Grocery Store Experiment

I need to eat better (more fruits & vegetables) and the grocery store is one way that I can help myself do that. I read some info on shopping the grocery store that we should "Shop the perimeter of your typical supermarket and ignore the middle." (Green Living p12) I know when I get to the isle of ingredients and seasoning that I just skip it. My wife helps a lot with buying good meals to prepare, but I want to save more money on food, eat healthier, and not spend a ton time preparing the food. Also this morning on NPR Timothy Jones reported that we waste a lot of food. He said that people typically buy food on Saturday or Sunday and decide they want to eat healthier (sounds like me), so they buy fruits & veggies. During the week they don't take time to prepare those meals and on the next Saturday when they do have time the food has started to spoil. So they just throw it away. He suggested buy groceries on Thursday night instead. But I had a further thought. What if I bought what I needed for breakfast & lunch on the weekends, but every night swing by the store and bought something for dinner. Would that save money? Maybe if something was on sale like meat that is getting near the end of it sale life. If I shopped the perimeter real quick then it would be healthier, but I would have to still prepare the meal when I got home.
So starting next week I'm going to convince my wife to let me try this little experiment on buying food at the store and see what happens.

Casino Royale

Well I saw the movie last night at 9:50 p.m. and got home at 1:00 a.m., so I didn't feel like writing the review for Casino Royale. I'll try not to spoil the plot or give away any details in my post.
First off Daniel Craig did a good job playing the role of 007, but I was confused while watching the movie. (More on confusing in a second). I believe the movie is centered around when Bond starts his career as a secret agent, yet the movie is modern day. So I guess the Bond time line over the last thirty years don't exist for this movie plot. You could tell that this Bond is more physical and rough around the edges than the last Bond [Pierce Brosnan], so that makes a little bit of sense on why they axed Mr. Brosnan. In all, the movie wants to take Bond in a new direction that he could not go. I would not be surprise if Hollywood remakes all the Bond movies since their obsession of remakes.

The open action sequence was great, very fast, very OMG did he just do that. Thumbs up for the first 15 minutes. But after that the movie slows down with little bits of excitement. Now the title of the movie is Casino Royale and the major climax for the movie is a poker tournament. So for like 30 minutes they are playing poker with action happening in between the breaks of the game. I guess the producers wanted to cash in on all the craze of poker on TV. You know there are like 10 channels that show Poker Tournaments every day. I typically flip past them, so I was getting really bored during this part of the movie. Of course the winning hand is between good guy and bad guy alone. And both have excellent hands but one is better, neither likely to happen at the same time. Too cliche for me. Then some more action and then a very slow part near the end where you like why are you showing this to me.

Now for the bad, the sexy banter that Bond is known for is absent from the movie, unless they want you to see Bond before he gets all smooth. So this a prequel for the Bond series yet it is modern day. (Sorry for repeating that.) The transition from scene to scene is poorly done. The gadgets are gone and replaced with his fist. He freaking runs everywhere through the movie. Everyone has a cell phone in the movie and answers every 15 minutes, I bet the movie was sponsored from a cell phone company. The last 30 minutes of the movie should have been redone. There were only two girls in the movie, only one was a "Bond" girl.

Now for the good. Action was great, the realism was much better than previous movies. If he got beat up in the movie, he still had the bruises in the next scene. The Bond girl reaction to seeing death was better than "Hey you kill him, want to do it?" mentality from the previous movies is gone.

Over all. If you are a Bond fan, go see it, if you are a movie fan, rent it. That's my report.

Casino Royale Review (preview)

My friend Sam and I are headed off to see Casino Royale tonight, the trailer looked really good (at least for action). I haven't made up my mind about the new Bond guy Daniel Craig. I am not a fanboy for the 007 series, so I can give him a fair shot. But check out the pictures on Wikipedia - James Bond I think that Daniel Craig looks a lot closer to Sean Connery then any of the other actors that played James Bond before. I'm pretty excited to just to see a movie, this is the first movie I've seen since Pirates 2 and nothing before that since January. (Having a kid limits time/money for entertainment.)

So hopefully after it is over and I come home I'll put together a little review, unless I'm bone tired.
Getting tires put on my car at 7:30 a.m. (early for a Saturday)

Really fast eco-car

I saw this article over at TechEBlog about a Lotus that runs on BioFuel, now that is a car I could zip around town all day. The video below is of TopGear reviewing the car. The information at the end of the video is why I'm posting this, nothing new is presented but it was good to have TopGear reconfirm what has been stated before. (A voice not from the wild crazy "save the planet" freaks, as the media views them)

U.S. pays for condoms overseas?

Last year NPR ran a report on about how some of the AIDS activists around the world were upset about the change of tactics of the United States government, trying to promote abstinence over use of condoms. That story prompted many questions, including: The United States government buys condoms for people in foreign nations? How long has this been going on? Is this program effective to preventing AIDS in those countries? Most of my concern was that U.S. tax payer money was going towards the purchase of condoms that were handed out to people in other countries. That old stereotypical argument was building up inside me. "We have enough problems here in the United States that that money could be used for first." Solve our own problems first before trying to help others. But I know that we will never be a problem free nation and should help out where we can around the world.

Washington Post had an article back in February reporting the cost of this program called President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which spent $5.2 billion dollars in the through 2004 and 2005.

"About $66 million was spent on the provision of condoms and prevention messages emphasizing their use." $66 million is a lot of money for condoms, if I were to head down to the drug store that would buy me 107 million condoms.

So who is receiving these gifts from the U.S. government? "The vast majority of the money is being spent in 12 African nations and in Guyana, Haiti and Vietnam, although the program is paying for AIDS work in more than 100 other countries, including Russia and India."

Only time will tell if this program of handing out condoms is helping slow the spread of AIDS around the world. In part two of this series I plan to dig deeper and find who is profiting from this project and why.

Running out of things to goof off on.

Well I get an hour for lunch everyday and I typically spend it surfing the web. I have noticed over the last few months that new content has become less abundant. I'll admit I'm a feeder I let others tell me what I should see, so I'm not seeking out new info in uncharted seas of the web. Typically I hit Digg, Slashdot, OSNews, NeoWin, Distrowatch, and a few others. But I seem to cruise all through those sites in about twenty minutes. The content isn't new it seems to be just re-submitted from one to the other. I feel like I'm on a guided tour and someone is showing what they think is important. It's getting old and stale, so I am seeking out new resources that dive deeper into the web.
I have a few things up my sleeve but they are all long shots so I'll start working on them.

I'm old

I turn thirty today around 10:00 am EST. I was planning on taking a day off from work, but I'm sick this week. So there is no point in taking a day off of work to goof off if I'm sick. Might as well sludge through work in hopes of getting everybody else sick. (he-he) Well Scrybe sent me an invite so I have been using it, so far so good, but I am really waiting for part 2 & 3 of the beta to open up before I make up my mind. Oh well hopefully today won't suck too much since I'm here, like no major CF's. Oh well I'm getting old.