Hey Guys video blogging the page will open tomorrow at 5:00 P.M. So Send Your Video To

upload@alecdavistv.com

Ok video blogging is going to be about the videos that you guys submit to me at admin@alecdavistv.com .  When you submit them to me you guys need to attach the file or post the link in the comments.  The link can be from any website. Just so i can review the video and put the video on my Video blogging page.

Rules

NO Adult Content

No more then 15 Minutes

NO Swearing

Please Obay The Rules That I Gave You Or Video Will Not Be Posted

Ze Frank Portrait

Ze Frank, the amazing blogger, let us viewers embark on an entertaining adventure where we decided the topic for one blog; amazing idea!

Us “Sports Racers” decided that we wanted the hilarious Ze Frank to cover in 3 minutes, world cup, same sex marriage ban, jupiturd, caffeine, beckham, shower, bathroom furnishings, hair gel, campfire songs and democracy: such a wide range of topics, but like always Ze Frank meets the challenge set!

He made hilarious comments and opinions on each of the topics and made them all lead on to another topic. I think the most amazing part was when he started to sing, the man has guts and talent in connecting with the audience. He is my inspiration on my blogging and if I ever meet this guy I will buy him a dougnut!

Check out his Fabuloso Friday Blog and let me know what you think: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/060906.html

Bye!

Cliff the Director

When making short videos for Product Evangelism (Video blogs, tutorials, etc.), the script is an essential item.  The script drives the video production. Capturing the video first, then trying to piece the video together never works well:  Similar to throwing together any food you find in the kitchen and calling it a meal.

Here is my chronological “to-do” list for creating a video:

1. Brainstorm the idea (this will surround the product being discussed).  I usually involve 2-3 creative people in this.
2. Write the script/storyboard
3. Capture the live video
4. Capture the screen video
5. Voice narration
6. Post production

For the script I will create a simple storyboard.  When I say simple, I mean simple.  There is no need to create elaborate sketches…this is not a Disney movie.  The storyboard will contain stick figures of the people, products, etc. and have quotes for the actors in the scene.

Note:  The script can always change, and usually does when taping.

This product Video was one of the most difficult videos I produced, with a lot of moving parts.  Without a script, this would not have been successful:

Yes, that’s what I’m rolling into- a calmer phase of life. The last few weeks/months/years have been the most hectic time of my life. I’ve done a lot and missed out on a lot in this time. For now, I’ll just update on the past few weeks. Post Indore Marathon, I had yet another challenge as the head of Creative and Design Vertical of ahvan ‘09, the Annual Management Summit of IIM Indore (previously called IRIS). My team’s work in ahvan will take another blog post which will come soon too *fingers crossed*. It was one hell of a roller coster ride. An experience I’d never miss for my life even if I’ve to relive the days all over again. The appreciation by the batch was well worth the efforts. But about that later. Right now, I’m almost done with most of my extra-currics here. I’m again in the creatives team of “Mridang”, the maiden cultural fest of IIM Indore to be held in January, but I’m not heading it this time. Harish is taking over all the headache. As a member, I hope to get some respite, and a badly needed break lest I run out of my already depleting creative brainwaves. :p

So basically, now I have some time at hand. I say this in the light of the fact that my second year academics aren’t that rigorous. Sessions for five of the nine courses for this trimester are over. End term exams for a few of them are also done. Remaining courses will have some classes/assignments/projects/presentations to keep me busy, but I think I’ll be able to handle them quite well, specially after the rigor we were made to go through in the first year. Besides this, I’ve a market research industry project from CavinKare to work on. Data collection is done. Analysis and recommendations remain. Even that shouldn’t take much time. Though all this might seem like some work already, I’m pretty relaxed cuz these stopped mounting up stress on me long time back.

Also, I’ve this Malaysian trip coming up in december immediately as my term ends. But before that, I also have a 2 day workshop here at campus by Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam. Excited to meet him in person and actually learn something from him first hand.

