The Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio
Brian Gongol


Follow along with the show live on Twitter: Here are the links to Brian Dean's Twitter channel and Brian Gongol's Twitter channel.

It turns out that, contrary to my recollection, poi is a Hawaiian pudding-like dish. I was confusing it with koi, the Japanese fish. Nevermind; I'm going to continue drinking my milk and fruit juice.

Here's the recipe for the fruit drink Brian Dean keeps teasing me about on the air: Blend the above to a smooth consistency and you'll have a tasty and extremely healthy drink that fills the stomach without piling on the calories.

The TV and movie writers' strike still hasn't ended, and just as predicted, it's turning out to be a good deal for alternative sources of entertainment -- like scriptwriters in other countries. Canadian production companies, for instance, are starting to benefit from the dearth of American-made programming. The writers and producers really need to realize that their strike is hurting other people (like actors and production crewmembers) as well as exposing them to replacement by foreign writers and producers and by other forms of entertainment. The war of attrition they're engaging in just can't go on without doing lots more damage.

The economic-stimulus package that looks likely to make its way through Congress and the White House is pretty scary, for a number of reasons: It's perhaps a bit telling that this economic "stimulus" is being discussed in the same week that a French options trader appears to have lost $7.2 billion of his company's money through a combination of subterfuge and bad speculation. It sometimes feels as though we've lost the connection between expecting a long-term return on an investment as a reward for ownership. Instead, we have become accustomed to looking at finance as speculation (which is purely what the French trader was involved in -- he lost the money on options bets, which are really nothing more than high-stakes gambling) and government as a source of entitlement checks. We really need to get the ownership society back, and there are a number of things we ought to consider to help make that happen, perhaps like rethinking dividend taxation.

What is with Russia and its attempts to scare our friends in Britain, France, and Spain? This nonsense really needs to stop.

You don't have to like the iPhone (I don't) to respect the way it's changing the mobile-phone industry. It's capitalism and technology coming together to make our lives better.

This week's news from the Gaza Strip is a reminder of just how far people will go to satisfy their economic needs.

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