ERGH. The newspaper last week carried the story that seems all too familiar of late. People taking advantage and using their jobs for personal gain, for fun, misusing the money given them to do something. It was ludicrous too. Really really ludicrous.

An audit of the - ready? - California Avocado Advisory Board - showed that members of this organization spent lavishly over several years. Honest. The AVOCADO people spent over 1.5 MILLION in three years on things like $850/ night hotel rooms, gym memberships, sporting events and high end clothing. They apparently arranged for the organization's logo to be stitched into the clothes, thus making them "uniforms". Uniforms. From Talbots, Ann Taylor and Nordstrom. Well-known uniform designers. They dumped $39, 000 on this and close to $9,000 more for the embroidery. I am not making this up. This money came from avocado growers who must pay into this board but of course, that gets passed on to the consumer, doesn't it? It must be noted that the top guy on this commission for 20 years resigned recently to "spend more time with..." NO, not his family, his CHURCH! the church? A huge evangelical megachurch, Saddleback Church located in (imagine my surprise) Orange County. Sound familiar? It should. It's run by Rick Warren.

To balance this off, and I really feel I must - it's like washing my mouth out with mints after realizing a little too late that, eu, wrong. That milk really did go sour, didn't it? i read the same day of the man who had designed essentially "do-it-yourself" glasses. They cost $19 but he creator is trying to lower the price. Joshua Silver - remember that name in your affirmations, prayers and nominations for the Nobel or a Macarthur Fellowship has designed self-adjusting glasses for the world's poor. He was, in fact, offered a buyout from a corporation and refused because he felt that they would not use this invention the way he intended it to be used. They look sort of like glasses that Harold Lloyd or yeah, Wood Allen would wear, but they are designed for you to adjust the lenses using a gel which you inject into the space between 2 lenses. Then you remove the injectors and poof. You can SEE. Silver hopes to distribute a million pairs in India this year alone.

Silver is an atomic physicist who teaches optics at Oxford. Get the whole amazing story here.

ttp://tinyurl.com/a24u7

I also read this one and it made my heart soar. In catching up on six months' worth of the Sunday New York Times (YAY!!! Laura's serial in the Magazine!) Yay! thank you Glenn and Kate. Again. Forever!) I read this story. This was in the Sports section (which yes I do read) around the time that Paul Newman died. if you know Newman's story, you know he was a race car driver. A total junkie for the sport. Okay? So the story tells of the time that Newman tried a maneuver on the track that resulted in a huge mess. Big crashes everywhere. Total chaos. After the race ended, and everything was cleared up, Paul Newman went to every driver in every pit and apologized. He apologized for the mess he made.

Okay. Better now.

One more. Because it's so very cool. I've talked here about the wonderful squishies you can buy at Squishable.com (see link above). They send out emails when they add new squishies (they got dolphins! they got pandas! oh my my). And I love them because they're funny, they provide a great product (I'm here to tell ya, I know, I have three of them) and they do good things. They send money to charitable organizations that do everything from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to the EFF to well, the Tipitina Foundation. That last one? I got to choose that month's charity. Wow. And I learned today that they support a microlending organization called Kiva. If you don't know about microlending, going and reading up over on Kiva.org. would be a great start. Squishable ALONE supports eight loans. The link on their site shows who got the money, what it is for, and how much they've paid back.

Think about this every time you eat some guacamole from a California avocado.

I'm not sure how it ties in, but it does.