Weekly Blog Round-Up

POP CULTURE:
* BSG at the UN - So Say We All. But, huh? From io9

* BlogHer posted a big discussion of the Jon Stewart evisceration of CNBC:

Stewart finds that outrageous. So do I. Reporters have a special role in our society. They are supposed to look at all stories with a skeptical eye. We count on reporters to make sure the mischief makers are caught and exposed. We do not expect the reporters to be turning a blind eye to the mischief.

Stewart's focus on CNBC captured what many people are feeling. From Mother Talkers,

I was listening to Marketplace on NPR during the drive home on Friday. I should really stop doing this, in this climate, because I get really worried. I heard this depressing statistic: if you graduated in the 1990s and started saving for retirement, you are basically back to square one. You have no more money for retirement than if you'd saved it under your mattress. I am furious. I did everything I was supposed to do: saved from the first day I started my first job, made it a priority. And because some fat cats on Wall Street got too damn greedy, I've lost it all. 11 years of investments, gone. Now what? I'm not sure I can trust 401(k)s for retirement anymore, y'know? Luckily, I'm at least 30 years away from retirement. But I'm still really pissed!

Oy on the financial news from BlogHer. From the same article: From Cenk Uygur of The HuffingtonPost

I have a close friend who works at a business news station -- and here is the worst kept secret in show business -- it's all about the access. If you piss off the CEOs or the companies, you're going to get a call from your boss. You have jeopardized our relationship with them!
That is very thinly disguised code words for -- don't ever say anything negative about a company we cover otherwise your job is in the trouble. The message is clear -- go along to get along. This isn't journalism. It's public relations by another name.

* I found this site randomly today. Need to take a listen

ART:
* Google flagging a French art blog for showing female nudes in artworks, which I learned about on Bob's Blog.

* Fast trains coming in Turkey! found on TreeHugger.

FOOD:
* Obama is tackling food safety via AmericaBlog. Yay! We've just sent in our check for our favorite farm's CSA I can't wait. And here's a second piece from Nicholas Kristoff's column about food safety, "Pathogens in our Pork." [A witty double entendre in there too!]

* White house green garden, via Huff Po.

* The Dirty Dozen buying guide for produce: a friend posted on facebook.

STYLE:
From my friend Jessica's Blog:

And now my friend is wondering, what does it say about him that he didn’t want to like those glasses because he was afraid that everyone else would like them, too? “Now and then,” he writes, “I get the awful feeling that people think I grew a beard to be trendy and I want to say, ‘I had this beard before it was cool.’… What sort of person feels that way and why?”

Here’s what I think. I think that the dynamic that accounts for his anxiety and my aneurysms is a particularly Generation X phenomenon. When we were growing up, we were fond of things that were weird and unlovable, largely because we, ourselves, felt weird and unlovable. Now that those things have been appropriated and repackaged for mass consumption, we instinctively want to reject them, even though we still love them—just like we mostly kind of hate ourselves, even though we inspire ourselves with something like the affectionate pity one might feel for a broken crayon, or, say, a tattered copy of Pac-Mania! The Official Pac-Man Joke Book.