Originally Published on Whiskey in My Sippy Cup

By the time this gets posted, most of you who are unfortunate enough to read my little blog will have already voted. And I’ve waited until today to post it because I don’t even for one second want to come across as “this is who you should vote for.” YOU should vote for whoever YOU deem most worthy. This is simply putting it out there for one day, a day far away from now, when I’ll wish I could go back to this day in our history, this monumental day for our nation, and see exactly what the hell I was thinking.

I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist. I will never, ever check Catcher in the Rye out of the library. I totally believe that JFK got shot by the government to get us into ‘Nam. I am fairly sure that we have proof of extra-terrestrial contact tucked away somewhere, and the only reason they interviewed people like my skull-less uncle for Project Blue Book is to hide the evidence. To discredit sightings. To make us THINK it was insanity. Because, really, if that man told me the sky was over my head, that would only mean one thing: I was standing on it.

And so, as my paranoid little mind works, I am predicting a McCain/Palin win tonight. Well, actually, I’m predicting and Obama/Biden win, a big fat temper tantrum, and an eventual GOP win.

It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. *coughgorecough*

I hope that doesn’t happen. I dream that when the GOP starts screaming FALSE COUNTS! that the DNC remembers that we still have a president until January, and we’ll all happily wait while every single vote gets counted, while all the re-votes are cast. If we can dump $750 billion into the market; we can pay the salary of the vote counters for a few extra weeks.

Hell, we’re CREATING JOBS!

But in all sincerity, I dream that I am wrong. I dream that tomorrow night, that socialist, skinny, not-quite-black-enough Muslim terrorist is my new president. I dream that over the next eight years, he gets the chance to make every single person that threw those hideous accusations around about him eat their words.

The nature of blogging is temperamental, as the nature of bloggers tends to be willful and unpredictable. The really enthralling ones, at least. You see it in your favorite blogs: wildly passionate daily posts one month, barely connected erratic ramblings the next.

Blogging, for the most part, is best enjoyed when you can afford focus and energy, on both the parts of the writer and the reader. No one really enjoys those “I’m too busy to blog” posts, but bloggers usually have “real” jobs and responsibilities that result in our being “too busy to blog” occasionally. What to do… what to do?

I’ve always been a big fan of the unplanned hiatus, personally. My friends say it is because I prefer a sense of mystery. I say I just loathe those “I’m taking a break” posts.

Therefore, rather than plate a pile of misshappen half-baked cookies for you the last couple of months, Blog Nosh Magazine has been on a bit of an unplanned hiatus. We kept thinking we were going to update, then we got busy. Life. Who knew?

More precisely, 2008… Seriously, who knew?

The end of 2008 has come and all of us at Blog Nosh Magazine are looking forward to an energized and focused new year in 2009. Our resolutions? The return of daily featured posts, new NoshTube videos, and the launch of the promisingly tempting channels Race & Ethnicity, Travel & Expats, Personal Finance, Military, and more. We are finally revamping our Editors page and sprucing up the “About” information you all crave when considering submitting your work.

In the meantime, I am insanely proud to introduce you to one of our new Politics Channel Editors: Mr Lady from Whiskey in my Sippy Cup. Now that we see how well Blog Nosh Magazine can work, we are actively fleshing out the channels with as much diversity as we can get our hands on. Naturally, the flip side of the political coin was at the top of our list. Mr Lady’s post, What a Dream I Had, Pressed in Organdy, is the ideal introduction and hint of what finds you may expect from her.

Look for delicious daily posts beginning again January 5th! Until then, nosh on!

Nosh Notes by Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Megan Jordan from Velveteen Mind

{Originally published on Dadomatic.}

My dad is a great dad. He indelibly shaped my personality, mores, and outlook in life. Now that I am a dad too, I appreciate what he did even more. It wasn’t easy to narrow them down, but these the top ten lessons that he taught me.

1. Don’t take any shiitake from anyone. My dad was a state senator for twenty years, and he never walked away from a confrontation with the local newspapers, labor unions, and government officials. He taught me not to kowtow to anyone just because they are in lofty positions. This is a very useful attitude because if people sense that you don’t take any shiitake, they won’t give you any.

2. Obey your teachers. My dad taught me that teachers knew more than I did so I should treat them with respect. This was a rare exception to the “don’t take shiitake from anyone” lesson. Come to find out, (a) teachers very seldom dish out shiitake, and (b) they truly change the world (and not for the money), so they (c) deserve truckloads of respect.

3. Don’t follow the crowd. Initially, I thought that he was saying that most people were stupid–and I agreed with him. But I now realize that he was telling me not to follow the crowd because the crowd “mentality” can make smart people do dumb things. This is why I don’t believe in the “wisdom of the crowd” to this day.

4. Show some noblesse oblige. My dad was very big on the concept that people who are fortunate (in terms of power, prestige, or money) have the moral obligation to be kind, help others, and even answer their emails. By far, this is the most difficult lesson to implement if lots of people want something from you, but as my father taught me, you just have to deal with it.

5. Read. My dad taught me to love to read. We had hundreds of books around our house, and he bought me any book that I wanted. With his encouragement, I also spent hundreds hours in the public library too. This love of reading led to a love of doing research (in those days, in the World Book Encyclopedia!) and eventually to a love of writing.

{Originally published at Connect with Your Teens through Pop Culture and Technology}

A new book has come out about Wikipedia, How Wikipedia Works: And how you can be a part of it. I plan to write a review of the book during the coming week, however I thought that in the meantime I would share some important facts about Wikipedia that everyone should know, but might not be aware of.

1. All content in Wikipedia is completely free for anyone to use. There are no copyright restrictions.
2. Not all information is included in Wikipedia. It must be encyclopediac, neutral and verifiable.
3. The mission of Wikipedia is to make the whole world’s information available in all languages.
4. Wikipedia is just one form of a Wiki. The acronym Wiki stands for What I Know Is. A Wiki is a web page that anybody can edit (although passwords are needed in private wikis ).
5. Every page on Wikipedia has its complete history saved of every version from its first edit on.
6. Anybody can edit articles on Wikipedia.
7. As of August 2008, there were over 2,500,000 articles on Wikipedia.
8. There is no censorship on Wikipedia as long as an article meets the guidelines in number 2 above to be encyclopediac, neutral and verifiable. Therefore, there will be articles with language and material not appropriate for all.
9. There are 3 types of hyperlinks used in Wikipedia - a) external-links to pages out of Wikipedia b) internal-links to other articles within Wikipedia c) redlinks-links to articles within Wikipedia that don’t exist yet.
10. Every article has a discussion and talk page for the editors to discuss it.
11. If you see an article in Wikipedia with a yellowbar and a broom chasing dust, that means that this article needs a lot of cleaning up. This is an article ripe for edit.
12. The name for members of the Wikipedia community is Wikipedians.