How to prevent being manipulated by evil advertising types (like me).
Keyhole

Working in the advertising business, I’m privy to a lot of online “services” which are dedicated to tracking your every move on the Internet. Their hope is to figure out who you are, learn all about your interests and activities, tie all that information to your public records and finally sell a frighteningly detailed and accurate personal profile to anyone with literally $39. So, as a public service, here are a few things you can do to thwart these nosy bastards.
Yosemite National Park, California: Nature at its most nature-iest.
Ansel Adams, who?

When the great B&W nature photographer Ansel Adams first gazed upon Yosemite, he must have stared dumbfounded at the splendor and thought, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat--er, I mean...view camera.” — a line that would later be co-opted by Roy Scheider in the movie “Jaws.”
Egypt, Africa: The world’s most ancient civilization (and it has the dust to prove it).
Great_Pyramids_of_Giza

Despite what the media proclaimed, Wael Ghonim, the marketing guy from Google didn’t start the Egyptian revolution in February 2011. It wasn’t started by Twitter. Or Facebook. No, it was started by a spark. Something that was the last straw. Something that finally set them off. Something so agonizing, so intolerable, that it pushed them too far. And I’m fairly confident that something was us.
Redding, California: It's close to a lot of other, better places to visit.
Lake Shasta, CA

Having read that a famous architect had designed an interesting bridge in Reading, I suggested to my wife that we drive there for our 15th wedding anniversary. Now, my wife generally loves to travel, but the thought of spending five hours traversing the “picturesque” scenery along I-505 to visit some bridge struck her as the romantic equivalent of gift-wrapping a vacuum cleaner. Luckily, her expectations of me are even more modest, so she took what she could get.
Why normal people should only buy Apple products. And why I don't.
apple, computers,

If you’re a normal person—and by normal, I mean, anyone who doesn't know what the Turing Test is—then you should only buy Apple products. Seriously. Sell your Windows PC, Crackberry or Android phone right now. Why? Because, by comparison, non-Apple products frankly suck.
Hawai‘i’s The Big Island: Probably not the Hawai‘i you're thinking of.
Sunset on Hawaii's The Big Island

When we first made plans to go to Hawai‘i, we didn't know much about the place, like the fact that you put an upside-down apostrophe between the last two ‘i’s. But we’d been to Honolulu before and thought we’d gotten the gist of the 50th state: Hot sun, lots of flora and fauna, with sprawling beaches, bars and barcaloungers. So it came as quite a shock to us when our plane touched down in the Proterozoic Era.
An incompletely researched, half-assed treatise on the demise of trying.

This once-proud nation has fallen on hard times of late. America’s manufacturing industry is in the toilet (mostly because that toilet was made cheaper in China). Our non-immigrant kids are no longer the best in math, science or anything that doesn’t involve racking their ’nads. And now it seems that even our criminals are getting lazy. They’re no longer putting in long hours or taking dangerous risks. So whose fault is the demise of our criminal’s work ethic? Most likely, yours.