I actually think this idea was a good one for National Geographic, they already have a name for nature and taking care of the Earth already, and despite the fact that being green is all the craze right now, there isn’t a reliable paper source out there to date for it. I mean there are a ton of websites out there that help you figure out what to do, what to buy, and how to do it, but none nearly as reliable as National Geographic. And you know, like has been noted many times, many people just like the feel of holding onto something when reading, me included.

The magazine itself has its ups and downs. Overall, I like it and have learned quite a bit of things that I can do to live better. I think it has a nice mix of useful things to do, that I think are actually reasonable to do. You aren’t just giving up modern living, you are learning to accentuate what you do to be better for everyone. There are tips for little things you can do, as well as various products that you can buy that are better for the environment.

The one complaint I really have about the Green Guide, is that while there are many products that it points to, it doesn’t really give me a good review of how good these products are, and how they compare to common household products on effectiveness. For instance, it runs through what to look for with Green Shampoos and then lists some possibilities such as Burt’s Bees Shampoo. While it tells me why I should want to use these types of products, it doesn’t really tell me how well it actually works compared to say Suave Shampoo (though in this particular instance I would guess that the comparison is rather favorable to Burt’s Bees).

I would like to see real reviews on products in future magazine. I don’t mind that they list possibilities to point you in the right direction, and then leave it at that. But I would like one or two real honest to god reviews in there as well.

My second real complaint about the magazine is that there isn’t really any news or noteworthy information. The magazine is chockful of tips and recommendations, but it offers nothing on the latest in green living. You mean to tell me there isn’t a hot new product coming out soon that could greatly help? There is no horrid disaster that some corp done? What about some hard hitting piece on how Exxon treats wildlife? These are things we could find in an average National Geographic, but not in this magazine and I really am sad by that. I think this sort of information could really make the guide much more in depth than what it currently is.

Still, I think the periodical is a worthy beginning to what is a needed source of info for a new way of living. I have read nearly 90% of the magazine (skipping the air conditioning unit recommendations as I have no plans on buying a new window-unit AC any day soon) and am strongly considering subscribing to it. I also am actually looking at some of these products that they suggest (the laundry detergent and shampoos in particular) and may order some soon and give those a shot. I also have greatly appreciated the piece on trying to buy green on a dime as it offers nice advice.

I think for anyone who is wanting to learn more about living green, this magazine is a great option. Sure, much of this stuff you can find easily online for free, but this is much better organized and you don’t have to wade through the deluge of crap to get the gem at the end. This offers a nice way to start off a good way to live.

Because of these not so great reviews, which essentially said it was a direct port of the DS version with not great controls, I decided to forego the early Cooking Mama games in hopes that the series would get better as newer iterations came about. Not to mention I wasn’t going to pay $50 for a game you could get on the DS for $25. After almost three years, I’ve been hearing the same complaints about each new version of Cooking Mama, until finally I see some videos of Order Up! and decide that finally, it looks like someone decided to do it right on the Wii, so I went out and bought it.

Upon buying it the first thing I noted was that while Cooking Mama had been a rather pricey $50 at launching, Order Up! was a reasonable $40. I think this really needs to become a target point for casual games like this and if more games came onto the market at this price, perhaps these games would do better.

The Nickelodeon-like art of the game is cute and original. This was one of the reasons I felt the game was worth buying. I think the style is largely American, and can’t see Japanese really getting into it, but it kind of works. Especially in the early stages when you really are in charge of a dingey burger joint. I think it is highly original and am glad to see someone doing something different.

The game itself i think is simple and straight forward. You go are a cook in the game trying to advance your restaurant to become a better place. You can buy upgrades to your kitchen, buy spices, new menu items, and hire secondary cooks to help out as well. All this adds a little more depth and strategy to the game that from what I have heard, Cooking Mama doesn’t have. However, the menu items are fewer in this particular game from what I’ve heard as well. You start generally with only 3 in a restaurant and move up to 12. There are three levels I believe which brings you up to a total of 36 different recipes. Some are tedious, some are really fun. All of which have pretty decent movement controls that completely utilize the Wii.