Since I’m already deriving how much time I’m now gonna have at hand, let me also add that I’ve only one trimester left before I pass out from this Institute. That’ll run from 22nd December to 27th February. Fortunately, I’ve covered most of my credits in my first 5 trimesters by taking a huge pile up of subjects in each. So I’ll be needing to cover ONLY 8 credits in the third term (compare that to 28 credits this term) . I’ve taken 3 courses for the last term (4+2+2). These include:

1) Personal Growth Lab (4 credits): Now this course is absolutely AWESOME. Don’t believe me?? Here is how the course description goes:

1. You learn practices and principles that enable you to enjoy a new level of Well Being and higher levels of energy. You can manage stress better and remain calm and be peaceful.
2. You learn techniques to let go of the baggage of the past and tools to let go of emotions (such as anger, regrets, upsets, resentment, fears etc.) that may be overwhelming or weighing you down. As a result, you will have access to being more relaxed, being more open and being more productive.
3. You learn communication techniques that enable you to be effective even in challenging situations.
4. You learn meditation techniques that enable you to be more aware and centred.
5. You have an opportunity to reinvent yourself, develop your sense of humour and widen your horizon

4 modules (spanning over 20 sessions)
Module1: Wellbeing
Module2: Freedom and Happiness
Module3: Reinventing yourself and Compassionate Communication
Module4 Presentation on ‘My life: Vision and Mission’

Now you may think I took it up coz it was a ‘light’ course with no exams/assignments (which is actually one of the motivations to be honest) but I do believe that such courses are a necessity to prepare you for the ‘dog-eat-dog’ corporate world out there. Plus, the course apparently includes meditation too. I anyways used to sleep in lectures. Now I’ll even get credits for that. #awesome

2) Building Creative Potential (2 credits): This is yet another awesome course. It involves workshops (no exams/assignments again :]). Well the course objectives read like this:

• To facilitate harnessing of participants’ creative potential and develop an understanding of creativity and creative thinking
• To develop creative capabilities and creative problem solving skills for application in everyday work and organizational settings

5 workshops (spanning over 10 sessions)
Workshop 1: Introduction to creative thinking and building creative potential in organizations
Workshop 2: Lateral thinking
Workshop 3: Ideation
Workshop 4: Morphological Analysis
Workshop 5: Synectics

With my involvement in creatives of festivals, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. :]

3) Rural Marketing (2 credits): The only ‘true-management-type’ subject in my third term. Makes sense to know how to tap the would-be biggest consumer market in the world (including both India and China). Though personally I wouldn’t like to work in a rural setting but will help in the strategies of any company planning to tap into rural markets.

So you see how much free time I’m gonna have in the coming days. Well, placements will be there in Jan end/ Feb start. I should be worried about them but frankly speaking I’m not. Not cuz I’m in an IIM and I’m sure of getting a placement or something (that’s just an urban myth) or cuz I’m well prepared with stuff but only cuz if IIM Indore has taught me one thing, it is to LIVE every moment of my life and not barely survive it like the rest of the crowd is doing. Money/Job Profile/Brand name matters but only to an extent. It would sound far fetched but now I see more clearly than ever how world is getting into one big rat race. I prefer to call it a rat marathon. And honestly, I don’t intend to be a part of it. Maybe I’ve been a part of it by trying to achieve maximum in the minimum time frame all my life, but no more. I’m pretty clear about one thing: Money or no money, I’m gonna do what I like doing the most. I don’t exactly know what I’d like to do for the rest of my life. But the moment that strikes me, I’m gonna give it a shot leaving whatever I’m doing, no strings attached. I guess I owe a lot of this confidence to the brand name of IIM. With that and some basic intelligence, I think finding a job for surviving will never be a problem. Life’s rolling by and I want to spend it doing what I want to do and not what everyone expects me to do. So there…

Meanwhile, in the free time that I now have I plan the following things:

