4166

Attention John Edwards' supporters

RealClearPolitics provides a lesson in economics.

"Of the charter members of the first Forbes 400 in 1982, only 32 remain today. Far from a country where only the rich get richer, the wealthy in the US are very much a moving target. While there are 74 Forbes 400 members who inherited their entire fortune, 270 members are entirely self-made. Though many attended Harvard, Yale and Princeton, there are countless stories within of high school and college dropouts, not to mention others who grew up extremely poor. Politicians who regularly engage in class warfare would do well to keep the Forbes 400 out of the hands of their constituents, because it makes a mockery of the kind “Two Americas” rhetoric suggesting the existence of a glass ceiling that keeps hard workers at the bottom of the economic ladder. To read the Forbes 400 is to know with surety that the U.S. is still very much the land of opportunity. . .

For the hard of hearing, Advanced Bionics founder Alfred Mann (#204) developed cochlear implants, and for those who are immobile, Stryker Corp. CEO John Brown (#380) makes artificial hips and limbs to help the bedridden stand. With cancer still a tragic fact of life for many, Abraxis CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong (#117) presently has the patents for 30 different treatments that will hopefully over time help to make cancer go the way of polio." [unless crafty politicians can tax or sue them out of creativity and existence]

HT HP

It's never about health, it's always the "gap"

The USA imports working-poor people because we have trouble growing our own. Our own poor may be homeless, or mentally ill, or elderly or in fragile health--essentially, unemployable; our own social agencies don't know what to do except offer them government assistance, insurance and welfare. So we wink at the working-poor from other countries who because of language or illegal status, must live a reduced lifestyle. We have a broken, unworkable, 20 year old immigration law, and a Congress who can't figure out how to fix it without swamping our social services and education system. The primary goal of both Republicans and Democrats appears to be to log more constituents for their parties.

Even with a jump start over the border, or a generational family tradition of government assistance to replace fathers-in-the-home (the primary cause of home grown poverty in the USA is single motherhood), our poor are better off than the poor in most countries because we set the bar very low. To qualify for SCHIP, our health insurance for children of low income employed people, the family of four income eligibility is at at 250% of the poverty level, or a little over $51,000 for a family of four. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like poor to me--remember, income isn't wealth.

No matter, though. It's always about the GAP between the rich and poor or the poor and middle class; it's never about the poor as real people with real health problems, or even their income. Even if every poor person in this country had full health, dental, vision and cosmetic surgery insurance with pet insurance thrown in for Spot or Fluffy, if someone richer had more, could elect a higher standard of care, it would be a terrible burden to bear for the psyche of liberals.

Here's the latest gap. Help for the obese. Bariatric surgery can reduce diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, sleep apnea, osteoporosis, etc. and improve general sense of well-being. Did you know that there is a gap between white, obese women who have bariatric surgery and black and Hispanic obese, women who have it? Also, a gap between white, obese women and white, obese men? Yes, 84% of the patients who have the surgery are women and 90% of those are white. But black and Hispanic women are more likely to be obese.

However, even people who can elect to have this surgery--rich, obese white women who live in cities that have special surgery centers--often choose not to have it. 15 million people are obese enough to have the surgery, but only a tiny fraction do. I'm just guessing here, but 1) there is a fairly high morbidity and mortality rate--you can survive, loose weight, but reenter the hospital several times--that ain't fun, 2) you still have to diet, 3) you still have to exercise, 4) after all that pain and frustration and giving up the comfort food you love, there are no guarantees you will live longer or save your marriage or job, 5) some minority groups and white males do not see obesity as quite the cultural sin that wealthier, white women do and have no wish to change their behavior, 6) this surgery is usually performed on those who have the best chances to survive and comply to the lifestyle changes which significantly helps the statistics of success, and 7) you can, with persistence, gain it all back!

For more information see, "Toward the rational and equitable use of bariatric surgery," JAMA, Sept. 26, 2007, pp. 1442-1444

4164

Passengers' Bill of Rights?

You can drive a 747 through the loopholes according to this travel editor. The legislation was introduced by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) to provide the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights Act. I guess we know which sex has to handle a wet, poopy baby who's been crying for four hours, don't we?

