(which I call my Rah-zer, just to irritate the sales geeks at the phone store), and I hate it. It is the worst phone I have owned to date, and I have owned seven or eight (first contract was about ten years ago). The Razr is next to impossible to open quickly with one hand, and if you slip, and the cover closes, the call is closed too. The numbers are entirely flat, so you have to LOOK at the phone to dial it. They are so flat and compact that I have to use a fingernail to dial to avoid pressing the wrong button. The UI is poor at best. Battery life is low, and they sound horrible. My wife has the same model, and we constantly have to repeat ourselves when conversing. The front glass cracked the first time I dropped it (there are two kinds of Razr owners - those that have dropped their phone, and those that will).

BTW, has anyone noticed that pictures taken with a cell phone are CRAP? You want to take pictures? Get a camera. The cheapest ones on the market take better pictures than cell phones.

So why did I buy this thing? We were renewing our contract with Verison, and we made the mistake of having our two college age sons with us. "Get the cool ones, get the cool ones!" So now I can relate to the metrosexuals in the phone adds, but I will probably get killed trying to drive and dial this piece of junk.

It would appear that there is quite a backlash against the "toy phone" syndrome. There are now ruggedized phones, simplified phones, and even old design phones on the market. Most of them cheap or free.

the stories about what a great job the dems are doing? You know, 'honest, transparent government', 'no more pork', blah, blah, blah, and all that other stuff. Oh, I forgot. They are doing exactly what the repubs are doing. What they have always done. Crooked as ever. My bad.

It sure is funny how many articles were run by Salon that blew Pelosi's horn the first few weeks after the dems took control. Now, nary a word... Just tumbleweeds. Oh, and stories about how the other party still seems to be in control.

Poco

not living up to expectations so now you're writing about bees? C'mon Salon, lets hear about them amazin' democrats!

Poco

P.S. I am not a republican

Same here. Did I miss something, or do they simply have to find something negative to say about Cheney? It seems like the whole article is a non-sequitur.

Poco

This what makes the cheap (or not so cheap, in the case of Coldstone) ice cream so nasty. They are both added to make lower fat ice cream "creamier". To my taste, they might just as well have added Vaseline. There is a distinct difference between creamy and greasy. Ice cream is not supposed to get stringy when it melts. To avoid both of these, my wife and I used to buy plain old Breyer's "all natural" vanilla at the grocery store. The ingredients read "milk, cream, sugar, eggs, vanilla beans", which is all you need to make absolutely fabulous vanilla ice cream.

Then one day, we picked up a box of "all natural" vanilla Breyer's, and noticed that it now had "natural guar gum" in it. Calling guar gum natural is like calling coal tar natural. You can, after all eat both, and both come from plants. Heck, hemlock is natural.

The solution to all of this? I little machine called Gelato. It is an ice cream maker that has a built-in freezer and electric mixing paddles, negating the need for salt and hand cranking. Put your ingredients in the bucket, and it will turn them into a frozen dessert in about a half hour. Once again, we are loving fantastic tasting vanilla ice cream with milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Plus, you can make sorbet, frozen coffee (mmmmm), or just about anything else you want frozen and squishy. And, you can sing loud and off-key while you use it for ambience.

For the record and to encourage those who remain silent to avoid the derision and humiliation that speaking the truth sometimes leads to, we buy our coffee from a plantation in the Kona district of Hawaii. Compared to that, Starbucks is the nastiest coffee I have ever drank (drinked, drunk, dranken?). On the other hand compared to just about anything, Starbucks is the nastiest coffee I have ever tasted. The plantation owner once asked me "You know why they flavor their coffee, don't you? Camouflage".

Poco

a danger to society, but it is anarchical.

"Blogging is more like samizdat (look it up) or Tom Paine's pamphleteering. And what is wrong with informational anarchy?" --L.W.M.

I consider it anarchical more-so than samizdat because it conjures the image of an unruly crowd all shouting their opinions, most of which are opposing and/or wrong. Samizdat was the expression of the voices of the oppressed. I hardly think of bloggers as oppressed. Opinionated and attention starved perhaps, but not oppressed.

I just don't put much stock in it, or go to the blogosphere for news. Ever. Not left. Not right. It may serve some purpose if it debunks some news story or other. However, I have found that more often than not, other established news outlets are better at that than blogs are. Just today, the Chicago Tribune debunked a story about Barack Obama that the Chicago Sun-Times had put a positive spin on.

I would hope that no one here is so ignorant of history and the nature of man to not know what arises from anarchy. "Leadership". The guy with the biggest club and mob "leads".