Guess which state drinks the most whiskey

I’m co-authoring an article on alcohol advertising trends for one of my jobs, so today I spent a few hours digging through industry literature to get some background information on booze consumption in the U.S. of A. Here are some fun facts I discovered:
Beer is the fifth most consumed beverage in America. Soft drinks are [...]

Diplomatic

Last Thursday, I covered a press conference at the Ferry Building in San Francisco that was hosted by President Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force. The group is comprised of 24 officials from various government agencies, and they were given 180 days to devise a national policy on preserving and cleaning up the U.S. coasts. The [...]

Spades

Behold the wise words of Bill Maher, who can always be trusted to call a spade a spade:
“Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like ‘recision,’ where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you’ve been paying into your plan for years.
When did [...]

I think every school has one of these

Currently I am navigating the fifth level of hell, also called “choosing a student loan repayment option.” The process is a sick and twisted balancing act that goes like this: choose a plan whose monthly payments are low enough that you won’t default, but not so low that it takes 20 years to pay off [...]

The wool may have just been lifted from my eyes!

I’ve wondered for years why so many conservative Christians advocate abstinence-only sex education in America’s public schools. Abstinence-only education leads to unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted pregnancies lead to every conservative Christian’s worst nightmare: abortions. If fundamentalist Christians really want to minimize/ eliminate abortions, why are they working so hard to insure that we will always [...]

For the record

The USC Daily Trojan student newspaper reported last week that the people involved in the Budlong and Adams shooting were:

Driver Cesar Osbaldo Ramirez, 25, who died.
Passengers Walter Puga, 20; Jose Alcanar, 31; and a minor whose name has not been released

LAPD Officer Ruben DelCastillo shot Ramirez in what the DT describes as a “possible narcotics [...]

I get that newspapers are dying and all, but come on

After publishing just three paragraphs on the Adams and Budlong shooting — part of which I witnessed and described here — last week, the L.A. Times still has not bothered to mention that someone died during the incident. Their one and only mention of the story:

10:55 PM | March 11, 2009

Los Angeles police shot and [...]

This didn’t even make the nightly news

My car after a parked truck was pushed into it. The pick-up was hit by a man driving an Impala after he fled a shooting a few blocks away. After the crash, the street was blocked off for hours while police searched for three armed suspects.
LOS ANGELES, 2:30 a.m.  —
The most ironic moment of [...]

So true

Last week, one of my anthropology professors gave a lecture about how the sexism that exists in street gangs is a magnified version of the sexism that exists in society as a whole. Any sexual double standard in a college student’s life is present in a street gang, but multiplied by ten: walking the fine [...]

Suddenly the GOP cares about generational theft? Ha.

Sadly, the letter to the editor I submitted to the New York Times last week was not published. I figured I would at least post it here to make myself feel better:
Re: Maine Senators Break With Republican Party on Stimulus
Feb. 11, 2009
To the Editor:
I hope John McCain and the other members of the GOP don’t [...]