The legislation requires airlines to offer passengers the option of safely leaving a plane they have boarded once that plane has sat on the ground three hours after the plane door has closed.

This option would be provided every three hours that the plane continues to sit on the ground.

The legislation also requires airlines to provide passengers with necessary services such as food, potable water and adequate restroom facilities while a plane is delayed on the ground.

The legislation provides two exceptions to the three-hour option. The pilot may decide to not allow passengers to deplane if he or she reasonably believes their safety or security would be at risk due to extreme weather or other emergencies.

Alternately, if the pilot reasonably determines that the flight will depart within 30 minutes after the three-hour period, he or she can delay the deplaning option for an additional 30 minutes.

I've never had to sit on a runway longer than an hour (most recently when our flight was diverted from Shannon to Dublin, Ireland because of fog), but even I can figure out that all you need to do is open and close a door after 2 hours and 58 minutes to get around that 3 hour rule. And the restrooms are already inadequate, so what is "adequate?"

4163

Gas Guzzlers

Bring back the grid! This plan is unsafe for children, impedes walking or biking any where, jams up artery roads if you can find them, and drinks up your gasoline as you wander around, turning around looking for an exit street.

Business 2.0, Sept. 2007, Indianapolis, "How to play the real estate bounce-back," p.61

4162

Who funds Media Matters?

Wealthy Democrats, most with ties to the Clintons, either from former cabinet posts, or heavy campaign supporters. George Soros, an immigrant who has done extremely well with our economic system and wants more government in our lives just like the old country, is another brick in this wall against free speech. Media Matters was founded by David Brock, yes, the former conservative who came to fame writing about Anita Hill, then had an epiphany and rushed down the sawdust trail to switch parties. Media Matters goes after conservative talk radio--that's its whole reason for being. The name, "Media Matters," is brilliant. I'll give them that. It does matter--and most of the media are liberal, but like the babies who escape the abortionist mills and minorities who leave the plantation, some reporters, journalists, media executives, movie stars, sports figures and celebrities make it out alive to speak to the masses--those of us outside the beltway living in fly over country.

Harry Reid (D) is an important talkinghead/spokesperson/mouth for Media Matters. He almost would have nothing to say if they weren't coaching him from behind the curtain.


"And you, Scarecrows in radio land, have the effrontery to ask for a brain! You billowing bale of bovine fodder!!"

4161

Pay back time for the MoveOn dot Org fiasco

Poor old Harry Reid. Can't get it right. Has to take his sound bites from Media Matters and haul it up to the halls of Congress. I doubt that he's ever listened to a Rush Limbaugh radio show.

Although Americans of goodwill debate the merits of this war, we can all agree that those who serve with such great courage deserve our deepest respect and gratitude. That is why Rush Limbaugh’s recent characterization of troops who oppose the war as “phony soldiers” is such an outrage.

Imagine old Harry defending the troops! Respect and gratitude, what a laugh. Rush is probably the biggest supporter of our troops out there. You can go to Rush's web site to see what the fuss is about. Don't EVER take the MSM's word for what is said on his show. Media Matter slices, dices and runs it through their blender.

4160

Mischa Berlinski's Fieldwork

The novel we're reading for book club provides an anthropological investigation (fieldwork) for several interesting species--The Walker family [Christian missionaries], the Dyalo [fictious tribe based on a mix of real people that Berlinski researched], a beginning anthropologist [Martiya, anthropologist daughter of a Dutch linguist], academics, and to a lesser degree, couples who live together, stringers for magazines, American and European ex-pats, former college friends digging out letters from their basement storage and memories, Asian towns and prisons, teachers of English in exotic lands and linguists who create written language, whether Christian or academic. I fully expected Berlinski to speak ill of the Christians and laud the anthropologists, but it was just the opposite. He is neither, but definitely sees the anthropologists the more strange and misguided of the two, although both Martiya and the Walkers believe in the reality of evil spirits.

