[imgbelt img=gospel.jpeg]The 53rd National Quartet Convention is taking place this week in Louisville. Some 40,000 gospel music fans are in town to hear groups like Richard Hyssong’s “The Hyssongs” (above) and to hear the keynote speaker, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. • Corn syrup has gotten such a bad rap from the foodie types that the Corn Refiners Association wants the Food and Drug Administration to give it a new name: corn sugar. There is “little scientific evidence” that corn syrup is different from any other kind of sweetener, according to the Washington Post. But the syrup is cheap and plenty of foodie type blame the sweetener for the large number of large Americans walking in to convenience stores to refill their soda pop tankards. (Folks, the problem is at the sucking end of the straw, not with the corn syrup.) Anyway, it could take two years for the FDA to go through all the rigamaroll needed to change the name. By that time, we will all be too fat to care.• Good article in The Texas Observer about how one Texas county, Hemphill, has tried to keep out the developers who are buying up water rights and planning to send rural water to the cities. Hemphill is in the far northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle. And it is home to one of the best weekly newspapers in the country, The Canadian Record. The Record and its editor, Laurie Ezzell Brown, first fought the introduction of factory hog farms and now they are seeing to the future of the county’s groundwater. Having a good weekly newspaper in town makes a big difference. • The Houston Chronicle’s Joe Holley is writing about the Texas governor’s race by looking at the state’s different regions. He’s adopted the scheme devised by our friends at Patchwork Nation for dividing the country into separate economic, social and political sections and applied it just to Texas.Today, Holley looks at “Tractor Country,” which in Texas covers a lot of the western half of the state. • Why invest in Apple when you can buy farmland?Minyanville gives tips for how you can invest and make money off the global shortages in food and the global boom in farming.