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Book Review - V Is For Vengeance

By Jessica Garrison

Sue Grafton, author of the alphabetically themed mystery series starring the snappy female detective Kinsey Millhone has long been adamant that her books and her character would never make it to the Hollywood screen. She even told her children that she would haunt them if they were to sell the rights after her death. It certainly hasn't kept her heroine from the kind of fame that is usually only achieved by being the main character in a blockbuster film.

Any casual reader of mysteries is familiar with Grafton's protagonist and her alphabetized series of madcap cases. So you know that central to the books' appeal is not the hoodlums and their crimes but rather Kinsey herself. She has reassuring habits. She runs three miles a day and grumbles about it. She likes to drink bad wine and hide from the world on her couch with a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. She doesn't have much of a love life, but she does have a supporting cast, including her beloved 80-something landlord Henry Pitt.

Most of all, she is witty and weary and a lot of fun. When we first run into Kinsey in V Is for Vengeance, she has had her nose broken, on her birthday. This happened, she admits, because yet again she was "sticking said nose into someone else's business." It goes without saying that someone soon winds up dead, and that Kinsey can't let it go. She pulls at the pieces until she determines that her chance encounter with a lingerie shopper connects to murder, a nationwide shoplifting ring and, of course, a naughty cop and a thief with a heart of gold.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, something dedicated readers know that Grafton doesn't do. In her books, there is always time for one-liners and amusing descriptions and asides, which are half the fun. Take the trip to the lingerie store that sets the story in motion: Grafton takes the time to describe the route Kinsey takes, her choice of parking spots and the fact that Kinsey usually prefers "the low-end chain stores, where aisles are jammed with racks of identical garments, suggesting cheap manufacture in a country unfettered by child labor laws." But on this day, Kinsey picks a Nordstorm, where, bored of "holding lacy scraps across my pelvis" she allows herself to be diverted by a woman stealing teddies and silk pajamas. Kinsey alerts store security, the woman is arrested and shortly thereafter turns up dead.

The initial verdict is suicide, but of course Kinsey is determined to learn more. Off she goes on her usual mix of madcap drives in her blue Mustang and stakeouts with her low-tech note cards, her witty repartee with any number of people and her disgusting meals at the local pub. It's not long before she's threatened, and vows briefly to mind her own business, although this determination lasts less than a sentence before she is back for more.

Kinsey shares the spotlight with a few other characters whose stories are at first unrelated and who get chapters devoted to their points of view. This time, we get a manipulative but appealing trophy wife with a tragic past and a semi-decent gangster looking for love. And because they are drawn by Grafton they are highly entertaining. It will not lessen the suspense to reveal that these two eventually wind up intertwined in the same mystery as Kinsey. Or that Kinsey comes out, as always, bruised and battered but ready for a glass of Chardonnay and her next case.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-book-sue-grafton-20111123,0,545082.story

Why Parents Still Want to Read Real Books to their Kids

By Bonnie Rochman

In my house, bedtime stories are sacred. Rarely does something derail the nightly routine, although feverish kids have been known to be tucked in without a story. But last week, my strep-throated 4-year-old awoke at 1 a.m. with this complaint: “You forgot to read me my bedtime story.” She was right. So I groggily pulled a book from her shelf and cuddled her close as she turned the pages. Reading forges connections between parents and children. It's also good for little brains.

But does the form in which the words appear matter? The New York Times reports that parents — even those who download books — are shunning kids’ e-books for the real thing. It seems that the feel and texture of paper pages dappled with colorful illustrations trumps the static dimensions of a screen. The article ran in the Time's Monday business section, but it may be more of a cultural tale. More than 25% of some adult literature is sold digitally, but e-books targeted at kids under 8 account for less than 5% of total children's book sales. “Reading a childhood classic on an e-reader is such a cold thing to do,” says Carol Moyer, head of the children's department at Quail Ridge Books, a bookstore in Raleigh, N.C., where my kids grew up going to book readings by visiting children's authors. (As far as I know, you can't get the e-edition of the latest Magic Tree House installment signed by the author.)

The bookstore's weekly story times — where real books are paged through — are more popular than ever. “E-books don't have the warmth and intimacy of the illustration on the page,” says Moyer. It is, in fact, kind of hard to conjure up with an e-book the same sort of Norman Rockwell coziness that comes with flipping pages with your child. It's even harder to imagine touch-and-feel board books for toddlers translated successfully to digital media. How can you pet the boar's fluffy tuft in Matthew Van Fleet's Tails or feel the porcupine's spines? And what about pull-tab books or intricate pop-ups?

Technophiles believe e-books can compete. Rick Broida sings the praises of the iPad, which “can do a lot more than just display static pages. It can read stories aloud; it can enrich a classic tale with touch-powered extras; and it can even render pages in 3D.” He describes Alice in Wonderland as a “lavishly illustrated 52-page abridgment of the classic tale [that] incorporates animation like no other e-book to date. Readers can tilt the iPad to make Alice grow and shrink; shake it to watch the Mad Hatter's bobble-head bobble; and so on.”

