While Busy Making Other Plans …

This year THE OREGONIAN published a massive 2&1/2 page crossword puzzle on a 2012 cultural theme.  So the resident puzzlers took it along to enlist Grandma Janet’s legendary crosswording skills as the highlight of Christmas Eve … supplemented by cookies and tea, of course.

In a frenzy of cooking — actually Ivi has been creating culinary delights in the kitchen every day of her winter vacation — Ivi prepares cookie assortments to gift Grandma Janet and her friends, braving the cold nights to make walking deliveries around the neighborhood.

The ingredients in some of these are fairly exotic, but I can’t shed much light on them without Ivi’s help.

Something from CNN Report:

… to remember what computers used to be like 40 – 50 years ago?  click on, then regress to enter your search …

Now, we know there is a lot of political polarization around these days, but this Slate piece attempts to explore the possible outcome of a new civil war: http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2012/11/27/civil_war_who_would_come_out_on_top_if_the_united_states_all_declared_war.html?wpisrc=obnetwork

Find out here or click on image.

Prepare to become distracted, and possibly addicted.

Small Demons says it is about “The people, places and things from books, and everywhere they can take you.”

HuffPo also has some explanation (and was the source of this discovery for me).

My so-far favorite Ted Talk of all time …

More on the topic here …

By the way, whenever we reach a family impasse when trying to decide upon which DVD to play or which Netflix movie to stream, we default to random Ted Talks to keep things moving in a positive direction. They consistently turn out to be well worth the time spent. And sometimes they can take your breath away, like the one above.