"The thirty years in China had seen the Walkers [Christian missionaries] occupy a dozen houses, all of them drafty, dreary places, with dirt floors and sod walls; and Laura had lived in them prepared to leave at a moment's notice should the good Lord need the Walkers elsewhere. She had lived the last fifteen years in the Mission House in Abaze, which was filled with spiders and simply did not get clean no matter how she scrubbed it. Laura never complained about her choices in life, but for thirty years now she [had wanted a real house like her sister in Kansas]. . . No Dyalo had ever thought to build a house with wooden walls--a Dyalo home had thin walls of thatch and woven bamboo--and organizing the labor in the wild country was a difficult job. . . The Dyalo wouldn't even consider the idea of working for wages; and if a man gives you his time as a gift, Laura felt, she really couldn't complain if he decided to take a week off. . . She was more than 50 years old, and although everyone helped, in the end, Raymond, Paul, and Laura built most of that house themselves." p. 111

"Farts-a-Lot [Martiya's host in the village, in whose hut she lived] kept a row of bottles of homemade rice whiskey, neatly lined up. In each bottle, there was some repulsive embalmed animal: a snake, a scorpion, a centipede, a few huge termites. These were added to the whiskey . . . to increase his potency, which, to judge by certain late-night mutterings was faltering. . ." p. 178 "The taste of the morning soup, more than the strange costumes and songs, and the weird language and the panoply of rites and sacrifices to please mean spirits, . . .that soup made Martiya feel as if she was living with the people from National Geographic. The vile soup was recycled day after day, and spiced with bitter herbs and a creepy brown fungus; it tasted as if everything that was the Dyalo and Dan Loi had been distilled into a concentrated broth; it seemed almost alive, slithering on her tongue like an oyster; it was as intense as eau-de-vie. All morning long, no matter how many times she brushed her teeth, Martiya could taste the forest on her teeth." p. 179

"It sometimes seemed to Martiya that half of the village was involved in bitter quarrels with the other half, and Dyalo feuds ran deep: there were people in the village who had no idea that a new baby had been born just one hut down, despite the agonized howling that accompanied Dyalo childbirth, so deep did their antipathies run. Watching the Dyalo snipe and bicker had disabused Martiya of the naive notion that tribal peoples would live in peaceful harmony with one another, just as watching the villagers hack down virgin forest and set it on fire for their fields had disabused Martiya of the notion that the Dyalo would live in placid harmony with nature. But as an anthropologist, she couldn't indulge in such diverting pleasures as blood quarrels. She needed to be a neutral Switzerland, an unencumbered Sweden. Farts-a-Lot [her host] was a leading member of the largest clan, the clan of the Fish, and Martiya suspected that if Farts-a-Lot felt in any way slighted, she'd never swim with the Fishes again." p. 188

Martiya thought that when "she got back to Berkely, all the other scholars and anthropologists and students of human behavior would help her understand the things she couldn't. Instead, Martiya found herself positively shunned in the department for having visited a preliterate society. The window of anthropological fashion had shifted while Martiya was in the field, and preliterates were out. . . It was an irony that 80 years after Bronislaw Malinowksi told all the anthropologists to get off the veranda of the mission house and go and live with the natives, the only people in all the world who seemed to share Martiya's obsessive interest and fascination with the Dyalo were a family of missionaries waiting for the world to end." p. 251-252

4159

Thank you, 60 minutes!

Years ago I was a regular 60 Minutes viewer. Then I watched a smear job they did on the people of little Polo, Illinois. I don't recall the details of the story, but I think the town had cut off the utilities of a down-and-outer who was scamming the whole community. Then there was the Dan Blather flap. But I did watch Steve Kroft's interview of Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas last night, and it was extremely moving with lots of added footage, plus an actual conclusion that gave Thomas the last word. How refreshing. What we know now. . . It was all about abortion for the hate-smear Clarence Thomas foes (I could have sworn it was racism, pure and simple). It was about standing on principle for him.

Flipping through blogs today, I saw one whiner that thought Thomas smeared Anita Hill. Not at all. He said she wasn't the meek and mild, demure young lady portrayed by the press. The Anita Hill he worked with was a fighter who would have never tolerated the indignities of what he was accused of, not for 10 minutes, let alone 10 years. What's demeaning about that? If she became a pawn of the press, slurping up the bright lights, she certainly wasn't the first.

Buy My Grandfather's Son. Let's show the Just-us Brothers (Al and Jesse) what a real man sounds like. Let's get this book into the school library. Ask my public library to buy 16 copies like they did for the anti-Bush titles. It will restore your faith in the very sorry mess that is Washington.

