Read more 

If you don’t care about brands, meat, fresh vegetables, and you don’t crave the eye-glazingly hypnotic experience that today’s modern superstore short-circuits your cortex with, then dollar stores are just fine.

Do the math: A jar of spaghetti sauce for $1.00, spaghetti for $1.00, that’s good for two days, so that’s a month’s worth of eating for $30.00, and who cares about brands? And we haven’t even gone for the luxuries like Canadian cookies ($1.00) or Romanian shampoo ($1.00) or cheap, bad light bulbs ($1.00) or Russian tsotchkes you can stock your hutch with or even sell on E-Bay ($1.00). If you’re in a city—if Philly isn’t famous for its dollar stores, it should be—different stores specialize in different varieties and flavors of detritus from the global supply chain, so you can even shop around.

As for vegetables, you can grow your own in the summer, and buy potatoes, turnips, and winter squash in bulk when the cold comes. And last I checked the supermarket actually had cans of beans at four for $1.00 which, in a pinch, is four meals.

As for meat, some of the dollar stores do have Spam…

Anyhow, dollar stores saved me when my personal economy crashed and burned after the dot com bubble burst in 2000, and I ate that way for quite some time. I got thinner, but that was partly because of all the walking I did, and I didn’t get sick.

Of course, there’s one assumption hidden in this survival strategy:  Read more 

Denzel Washington stared in a 2002 movie called “John Q” about an average Joe Public whose child needs a procedure the insurance at his job won’t cover — despite  Read more 

On Monday, Mrs. Greenspan was full of shit as per usual when she said that most Americans wanted Scooter Libby pardoned. Actually 18% wanted him pardoned according to a CNN poll released that same day, but I guess that is just being a stickler for details.  Read more 

This will be a shamelessly personal post, but at the same time one I suspect to which many of our readers can relate. I just finished up with a job interview, it went very well and I have lots of fuzzy feelings about it and I assume the interview does as well. In a nutshell, I’m almost perfectly qualified and didn’t flub any part of it, and got him to laugh and listen to my well prepared presentation of my list of experiences and qualifications. In short, I couldn’t have asked for it to go better, and now all I have to do is hope that no one else on his list has more than me.  Read more