Like any Wii game there are a lot of mini-games. Besides cooking, at random times in the kitchen the inspector will come in and make you wash dishes, rats will attack your Kitchen and you will have to flick them away, or your assistants will fall asleep. There are also games outside of the kitchen. If you click the newspaper delivery guy there is a duckhunt-like newspaper shooting game, there is a slots game, and I also know there are a few other hidden games that I haven’t found yet.

While I haven’t played Cooking Mama, I find it hard to say that you should buy that game over this one. The simple, yet good controls of Order Up make it a very good buy. Even if the price was the same, I would say that Order Up might be the better of the two, but by saving you $10 in price, I find it hard to believe anyone would purchase Cooking Mama over this game.

For it’s original art and fun gameplay I give this game a B. It may not last long, but if this game gets priced down to $30 go out and grab it, because it is pretty good quality while it lasts and can be really addicting as well

One significant change I noticed this year was that they made us de-husk our own corn which I don’t remember ever doing. I didn’t mind really, but it was kind of annoying all the same. I thought it was nice that it was part of the experience that we paid our price and got our corn back all ready for us to eat.

The corn was still better than I’ve ever been able to do on my own, and it was fun to go back to my hometown and see how things have changed. I always wonder who from my high school is still around Sun Prairie, as I almost never see anyone I went to high school with. It isn’t like I was in a small 200 student school either, there were a good two or three thousand there (not giant but not small). And I never see anyone, not that I want to.

Our main issue with the trip though was really that it was a spur of the moment trip. We came up with the idea on Thursday night, but was unsure about it until Saturday morning at 10am that we should just go because we would have been bored at home otherwise. So we didn’t get out until about noon. Brookfield is a good two and a half hours from us and the zoo closed at 6pm so we were already at a disadvantage for going. But still we figured three hours at the zoo might be enough, we might miss a few exhibits but at least we’d get out, have a fun trip, and we figured we’d go somewhere to eat as well.

We were a bit wrong. We did get there at three and were more than willing to pay for the tickets (though we are very used to our free zoo), we also decided to pay extra for the children’s zoo, the sting ray petting, and the dolphin show as these we thought would be great for my daughter to get to experience.

We started out walking to the dolphin show since that was close to when we got there and saw the big exhibit on the way. The exhibit was great. It was an indoor desert area and we saw a lot of animals that we normally don’t see in our zoo including a jaguar, meerkats, rock hyraxes and a caracal. They were very high quality enclosures as well and we thought that we did the right thing in going to this zoo.

Next to the dolphin show, we were 15 minutes early and there was already a lot of people so we sat kind of in the back. The show wasn’t one of the better dolphin shows we saw, but it wasn’t horrible. It was a bit short, only about 15-20 minutes long. We didn’t completely feel like we got our money’s worth, but we were still happy we went because my daughter hadn’t ever seen a show like that to our knowledge.

This is when the trip really started to go downhill. We decided that since we were close that we would start walking to the sting ray petting area, where the line was so huge we thought we’d be there for an hour and we didn’t want to waste that much time. We thought it might be because others went there straight from the Dolphin show so we decided to see the Children’s Zoo first and hit it up after that. It took a little while to find, and we passed a lot of empty bear exhibits to get there but the Children’s zoo wasn’t entirely worth going to. It was mostly a farm with a couple (and I mean that literally) of goats to brush. I think for kid’s the local children’s zoo was better since you not only get to pet them, you can feed the goats as well, and you don’t have to pay a couple extra bucks for it as well. There were more types of animals there, but it was essentially a farm which I didn’t find it worth it.

So that done, we returned to the sting ray petting exhibit to find the line nearly empty. Our spirits had returned shortly until we found out that they closed the exhibit at 5pm. This turned out to be a reoccurring problem at this zoo, as even though the Zoo is open until 6pm, most of the exhibits were closed (even going so far as to taking the animals in) at 5pm. Even the gift shops and restaurants were closed for the most part at 5pm which really sucked as we promised my daughter she could by something at a gift shop and had avoided gift shops till the end. (I actually assumed they would stay open later to get leaving families, but apparently while the zoo is extremely greedy, not if it means they have to stay until the zoo cloes).

