Crowns

Cool hats

Book Your Dates

A good number of our winter 2010/spring 2010 workshops have been posted online and you can find them right here.

Once again we have workshops scheduled that fit the needs of teachers K-12. I hope to see you at a few of these offerings.

O Pumpkin Pie, Where Art Thou?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

If you come up blank in the pumpkin pie department this year you can find out why right about....here.

How on earth did we as a nation let Nestle gain control of 85% of the pumpkin pie goo supply? We need to investigate this at once!

A Good Read (Japan Version)

I just finished this incredible book about the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, Japan. As some of you may recall I spent ten days in Tokyo this summer as a fellow on the Keizai Koho Teacher Fellowship trip and Tsukiji was high on my list of incredible things I visited while in Japan.

Author/anthropologist Theodore Bestor gets to the heart of the world's largest fish market while explaining how this place functions. Bestor examines the complex organization of the market and the evolution of trading practices in and around Tsukiji. He also delves into globalization and the shrinking of the world.

Did you know that Tsukiji does about $6 billion in business each year? Did you know a tuna caught off the coast of Maine on a Monday can be auctioned at Tsukiji on Wednesday of that same week after being flown to Japan in a specially designed frozen tuna container? Did you know that the sea urchin you ate in the Ginza district of Tokyo came all the way from Nova Scotia?

Give it a look. I guarantee that you will never look at sushi, or markets, the same way again.

Domo.

The Times They Are A Changing

Click on image to expand.

SMG Leaders 8th Week

$773.00. That is all that is now separating the top two teams in the fall 2009 Stock Market Game after a week of BIG changes.

1st place- Mountain View High, $205,262
2nd place- Westminster, $204,489
3rd place- Mountain View High, $169,215
4th place- Parkview High, $146,666
5th place- Mount Zion High of Carrollton, $140,606

This is really going to be close.

Weekend Reading (Movie Edition)

Looking for something to watch over Thanksgiving break? Have I got just the movie for you. "The Lives of Others" is hands down my favorite movie of all time. The term "masterpiece" gets thrown around in movie circles about as much as a beach ball at a Dave Matthews concert but I think it is a fitting description of this movie.

With so much talk these days about Socialist this and Socialism that, I believe "The Lives of Others" goes a long way in explaining why communist states fail in the end. Ultimately the people, the average citizens just trying to survive and prosper, see through it all. In the end human kindness and the desire to be free win out over the system and the system collapses like the Soviet Union did in 1991.

"Would you like this gift wrapped?....no, it's for me."

The Sign

If this isn't a sign that the world is about to end I
don't know what is.