What are the chances?

At 1:47 this afternoon, two people, one in Chicago and one in Colorado, googled searches about Roger Vernam, an illustrator of children's books, and both found my blog. I hope they found the second one too. Maybe they were discussing him on the phone?

4157

An October resolution

Making resolutions isn't my thing. Or maybe making them is, and keeping them isn't. I just couldn't tell you how often I start the month saying something like, "This month I'm going to try a new recipe," or "This month I'm going to see a movie," or "This month I'm going to learn how to use Lulu.com and upload my memoirs." Tomorrow is October 1 (book club, and I'm only on p. 50 of Fieldwork, which one review describes as a fictional account of "3 separate tribes--the fictional Dyalo, American Protestant missionaries, and the tribe that lives in ivory towers . . .studying other tribes"). But I did find a wonderful peach crisp recipe I might try, I mean, if I were going to make a resolution. It's not peach season, but it sounds good, and easy to modify for Splenda. I'll let you know if it's really yummy, and if I finish the book.

Fresh peach crisp recipe is a delicious dessert with cinnamon and whipped topping or ice cream.

INGREDIENTS:
2 1/2 pounds fresh peaches, peeled, pitted
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup soft butter

PREPARATION:
Butter an 8-inch square baking dish. Preheat oven to 375°.
Slice peeled, pitted peaches into the prepared baking dish. Sift together the flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon into a medium bowl. Cut butter into flour mixture with pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse meal.

Sprinkle crumbs evenly over peaches in baking dish. Bake at 375° for 45 to 50 minutes, until topping is golden brown and peaches are tender. Serve peach crisp warm with cream or whipped topping.

From About Southern U.S. Cuisine

4156

What teens can do to help the world

St. Francis DeSales High School seniors were protesting the death penalty at the Ohio Statehouse last week (Columbus Dispatch, 9-27-07). I don't support the death penalty (there were 2 executions in Ohio this year) because I don't want to be drawn into doing evil by the evil deeds of others. However, these teens could save thousands of lives each year by working for raising the legal driving age to 18. Yes, it's that simple. About 6,000 teens are killed each year in auto accidents because they don't have the maturity and brain development to handle the constant decisions about safety and driving that it requires. Anyone driving with a teen in the car, even adults, increase their risk of an accident.

I won't hold my breath that they'll try to make a real difference about something they face every day. Maybe they could start small and just turn off their cell phones while driving.

Nationwide, car crashes are the leading cause of teen death — among especially 16-year-olds, according to the highway safety group. Statistics include motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles.

Teen motor vehicle fatalities declined in the 1980s, almost entirely because of crackdowns on underage drinking. But the decline leveled off in the 1990s, and the rates haven't changed much since.

A number of factors make teens vulnerable to auto crashes. They lack experience behind the wheel. Their brains are not mature enough to handle the multiple mental tasks driving requires. They don't always wear seat belts. They're more likely to speed, especially at night and especially with other teens in the car.Tennessean.com

4155

NPR's liberal bias is aggravating

Usually I don't listen to our local NPR, WOSU Radio, but you all know what's the fare on Saturday--garden shows and sports. So three different times today my dial stopped at WOSU-AM.

First in the car I got Wesley Clark, complaining about Bush in Iraq but suggesting, I think, that we need to take out Iran. I only caught about 5 minutes, so I'm not sure of his drift or if he's running again. Then about an hour later on a return trip I got a book interview, and the author was genuflecting before the memory of FDR and complaining that conservatives portray liberals as spendthrifts taxing us to the poor house, but liberals haven't been in control since the 1960s. Huh? Where was this guy during the years the Democrats ran Congress and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were in office? The interview was so worthless, I'm not even bothering to track it down for you.

But the absolute worst was around 5 p.m, when needing noise while I fixed dinner, I heard on WOSU-AM a tiny clip of Bush's speech at the U.N. about dictators, and then a whole bunch of sound bites from various dictators slamming President Bush charging violations of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights and dripping blood of the innocent Iraqis. They could have at least balanced the time.

