My Favorite Things

This week at work, we were asked to complete a couple of forms to prepare us to discuss our career goals with our direct manager. After a couple of questions about what's important/what we value at work, one of the forms asked about our lives away from the job:

What's important to you/what do you value outside of work? (i.e. baseball, family etc..)

We think they meant "e.g." instead of "i.e." but in our case "i.e." fit like a infielder's glove, so we took off from there, answering:

Baseball, family (these aren't necessarily in order), music, silence, faith, doubt, love, grace, literature, dark coffee and dark beer.

The more we thought about it, we felt we ought to share that question with our vast readership as an edition of This Week's Discussion Question:

What's important to you/what do you value? (e.g. baseball, family, etc..)

Please keep the discussion civil and do not wander off into any additional Latin abbreviations.

Discuss.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

We fear that Time's 2004 Blog of the Year (the blogosphere equivalent of Celine Dion nabbing an Album of the Year Grammy) is going to put The Onion out of business with stuff like this:

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn't raise his standards, he will exceed Bush's total before he is inaugurated.

Now that we're done shaking our heads at that, here's This Week's Discussion Question:

How quickly would you be reaching for the Yellow Pages after learning your lawyer had scribbled a paragraph like that?

Please keep the discussion civil and do not wander off into "Here's a bit we call 'Great Moments in Presidential Speeches'" or "Cliff, what color is the sky in your world?"

Discuss.

Wise Up

We saw this headline on Yahoo News today and got rather excited:

Philips develops "intelligent pill"

Sadly, it's about a pill with a microprocessor, wireless radio, pump, and drug reservoir, that can release pharmaceuticals in parts of the body where they'll be most effective.

While this is very cool and has the potential to make lots of folks' lives better and all, we were hoping it was a pill that would make people smarter, which would make everyone's life better.

Well, everyone except the folks who get royalties from Adam Sandler's movies.

What Digby Said

After a campaign stuffed with disinformation and outright lies (to use a sanitized, family-friendly term) about who's gonna tax whom and how much and whether or not it's patriotic to settle up with the IRS, Digby (not at all surprisingly) nails it all beautifully.

Here's the conclusion, but go read the whole thing:

For those government helps directly, whether it's through educational opportunities or unemployment insurance or health care for their kids and elderly parents, the benefits are obvious. But there's nothing unusual about financially comfortable people also being willing to pay for a decent society in which to live and work and bring up their kids. The unnatural ones are those who think they can live a good life without contributing to such things. Apparently, they think they can live inside a castle and pull up the drawbridge behind them, leaving all the ugliness outside. And that is the perfect, time tested recipe for revolution. It's not exactly the smart move for the long haul.

Like we said, go read the whole thing. While trees die in vain so the dumbassery of Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer can regularly stain the New York Times and Washington Post op-ed pages, respectively, this woman is cranking out shimmering brilliance each and every day at Hullabaloo. If you're not a regular reader, you should be.

We'll leave you with a pair to kick around as This Week's Discussion Questions:

Isn't a broken clock right more often than Bill Kristol?

Can Charles Krauthammer milk four (eight!) more years out of nothing more than "You'll be sorry you voted for Obama! SORRY, SORRY, SORRY!"?

Please keep the discussion civil and feel free to wander off into "Is Obama President yet?"

Discuss.