Emerita's Mexican and Salvadoran Cuisine, 5408 Queens Chapel Road, Hyattsville, MD 20782, 301-559-7400.

Truly long-time readers of this blog may recall that it has been at times sharply critical of Markos Moulitsas, aka "Kos" of Daily Kos. Now is not the time to rehash and reminisce about petty blog sniping of now one year's aging. On certain matters, however, this blog absolutely defers to Kos, to wit: issues involving Salvadoran cuisine. Kos is of Salvadoran heritage and lived there; I am not and have not. A few weeks ago, Kos urged readers to go to Salvadoran restaurants and try out pupusas if they had not had them before. I decided to take Kos up on his suggestion.

I am pleased to announce that Crab Media now operates responsivedocuments.com, which will serve at the home for all Crab Media document review content, links, information and jobs listings. I must admit my continued surprise that the domain name has remained open to this date; the term "responsive documents" is central to most litigation or transactional document reviews and it is a pretty decent tradename in itself for a document review placement agency or software vendor. Now Crab Media owns it, and new content will appear there once the server in Hong Kong or Boston, whichever, processes the new domain (about 24 hours or so.)

Gizmodo/BBC, April 5, 2008:

A 43-year-old man from Maryland has sold the domain name pizza.com for almost 10,000 times the price he paid for it. Chris Clark registered the name pizza.com in 1994 for just $20, and continued to pay the annual registration fee until January of this year, when he heard the domain name vodka.com had gone for a massive $3 million, and decided he wanted a slice of the pie.

I won't attempt to calculate the effective ROI on this one, but at any interest rate if you are spending less than $500 total and getting back over 2 million dollars, you are doing well.

This is absolutely not safe for work and may be quite offensive to some readers. Explicit content below the link, you are advised.

I have had some fun looking at DC apartments, "fun" in the "oh s%%% a freight train just mowed over my Corolla, may as well enjoy the fire" fun.

On Saturday, I enjoyed a meal out in Olney with a friend and former professional colleague who, like me, is going through a difficult divorce. Over a meal of spicy eggplant with garlic sauce and a couple of Tsing Tao's, we joked and complained about, well, what you'd expect a couple of divorcing dads to joke and complain about. We decided that two Tsing Tao's was not enough, so we went to a private beer and wine store in Olney that also sold gourmet cheese. So we were on notice, I suppose.

Minister and controversial supporter of Senator John McCain's presidential campaign, John Hagee: "The Catholic Church is the Great Whore... [of Babylon, from the Christian Apocalypse.]"

Next Frame: Disgraced NY Governor Eliot Spitzer, wheeling in a Brinks Armored Car of cash with hand signal lights like on the airport tarmac, "As if you'd know from great whores. At this price, they'd better be great." It is alleged that the services of one of the ALLEGED prostitution agencies implicated in ALLEGED connection to Governor Spitzer cost up to $4,500 an session, that's four thou five hunnert.

Better be a great whore. Eliot would be right to be pissed off if they tried to pass a "budget" $2,800 whore. maybe some toothless, high-mileage leatherbeaten retread from Beirut, off on him at that price.

(3/11) There is a current project for tri-lingual document review attorneys - French and Spanish - in DC. To find out more, please call Stephanie Schoenfeld at Update Legal DC at 202-872-5000 and mention "Bruce Godfrey/Crab's List." Thanks.

Washington Post, March 10, 2008:

"I just want to live a little better, and one day own a little house or something," said Socorro Diaz, 54, a borrower who sells women's lingerie and jewelry. "I'm trying to change my life. Bit by bit."

Grameen America, which offers loans from $500 to $3,000, hopes to reach people like her, part of the large segment of poor Americans without access to credit, said Ritu Chattree, the vice president for finance and development.

...

This article is the first in the Project 222 series on this blog. Project 222 is a Crab Media initiative to blog about charitable organizations on the 2nd day of the month, to donate 2 days a year to community service and to commit 2 percent of BLOG gross revenue (not blog-GER gross revenue at this time) to charitable work.

The charitable organization is one that, I suspect, will have some appeal both to bleeding hearts like me and the flintier conservatives among Maryland Weekly's readers as well. I refer to KickStart, Inc., Tax ID Number 06-1613235, a charitable organization headquartered legally and financially in San Francisco but with operations primarily in several African countries.

