Friday News Bucket

13 Comments

1. 

   CabinGirl on July 18, 2008 at 9:08 am

   thinking how much I would be willing to pay for a full night of sleep when my kids were babies…apparently it was a marketable idea: NYT

   SLOGGING through endless nights with a newborn baby has long been a parenting rite of passage. But for some dual-income parents, the arrival of the night nanny is making those 2 a.m. interruptions a thing of the past.

   Demand for overnight nannies — also known as newborn specialists — has been growing, especially in the last five years and largely in major metropolitan areas, said Wendy Sachs, the co-president of the International Nanny Association and the founder of the Philadelphia Nanny Network…

   …As might be expected, help doesn’t come cheap. A week’s worth of night-nanny services can cost well over a thousand dollars, with nannies earning about $15 to $40 an hour, depending on their experience, the number of babies and the babies’ health. Ms. Seveney says overnight nannies usually spend 6 to 10 weeks with a family with one newborn, and anywhere from two to four months for twins.

   $40 an hour?  Incredible.

   • 

     boran2 on July 18, 2008 at 9:16 am

     I’m in the wrong field.

     • 

       CabinGirl on July 18, 2008 at 9:20 am

       I was thinking it would be a great job for insomniacs and night owls.

   • 

     Second Nature on July 18, 2008 at 9:21 am

     Though it was exhausting, I wouldn’t trade those middle of the night feedings for anything.  Ok, maybe once a week… 🙂

2. 

   CabinGirl on July 18, 2008 at 9:11 am

   celebrates his 90th birthday: CNN

   Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid icon, Nobel peace laureate and South Africa’s first black president, celebrated his 90th birthday Friday by doing something he had indicated he would not do again — grant an interview to journalists.

3. 

   CabinGirl on July 18, 2008 at 9:19 am

   Did we use them all up in the cafe?  

   Not quite: NYT

   With regular gas in New York City at a near-record $4.40 a gallon, station managers are rummaging through their storage closets in search of extra 4s to display on their pumps. Many are coming up short.

   That’s why Vishal Nair, who runs the Lukoil station at Eighth Avenue and 13th Street in Greenwich Village, took another plastic number last week, turned it over and scribbled “4” on it with a black magic marker. The result was an obviously homemade “$4.47,” but it would have to do until he received the extra 4s he ordered months ago.

   “Typically, we have a lot of 9s and 1s, and we had a shortage of 3s before we got a lot of 3s in,” Mr. Nair said.

   The missing digits are an unanticipated barometer of how frequently prices are changing.

4. 

   Brendan Skwire on July 18, 2008 at 9:43 am

   This is more local news than anything else, but I’ll be blogging and writing a LTE about the way forward for Philly’s stalled neighborhood transformation initiative

   Given that we have 2 production breweries (Yards and Philly Brewing, with Yuengling nearby), as well as several micros (Nodding Head, Dock Street, and Manayunk to name a few); and given both the shortage of hops as well as the increased cost of shipping them from Washington state, Oregon, Europe and New Zealand (and keeping them cold as well) why not reclaim that land for hops production?  We have tons of vacant space that no one is using, and that no one can afford to purchase due to the credit crunch, so it makes sense to use it for crop production….

   • 

     Joyful Alternative on July 18, 2008 at 1:56 pm

     Great idea, brendan. What do you need to move forward?

     • 

       Brendan Skwire on July 18, 2008 at 2:22 pm

       it would be great if the city sold or leased some of these vacant lots to either CDCs that deal with agriculture or to the breweries themselves.  

5. 

   MikeInOhio on July 18, 2008 at 9:55 am

   Benjamin Franklin was right.
   “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”

   A sad state of affairs.

   The South tips the scales again as the nation’s fattest region, according to a new government survey.

    More than 30 percent of adults in each of the states tipped the scales enough to ensure that the South remains the nation’s fattest region.

   Colorado was the least obese, with about 19 percent fitting that category in a random telephone survey last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

   The 2007 findings are similar to results from the same survey the three previous years. Mississippi has had the highest obesity rate every year since 2004. But Alabama, Tennessee, West Virginia and Louisiana have also clustered near the top of the list, often so close that the difference between their rates and Mississippi’s may not be statistically significant.

   

   Top 10 Obese States

   1. Mississippi, 32.0 percent
   2. Alabama, 30.3
   3. Tennessee, 30.1
   4. Louisiana, 29.8
   5. West Virginia, 29.5
   6. Arkansas, 28.7
   7. South Carolina, 28.4
   8. Georgia, 28.2
   9. Oklahoma, 28.1
   10. Texas, 28.1

   This continues a disturbing trend and does not bode well for our ability to address rising health care costs over the next generation.

   So everyone…………GET MOVING TODAY!!  Take a walk, ride a bike, do something to help reverse this looming catastrophe.  This is a wholly preventable situation we are in today.

6. 

   americanforliberty on July 18, 2008 at 11:22 am

   The gas tax holiday idea just won’t die:

   http://www.kansascity.com/637/story/710218.html

7. 

   infidelpig on July 18, 2008 at 12:30 pm

   Old/New News:

   we’re still getting screwed at the pumps
   (at least they’re blowing in our ears, the MSM that is)

   still getting screwed on the hill
   (and it costs us more to get there, and twice as much to get back)

   still getting screwed by the utility companies
   (even tak’n a dump costs more, although we can afford less food to make one)

   still getting screwed by the corporations
   (more work, less benefits, or none, tell you what you can do in your off-time, and when it comes time to retire, well some ass-hole just used it up for his golden parachute)

   still getting screwed by the cops
   (they’re targeting the working people, those that still have a job, because they’r the only one’s who can pay the fines, and they’re going back to inifinity to find prior little tickets so they can clasify you as a repeat offender, so they can get more money for fines, re-hab, etc. etc.because now they can)

   this list can go on and on, if you would like to add to it…..have fun, I don’t have time to keep go’n ; )

   peace

8. 

   Oui on July 18, 2008 at 12:52 pm

   .

   ESA – Herschel Space Observatory

   Objective
   Herschel will investigate the history of how stars and galaxies formed and to study how they continue to form in our own and other galaxies. Herschel will observe at wavelengths never covered before.

   The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory (formerly called Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope or FIRST) has the largest mirror ever built for a space telescope. At 3.5-metres in diameter the mirror will collect long-wavelength radiation from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. In addition, Herschel will be the only space observatory to cover a spectral range from the far infrared to sub-millimetre.

   Infrared radiation is invisible for the human eye. It is actually ‘heat’, or thermal radiation. Even objects that we think of as being very cold, such as an ice cube, emit infrared radiation. For this reason, infrared telescopes can observe astronomical objects that remain hidden for optical telescopes, such as cool objects that are unable to emit in visible light.

   Also, infrared instruments need to be cooled down to temperatures very close to absolute zero (-273.15°C), otherwise their own infrared emission would spoil the observations.

   Herschel Acoustic and Vibration Tests

   Note: ESTEC or European Space Agency was developed and build on property in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. On this property I grew up as a child before we emigrated to the US.

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."