"some of you will recall that she once angrily protested my great admiration for India’s proud vegetarian tradition, as if my stating the obvious was an insult to her homeland, which has sadly become increasingly unhealthy because of its recent embrace of the high-animal-product Western junk food diet to show its affluence" This is an extremely cute statement Veg. How did I miss it! But in case you are serious - let me clarify. India doesnt have a "proud vegetarian tradition". The most famous Indian, Gandhi, was vegetarian and has made a touching description of his tryst with non-vegetarianism in his biography, which is well highlighted - so maybe you are confusing all Indians to be vegetarians till "western junk food" spoiled them! As far as i know my forefathers and their forefathers too age non - veg food (I am not really saying it proudly, for I am on the verge of turning veg). India has a complicated caste system and mostly that dictates who eats veg or non-veg. I think 70-80 % of Indians would be Non-vegetarian by that tradition. Geography too plays a role in who eats what. Nowadays with exposure (yes we do have TV and internet too, u know) veg or non-veg is mostly by personal choice as the old system doesnt really have much say. Your statement is really as cute as Dubya's statement that India and China are eating more, so the prices of essential commodities have gone up (he did say that - honestly!) My writings here My profile here My Xomba Blog

How can a person "rest in peace" if they refuse to die or go away? Sarah Palin gave two major interviews in the 8 weeks or so that she was a VP candidate. She's given easily four times that number in the 12 days since the election. She's everywhere... talking about politics, caribou hunting, moose, energy, you name it. She obviously wants to keep her profile very high, and Xombies are happy to oblige. Maybe Nick can land an exclusive interview with her? Some of her kids must be online... perhaps we can get some of them to join Xomba? That would be worth a bonus of 1,000 extra Xombie user points!

Maybe she should run for president! But she's not a medical doctor, she's a dentist (which is fine--the world certainly needs dentists, but it's not the same profession). I think if rawnak believes Sarah Palin is a viable candidate for the position of leader of the free world, that pretty much proves how politically astute she is (not very)--about American politics, at least. I have a Bachelor's degree too, from three years in one college plus a year of study abroad. But having a BA doesn't necessarily mean you know anything, and to make matters worse, Palin has been all over the map with her college education (three or four different colleges and majors, I believe), and that shows in her lack of knowledge about basic stuff, like how many countries there are in North America (another fact she got wrong). All you had to do was watch the Biden/Palin debate or the Katie Couric interview to realize how ignorant she is. She kept refusing to answer the questions posed to her because she couldn't answer them. By all accounts, she's bright enough and certainly has chutzpah--her problem is plain ignorance, which could be remedied if she applied herself. But we've already had eight years of a guy who claims God talks to him and tells him what to do (including killing innocent people in an illegal war, apparently), and who doesn't believe in the separation of church and state, which goes against our Constitution. Do we need another president like that? As the great Lily Tomlin famously said, when you talk to God, it's prayer, but when God talks to you, it's schizophrenia. And I didn't say she swore--I said she had a nasty mouth on her. Even after the election she was still bad-mouthing Obama about his so-called association with people like Bill Ayers and she all but called him a terrorist during the campaign. That's nasty, mean-spirited and untrue.