Sounds cool, but it seems more like a movie than a book. Just as ketchup isn't a vegetable, watching extravagant digital dramatizations of stories isn't reading. When my kindergartener spent tech-lab time following instructions to navigate to an e-books site, her teacher recognized that she wasn't reading; she was learning to use a computer. As is, our kids spend more than enough time in front of a screen. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wants parents to ban television and computers for kids under 2 because they just can't comprehend what's going on yet. After age 2, two hours of screen time should be the max. Should e-books count in this calculation?

There's also the nagging concern that the technology could prove more compelling than the storyline. “The bells and whistles of an iPad become a distraction,” Matthew Thomson, a dad of a 5-year-old told the Times. “When we go to bed and he knows it's reading time, he says, ‘Let's play Angry Birds a little bit,'” Mr. Thomson said. “If he's going to pick up the iPad, he's not going to read, he's going to want to play a game. So reading concentration goes out the window.” Moreover, if the iPad can read Alice in Wonderland aloud, Mom and Dad start to seem a tad superfluous. Parents are discouraged from propping a bottle so that a baby can drink on her own because feeding time should be bonding time; isn't that what reading stories is all about too?

“If you're farming out the reading part to a virtual reader, it becomes a different experience,” notes Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Texas, who authored the AAP's recently updated policy on media use for kids under 2. Still, points out Brown, what really matters is spending time with your child, telling stories. “When you have a parent and child reading together, whether it's an electronic book or a paper book,” she says, “the experience they're sharing is what's important.”

Why Parents Still Want to Read Real Books, Not E-Books, to their Kids

Book Review - Heavy! The Surprising Reasons America Is the Land of the Free - And the Home of the Fat

America's emerging "fat war" threatens to pit a shrinking population of trim Americans against an expanding population of heavy Americans in raging policy debates over "fat taxes" and "fat bans." These "fat policies" would be designed to constrain what people eat and drink - and theoretically crimp the growth in Americans' waistlines and in the country's healthcare costs.

Richard McKenzie's HEAVY - ISBN: 3642201342 - offers the new insight into economic causes and consequences of America's dramatic weight gain over the past half century. It also uncovers the follies of seeking to remedy the country's weight problems with government intrusions into people's excess eating, arguing that controlling people's eating habits is fundamentally different from controlling people's smoking habits.
McKenzie controversially links America's weight gain to a variety of causes including: the rise of women's liberation, the long-term fall in real minimum wage, the downfall of communism, etc.

In no small way - no, in a very BIG way - America is the "home of the fat" because it has been for so long the "land of the free." Americans' economic, if not political, freedoms, however, will come under siege as well-meaning groups of "anti-fat warriors" seek to impose their dietary, health, and healthcare values on everyone else. HEAVY! details the unheralded consequences of the country's weight gain, which include greater fuel consumption and reduced fuel efficiency of cars and planes, growth in health insurance costs and fewer insured Americans, reductions in the wages of heavy people, and required reinforcement of rescue equipment and hospital operating tables.

McKenzie advocates a strong free-market solution to how America's weight problems should and should not be solved. For Americans to retain their cherished economic freedoms of choice, heavy people must be held fully responsible for their weight-related costs and not be allowed to shift blame for their weight to their genes or environment. Allowing heavy Americans to shift responsibility for their weight gain can only exacerbate the country's weight problems.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20111029/Book-discusses-how-America-can-solve-its-weight-problems-without-government-intrusion.aspx

The Latest Knitting News From France

By Emmanuelle Michel

From Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Nicolas Sarkozy and more, a French blogger has become an Internet hit by poking fun at the rich and powerful with knitted dolls and her reactions to the news. Inspired by the sex scandal around former IMF director Strauss-Kahn, this knitting fan launched her blog in Lille last May. She has since had more than 120,000 visitors to her site. Every week she posts knitted scenes from the news on the blog, called "Delit Maille" (Knitted in the Act).

"It's a way to make fun of something without being too cruel. Wool is soft, nice. You can say anything you want and it's okay as long as it's wrapped up in wool," said blogger Anna, a speech therapist in her 40s who preferred not to have her last name published. Saying she did it "just for a laugh", Anna posted her first knitted scene shortly after Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York after a hotel maid accused him of attempted rape. She said she was inspired by a book , Knit Your Own Royal Wedding, that was released to coincide with the wedding of Britain's Prince William to Kate Middleton.

Her post featured photographs of knitted dolls of Strauss-Kahn and the chambermaid, Nafissatou Diallo, in a variety of poses. In one, the Strauss-Kahn doll is shown wrapped only in a bath towel while the maid recoils in horror. The Strauss-Kahn doll also features a removable suit. "This allows you to play out the different scenarios and to set the protagonists in a scene, to check your theories in a live simulation," was a comment under the photographs.

