auburn grad and fan, maybe I'm biased, but I'm happy to read this article and see that there's something deeper going on there than just winning football games.
Make no mistake about it, these Tigers have the same on-the-field mission as every other football team in the country. They want to win. But unlike most other teams, their definition of a “win” isn’t restricted to a scoreboard. The successes of this team are found in the graduation rates of the players, in the marriages of the coaches, in the personal development of mature young men, in the integrity of the program, and for many, in the spiritual development of all involved.
Yes, God is up to something at Auburn University, and from the looks of things, this is only the beginning.
The unique program at Auburn is a direct reflection of the heart of the man in charge. Now in his seventh season with the Tigers, head coach Tommy Tuberville has established the kind of successful program that many coaches only dream about. Last season, he guided his team to a perfect 13-0 record, a victory in the Sugar Bowl, and himself received four national coach of the year awards. But getting caught up in accolades isn’t Coach Tuberville’s style.
This is the mantra of the extreme Left: "Bush lied, thousands died." A softer version from politicians now often follows: "If I knew then what I know now, I would never have supported the war."And, as usual, read the whole thing.
These sentiments are intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible for a variety of reasons beyond the obvious consideration that you do not hang out to dry some 150,000 brave Americans on the field of battle while you in-fight over whether they should have ever been sent there in the first place.
Consider the now exasperating (and tired) argument that almost anyone who looked at the intelligence data shared the same opinion about the threat of weapons of mass destruction — former presidents, U.S. congressmen, foreign governments, Iraqi exiles, and numerous intelligence organizations.
The prewar speeches of a Jay Rockefeller and Hillary Clinton sparked and sizzled with somber warnings about biological and chemical arsenals — and, yes, nuclear threats growing on the horizon. Politicians voted for war at a time of post-9/11 furor and fear, when anthrax was thought to have been scattered in our major cities and the hysteria over its traces evacuated government buildings. In response, the Democrats beat their breasts to prove that they could out-macho the "smoke-em-out" and "dead-or-alive" president in laying out the case against Saddam Hussein, especially after the successful removal of the Taliban.
To argue recently, as Howard Dean has, that the president somehow had even more intelligence data or additional information beyond what was given to the Senate Intelligence Committee can make the opposite argument from what was intended — the dangers seemed even greater the more files one read attesting to Saddam's past history, clear intent, formidable financial resources, and fury at the United States. If the Dean notion is that the president had mysterious auxiliary information, then the case was probably even stronger for war, since no one has yet produced any stealth document that (a) warned there was no WMDs, and (b) was knowingly withheld from the Congress.
A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: "For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: Given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?"
Even more importantly, the U.S. Senate voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein for 22 reasons other than just his possession of dangerous weapons. We seem to have forgotten that entirely.
Discoshaman at Religion of Peace? is asking some good questions of the anti-war crowd. Something tells me they will go unanswered.
Michael Yon writes about the heroes (and movie star) at the Deuce Four Redeployment Ball. Those guys sure deserve a good party, at the very least.
Tim Challies recently interviewed Derek Webb. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.
I would never have put the words Calvinist and romance together, but someone has. Click here for one of the cheesiest pick-up lines ever. (Via gid)
Postscript Posthaste links to an article about marketing the church. It disturbs me.
Christian at See Life Differently shares a Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote about Christian fellowship. The post and the comments are worth reading.
My brother-in-law, the PortsmouthTea Guy, is blogging about tea... and CHOCOLATE!
If the political news this week has left you as discouraged and ticked off as it's left me, visit Scrappleface for a dose of humor. Sometimes all you really can do is laugh...
The message: The president's time is running out.The editorial draws the wrong conclusions, as usual, but even they see the vote as a rebuke of the President. I'm disgusted by those Republican senators who voted for the amendment. Even my own senator voted for the amendment (I'm a registered voter in Florida), and don't think I'll forget that. Senator Martinez, you'll have to win my trust back.
Prices are perhaps the most misunderstood thing in economics. Whenever prices are "too high" -- whether these are prices of medicines or of gasoline or all sorts of other things -- many people think the answer is for the government to force those prices down.Click here for more.
It so happens there is a history of price controls and their consequences in countries around the world, going back literally thousands of years. But most people who advocate price controls are as unaware of, and uninterested in, that history as I was in the law of gravity.
Prices are not just arbitrary numbers plucked out of the air or numbers dependent on whether sellers are "greedy" or not. In the competition of the marketplace, prices are signals that convey underlying realities about relative scarcities and relative costs of production.