Right after the Bush slamming with my tax dollars where NPR became a mouthpiece for dictators I might not otherwise had to listen to, I got Nina Totenburg just aghast by Justice Thomas' new autobiography. Boy, is she miffed that he's escaped the plantation. Successful black folk should be more respectful and know their place, I suppose.

"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' autobiography My Grandfather's Son hits bookstores Oct. 1, coinciding with the start of the court's new term. Justice Thomas received a $1.5 million advance for the memoir, which is being promoted by conservative interest groups. It covers his life up to his swearing in as a member of the high court. He offers vivid, and at time seething, details about events surrounding his nomination, the charges of sexual harassment against him by Anita Hill, and his memories of growing up poor in rural Georgia. NPR obtained an advance copy." [from promo]

Nina's shocked, just shocked, that he's made this book so personal. It's just unseemly, you know? Now, any other black leader or celebrity growing up poor without his parents would be lauded for "a tortured soul," but Justice Thomas is a conservative. He's also been skewered in another book, according to Eugene Volokh in WSJ.

Thinking about what to have for dinner

I've thawed some steak, but pizza sure sounds good.

What Your Pizza Reveals

Your appetite is pretty average. You don't go overboard - but you don't deprive yourself either. You are a very picky pizza eater. Not any pizza will do. You fit in best in the Northeast part of the US. You like food that's traditional and well crafted. You aren't impressed with "gourmet" foods. You are dependable, loyal, and conservative with your choices. You are cultured and intellectual. You should consider traveling to Vienna. The stereotype that best fits you is geek. You're the type most likely to order pizza to avoid leaving your computer.

What Does Your Pizza Say About You?

Are the smartest and best educated becoming more helpless?

or do they just expect more? In a survey of faculty and staff at Ohio State, the staff rated higher on job satisfaction than faculty. 68% of staff said they were satisfied; 65% of faculty were. The faculty (43%) also had more problems finding backup child care or temporary child care than the staff (38%).

When you think benefits, you're probably out of date--vacation, health, holidays. Both the faculty and staff have bunches of benefits--many of which I never used at all when I was faculty (but our net salaries are reduced to pay for all of these):

same sex domestic partner health benefits
sponsored dependent health benefits (I think that means they live in the household)
child care facilities
state of the art recreation facilities
special rooms for nursing parents
paid parental leave
lunch and learn programs
weight and tobacco management programs
elder care resource and referral
tuition assistance
adoption assistance
relocation assistance
and so forth

But they can't find back up child care. Tsk. Tsk.

What book would you most want your kids to read?

Here's a really odd response, showing great narrowness of mind and ignorance of what's on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, from an Ohio State University Professor of English, Kathy Fagan:

"I would be glad for my kids to read anything. Except maybe books by Anne Coulter." onCampus, Sept. 20, 2007, p. 16

See? Didn't I tell you about banned books starting in the selection process? I wonder what sort of grades she gives to conservatives. A sample of her poetry

4151

Fannie, Fred and Sam and the subprime mess

Most of the folks both parties in Congress want to bail out of the widening home mortgage mess are not the poor minority Pedros and Letitias in the red lined neighborhoods of Cleveland you read about in the newspaper sob stories. They are very wealthy investors who were flipping houses in Sarasota, or hiding from the tax man in Colorado, or packaging jumbo loans or going after no doc and low doc loans in Chicago.

Here's an ad in one of my newest premiere magazines, Vertical Living.

A $1,000,000 loan with payments of only $2,528 per month
1.000% start rate / 7.516% APR
Fixed payment for 1st year
No prepayment penalties
Interest-only payments
Unlimited cash out-refinancing available

Adjust those numbers a little, and the appeal is the same as it was for all those low income buyers a year ago. How long before this buyer is asking you for help?

At this time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac* can't go that high, but oh, they are knocking, knocking at the door of Congress. Last Saturday the WSJ Hot Topic pointed out that FHA (Federal Housing Authority, a New Deal program that long ago outlived its usefulness) wants to suspend downpayment requirements to insure even zero-equity loans. :

It's a testament to the FHA's underwriting ineptitude that, even during the biggest housing boom in a generation, the agency's delinquency rate has somehow doubled over the last 10 years. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, the FHA's delinquency rate was 5 times higher than the rate on conventional prime mortgage loans, double the rate on loans with private, mortgage insurance, and even slightly high than the rate on subprime loans. . . Downpayment assistance program has suffered default rates as high as 20%. "Uncle Sam: Subprime Lender" 9-22-2007, WSJ

Freddie and Fannie
went up to Capitol Hill
to fawn for a bigger profit
Sticking you and me with the bill.

