Round Up

In this round up: games for two, awesome music blog, starting seeds, IKEA cookery, Girl Scout cookies, consumer journalism, personal finance in the end of days, greenhouse gas emissions, nature makes you smarter, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, California's sentencing sucks, Teague retroactivity, kick off your shoes, Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, and another Shepard Fairey poster.

Also, I've added a few more resources to my page of parenting resources.

Bob and Rebecca gave David and me Carcassonne for Hanukkah 2008. We actually played it at least once a night for the first two weeks after we received it. Now we're sort of in a gaming frame of mind. Which makes the AskMeFi discussion of great games for two people particularly timely.

Carrie Brownstein, one of the members of the awesome band Sleater Kinney, has her very own music blog via NPR called Monitor Mix. Definitely worth a listen.

As discussed in my post about Mark Bittman's recommendation to use fresh basil and parsley, I'm planning a minor expedition into the world of container gardening this year. Re-Nest has a nice post about when and how to start your seeds inside, including a handy link to Organic Gardening's article about when to start seeds.

Michele Humes over at Serious Eats did an incredible job assembling the food available at the grocery department of IKEA into some pretty impressive dishes. She was refreshingly frank in her review.

If you like the pronounced flavor of oily fish like sardines and mackerel, you'll probably enjoy this hors d'oeuvre. If you don't, you'll probably gag.

I'm totally serving Lingonberry-Glazed Sausage Bites with Crispy Onions at my next dinner party.

Erin Zimmer, also at Serious Eats, reminded us that it is Girl Scout Cookie Time and also provided a few links to recipes for homemade versions.

The Consumerist, which was recently purchased by the Consumers Union, posted an interesting summary of an article by Trudy Lieberman in the Columbia Journalism Review about the death of true consumer journalism.

The Consumerist also posted a list of good habits for personal finance a deep recession. Much of it is quite helpful, though, "You should have an emergency fund, with 3-6 months of living expenses in a savings account," seems utterly unrealistic to me. Am I wrong?

Jon Rynn posted a summary of his findings about the sources of greenhouse gas emissions over at Gristmill.

And just when you thought all environmental news is depressing: The Blue Marble reports that a study showed that walking in nature for as little as 30 minutes, regardless of whether you enjoy the experience, helps improve memory and attention by 20 percent.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission is holding public hearings and initiating a practitioners' advisory group. The first public hearing is in Atlanta, Georgia, February 10-11. So if you have "any suggestions regarding changes to the Sentencing Reform Act and other relevant statutes, the federal sentencing guidelines and policy statements, and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that," you think, "will further the statutory purposes of sentencing," you should totally go. Via Prof. Berman's sentencing blog.

Prof. Berman also crowned California as the most dysfunctional state in terms of sentencing.

If you're one of those post-conviction practitioners who loiters around here when you should be working on your responses to habeas petitions, check out Christopher N. Lasch's forthcoming article on Teague retroactivity from Yale's American Criminal Law Review as summarized by Prof. Berman.

We have a friend who's a doctor and has a small child and is a big stickler about taking shoes off in the house. We thought he was just OCD, or suffering from PTSD due to his internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta. But according to Re-Nest, there are 37 different reasons he might be perfectly sane about this whole shoe taking off thing.

Consumerist recommends something my friend Julia recommended long ago: head to Habitat for Humanity's ReStore for material for your next home project. There are two in Orange County, California, at 12827 Harbor Blvd in Garden Grove and 2200 S Ritchey St. in Santa Ana. There are two in Baltimore, Maryland, at 505 Kane St., and 1300 N Fulton Ave. There's one in Richmond, Virginia, at 1901 Roane St. There's one in New Port Richey, Florida, at 3531 Grand Blvd. I think that covers our top reader locations.

Birdie Loo of Dear Ada fame loves Shepard Fairey's poster for the animal adoption group Adopt A Pet and so do I. It explores many of the same themes addressed in my post-election patriotism furrday post.

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