KickStart has an interesting approach for a non-profit organization. While it is a 501(c)(3) organization and cannot engage in activities with the primary end goal of "making money", its primary tool is a series of foot-powered water pumps called the "MoneyMaker," with the Super MoneyMaker Plus serving as their top of the line model.

Who wants a foot-powered water pump? Probably not the average North American farmer, who has tractors and gasoline and municipally pumped water in most cases or at least a reliable electric well. A Kenyan farmer, on the other hand, needs to haul water on a beast of burden, a wheelbarrow or the like from an off-the-grid creek, well or lake in most cases. Neither electricity nor gasoline nor pumped water is generally available. A foot-powered pump can increase the effective irrigation radius dramatically in such circumstances. While the wheelbarrow, etc, may be necessary still, the effective crop irrigation coverage is much broader when one is more or less using gravity, rather than fighting gravity, to deliver water to crops.

Rural Kenyans (and other rural Africans) are not used to forms of commercial mass marketing known all too well to Westerners, and one of the things that KickStart does is to market the devices effectively so that risk-averse, impoverished African farmers will trust in their utility. The website for KickStart promotes some pretty amazing figures for the GDP impacts of KickStart's activities in Kenya and Tanzania. In addition to the water pumps, KickStart markets oil presses for the small-scale production of cooking oil, as well as other technologies.

This organization's site is all about profit, cost-recovery, return on investment. I don't know enough about KickStart to know whether there may be some hidden downside, but distribution of oil presses and water pumps to subsistence or near-subsistence farmers sounds almost per se positive to me, especially if they are being distributed with the emphasis on profitability and cost-recovery to such farmers.

By Crab's List reader demand, I have brought back my nine-part e-pamphlet series on the legal document review industry.

Customers of any e-pamphlet will be placed on the Crab's List Document Review Alert List (or NOT if you prefer NOT). When I get a hot tip that I am seeking to pass along or to publish on this site, I will notify the list FIRST, then publish it here thereafter. In addition, I may send out other information that may be useful to document review attorneys. Even if you are in New York, Los Angeles or elsewhere, you may find my DC-focused information helpful to you in achieving your desired results.

E-Pamphlet Titles:
1: "Code Warrior" Attorney Work in DC
2: The Job and The Jobsite

I just got an iPhone, and am happy with my purchase. Had been eyeing it for a number of months, maybe over a year. It replaces a bulky camera (which I did not own and would have bought), BlackBerry (which I own and will sell in recoupment) and iPod (which I also own and will sell.) A picture of my little fellow Noah (2, almost 3) is above. The monthly fees are actually better than what I had for a less extensive contract now expired with Verizon and Sunday and the service has been great. The email service looks great on the phone and is approximately as efficient as that of the BlackBerry, and the internet service is great.

I can understand how pro-life doctors will want to refuse to administer an abortion. I can even understand how some will refuse to supply birth control. But I cannot understand how a GYN refuses on MORAL grounds to administer a PAP smear to determine whether a woman has cancer or a meaningful risk there of in the future. Apparently, the risk of death from cancer is important to preserve as a moral bulwark against the immorality of, well, sex before marriage. I guess it's more moral, more "pro-life", to watch a woman die of cancer than to risk the appearance that her concern for her health might be interpreted as an endorsement of her presumed sex life.

Project 222 is a small charitable idea that I am promoting to any interested bloggers.

The idea is pretty simple. Bloggers interested in Project 222 would volunteer the following per year:

1. a post once a month on the 2nd of the month (or as close as possible if the 2nd does not work for e.g. religious holiday, etc.) on a topic related to a non-profit, charitable, educational, humanitarian or other related organization;

2. two days of volunteering per year, ideally turned into blog posts with pictures if appropriate; and

3. a pledge of 2 percent of blog-derived gross revenue (ad revenue, royalties from syndicators or others, subscriptions, CafePress royalties, gross sales of misc. items, etc.) to any such organization.

The idea is not to promote the idea of any given political or social "bent" to charities but to promote the activities of all. This is not a "liberal" idea but a civic one: I think it would be great if conservative bloggers picked charities that reflected their values and gave them public support. Some might donate to a national charity while others could go to one in their ZIP Code. The volunteering could be to help out with a fundraising event or other such project; there are a lot of opportunities to volunteer for just a day.