This article has been emailed more than 7,000 times according to Yahoo, so you’ve probably seen it already. But I just wanted to chime in with my opinion here. A quick recap: A small group of friends in San Francisco decided that they were fed up with consumerism, so agreed to go an entire year without buying anything new (except food, toiletries, and items pertaining to safety). They made it and enjoyed it so much that they’re going to do it again.

There’s NO WAY in hell I’d be able to do something like that! My husband and I are both shopaholics and love buying new things. I know it’s a bad trait, but we can’t help it. Whenever we try to control our spending, we do fine for a few months, but then we can’t take it anymore and go on a buying binge!!

Back to the Yahoo article. Did you notice the part where it says that there are communities of “freegans” who don’t even pay for food or shelter? They scrounge in dumpsters and sleep in abandoned buildings. Man, that’s just going too far! Eating out of dumpsters??? What does that prove?!

Today I had lunch with a friend who just returned from a trip down south to visit relatives and enjoy an extended vacation for the holidays. She and her husband drove so they could stop off at any interesting places that they came across along the way. She was very impressed by the scenery — especially around the Blue Ridge mountains. I looked up some photos of Blue Ridge real estate to see te area for myself, and I have to agree: it’s a beautiful place!

Everyone kept saying that the Bears’ final regular season matchup against the Packers was a “meaningless” game, and the team sure came out and played like it. But as Steve Rosenbloom wrote, there’s no such thing for a team that has been tanking as much as Chicago has. Besides another bad outing for quarterback Rex Grossman, the defense, which at the beginning of the season was actually drawing comparisons to the ‘85 team, has been alarmingly soft.

The Bears will have two weeks to prepare for their first playoff game, and I hope they make some major improvements in that time. Another early exit from the postseason would be a huge disappointment for sure.

I’ve been spending a lot of time checking into different types of investments lately. A lot of the more traditional types are either way too complicated for me to wrap my head around or require too much of a buy-in to make the return worthwhile. Then I started learning about silver coins and am slowly warming to the idea of silver as an investment.

First of all, silver is very affordable when compared to other precious metals, and is just as likely to maintain its value. Second, the process of buying silver coins is very straightforward. I understand exactly what I have to do and exactly what I’ll be getting in return. There would be very few rules or contingencies involved in the transaction, so it’s actually something I might do!

I’m going to keep checking around, but so far, if I had to invest in something right now, silver coins would be near the top of my list.

I heard that the FOX show The O.C. has been cancelled. I actually tried watching that show when it first came on because of all the hype it was getting. But frankly, I couldn’t see what the big deal was about. I thought the main character Ryan (Benjamin McKenzie) was boring — all of his problems have been done to death in other teen dramas. The poor, working-class outsider? Yawn. Plus, I thought the acting sucked!

Now with both Justice and The O.C. cancelled, I wonder what kind of new shows FOX will be bringing in. It doesn’t seem that they’ve been doing very well lately, so I hope they come up with something big!

I’ve got a couple of friends who use online dating sites, and one complaint that I hear quite often from them is how expensive some of their membership fees are. Many sites allow people to register for free so that it looks like they have a huge database of potential dates for you. But the catch is that you have to become a paid member in order to receive messages from people interested in answering your ad.

But JustSayHi.com is different in that it’s completely free to join, post an ad, receive responses to your ad, and contact other members. You don’t need a credit card to sign up at JustSayHi; you just need to be ready to meet great new people!

It’s been several days since Saddam Hussein was executed, but the event is still very much in the news. He’s the top search term on Technorati, and there are stories about the leaked video in most major newspapers and websites.

The general sentiment that a majority of these sources are expressing is as follows: Yes, Hussein deserved to die for the crimes he was convicted of. But no, he didn’t deserve to go out with people screaming at and taunting him while his execution was recorded on someone’s cell phone and subsequently posted on the Internet for all to see.

One main complaint that these folks have is that Saddam wasn’t allowed to die “with dignity.”

I’m sorry, but I just don’t agree with that line of reasoning. Sure, he looked like a pathetic figure as he was being lead to the noose so it might have been easy to feel sorry for him. But remember the reason he was there in the first place. Did any of the 148 people who were killed in the 1982 Dujail massacre die with dignity? Was Saddam worried about that point when he was in power? Absolutely not.

So, no, I don’t think I’ll worry about Saddam’s dignity in his final moments….