I can’t imagine too many people are in favor of high-fructose corn syrup outside of the mega-factory-farms (though I’m sure it’s not limited to them) who make heavy use of the corn subsidies and the food producers who purchase it as a cheaper alternative to sugar in the US. It’s the subsides that make HCFS cheaper. While some people have been complaining about it for a long time, others are just now beginning, including the city of San Francisco. There are a lot of natural/organic-y/whole-foods-y products that shun HFCS, but I was pretty surprised to see Bullseye’s new packaging the other day when I was checking out Duc Loi Supermarket.

There’s a lot I like about Obama and have since watching his speech at the 2004 Convention (below) and soon after reading Dreams of My Father. What amazed me most about that book was its openness. Here’s a guy who has chosen a public path where every aspect of his life will be scrutinized talking about race, drugs, poverty. And not just talking about them in generalities, but about his personal feelings and past behaviours: smoking pot, trying cocaine, black power groups, being of mixed race, … I was impressed, somewhat by what he had to say, but even more so by the fact that he was saying it, open, honest. I wanted to see more of this guy.

In the four years since my introduction there have been many more opportunities for me to learn more about Obama and what he wants of and for the world we live in. I can’t say that I’m worried about the details. Details are things that I don’t have the time, energy, or desire to concern myself with. I feel like we are responsible for trying to get to know our elected officials before voting for them and then trust that they do what’s best from there.

This trust depends on, in part, an openness of the official and government in general. So that if a citizen is motivated to check up and see what the official (or government as a whole) has been doing they can easily and quickly get access to the full details. There are situations where this is not possible when the security of our nation is at stake, but that is the only acceptable reason preventing access to information.

To that end Obama has authored a Presidential Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act and completely overhauled Whitehouse.gov providing a blog with feeds for a plethora of subjects (which can be subscribed to en-mass here.) This coupled with plans like the one to create a site for tracking federal government tax expenditures shows that openness is the default, that the only thing required to find information should be to want it and look. That’s change America, and the world, needs. I can only hope that I’m not wrong and that we have it.

2004 Convention

2009 Inauguration

Neces.com is the #1 result for “madam tuso” and #2 for “madame tuso” on google (and does pretty well on other search engines.) While there seems to be a lot at work in this, page rank doesn’t seem to be a factor since my site’s pagerank was 1 the last time I looked. The above searches point at this album in my gallery. Those pictures were taken when I was in Vegas for a friend’s wedding and hanging out with another friend Ivy who lived there at the time.

So why is neces.com the #1/#2 result? Well one of the major contributing factors has to be the spelling of madame, madam when I put the photos in my gallery. It seems to be a very common type-o according to google trends, about 75% of the correct madame tuso (though the data for the terms seems funky.) My only other guess is that my site is a good answer for the search terms, when I get visits from those keywords people view an average of 6 pages and spend a few minutes on my site. Granted these aren’t very busy keywords, few hundred a month, but I still think it’s cool.

So the title of this post, 67 Countries, is about the number of countries I get visits from according to Google Analytics. I have hits from 6 of the 7 continents, that’s pretty cool, not sure about Antarctica, google analytics doesn’t seem to show it . The top country, not surprisingly is the United States. The Netherlands, United Kingdom (home of the original Madame Tuso’s,) Germany, and Sweden round out the top 5. The rest of the top 15 are dominated by, somewhat surprisingly to me, by middle eastern countries including Israel, Pakistan, and Iran, though by that point the number of hits per month have dropped off considerably.

The only other thing my site (seems) to show up often for is me. So I’ve gone international, pretty cool eh?

The worst negative ad I can remember.

And an excellent response.

The race has been called for Hagan, but results aren’t yet complete. Dole was an incumbent and projected to win until recently. I wonder how much this ad and response had to do with the outcome. It has received a lot of national coverage so I would imagine it’s all over the place in NC. Using an ad like that shows a lack of character as far as I’m concerned so regardless of reason I think it’s a good result. I feel like there’s been a lot of things along the same lines being lobbed at Obama by Republicans with for the most part the exception of McCain, Palin being the most prominent and vocal of them.