Hey, I’m a fan of fine jewelry, but sometimes these things just go too far. And $7.1 million seems like an awful lot for a pearl necklace, no matter how beautiful.

Be an interesting thing to see, perhaps, pearls the size of gumballs. I spent years working in the jewelry industry, so these things can be a matter or curiousity to me. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably heard about the contamination of pet food by melamine and how a number of pets have died of it. It now appears that hogs were fed the same, and so the contamination has entered the human food supply. It’s enough to make one avoid pork.

The number of hogs is relatively small, perhaps 345 are involved in the problem. Better yet, the odds of human death from this is considered to be low. Read the rest of this entry »

Grauduating in one year is certainly a way to get out of the weight of student loans. Just imagine how much that would save.

A girl in Michigan is on track to do just that. She took various AP classes and studied at the community college while in high school. After graduation, she took 27 units at the University of Michigan because 19 weren’t enough to keep her busy. Read the rest of this entry »

Snacking is just so much fun, so I thought I would share some of my favorite snacks. Don’t worry, I do control how much I eat, or I’d be huge by now.

Don’t read if you’re about to go to the store. Wouldn’t want to tempt you too much! Read the rest of this entry »

I just have to smile, hearing that Dell has given in and started offering buyers Windows XP instead of Vista as an option again. It just seems like a lot of people aren’t that pleased with Windows Vista.

The suggestion saying “Don’t eliminate XP just yet” got almost 11,000 votes.

As I said, just have to smile sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »

Hurry up and tell the FDA not to allow the standards for chocolate to be changed. Comments close on April 25, 2007 May 25, 2007 (updated with new date), so there isn’t much time.

I caught wind of this over on Slashdot, and followed the links to the Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate website. And from that website, here’s the basic problem:

Their plan is to change the basic formula of chocolate in order to use vegetable fat substitutes in place of cocoa butter, and to use milk substitutes in the place of nutritionally superior milk. These changes will have adverse effects on the eating, physical and nutritional quality of chocolate

I’m a big fan of good chocolate. Not Hershey’s. I love dark chocolate, and eating some of the good stuff is far more satisfying than eating a larger quantity of the cheap kind. We don’t need junk masquerading as chocolate. If manufacturers want to make really bad chocolate, they can just call it something else!

The Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate website has instructions you can follow to help get the point across. Go do it quickly. It only takes a couple minutes.

Technorati Tags: chocolate, bad chocolate, fda, chocolate standards, food standards, cocoa