• Read as much as I can
• Finish off revamping my room
• Complete drawing life size Calvin and Hobbes (I bought the biggest sketch-color packet available and the biggest white sheets available at the stationary store for the purpose *excited*)
• Find appropriate place and stick the gazillion large stickers that I got of Batman, Spiderman, Pooh bear, Kung-fu Panda, Spongebob Squarepants (yeah, I’m still 5 :p)
• Update myself with whatever is happening around the world and in different sectors (will help in placements too)
• Learn/Play guitar even more often
• Blog more often and write more articles
• Eat a lot and gain more weight (I’ve no idea why I don’t gain weight even though I eat so much. It’s kinda good I guetss)
• Be regular at gym again and redistribute the gained weight (if any) in proper places :p
• Video blog starting the Malaysian trip or maybe before that

Will add more later…

For now, a sumptuous breakfast awaits me!!
Signing off,
Sadaf

So I love making videos and so does my friend Leslie, so the question is what happens when you get two people that love making videos and doing random things together. Simple you get the following videos produced.

(Warning no one was harmed in the making of these videos and these were only intended for entertainment purposes)

OK, so I’m reaching out to the internet for help again. I’ve recently started a new regular segment on my YouTube channel called WAINGAFAT Wednesday. It’s on Wednesdays. The acronym stands for Who Am I Not Giving A Fuck About Today?

I was excited when the awesome Blordough AKA Shaun McGlinn volunteered to do me some theme music (he already did the heavy metal Angry Aussie theme I use for my TFU Friday videos). After he did the them I thought I needed some visuals for the opening as well and I’ve come up with a few possibilities.

There’s option number one:

Option number two:

Option number three:

In case you can’t tell, number two is a slightly sped up version of number three.  So let me know, which one do you think works best?

Well, there was a clear winner in the polling for which tie to get – and it arrived!  I thought I’d make a video while wearing it to celebrate.

Yeah, I’m all in your face, continuing the talk about this unemployment business. Let me know what you think!

I’ve told my story about diving into social media before, but today, I’m adding a new chapter to that story. I’ve started video blogging.

It’s not that our team at Sprint doesn’t have video capabilities — we do. We have an entire fully equipped television studio at our headquarters where I can connect any television reporter via satellite to a colleague for an interview. But as great as the studio resources are, they don’t always meet my needs. Sometimes, I need to quickly shoot a video and I don’t have the budget for a high end production or the need for one.

My trip to North Carolina for our Sprint 4G launches was a good example. I was traveling back and forth across the state and I just wanted to capture a few minutes of footage to share with reporters and my co-workers on our Intranet’s social network, Sprint Space. It didn’t make sense to spend a great deal of money to accomplish what I was looking for.

So before I left for Charlotte last Sunday, I bought a Flip video camcorder. I spent $200 at a Best Buy and got the HD version with built in editing software. The camera fits in your pocket and has 2 hours of recording time and 8GB of memory. The editing software very pretty intuitive for basic editing.

I have to say, this thing is foolproof and perfect for someone like me who isn’t gadget savvy. As I met reporters, customers and colleagues, I shot several short videos and added them to a You Tube channel I had set up earlier this year.

When I went to the local Fox station in Charlotte for an interview about Sprint 4G coming to North Carolina, the executive producer of their morning show told me that he keeps one on hand for breaking overnight news. Due to budget cuts, they no longer keep a camera operator working on the overnight shift, so if there’s breaking news, he goes out and shoots it himself and then edits it at the station. Eventually, he hopes to outfit his reporters with the Flip cameras for this purpose. He’s also intrigued with the possibility of getting them Sprint 3G-4G air cards so the team can email the footage straight from the field.

It’s not just broadcasters who are using these little cameras, print reporters are, too. One Washington Post reporter I work with uses video clips to augment her print stories as they appear on WashingtonPost.com. Another CNET reporter I work with is doing a great deal more video since they were bought by CBS.

Sure my camera work and editing aren’t the best, but I expect I will get better with practice over time. Already I’m surprised at how quickly my You Tube videos have been viewed — I’ve gotten 100 views in less than 24 hours. (I certainly can’t connect with that many reporters or customers in the same amount of time.)