With help from our taxes
They'll package and resell,
a windfall for the banks and rich,
for the rest of us, economic hell.

Years ago the original aim
was to help the struggling poor.
Now they seek those jumbo loans--
Congress and Bush! Show them the door!

*Freddie Mac is the actual name of The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, created in 1970. It buys mortgages on the secondary market, pools them, and sells them as mortgage-backed securities to investors on the open market. Fannie Mae is the former Federal National Mortgage Association, which used to be a government agency, but is now a private corporation. In some sort of quasi-nightmare, these two are supposed to be "competition" for each other.

4150

A mother of three teens writes:

" . . . will someone please tell me why I probably had forty classes teaching me how to give birth, and was even offered classes fifth time round, (as clearly nature had changed in the previous 20 months), why we were given midwives, health visitors and regular support in child rearing for the first five years of the children's lives, five times round, but, just when it starts to get really challenging, interesting, impossible to deal with . . .everyone has disappeared off the face of the earth"? [she's British--we don't get THAT much help in the USA unless we're on welfare] Sally Writes.

4149 Jenna Bush's book for young people

Jenna Bush has authored a book "Ana's Story; a Journey of Hope" (HarperCollins, 2007, 209 pp. $18.99). It is non-fiction, for teenagers and about AIDS, is based on 6 months of conversations with women and children with HIV or AIDS when the president's daughter was working with UNICEF. It was reviewed, probably reluctantly, by Bob Minzesheimer in USAToday. In general, he was positive, pointing out it was easy to read with 35 pages of sources addressing common myths about AIDS and HIV. The paper edition differed from the online version. In paper he wrote that it doesn't address how much U.S. support should go to organizations that distribute condoms as opposed to religious groups that promote only abstinence. How picky is that? Reviewers and talking heads always want the book they themselves didn't make the effort to write and publish. I wonder if Minzesheimer would board an airplane that had the same failure rate as condoms?

In another column this reviewer points out that when Oprah even mentions a title (Eat, pray, love; Middlesex) it leap frogs to the top of the best seller list. That won't happen to a book by a conservative, even if the topic is one of her favorites.

The commenters at the revised online article are the usual collection of Bush-haters and author-wannabees complaining about favoritism. They are well worth reading for their ignorance, pomposity and narrowmindedness, just in case you'd forgotten how green the left is. If even five young people read this book and decide that HIV is probably something in their future if they don't change their lifestyle, she will have achieved her goal.

4148

What are the Democrats up to now?

Politics would be my guess. They probably prolonged the war by at least two years by giving the terrorists encouragement and comfort (as in Vietnam), now with the taste of the presidency on their tongues, they're bleating a new baaa baaack off. Not a single one of the front runners would promise to have brought the troops home by the END of their first term as President. "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting," said Hillary Rodham Clinton. "I think it's hard to project four years from now," said Barack Obama. "I cannot make that commitment," said John Edwards.

"Iraq is getting better, and the opposition to the war is, in the current campaign cycle, is starting to shift away from the "war is lost" to something more like "stabilizing the government over time would not be worth the cumulative cost in American lives and treasure."

All sober Democrats realize not only that the Moveon.org ad was a political disaster, but more importantly, that the Moveon.org/Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan/Hollywood ticking bombs actually scare off Americans, even as they demand more influence among the candidates." Victor Davis Hanson

Still, I don't trust them not to flip again. Hillary's sneaking in her health care all dressed up like it's the early 90s while we catch our breath about Iraq. She talks tough on national security. Now. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago . . . Politics.

4147

Do you think we have enough photos?

Would you believe we've actually winnowed these down to our favorites? We viewed the disk several times, discussing each one. My husband is returning the album he bought because there weren't enough slots. Now I've just gone through mine and ordered about 45 on-line. That's the problem with digital cameras!

I think the cat has been playing with the layout