The highlight of the trip I think was that first exhibit building and the Giraffe exhibit. I do think these were the best Giraffes we’ve seen. They had a huge yard, there were 5 of them (I think) and they seemed very happy and playful. It was a joy to watch them. I was sad that I didn’t get to see the Okapi which would have been a highlight for me as it is one animal I don’t think I’ve ever seen in person.

Overall, the trip was more than a bit disappointing. Some of the zoo seemed great, but much of it was suffering from age. This was disheartening as well as you pay so much more for these bigger zoos only to see it often in worse repair than the local free show. Milwaukee Zoo suffers the same issues, though nowhere near as bad.

I think the trip was worth doing, and I would try again, but we should have planned better. It just sucks that this last hour that they said they had wasn’t there, we may not have gone at all if we knew it wasn’t. We were counting on it to see the zoo…

To answer this question we must first really figure out what Nolan has done in his first 2 films. Both films featured realistic villains with new super human powers. Even looking at Ra’s al Ghul in the first film who had the power to live forever through the Lazarus pits had this power, maybe not taken completely away but was completely ignored in the movie. This was a great move by the way because it really wasn’t all that important in terms of this movie anyway.

By trying to stay realistic we can take out many types of villains straight off the top. Killer Croc, Mudface, and Man-Bat which were all creatures more than anything and I just don’t think would fit at all with the tone of the Nolan movies. Mudface also has the other issue of being too similar to the horridly bad Spider-Man 3 villain Sandstorm.

Then we have tweeners, characters whom had super powers of some sort, but these powers might be worked around in some ways. In particular I can think of Bane and Poison Ivy. Bane could be worked around in that maybe he is just a serious steroid user and is an interesting character in that he crippled Bruce Wayne and forced him to retire from the Batman scene at one point and if incorporated into the movies could really bring a nice twist to the story. Poison Ivy could be brought in as someone who is going too far to protect wildlife, but doesn’t have the direct control over plants the way she does in the comics. Maybe she just uses them in ways to do harm to others, such as poisoning and what not.

But neither of those would be all that interesting. Other obvious choices include the villains that we’ve already seen including The Riddler, Penguin, Catwoman, and Mr. Freeze. Although one of the writers has already insinuated that this next one may go for a villain that hasn’t been in the movies yet. I also think it might be too soon to do The Riddler though I would love to see it. The reason is because the difference between The Joker and The Riddler are minimal at best.

I have a feeling after this last movie though is that the next villain will be a return of the Catwoman. The reason I think this is that they got rid of Rachel which will mean he will need a new female counterpart in the next movie, and what better one could they get but the Catwoman whom he had a romantic relationship with as Bruce Wayne? She is also a super realistic character, containing no special powers herself or any sort of mysticism. Plus, while Pfiffer did a spectacular job on the role in Batman Returns, she could be easily outdone given the right casting and direction, which they obviously have in spades.

You could also get this same type of romance from the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul as well which would require that Liam Neesan reprise that role though and that may be a route that Nolan is unwilling to go. And in and of herself, she was nothing spectacular in reality, the interesting part of her was her father and that he approved of it and that she was the grey area between the two of them. Which I guess could be done without the father (and without the approval). I mean if Bruce Wayne fell in love with this woman and found out who she was, it certainly would create an inner conflict with him, especially if she wasn’t necessarily good or evil, and we could get an interesting story with it. Perhaps she could be coupled with another character that has been around such as the above Poison Ivy or Riddler to keep a stronger interest in the movie; after all she wasn’t really a villain.

The first one came in the form of “I don’t know why they’d want it, most of the country has no form of communication anyway.” As if they have less communication with each other really than we do. I mean, yes it is a different country and their communication lines are thusly different, being that they may have communal telephone in some parts instead of a cell phone on every body, but this is hardly a negative thing. And not like you can’t find similar conditions in say Alaska. The form of communication most important is their mouth, and while we like to paint the picture of these people not being able to talk freely, I highly doubt it is really as bad as we think it is.