Let me know what your experience is with video and please, send me your tips on what I can do better. (I need all the help I can get!)

More posts to come shortly on ustream.tv and twitcam. Until then, get off your lazy butt and check them out on your own time!

Sometimes life can be amazing and happy and stress-free.

And sometimes little frustrations find their way in and make you want to punch them in the face.

When that happens…

Sometimes all you need is a road trip with your sister, a handful of your favorite 90’s cds, and a flip camera.

(If you are reading this through a reader, click on over to my blog to see the video. Otherwise this post is not nearly as entertaining.)

P.S. Don’t forget to enter my Starbucks Doubleshot Energy+Coffee Giveaway! Contest ends 11/2/09.

Alright, so it has been a while since I’ve updated this blog. As it is October, Halloween is right around the corner and so are midterms. My midterms consist of my Computer Science intro class, Political Science, and Calculus 2. Each one of the exams will be a struggle of sorts, with my hardest being Calculus. My Computer Science exam will be easy as it reminds me of HTML so much even though it is all C++. So apart from having midterms this entire week, I still have to attempt to catch up with my collateral and prepare for a poetry slam that Cody and I will be putting on here at the Residence Hall.

On other things, if you received a phone call from me last week just asking one question, please don’t freak, you are all helpful that I called as it helped me discover my identity. It was a long journey to finally realize who I was and I am still getting there. Thanks to the help of my few close friends, I’ve come to the conclusion on who I am and I am proud of who I am. However, from realizing my identity, I’ve also come to the conclusion that religion isn’t something for me. I love the whole hymns and all but I’m not religious enough and wasn’t raised to be religious in the least bit so as of now I am denouncing the fact that I claim to be anything that deals with religion or any religious terms as it is.

Woot, now my favorite part of this post, technology! So I’ve been a Computer Science Major for about only a week or two and I am not looking forward to how my schedule will be next semester as it conflicts with amazing professors that teach other classes that I am needing to take. But as it stands so far I am looking forward to completing this degree and becoming a webmaster. That reminds me, I might have a client for being a web designer, and I shouldn’t say to much about who the client is or what his idea is but I know that this could be my big break in getting some more practice in web design and web mastering (Can’t wait for HTML5).

Well that is what I’ve been up to, I have a few more tasks to catch up that deal with my collateral as being a Residential Assistant and all, and I’m still searching for people to do another vlog with me as I want to post one up before the year is over. I have no clue what the new video blog will be about but once I have an ideal of what it can be on I’ll be able to narrow down my choices on people to include in the video.

Take care everyone, till next time.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Loving HTML5 (zeldman.com)

Speech for the Council of Europe Cross-Border Internet, Consultation meeting (Strasbourg)

This speech will be delivered in Strasbourg on Thursday, 08 October, 2009

Intervention Speech for the Cross-Border Internet: Consultation meeting organised by the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 8-9 October 2009
By Dr. Yaman Akdeniz, Associate Professor in Law, Faculty of Law, Istanbul Bilgi University.

It is a great honour to be here today in Strasbourg at the Council of Europe, and to be very close to the European Court of Human Rights. For me, as an academic working in the field of human rights and new media, in particular with regards to legal and policy issues surrounding the Internet since the mid 1990s, the role of both the Council, and the European Court has been crucially important.

and more from cyberspace:

Turkey criticized for blocking access to websites

Value is the core of Web 3.0

As net surfers everywhere explore the benefits of interactive sites such as Twitter and Facebook, the Web’s evolutionary wheels continue to turn moving users from the user-centric Web, or Web 2.0, to the semantic web more commonly known as Web 3.0. Delegates at the 2015 Newsroom conference being held in Prague displayed mixed reactions to presentations from three of the digital realm’s top thinkers during the session entitled Personalised news and the semantic Web: what added value for journalism? As many delegates continue to discover Web 2.0 they were taken aback to learn of the next step to the World Wide Web’s development.

More Than Half of Employers Now Block Twitter, Facebook, MySpace

Can’t check Facebook or Twitter from the office? You’re not alone. In fact, you might be in the majority.

