Blog Archive

One day on a whim I signed up for Fudha. What is Fudha?

Fudha offers discounts from the best locally-owned restaurants in Columbus, donating revenue from every meal to support families served by the Mid-Ohio Foodbank.

Most of the offers haven’t really grabbed my attention but as we got close to Thanksgiving I saw that Piece of Cake had an offer for half off their pies. This sounded like my kind of deal. So I went ahead and ordered.

Then the family was hit but the messenger of death. About the time I was supposed to pick up my made from scratch white chocolate banana cream pie I was sipping water and eating toast having nearly died (OK, not really but still). When Piece of Cake called worried that I wasn’t going to pick up my pie I told them I wasn’t going to be able to make it.

Sadly, they were going to be closed over the Holiday and my pie would not make it if I didn’t pick it up that afternoon. I had to explain that I had already paid for the pie through Fudha but there was no way I was going to be able to pick it up.

The very nice person on the other end, however, asked me to hold. When she came back she told me that I could still use my coupon the next week. Call back and place your order and you can still get your pie for half price.

The next week I promptly did so and went to pick up my pie the next day. It was delicious! The whole family loved it.

In business school this is what they call “Customer Service.” Despite the fact that so few companies believe in it anymore this is a great way to build loyal and devoted customers.

The nice folks at Piece of Cake understand this and so now if I want some pie or cake guess who the first people I am going to call?

Thank the Lord for the Federal Government! Imagine the death and destruction if alcohol and caffeine were allowed to be bottled together and sold!

Ever since the scourge of Four Loko ravaged the land the FDA has been ramping up its eternal vigilance that we might be spared the threat of artificially caffeinated alcohol. And it has caught another perpetrator:

When Rhonda Kallman set out to create a beer that would draw a crowd, she never expected the attention her Moonshot ’69 brew received this month.

The problem is that the light beer, made by Ms. Kallman’s company, New Century Brewing, contains caffeine. Earlier this month, she and three other manufacturers were told by the federal Food and Drug Administration that they must remove the stimulant from their beverages or stop selling them.

OK, saracsm off now. But seriously this is a shinning example of regulatory over-reach and consumer safety gone mad.

Do I want to drink this beer? No, sounds disgusting to me. But should it be pulled from the shelves as a danger? Heck, no.

It is nonsensical. You can buy a rum and coke but you can’t buy a light beer with caffeine? Right ….

This is just part and parcel of the idea that you can regulate safety down to a fine tooth level – that you can protect people from stupidity and bad choices.

Guess what? You can’t. If people want to imbibe dangerous things in an effort to get the latest buzz they will do so. So when you attempt to regulate things like caffeine and alcohol like this it is inevitable that you are going to force a lot of products out of the market that are no more harmful than what most people have in their fridge already.

We live in strange times. People complain about the size, scope and nature of the government. The news is full of failed government programs and money wasted. And yet the machine marches on creating rules and regulations on top of rules and regulations.

Every time someone gets hurt or a tragedy strikes the government media complex winds itself up and we speed down this path faster and deeper than ever. Hearings, legislation, regulations, agencies, cars, watchdogs, on and on it goes.

Do you feel safer now that this beer is off the shelves? Now that Ohio has a antique steam engine tractor board? With all of this action I am not sure the world is all that much safer.

Do I have an answer on how to stop the nanny state run amok? No, just felt like venting …

Despite a winning record losing to Ohio State today in embarrassing fashion feels like the nadir of my Michigan fandom. In many ways today wasn’t necessarily about winning. Let’s face it, in every conceivable category Ohio State is a better football team than Michigan and everyone expected them to win. Seven wins and a bowl game feels like progress – at least on paper.

But what I had hoped was that Michigan would play hard and with a pride and determination that could prove they were headed in the right direction; that they were a competitive team that just hadn’t quite put the pieces together.

Instead they came out and showed they are a sloppy, undisciplined, fundamentally unsound team that makes critical mistake after critical mistake when the game is on the line.What an absolute embarrassment.

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Okay, perhaps the title is a bit hyperbolic but it certainly felt that way. As those of you following along on Twitter and Facebook know, Chez Holtsberry has been visited by a virus from heck of late.

Warning: what follow is rather gruesome …

First, Ella came how from kindergarten after throwing up at school. She was sick a couple more times at home but didn’t seem particularly bad off.

Then came Max’s turn. He had a fever and then began to be sick just about bed time.  This continued every 15-20 minutes for five or six hours. I tried to comfort him as he struggled and cried out in pain retching up little but water and bile.

It was painful for me to watch him go through this and it also brought up the classic parents dilemma when their kids are sick. They want nothing more than to cuddle and hold on to you when they are sick and yet this almost guarantees you get whatever bug they have. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my constant struggles when it comes to new/social media and online communication is that my natural inclination is to websurf way too much and think and/or contemplate too litte.

I jump around the web seeking content and reading bits and pieces of this and that (and attempting to follow what my friends and family are up to) without studying deeply in anything or offering much in terms of insight or clarity.  Although it is something I have recognized in the past, I think I have come to a stronger realization – and a determination to do something about it – lately.

It is my experience that you can provide value and get lot of traffic without being particularly knowledgeable or deep if you 1) provide useful links faster or more comprehensively than anyone else 2) are naturally funny 3) are good at pontificating and/or marketing yourself.

I am not really suited to any of the above. I have always been more in the thinker rather than linker mode. The problem comes when you waste a lot of time and energy jumping around the web and you don’t produce either useful links (links to sites and articles everyone else has already read don’t count) or insightful, useful or interesting commentary.

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I am testing out the WordPress for Android app. Looks very handy for mobile blogging.

For a variety of reasons I won’t go into, this blog is not currently active.

You can go to Kevin Holtsberry Dot Com for more information. Those odd people who have visited in the last few weeks might have noticed that I have been using this site to test out themes. In case you were wondering …

The archives are available to your right as well.

That is the question, right? An odd one to be asking yourself just past what was Good Friday – now Saturday.  But such is my life.

Lisa and Ella are sleeping in a tent in the back yard. It has been so nice today that Ella wanted to camp out. She already “camped out” in the living room two nights ago so I guess she was in the mood for the real thing.

Max – who was scared of the dark outside I think – is sleeping upstairs. So I am in the basement online. I can’t seem to focus on reading so I started playing around with websites (this one in particular).

So that led me to the question that is the title of this post.

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Interesting column from Ross Douthat on the battle over sex ed.  I don’t want to get into the back forth on the topic but it is worth nothing this section:

The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

[...]

What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem.

But the point I really wanted to highlight, and one I find incredibly frustrating, is this:

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless. But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy. Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

The debate might be less rancorous if the naturalists and sacralists didn’t have to fight it out in Washington. This is the real problem with federal financing for abstinence-based education: It drags the national government into a debate that should remain intensely local.

We federalize the culture wars all the time, of course — from Roe v. Wade to the Defense of Marriage Act. But it’s a polarizing habit, and well worth kicking.

This strikes me as one of the epic failures of conservatism or the Right writ large.  Power continues to flow to Washington and the federal government. Issues are increasingly nationalized and local control lost or subverted.

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I am experimenting with using this blog to post photos and comments. So consider this the first try.