The next problem… “What happened to all the smog?” Yes mom, like any big city, Beijing has smog. Grats on that realization. However, Mexico City and L.A. are both largely thought to be worse in the smog route than Beijing, though Beijing is no gem either in this aspect.

These types of comments make me angry over the fact that so many people do buy into the propaganda so easily. As if China is really as evil as we make them out to be. They aren’t, they do bad things yes, what country doesn’t? The way I see it, they are just an average country that do their own thing, and because that thing doesn’t entirely coincide with our thing, and often they don’t do what we want them to, they must be the ones who are a big evil empire. As if we don’t commit heinous acts of genocide, censorship, facism, corrupt politics and leaders, atomic power, war for no reason, etc. We are all of these things and worse, we are not ones to judge the evilness of China as we have more than likely committed far worse crimes in the last 50 years, let alone the 200 before that.

I’ve heard many talk about boycotting this olympics just because it was in China. If it were in the US this year would you have boycotted it? I doubt it, and why not? On a global scale, the US right now is likely seen worse than just about every other country on the planet and largely because we’ve started this habit of attacking random countries for no better reason than the leader has a moustache. My suggestion is to get over it and enjoy what may very well be a memorable Olympics.

The Jets however are not too good of a team. Sure, they’ve been aggressive in the offseason and have made some decent moves to pick up key players. However, the Jets with Favre are still likely going to be worse than the Packers without Favre.

Now in saying this I don’t want to be one of those fans that blame the QB when he plays bad but praises the team around him when he plays good. But there is no doubt in my mind that the difference between last year and the 3 or 4 years before that really was the team around him more than him. And let me go on record in saying that I didn’t think the years previous he actually played bad, he played like he always did, the team around him wasn’t there though.

Last year, had 4 really good receivers (instead of the previous 1), an improving offensive line (which even improving wasn’t great), and a set of tight ends that most quarterbacks would die for. On top of the offensive improvements, he had one of the better defenses in the NFC which whatever you think about Favre has been one of the more important facets of his career. Whenever you throw interceptions like he does, you need to have a defense who can stop the opponent from using the int to score and it was the first time in a long time that was true last year. If all that wasn’t enough, McCarthy finally got him a little better controlled and you saw his completion rating skyrocket and his interception count dip.

With the Jets he will be going to a team with a weaker offensive line, little help at wide receiver, one tight end, no defense, and what very well could be a coach who has no grasp over Favre. Not only that, but unlike last year, this year Favre did NO offseason training, and is also going to be running a completely different offense than what he’s been used to for the 17 years of his career.

This very well could work out well for him and be what he needs at this point in his career. However, all signs point to this being a complete disaster for him. I totally expect his interception count to skyrocket back up and his TD numbers to drop again and the team to continue to lose.

If this happens, what will the Jets do in that 6 interception game that he will likely throw? Will they treat him the way they treated Chad Pennington, whom wasn’t a great QB, but also wasn’t as bad as they made him out to be? I hope not, because unlike the way he would have died out here if he lost his ability, I suspect he will be completely murdered in New York. And if that is the case he won’t be known for just being a jack ass when he un-retires.

All that said, do enjoy him. He is a gem and we may never see another even remotely like him in the NFL. Every play with him is thoroughly exciting to watch, even at his age he still pulls off those plays that make you wonder what he was thinking in the first place. Both good and bad. And it is definitely worth the ticket to watch it happen.

I think this is terrific and am glad to see that McCain has finally decided to stop cowering behind his attack ads like a scared little animal and not only join the debate on how to fix the energy problem, but come out and support his fellow running mate in such a strong way.

I would love to have one myself. I fully admit I am completely guilty of not checking my tire pressure. In fact, I don’t think that I ever have checked my pressure. And even if I save just 2 or 3 gallons of gas a month, that savings adds up quite fast in this gas economy. That is about $12 a month and $150 a year! The cost? Well air is completely free at many gas stations so that would be completely free money in my pocket.

The problem? Well John McCain’s tire gauge costs $25! Yikes. I don’t think that the thing is really worth it, I was expecting $5, maybe even $10 since it is engraved. And I don’t particularly like John McCain or his policies (or lack thereof) and don’t feel I should give him my money, even if he is now supporting Barack Obama. I guess I can only hope that Obama comes out with his own version of the tire gauge, either that or buy myself an unengraved one. However, I really would like to buy the engraved one to show my support to Barack Obama.

Just going to the site and looking at it the first thing you notice is that they have gone the route of black instead of the modern fad of white that both google and apple have had a hand in. I think this is a fairly bold move, but more importantly studies have shown that monitors do in fact use less energy with black backgrounds than white, and thus this type of thing could lead to some decent energy savings if the site takes off. Once you make a search though, don’t worry about reading white text, the main body of the page is white after you search and is bordered by black. A nice compromise I think as the main problem with black is reading on it.

The search itself seems to be sort of a mix of yahoo and google. It takes google’s relevance and adds yahoo’s categories which I actually kind of like. I often switch between the two because I often find category searches easier to find new things, but if you are looking for something specific a pure search is better. Basically, most the time Google is best, but sometimes I am looking for something new so I yahoo. This has the potential to cover both aspects which would be great.

Speaking of relevance, many have questioned whether it truly is more relevant. In one article I read, they compared Google & Cuil using the search of giraffe. They pointed out that Cuil produced results that included a video game and a children’s book category while it failed to produce a link to wikipedia. I do find that it fails to bring in wikipedia a little strange, but at the same time I actually find that it brings in video games and children’s books kind of interesting. After all, if you heard of some weird giraffe game or book and you wanted to find out more about it, at least you would have had 1 result in the front page that helps you find them. I’d also point out that google has taken criticism that Wikipedia is so heavily populated on the top of every search in google, which is both helpful and annoying as by now most people know what wikipedia is anyway so if we wanted to look there, we could. But I do think that cuil brings in a lot of variety of results into a search which I think is perfect for finding exactly what you are looking for.

I do think that cuil.com may be a little early in its development. This showed when it had a load of bugs in the first couple of days where it would produce no results at all for common searches. Still, I think the engine shows a lot of promise. Many criticize that it can’t compete with the big dogs because those guys provide more than just searches. But this was an argument against Google in its early days too. I do wonder how they are planning on making money though… maybe we will be seeing a cuilsense at some point?

This got me to thinking. What album do I buy anyway? Do I go with the classic Nevermind? Or do I try out one of the less popular albums. One thing is that because Cobain died, there really aren’t a ton to choose from in the first place, but it still is a tough choice. At the end of the day, I decided it probably would suit me best if I just got the Greatest HIts album “Nirvana.”

However, this thought got me thinking a whole new set of issues. I started wondering just why in the first place we get these Greatest Hits albums? A lot of the times these songs are indeed the reason we buy previous albums in the first place, and thus is often redundant to rerelease them on a new album. Albeit this is also very convenient for those of us who missed it the first time around or those who may only have liked the hits and ended up buying all the albums previously; this would be more convenient to listen to songs.

The thing that is missed here is that more often than not, the best songs of a band are not hits, or even released to the general radio stations. In nearly every album of a band that I’ve really loved, there has been one or two songs that I just absolutely love. And this brought on the idea of a Greatest Songs album instead of Greatest Hits. Yes, this album would have many of the hits that the band had over its lifespan that people really liked that made it to the radio. But it would also contain some of those lesser known songs that were equally good, if not better.

This idea has been done to some degree in the past, but I do wish it was done far more. I think the better try at this was the Beastie Boys with their Science of Sleep album that was essentially a Greatest Hits album mixed with their favorite mixes and unreleased songs. There were also a few songs on there that were on previous albums, but never hits. I think they completely got the idea.

A Greatest Hits album isn’t necessarily bad though. Like I said they have their purposes. Especially for bands who have tons of albums and tons of hits. I don’t think that anyone can complain about the recent release of the Beatles Greatest Hits entitled “1.” But if you buy that, imagine all the great songs you are missing out on that never made it to the mainstream, many of which endured the test of time far better than those that hit the #1 spot, many turned out to be some of the better songs the Beatles ever did.