According to a new survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees, 54% now completely block employees from accessing social networking sites at work.

Mutterings on charging for online news

Alan Mutter on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, has published a checklist for publications to follow in their attempts to start charging for online news content.
Mutter argues that charging for particular content such as world, national, business, sports and entertainment news is not an option, though perhaps some revenue could be generated from local news if it is of a good enough quality. Niche news publications, such as those in the ‘business to business realm’ could probably charge users for exclusive information, as could those producing exculsive entertainment content. But apart from these publications (which is just about everyone), he says that newspapers need to totally modify their attitude toward the way and the type of content they produce before they can even contemplate trying to sell it.

Highlights from the Online News Association conference

The Online News Association conference this last weekend was a big success — the third-straight sold out conference, with more than 750 attendees. A big thanks to everyone who came. You can find fantastic coverage at http://conference.journalists.org/2009conference/ thanks to the student newsroom.

CA – Social Network Site Privacy: A Comparative Analysis of Six Sites: “(Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada)
This report was prepared for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner by Jennifer Barrigar, a consultant and researcher with experience in both privacy law and developments in internet technology. It was originally commissioned in late 2008, and a final report was delivered to the Office in February 2009. Some of the observations made in this report may appear outdated or even incorrect. This is certainly the case with Facebook, one social network that has undertaken successive rounds of privacy amendments in 2009. This is not the case with many of the other social networking sites identified by Ms. Barrigar.

The Complete Guide to Video Blogging

by Leah Betancourt

Dan Gillmor’s ‘new rules of news’

by Nestor Bailly

Dan Gillmor has written a column over at guardian.co.uk about standards of journalism practice, his ‘new rules of news,’ that he would enforce if he ran a news organization. Here are a couple of the more interesting suggested guidelines:

Record Labels Are Losing Power to Fans, Artists

Over the past month, I received a significant amount of feedback on my recent MediaShift article, What Will Record Labels Look Like in the Future?. People from all areas of the music industry reached out and shared their feelings on future business models, and strategies for moving forward.

Mainstream Media Miss the Point of Participatory Journalism

The ability of anyone to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and sharing news and information is seen as one of the big shifts in journalism over the past 10 years.

Deidre Straughan a Community Specialist and (Video)blogger at Sun Microsystems discusses why video is effective. You can find her video at http://blog.sun.com/video and her blog at http://blog.sun.com/deirdre.

Thanks to Cody Whitesell and Ruby Shuz.

Today’s video diary entry:

Few things piss me off as much as censorship that treats adults as if they aren’t grown up enough to make their own decisions. I actually agree with limiting what kids see, there are all sorts of things that are appropriate for adults that aren’t for kids. Not everyone matures at the same rate but given the lack of any objective measurement of maturity, age will do.

Stopping kids from seeing things that aren’t suitable is fine. Stopping adults from accessing thing because they aren’t suitable for kids is totally fucked up! I bring this up because Australia doesn’t have an 18+ rating for video games. The highest rating we have is 15+. That means that if the government censors think a game isn’t suitable for someone under 15 then it gets banned from sale. That’s right, the government sees nothing wrong with saying that if a game’s too violent, gruesome or maybe sexual for a 15 year old then adults aren’t allowed to have it.

The latest victim of this totally fucked up regime is Left 4 dead 2 which has been refused classification in Australia. This means it will be illegal to sell the game here. I am well pissed off about this Because Left 4 Dead was pretty much the coolest fucking game ever. Hell yes it was violent. Hell yes it was bloodthirsty, gruesome gratuitous and scary as fuck to play at 4am.

I would not for a second let my kids play it because it very nearly gave me nightmares. This was possibly made worse by playing 6 hour sessions at night fuelled by toxic doses of energy drinks. But I digress. I’m a fucking grown-up – I should be able to make the decision to do that to myself if I want to.

