The online journal, notebook and playground of HFM

Awesome charts linking who owns what soda together. Basically, coke, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper dominate the drink industry. I actually thought Dr. Pepper was owned by Pepsi, but I guess not.

On the total cost of the Iraq war: Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians died, as did nearly 4,500 American soldiers. Another 32,000 soldiers were wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis became refugees. Iraqi civilians are still dying. All for the nice tidy sum of $740 billion — money that could have been used to actually better the lives of civilians, both in the U.S. and abroad."

"Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn't even have boots were it not for the women who came before. Listening to Palin, it's almost impossible to believe that, as recently as 50 years ago, a woman at Harvard Law School could be asked by Dean Erwin Griswold to justify taking a spot that belonged to a man. In Ginsburg's lifetime, a woman could be denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter just because she was a woman. Only a few decades ago, Ginsburg had to hide her second pregnancy for fear of losing tenure. I don't have an easy answer to the question of whether real feminists are about prominent lipsticky displays of "girl-power," but I do know that Ginsburg's lifetime dedication to achieving quiet, dignified equality made such displays possible."

olitude…what is that anymore? I am the only one I know who doesn’t text at all, I don’t talk on the phone when I drive, and I actually shut it off at times. I ALWAYS take time to head out into nature, smell the breeze, revel in the sun, touch the glorious flowers….and just reconnect to myself and Spirit. Without this, I get stuck in my head. My intuition heads to the backburner, only to come out and play when beckoned.

Our former neighbor when we lived in Ohio.

Now that's an interesting list.

Drinking a pint of water before you eat apparently does help you lose weight.

Hand Crafted, Infinitely Scalable & Royalty-Free Icons for User Interface Designers – this is going to be fantastic to use for CSS3

Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up? This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”