Argh...

I have to work eight days straight from today... a combination of doing a swap for someone and changing shifts as I'm changing schools. Not fun, but I had a pretty good run before with getting short weeks when changing.

So this may be the last post for a while as I think I'll be shoring up my energy by actually trying to sleep or something radical like that.

Some of the usual suspects for you.

Firstly, the global war against food is heating up, both in the US and here. The first article really goes into a lot of detail about how bio-fuels will really end up causing famine for two billion people. Scary and anger-inducing reading.

While on the subject of the US - there's this story about how there are 90 guns for every 100 people there. That's the most in the world, by the way. Other tidbits from the story, "About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, " "There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," and "U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms," What a fun place to live! It boggles my mind how the whole place hasn't dissolved into civil war again. Then again, with the military/police having a lot of the biggest and baddest guns, I guess that keeps the population in place. That and having them glued to the screen...

There were also a lot of terrible fires in Greece this week. They nearly burned Olympia, but they managed to destroy a lot of towns and villages and ruin the livelihoods of thousands of people. Very sad...

But, oddly, the articles that stuck out for me this time were mostly of a positive nature.

There was an interesting one about the upcoming Speed Racer movie. Any movie that uses a camera that needs bodyguards is going to be interesting!

Also there was this article about how to become more energy efficient. It still trumpets solar as the way to go, although there are a lot of interesting wind turbines out there, which I'm becoming more interested in - primarily as wind power can be harnessed any time of the day or night.

An Aussie comic, Brendon Burns won the main prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. There are quite a few videos of him on YouTube, including a session where he faces off with Mark 'Chopper' Reid! Quite a funny vid, but be warned, the language is not suitable for kidlets.

There was an interesting questionnaire/quiz thing about if you're a traveller or a tourist. Normally I don't do these kinds of things, but this one piqued my interest. I scored 22 so that puts me in 'Traveller' status, which was a pleasant surprise. I thought I'd be a tourist, but hey...

Finally two food stories. One about the horrific varieties of deep-fried fare available at the Texas State Fair. You can buy deep fried latte, Coke, guacamole, peach cobbler, sweet potato pie and cookie dough! Yoiks, I can feel my arteries hardening as I type... The other contains some interesting Middle Eastern rice recipes. I can't really do them here in Japan, but that lamb dish at the end looks very tasty indeed (Mum, are you reading this? Hint! Hint!).

That's it. I'm off to work. Catchya later!