And if you’re one of those fuckwits who say video games are different to movies because they’re more immersive and interactive just shut the fuck up. If someone can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, how the fuck is that my problem? Saying I can’t play a video game because someone with a mental illness might not be able to handle it is just as fucked up as saying I can’t play it because a kid couldn’t handle it. You’re worried that some unbalanced individual will think the game is real and start killing their zombie neighbours? Some people think their fucking cat talks to them! Are you going to drown all the cats as well in case they cause a killing spree?

When most gamers are in their 20s or 30s it’s unforgivable to not have an adult rating for games. The government needs to wake the fuck up and put video games on the same footing as movies. Until they drag themselves into the 21st century and recognise the validity of video games they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Arguing that to protect children you have to take away my rights as an adult is totally fucked up!

—

I also did a video version of this – a collaboration with Shaun AKA Blordough who did my heavy metal theme. I did it as a comic because lip synching would have driven me crazy. Even so, that one video lip synch gave me about an hour of pain.

Question: Would you hire a job seeker at half-pay for a three-month probationary period, under the agreement that if they performed awesomely well you’ll bring them on full-time at full pay? Tell me in the comments!

And yes, I know I look all sleepy and stuff — it was the best thumbnail they offered!

It seems as though, sooner or later, everything that I enjoy becomes illegal, expensive or just plain stupid. Of course, some things that I like have always been that way. For example, in my lifetime marijuana has always been illegal, travel has always been expensive and getting married has always been stupid. Avoiding stuff that has ALWAYS been illegal, expensive or stupid is bad enough…it’s REALLY tough to deal with stuff that suddenly BECOMES illegal, expensive or stupid after you’ve grown up.

(By the way, I didn’t leave out morally corrupt behavior, politically incorrect actions or calling the President a “liar” from the floor of congress…I just lump all of those things under “stupid”. Stupid covers an amazingly large percentage of fun human exploits.)

As a child sitting in the back seat of the family Ford Country Squire wood paneled 8 cylinder station wagon, I remember my father telling the gas attendant to put in “Two dollars regular, please.” It was Dad’s usual request so that two bucks must have bought enough gas to propel that huge Brady-mobile for quite some time. Today it won’t get the most gas-efficient of cars around a city block with the AC on. Gone, along with the gas attendants, are the days when two bucks worth of gas would get you anywhere. They’re both a thing of the past.

My grandfather had a weekly ritual that included an after-church ride in his Cadillac. Those Sunday rides were like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates…you never knew where you might end up. I inherited my grandfather’s prodigious appreciation of enjoyable automobile rides but none of his 2 millions bucks so I can’t afford superfluous road trips. My charabanc undertakings have devolved from pleasurable rides down the interstate blasting Bruce Springsteen AND the AC to creeping along slowly with the rest of the Atlanta commuters listening to Captain Herb Emory tell us about the jack-knifed truck full of cows that’s causing the delay du jour as he circles above in WSB-TV’s Skycopter.

It seems as though the government would like to curb certain activities that we enjoy, if not ALL of them. If there are laws against certain things that we want to do, and we have the money to fund the illegal activity in which we’d like to engage, chances are pretty good that we will go ahead and participate in that illegal and expensive enterprise, whether it’s stupid or not. So, what does our leech of a government do next? Why…they tax the behavior of course. Citizens will still suffer the ill effect of the behaviors, but at least the government gets it’s share of the revenue so that they can afford to have more meetings to discuss what behavior they want to tax next.

Pope Leo X’s parsimonious extravagance elicited the taxation of prostitution, an income tax of sorts. Peter the Great counted upon the vainglorious coxcombry of the average “turn of the century Russian” when he charged his subjects who chose to grow a beard. By the way, that was the turn of the 18th century.

I’m pretty sure that this particular levy applied only to Russian MEN but there was a lot of vodka at the time and they didn’t have all of the fancy diagnostic stuff like the tests that doctors performed on that hermaphrodite tennis player. By the other way…the vodka was NOT taxed.

Sin taxes in America have NEVER been very popular with the average law abiding sinner. Alexander Hamilton tried it and he fomented the Whisky Rebellion. The feds had to be sent in to squash the Pennsylvania settlers.

