Heads up! Daylight savings time ends on Sunday. Don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour. We’ve all earned an extra hour of sleep this weekend, that’s for sure. Between registration opening for classes this week and early voting ending, you deserve a break.
That brings us to the why-in-the-world-don’t-we-get-a-vacation-before-Thanksgiving-break edition of...
Darts & Laurels
We need to start off with a huge shout out to everyone helping with the recovery efforts of the northern East Coast. Hurricane Sandy affected hundreds of thousands of people. We give a thank-you-and-keep-up-the-hard-work-our-thoughts-are-with-you LAUREL to the first responders for Hurricane Sandy. Visit redcross.org to find out how to help.
Remember Michael Brown? He was the director of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina, and he didn’t exactly handle things very well. “People are going to get frustrated — I’d just encourage people to just kind of chill out over this whole situation,” Brown said about the response to Hurricane Sandy. We give a stop-being-a-terrible-person DART to Michael Brown. President Bush might’ve thought he did a “heckuva job,” but the rest of us don’t.
In a weird, but awesome, display of bipartisanship, Mayor Bloomberg endorsed President Obama for reelection. He’s been pretty critical of both candidates and refused to endorse either of them. He’s basing this decision on how he sees the environment and climate changing. We give a good-for-you-Bloomberg-sorry-your-city-got-run-over-by-a-hurricane LAUREL to Mayor Bloomberg.
Chris Brown is still a terrible person, in case you forgot he was still a thing. He dressed as a terrorist for Halloween. Yes, he went as a terrorist, with a group of his friends also dressed as terrorists. Imagine that, the way someone dresses up can be insensitive. We give a just-because-it’s-Halloween-doesn’t-give-you-an-excuse-to-be-a-butthead DART to Chris Brown or anyone who used blackface this year.
Paying for things online just got a lot easier, which means spending money just got a lot easier, too. The new Google Wallet feature will save your billing and shipping information, so you don’t have to type in dozens of fields to purchase something online. This will only work for sites that accept Google Wallet as a payment option, but this streamlines stuff that doesn’t need to be streamlined. We give a who-needs-to-manage-money-anyway-budgets-be-damned LAUREL to Google Wallet.
Reach for some carrot sticks instead of french fries, everyone. There is a new initiative to remind high schoolers to make healthy choices — but the options provided for them to choose from are still not healthy. This specifically looks at snack food, not what’s available in the cafeteria line. We give a healthy-isn’t-a-bad-thing-it’s-a-smart-thing DART to high schools.
On a nerdy note, Gmail released a new design for its message composition. Now, it just pops up into the existing window, instead of opening a new tab. “The big improvement is that the interface is clean, stripped of all the whistles, whitespace everywhere,” said Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic. “It’s ultrasimple.” We give a this-is-a-step-in-the-right-direction LAUREL to Google … again.
That’s all for this week, folks. Have a safe and great weekend, and we’ll see you back next week!
