Happy Friday..bit of a mixed bag this week and not all the links are from the Guardian…

1) Redundant. I’ve been here and remember it well. Go read this..

Then trading started, and all I remember is being shouted at by angry people who couldn’t use their gift cards. If you know anything about companies who go into administration you will know that gift cards immediately become invalid. It is not the choice of the staff. Let me say that again. IT IS NOT THE CHOICE OF THE STAFF YOU ARE SHOUTING AT. If you are the kind of person who would get angry about that, then think about this. You have just lost your £10 gift card. The person you are screaming at has just lost their livelihood.

2) Eating well is hard work when you’re poor. Wise words.

It’s not just about the cost of your food budget. It’s about the value of your food budget. So yes, you could pootle off to your local butcher (if they still exist) for some beef shin that costs about £2 for 2 people, but how much is the added cost of cooking it? A couple of hours in the oven all adds up when money is tight and that budget meal eats in your resources elsewhere. Sometimes that’s doable. You can do a bag of baked spuds at the same time and if you’re on quarterly bills there’s time to put cash aside before the Big Six put the costs up again. But if you’re on a prepayment meter for the electricity and you need to wash your hair and the kids’ school uniforms before the money runs out, then microwaving some hot dogs seems like a much better idea.

3)How to write a recipe. I’m just not enough of a perfectionist!

First came an overarching muffin philosophy: Muffins are not cake. “I have a lot of opinions about breakfast baked goods. And I feel like although muffins are pretty much cake that we pretend is okay to eat for breakfast, I insist that this good is on the breakfast side of the line, I feel like it should have breakfast ingredients in it and it should be lower in sugar and … it shouldn’t be as buttery as a cake.”

4) The snow is not responsible for a recession.

Supporters of government economic policy, which includes the large majority of City economists, have begun to suggest that the recent snowfall may cause an unprecedented “triple-dip” recession. The problem with this idea is that GDP in the final quarter of 2012 will also have been very weak and may have contracted. That was long before the weather disruption.

5) Has anti abortion campaigning lead to a rise in single parent families? Interesting.

In Red Families v. Blue Families, we pointed out the irony that blue states, despite their relatively progressive politics, have lower divorce and teen birthrates than red states. In fact the college-educated middle class, partly by postponing having children, had managed to better embody the traditional ideal: that is, a greater percentage of children being raised in two-parent families.

6) Girl drinks. I’m not a fan of super sweet drinks but this is quite interesting.

If the Pink Lady were a piece of household hardware, she would be a floral-print hammer—

7) Photos of fire fighters in Chicago where it’s really cold!