More recently, cigarettes have been taxed badly and all we have to show for it is a bunch of mega-poor lung cancer patients with no/poor health insurance. If the extra tax dollars went to care for them, it would make some sense but that’s not what the government does with cigarette tax revenue.

Recently the government floated the idea of a sin tax on soda pop. I don’t know what they planned on doing with THAT money. After the soda tax was shot down by people all over the country, I thought that I had heard the last of the soda tax.

I was wrong.

On the Sunday edition of Fox and Friends, I was listening to Allison Camerota who ordinarily appears to have a great head on her shoulders. But she really got to me when I heard her agree to the soda tax. I was STRENUOUSLY disappointed in Alison so I tweeted Clayton Morris the following tweet:

“I never miss weekend Friends, but now I might as well watch NBC if Allison is so liberal. She and her soda tax blew it-see ya.”

Morris responded to me with this tweet:

“She’s fair and balanced. That tax doesn’t make her liberal. This show would be boring is one viewpoint was voiced.”

Of course he’s right and I don’t listen to Fox to hear people parrot my own opinions. But a tax on a bottle of soda? That’s simply Arkansas-ish. What silly vice would be taxed next and how does the government know what’s good for us as compared to what’s bad for us? I can’t keep up, they keep changing the health value of everything. Margarine alone has me totally baffled. One decade it’s better for you than butter and the next year it’s not. I LOVE butter so I’m going to stick with it…until they sin tax it out of my price range. Even cigarettes had their supporters in the medical field at one time:

Obviously cigarettes aren’t the best example but consider things like butter. When I was a kid, it was reported that butter was bad for us so we were told to eat margarine instead. Today we’re being told that butter is the healthier choice. It the 50’s we were told that breakfast didn’t get much healthier than steak and eggs. The 70’s found doctors instructing us to avoid such high cholesterol meals. Currently, steak is back on a healthy menu along with other low-carb foods. And who would have thought that wine, in moderation, would be a benefit to cardiac patients!

It’s difficult enough to keep up with the current thinking on the one food or another but some would have us take TODAY’S standards and use them to increase the government’s bank account.

Sunday morning, my favorite morning show, Fox and Friends Weekend Edition was on the telly and as I was listening to my 3 favorite anchors, I overheard one of them say that a sin tax should be applied to a bottle of soda. I don’t like soda myself but I can imagine that something I DO like will be added to the list of taxed foodstuff next.

Here are a few ideas:

How about a special tax on McDonald’s to help pay for high cholesterol related disease?

A condom tax can be used to pay for research on stretch marks.

Sin taxes are a slippery slope and I’d like to think that my foxy friends would consider that concept before they endorse sin taxes for things like soda pop. Consider the fact that, as healthy as fruit is, fruit juice is loaded with high levels of fructose. There is a school of thought that turns a health “thumb down” at beverages such as orange juice and apple juice. Should we apply a tax to them as well?

How do we decide which things will have special taxes and which will not? Who makes those decisions and at whom do we complain if science suddenly finds an ingredient in Pepsi that cures cancer?

You know, I’m with Pope Leo and the State of California, tax the hookers and the weed.

So much has happened over the last few days that it would take forever to write about it all. And a vlog is just easier.

In case you don’t feel like watching the whole thing (or are too lazy to click out of your reader to my actual blog…):

• I bought a car. It’s so pretty and shiny and black!
• I took the National Counselor Exam and passed. Woo!
• I looked at apartments and found nothing. Boo.
• I met a new roommate through Craigslist… and he’s really cute!
• I saw Jason Mraz in concert. So much fun!
• I started packing away my life in boxes… again.
• I begin the moving process tomorrow. Kind of excited…
• And my 25th birthday is on Sunday! Yay!

So yes, life had been crazy hectic. I hope to get back to regular blogging soon, but for now you can enjoy five minutes of my rambling.

For the sake of completeness, here’s the video version of how to tell someone you don’t give a fuck about them: