Round and Round

What comes around goes a-Round Up. Yeah, I'm all about the heavy metal.

In this round up: NPR's speech coach, best brainy podcasts, natural makeup, anti-bacterial soap = the anti-Christ, consumer product health/ecology/social goodness review site, roasted tomato sauce recipe, blogging life in culinary school, blogging life in creative writing school, wanna-be Consumerist, universal health care or revolution - those are the options.

So you have to record a bunch of podcasts for a distance learning course, or you just want to impress friends on the phone, you too can learn the tips and tricks of NPR's speech coach. Via Not Martha.

I've come to realize that my more tedious work tasks are much less tedious when completed whilst listening to something like NPR. I contemplated looking into audio books. Then I saw Not Martha's link to the discussion of intellectually stimulating podcasts at the AskMetafilter.

Looks like I'm not the only person into less chemically evil beauty products. Grist has an article about the recession-defying boom in natural personal-care product sales. Via Re-Nest.

Per Re-Nest anti-bacterial soap ingredient triclosan is El Devilo, but it was two for one at Stater Bros., so I just bought me a gallon of it. Apparently my natural liquid hand soap buying is not recession-defying. But their Method hand wash isn't perfect. So there. OK, I'm just trying to make my hands feel less infested with resistant bacteria by putting down Re-Nest. But, dude, where's the love for Desert Essence’s product Castile Liquid Soap with Organic Tea Tree Oil?

Add GoodGuide to your informed consumer armory. This site rates personal care products and household cleaners based on their health, environmental, and social impact. Via Re-Nest.

Inspired by Chef Rebecca to roast all the tomatoes in my kitchen, I found this Roasted Tomato Sauce recipe on Serious Eats.

I think this blog, 19 Months, about going to the Culinary Institute of America will surely cure me of any tiny fantasy I might have of going to cooking school. Hell, I don't like standing in line at the grocery store, standing for the duration of your class day? Hell to the no. Via Serious Eats.

Sort of parallel, but probably not so much new journalism as new agey, my dear friend Jonathan is currently attending the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop and blogging about it and life during it. So if you ever thought you wanted your MFA in creative writing, but you want to kill that dream dead dead dead, click here. Not really. The blog's a fun read.

Totally contemplating parlaying my extreme spreadsheet of grocery prices in the Fullerton area into a Consumerist-esque weekly post. Thoughts, questions, comments, concerns?

I finally watched Michael Moore's Sicko the other night and while I'm not sure trying to get 9/11 first responders treated at Gitmo is really communicating a message to anyone who doesn't already get it, I liked the film.

More importantly Sicko clarified the issues and gave me the vocabulary to enunciate what I think this country needs: free, universal health care for life, to abolish health insurance companies, and to regulate pharmaceutical companies like public utilities. Not coincidentally, these turn out to be Mr. Moore's positions as well. In case you were getting confused by the jargon (I was), universal health care has also been called socialized medicine, single payer health care, Punishing the sick by jacking up prescription drug "co-pays" is a particularly poignant issue in my house. If you want to help, click here for a long, somewhat dated, list of opportunities to do so, including contacting your representatives and the presidential candidates (which still includes like everybody and their mother, well, and your mother if you're Chelsea Clinton).

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