We'll return to my Twelve Days Whilst Christmas Approaches feature, but I was interested to learn that Muhammed Yunus went to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. SEE? I'm not just a Justin Timberlake-obsessed female with mommy blogging tendencies! Anyway, I've been reading an article on microfinance in the New Yorker. I've not finished the article, and I've been reading it for two weeks now, but I'm getting the idea. Provide monies to the poor, and in many cases (especially in Latin America) to women, and charge them interest and give a payment schedule, and entrepreneurship may win the day. The success stories in the article are modest, but they are successes nonetheless, and I hope to get to the end of the article with a better idea of a new kind of charity...a pro-commerce kind.

The magazine is in the bathroom...but now that the Prize has been awarded, I've decided to upgrade it to the bedside table.

How does a microcredit bank or loans to the very poor compare to the feel-good and splashy charity of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"? And does Ebay really signal a chance for people the world over to finally trust one another and become players in the global economy on their own scale? Discuss amongst yourselves.