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hmmm… Actually, that hit a little too close to home.

hacking into the Olympic committee’s database using his mirror that looked like a Mac and faking her typing test results. The princess hotly replied…

I traveled, lost myself, loved it. I met you, settled down, loved that more.

The villagers’ inability to understand her depressed the princess. Even worse, she felt she didn’t recognize herself now that the witches had transformed her.

A Prius has a much more complicated drivetrain than a regular car. This means it takes a fair bit of energy to make and may not be as durable. It’s also about as big and heavy as a regular sedan. Once again, this means there’s lots of energy and materials going in to each one. Even regular cars take more energy to make than they will burn driving down the road. It also accelerates quickly, which is nice for people who want to feel like they are driving a high-end car, but terrible for efficiency. And the mileage isn’t THAT hot – my little $1300 1996 Toyota Tercel gets 46 mpg. Most Priuses don’t get better than 50. Even without the batteries, I think Priuses and other hybrids (with the exception of the insight, which is actually small and light and gets 70 mpg) are just ways for Americans to keep buying nice things and consuming more than our fair share of energy and resources but with the added benefit of a little undeserved moral superiority.

Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma-chameleon? A comma joke! English nerds unite!

I actually don’t like the use-the-comma-when-there’s-a-pause rule. It’s very widely used, but it too often leads to unnecessary, incorrect and potentially confusing commas in the middle of very long sentences.

My pet peeve is seeing random commas between the subject and verb of a sentence because the writer felt like the reader needed to take a breath. For example, “The tall green apple tree at the foot of the hill at my grandfathers farm, is dying.” Even more common, people tend to put a comma before a conjunction in a simple sentence when there are two verbs. For example, “The tall green apple tree is at the foot of the hill, and grows badly in the partial shade.”

As you explained (very well, I thought) commas set off dependent clauses and separate independent clauses from each other. I think a good rule of thumb for comma usage is that, unless commas are used in a list, a date, or an address, you should be able to remove the part of the sentence set off by commas and still have a complete sentence. For example, “The apple tree, which my grandfather planted at the bottom of the hill, is dying” makes sense if you take out the part offset by commas and just have “The apple tree is dying.”

When commas are used correctly, they are a great way to help the reader break a sentence up into digestible blocks and figure out which parts are the most important. I think American schools often do a disservice by teaching that commas are stage directions instead of meaningful structural elements.

Canadians, these food labeling standards apply in the US. You might want to research what they mean in Canada – I’m not sure.

Also, real pasture-raised eggs and other animal products have tons of naturally occurring omega fatty acids and almost no bad cholesterol. I don’t know what they add to the food to make grocery store eggs have omegas, but I like the idea of eating eggs that just naturally have them because the chickens ate things that chickens were designed to eat.

For eggs, cheese, milk, meat, etc, I usually buy them from the farmer if I can. The best way to know how things were raised is to be able to ask the person that raised them. You can find local farms at http://www.localharvest.org.

When at the grocery store, I usually buy from Organic Valley. Many other large organic companies have worked to weaken organic standards. Organic Valley works to strengthen them, and they are a bona fide cooperative of small family farms. Organic Valley eggs won’t be pasture-raised (I don’t think) but they’ll be from a company and a farmer that actually care.

We have some great ones in North Carolina.

Appalachian State has a concentration in sustainable technology for it’s industrial tech majors. That includes everything from wind power to green building to electric vehicles. (http://www.asu.edu)

Central Carolina Community College has one of the only sustainable agriculture degree programs in the US. (http://www.ccccc.edu)