Oprah may be the most recent, and most famous, amateur marathoner, but she's certainly not the first. After reading this article, I had a vague memory of a TV movie that I watched as a kid, about a housewife who finds empowerment by running a marathon. I looked it up - it was called See How She Runs and came out in 1978. I don't think you can blame Oprah for that. It may be more trendy now, but running the marathon "just to finish" has been around for a few decades.

There's a bit of confused chemistry in this article - sodium hydroxide is neither "volatile" or "organic". (It may be the main ingredient in Drano - oooh, scary - but it's also used to make soap and lots of other products.) The rayonizing process is environmentally problematic, but not because of sodium hydroxide specifically.

What is the obsession with video on previously textual web sites? I didn't get to discover what the author has to say about Hillary Clinton, because I'm at work, and I don't want to turn on my speakers. I can't see it at work, because I have an old computer that won't play the videos. It would be one thing if the video was adding to the story in some way, but there's no reason to have video here - it's just a way to look "hip", and exclude large numbers of your readers.

Oh well, based on the comments it doesn't look like I'm missing much...

I like the idea of the Smart Car. I drive a Toyota Corolla, and I rarely use the back seat - a two seater with decent trunk space would be great for me. However, it can be difficult to drive a small car when you're surrounded by big ones.

Try backing out of a parking spot, when there's a massive minivan or SUV on both sides of you. You are completely blind and can't see if there's someone about to step in your way, or smash into your bumper. Every morning, I have to make a right turn onto a busy street, and every morning, a minivan or truck will pull next to me, trying to turn left. My view is completely blocked, and I won't be able to see oncoming traffic - I just have to wait until the road hog turns left and gets out of my line of vision.

I love my small car, but there are definite disadvantages when you're driving on streets dominated by massive minivans, tremendous trucks and stupendous SUV's.

Amazon may be offering discounts now, but will they last? One of my reader blogs has already reported that Amazon is discontinuing the discount for books originally sold as mass market paperbacks (i.e. genre fiction like romance, mystery, etc.) These books make up a big part of the reading market, even though they're not as prestigious as other books. I expect that discounts will start to disappear on other types of books as well, except perhaps for a few bestsellers.

I can take a few "Sex and the City" references, if it means politicians are actually paying attention to issues that affect single women. (They aren't that different from issues that affect other voters, but there are some issues that affect singletons more directly.) It's a vast improvement from previous elections - I remember one candidate in the last election stating that singles weren't "real Americans". (Not that I care that much about being a "real American" but it definitely symbolized his contempt for anyone who wasn't married with 2.2 kids and living in the suburbs.)

These books sound great - I'll definitely be picking up the book on knife techniques. However, I wish someone would put out a great DVD set that matched up with these great instructional books. I had to learn to cook from nothing - my mother cooked every night, but she didn't allow anyone to set foot in "her" kitchen to "make a mess", so I had never seen anyone cooking until I went away to college. And I found it very difficult to learn to cook from books - how do you know what "saute" means if you've never heard the word before and have only seen it in a cookbook? Even a great book about techniques can't really show you in the same way a video could. I only really became a confident cook after watching a lot of cooking shows on TV and copying what they did - it was so much easier than trying to figure it out from some text and perhaps a small illustration, with no personal experience to guide me. Unfortunately, most cooking shows aren't very instructional, especially when it comes to techniques, and I can only think of a very few that are available on DVD (some of the old Julia Child episodes, some Jacques Pepin videos that you can order through PBS).

I think there's a great niche for a cookbook author who wants to branch out.

I have to disagree with you when it comes to Huckabee. He may not have gotten a lot of coverage at the beginning of the campaign (when he was mostly unknown), but he's gotten lots of coverage in the past month or so, including lavish and fawning coverage by the NY Times. (Which seems to swoon every time he's mentioned, and rarely mentions any of his ultra-conservative views.) I can't say whether he gets this kind of coverage on TV - I don't watch those yappy political shows - but I don't see any "media hostility" toward him. More like "media butt-kissing".