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A friend at work gave me a heads up about buyblue.org, it’s a website where you can look up companies you buy services from, and see how they invest their profits, and what they’re politics with their money is like. From their about page:

“BuyBlue.org uses our power as consumers to vote with our wallets, supporting businesses that abide by sustainability, workers’ rights, environmental standards, and corporate transparency. At the same time, BuyBlue.org focuses sharply on businesses that violate the essential values of a sustainable, fair and profitable society through their policies and the politicians they support.”

So let’s see, I have cell phone service with Verizon, which is largely Republican in their political contributions. I have a credit card with Citibank which is also largely Republican, and apparently has been having issues with treating workers in Korea fairly after an acquisition. I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, and they seem about half and half, and they have articles on how they haven’t treated laid-off employees very fairly, but have a non-profit award program. So not to say that I should make all my buying decisions on this website, cause there are many sides to every story. But it’s definitely an interesting look at how corporations I “invest” in by using their products or services use my money.

I just got back from Connecticut last night. I ended up extending my trip out an extra handful of days, so I was out there for about a solid week. I played some tennis, ping pong, pool, mini-golf, cooked a bunch of food including black-eyed pea and kidney bean shak, fried plantains, ravioli pasta, and apple cinnamon pancakes. Mmmmmmmmm. It was a great week, relaxed and chillin with my girl and her brother, very fun and relaxing. I also saw a bunch of movies, some I had already seen like Spaceballs and The Goonies, but her brother’s really cool about checking out cool foreign films. We watched this Japanese animated film called Howl’s Moving Castle that was beautifully animated, and had a great story. We also watched a German film called Im Juli which translates to “In July”. It was about this really uptight math teacher, who randomly meets this girl and completely falls in love with her, and ends up hitchhiking from Germany to Turkey to find her. But he ends up hitchhiking with this other girl who’s totally mad about him. Has anyone in Bollywood seem this film yet? I’m sure they’re already working on their own version… but that was a great movie, too! In the classic movie style, it starts right before something major happens to the main character, and takes you through his journey, and you can see how he changes as he learns more about himself and his situation. It was awesome.