A couple weeks back, news about limited rice exports from India gave my husband and I -- both raised on rice-heavy diets -- pause. We briefly mulled over the idea of buying an extra bag of rice just in case, but then let it slide.

Last week, our weekly groceries bill leaped from an average of $40-$60 to $90+. Whoa! What did we just buy?

Or is it the food crisis that we hear about? So it's here?

If you are a Canadian there are certain terms you've likely known since infancy and no I'm not talking about "eh". I'm talking about "double double" and "timbit". For the uninitiated a "double double" is a coffee (two cream, two sugar) and a "timbit" is a doughnut hole that is sold at that Canadian institution Tim Horton's (aka Tim's, Timmy's, Timmy Ho's, etc). A teeny-tiny $0.16 doughnut hole. And giving away a single timbit got one single mom fired.

We can’t help but react to the death and destruction in the wake of Saturday’s cyclone in Myanmar with a sense of personal loss; the journals and photos of travelers who have visited the isolated country are some of IgoUgo’s most indelible.

After reading Denise's BlogHer post last week that the gift of maternal health is the perfect Mother's Day gift, I thought "this really is perfect!" I blogged it and suggested that not only is it a great cause, but it is also a great consumerism/stuff-free gift, something that I feel, in our consumerism-driven society, is so important, but so ofte

Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar last weekend devastating five regions. Channel NewsAsia reported that more than 22,000 people are dead with another 41,000 missing. Hundreds of thousands are now homeless. The media reports are horrific. "Witnesses described images of rice field littered with corpses." Save the Children, one of the few relief agencies allowed to operate in-country, said the toll would rise sharply in the coming days as more victims were found in difficult to reach areas.

The photos, videos, and blog reports are giving us vivid citizen accounts. Global Voices, South Asia Editor, Mong Palatino, offers this round up of what blogs in the region are reporting, including these eye witness accounts.

The hot hot ladies of the Washington Redskins cheer squad are in India shaking their shapely hips in those short shorts, matching go-go boots and bikini tops. Needless to say male fans were left salivating for more, our culture guardians gasping at the "vulgarity", purists demanding that the "Indian" sport be spared of such cheap thrills, and some fence sitters (me included) wondering and analyzing to no end what this all means and if all this fuss is warranted.

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