- Think the housing market is out of control?  The wedding market is going just as crazy.  So crazy that some couples are taking Wedding Loans.

    - You're forgiven if you're thinking about the weekend today.  It's going to be gorgeous and fun, with these events all starting up:
          - Children's Festival
          - Cloverdale Rodeo
          - Chinatown Night Market

    - There's a bunch of breakups in Hollywood today.  Shania Twain and Mutt Lange.  Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson. Oh, and one new crazy couple - Britney Spears and Mel Gibson vacationing together.

    - If you thought the story Nat and Drew discussed this week about letting your kids become Free Range was crazy, check out what they do to children in Bulgaria.

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Twitter is down for the second day in a row.

Facebook is MIA too.

How does that Joni Mitchell song go? “You never know what you got til it’s gone .. “

Yeah, well the Twitternets were my paradise, now they’re a parking lot.

I feel naked and empty today without my “friends.”

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Jennifer Love Hewitt did. So did Minka Kelly and Jessica Simpson.

Lately it’s Jennifer Aniston opening the gates to Wonderland for John to play in with his all day ride pass.

Which means she’s seeing a lot of this face.

Ahh the sex face. I still don’t have a copy of Guitar Hero III to play in the mirror, so I don’t know what mine looks like. I don’t want to know. But I’m certain this is John Mayer’s.

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Jen’s back at work, so that means the cellar is getting re-stocked for the return of Wine Wednesdays.

Last night Jen was telling me a story about a tasting they had at work earlier in the week. Jen’s company reps Gabbiano. It’s a winery from Italy with a great heritage, and an absolutely horrible label.

And that’s the problem. The wine inside is perfectly brilliant, but in this world where few of us are wine connoisseurs, but all of us are wine lovers - we have to judge the juice by it’s bottle. Gabbiano’s Pinot Grigio is an excellent selection for this smokin hot weekend we’ve got coming up. Floral, crisp and just right for the heat while the kids run through the sprinkler. It’s just $10.99 at the liquor store, but when placed up against Voga, another Italian Pinot Grigio that’s $4 more expensive, it’s getting killed at the till.

Do a blind tasting and you’ll probably pick Gabbiano. Voga isn’t bad, it’s just the Gabbiano is better. However, we don’t do our buying by taking a blind taste test. We taste with our eyes before we taste with our tongue, and just one look at the Voga bottle will have you whipping out $15 faster than you can say “Hey, it looks a lot like the Voss water bottle, doesn’t it?”

So if you’re rocking the bbq this weekend, or just chilling in the backyard and watching the petals fall off the tulips, pick up the Gabbiano, and decant it in an empty Voss bottle. Your friends won’t know the difference.

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Sometimes the best perspective doesn’t come from the most qualified candidate, it can come from someone who is actually very under qualified.

It’s happened in hockey a lot.

Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player in the history of the game, but when he was hired as Coach of the Phoenix Coyotes, he had never stood behind a bench or run a practice in his life. Sure, he had been to lots of practices, and he had sat on lots of benches in front of coaches, so he understood the job, but he had no experience doing the job.

Same for Garth Snow. One day he was the 3rd string goalie for the New York Islanders, the next day he was the General Manager because the owner “”knew what he could do.” Garth had no managerial experience, but by all accounts, has done a bang up job since getting the gig.

More recently the Vancouver Canucks ownership set out to search for an experienced hockey man to be General Manager of their team. Instead of hiring any of the available and experienced GMs currently out of work, the team went the other way and hired someone from across the table - an agent. Mike Gillis had never been a GM before, but like Gretzky, he had seen how others did the job and he was involved in assessing talent from his own side of the business.

Sometimes hiring someone with no direct experience for your job opening gives you a chance to bring in fresh perspectives and ideas to your work place. If the Coyotes had hired an experienced coach, or the Islanders or Canucks an experienced GM, they would simply be re-trying tactics that, in the past, had gotten the person fired. It would be simply recycling old ideas in a new workplace.

Doing things the way they’ve always been done, or accepted to be done in an industry is not always acceptable.

When you’re trying to rebuild or reimagine a business often you’re told to “think outside the box,” perhaps hiring outside that box goes right along with it.

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DONATED: $2 330
GOAL: $10 000
REMAINING: $7 670

A couple cheques just landed in my lap and immediately went in to the Team Diabetes donation jar.

