The Sunday Papers – "If I Was a Carpenter" Edition

My wife and I tried to hang a couple of bike racks in our garage this morning, and we failed miserably. We stripped one of the screws on the first one so we couldn’t get the rack stabilized. I really wish I picked up more carpentry skills from my Dad – I just can’t properly drill a screw into a wall stud. Oh well, having learned that lesson we’ll just call a real carpenter and that will be that (plus a bit of spackle and paint).

Now, on to something I think can do better than carpentry, which is type about the Sunday Papers:

1. After writing my “Good Buzz/Bad Buzz” post of last week I got the feeling that these stories were not going to die off very soon ,and sure enough they made the national news during the week, plus this piece in the NY Times by Randall Stross. My favorite (and shiver inducing) line from the story: “executives in charge of customer service may long for the good old days when they had to deal only with a finite number of federal regulators and state attorneys general, not a universe of millions of Web-savvy customers”. We must be careful……very careful. I’d love to hear Tom Vander Well’s take on the “Retention Queues” noted in the article (hint hint).
2. I read a provocative article by Henry Fountain in the NY Times entitled ” The Lonely American Just Got Bit Lonelier”. The gist: “A recent study by sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona found that, on average, most adults only have two people they can talk to about the most important subjects in their lives — serious health problems, for example, or issues like who will care for their children should they die. And about one-quarter have no close confidants at all……the Duke study suggested that a weakening of community connections is in part responsible for increasing social isolation. More people are working and commuting longer hours and have little time for the kinds of external social activities that could lead to deeper relationships.” The good news is that the Internet is cited as a cause for optimism because of its use to maintain ties accross the miles among scattered family and friends. So E-mail isn’t so bad after all (and neither is blogging, for that matter, which the author failed to mention as a networking tool)! One more point noted by a Harvard professor – “Sure, you might say, we’ve still got our wives or husbands or mothers,” he said. “That’s true. But gosh, the number of friends you have is a strong predictor of how long you live.” Family and friends are, and always have been, one of the keys to happiness, no matter the means of communication.
3. I’ve occasionally gotten “on the soapbox” about the evils of high-fructose corn syrup (right up there with trans fats), so this piece by Melanie Warner which implies it might be getting a bad rap got my attention this morning. Is it really just a coincidence that obesity rose about the same time this substance began being consumed in high quantities? The article claims that the fructose in the corn syrup is actually pretty close to regular sugar, so maybe a sugar by any other name is still as sweet (with apologies to Bill Shakespeare). Maybe we just have to avoid them all, including the organic agave nectar that we use our house to sweeten our hot beverages (yes, it has a lot of fructose, but hey, it’s organic and not processed!). What’s the expression – “moderation in all things“. That advice is over 2000 years old, but it still works, doesn’t it?

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