The big one is for a voice session I did for Western Financial, the smaller one is for the Links for a Cause in my sidebar courtesy of TextLinkAds. Next month I’ll be getting a cheque for my Google AdSense that I run with each post.

I’ve committed to Freelancing for Charity as I get ready for the Easter Island Marathon in June 09 with Team Diabetes. I need to get to $10 000 and these latest cheques will nearly double the fund raising efforts.

If you have need for an emcee, spokesperson, voice talent or anything along those lines, I’d appreciate you hiring me. I will do the work for you in exchange for a donation of the usual fees to my Team Diabetes jar. You get a professional product AND a tax receipt, I get closer to my goal.

This week, now that Z has started daycare, I’ve had some time to start running again. I’ve been lazy. I’m only running about 3k and huffing and puffing the whole way - a far cry from the 42k I will do in a year.

Team Diabetes sets out fundraising benchmarks to hit as you get ready for a marathon. My first one is for $2500 in October, I’m well on my way to making that milestone!

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    - Mariah Carey went on Ellen talking about how she wants to have babies!  Huh? She's been married a week.  She'd better read this study showing that having children makes married couples LESS happy.

    - Further to Nat and Drew's interview with FreeRangeKids this morning, comes this blog entry about a woman who let her daughter fall.  On purpose!

    - Duffy's album, Rockferry, is out today.  Some are comparing her to Amy Winehouse - but in a good way.

    - Jessica Simpson is single.  Who got next?

    - SJP is on the cover of Vogue and is probably cool with that ugly hat she wore to the SATC London premiere.

    - Britney's been off the radar for too long.  She got in an accident today that should get her back on ET right quick.

    - Barbara Walters and Star Jones won't let it die.

    - Miley Cyrus sits down for another photo shoot.  Moms will like this one.

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    - The cast for 90210 2.0 is filling out - with old names.  Jennie Garth is on board as a main character, now Tori Spelling has signed in for a recurring role.

    - Check out these amazing tricks your cell phone can do.

    - I found a great check list with all the good and bad plastic in your cupboard.

    - Check out this awesome Mac inspired video, it's gone hugely viral over the weekend.

    - Want to eat healthier?  Buy healthier groceries.  Here are 2 tips:
               1.  Most everything you need is around the outside of the store.  Veg, meat, dairy, grain.  The middle is where all the processed stuff is.
               2.  Check out this healthy shopping list, it will help you make better choices

    - Remember when Carrie went through the nameplate necklace phase and then the big corsage phase on SATC?  Yeah, now she's going through a really ugly hat phase.

    - The latest BC Ferry visited London today.

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I think we’ve established the existence of BPA in our children’s bottles is a bad thing. Retailers have quickly scrambled to remove them from shelves after the Canadian Government took steps to label BPA a dangerous substance.

So we’ve taken steps to save our kids. Now it’s time to have a look through the rest of our cupboards and see what’s doing damage to us.

After reading all the blog posts on the topic, a colleague emailed me this great Plastic Checklist.

It has everything broken down by manufacturer, product, and recycle number. It explains everything simply, and if you find anything on the list in red in your cupboards, you’ve got to get rid of it.

Actually, my colleague is done with plastic, and the microwave altogether. I might be heading that direction too.

**UPDATE** for some reason the links above don’t link directly to the pdf file. Please right click on the picture or the text link and choose “Save Link As” to download the file and view it.

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The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. [source]

Ah yes, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats from TS Eliot. It was a fave, back in the day.

Jen and I have borrowed a page from it, as we give everything in our house an ineffable effable effanineffable name.

We have named all of Zacharie’s toys. And we have named our plants.

Jen has a had a small tree for a number of years. She named it Feenie. Yes, after the Iron Chef, Rob Feenie. I’m thinking she had a wee crush on the man. Last year, when Jen got another, smaller tree of the same type he instantly became Mini Feenie.

Now, as we get ready to landscape our backyard, we’re out looking at and buying trees. Jen came home with a wee Japanese Maple last week. It needed a name. An ineffable effable effanineffable name.

We stopped and thought about it for a while, and decided that all the trees in our yard should be named after chefs. We already had Feenie, so this little maple should also get the name of a famous chef. Vij? Flay? Tojo? No.

Meet Morimoto, or Mori for short.

We stuck with the Iron Chef theme and named him after the legendary Iron Chef Japanese, Masaharu Morimoto. I actually voted for Masaharu as the tree name, we figured Z would have an easier time saying Mori.

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