Her blog was an immediate hit after the Strauss-Kahn pictures were posted. Inspired by this success, Anna began knitting and posting pictures of other news scenes and the blog took off. Anna has made more than 60 dolls and posted dozens of new scenes. Another favourite with readers was former Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi shown being warmly welcomed in France by Sarkozy during a 2007 visit. The Kadhafi doll -- featuring a tangle of black hair and pencil moustache -- is shown with Sarkozy posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, enjoying a picnic and frolicking in a field.

Sarkozy was featured again in a post earlier this month after he was on French television with US President Barack Obama during a summit in Cannes. Waving a small US flag, the French president is shown standing barely half the height of Obama and with his feet dangling above the ground from a chair during the interview. Not every scene is political. Anna has also taken aim at popular culture: In October, a scene with the character Don Draper from the television series Mad Men and he is shown posing in a knitted suit, leaning back with a knitted cigarette and kissing a variety of knitted women. Another post recreates US pop star Lady Gaga's "The Edge of Glory" music video, complete with knitted versions of the singer's raunchy leather outfit and silver-tipped boots.

Anna said the blog is taking up more and more of her time, especially as French political news heats up ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections next year. "It takes at least six hours to make a doll, and then I set the scene. It's a real job!" she said. But despite numerous requests and to the disappointment of fans, the dolls, are not for sale.

[But ... I sense a series of collectible dolls in Anna’s future]

Anna's blog:
http://delitmail.blogspot.com

Black Friday Countdown

1. Prepare for more marketing
The number of consumers who plan to hit the stores and shopping malls on Nov. 25 may be down again this year. To lure more shoppers, retailers are rolling out new marketing strategies. Many consumers can expect text messages touting Black Friday deals. Macy's, has been announcing Black Friday deals on Facebook each week since Oct. 31, including 50% off Sharper Image items and 40% discounts on coffee makers and espresso machines. These sneak previews can be a plus for consumers. By knowing Black Friday prices in advance, shoppers can decide whether it's worth holding off until the big day.

2. Thanksgiving or Shopping
This year, some retailers will roll out their Black Friday deals before the Thanksgiving dinner table is cleared. Toys "R" Us and Walmart deals will kick off at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., respectively, on Thanksgiving night in most locations. Macy's, Target, Best Buy and Old Navy say they're opening most stores at midnight. But here's the problem for shoppers: Those who want to snatch up the low price door busters will have to be among the first on line, which means arriving at the store on Thanksgiving morning or at the latest in the afternoon.

3. Black Friday came early
Lots of retailers started the Black Friday-like come-ons in early November this year. Walmart launched a "Super Saturday" sale on Nov. 5. That same day Best Buy hosted an event on select consumer electronics. Some consumers might be better off shopping before Thanksgiving, especially if they're trying to get a TV, computer or other electronics at a discount. While Friday prices could be lower, they'll avoid the long lines and crowds and the possibility of not finding what they want.

4. You should have stayed home
You can always stay home and search online. Your item may even be selling at a lower price than the brick and mortar stores were advertising. Oh, and you might get free shipping, too. More retailers are offering their Black Friday deals online. Toys "R" Us shoppers will be able to get the same deals online that are in its stores. Some great deals will be reserved for stores only. Retailers know that once consumers are inside the store, there's a higher chance that they'll end up buying more items than what they intended.

5. Prepare for violence
In 2008, roughly 2,000 shoppers stormed a Walmart in Valley Stream, N.Y., trampling an employee to death. Since then the company has implemented crowd management techniques. Separately, last year, a shopper was arrested outside a Madison, Wisconsin, Toys "R" Us after she allegedly threatened to shoot shoppers who objected to her cutting the line. The shopper didn't really have a gun, but police arrested her. At Best Buy, employees give shoppers who are waiting in line tickets for the door buster item they want to help maintain order.

6. Don't expect good quality
Stores are less likely to offer big discounts on top quality electronics on Black Friday. Retailers know they can still sell the most coveted models for higher prices. The same holds true for laptops: While enticing, $200 to $300 laptops are usually not the best products. They're intended primarily for web surfing, as opposed to gaming or watching movies. Quality isn't always an issue on Black Friday. High priced clothing is often marked down significantly. Prices on home appliances are also slashed that day. This Black Friday, some examples include an LG washer and dryer each selling for 45% off at Best Buy and a Kenmore Elite top-loading washer and electric dryer at 50% off at Sears.

7. We market to women (but not the best deals)
Women spend four times more on holiday shopping than men. As a result, retailers direct much of their Black Friday marketing toward women. However, the products such as clothing, handbags and jewelry are the least in danger of running out. So consumers might want to hold off until the last few days of the holiday shopping season when retailers typically slash prices on whatever's left. For other products, if you can wait until after the holidays. Cookware and home accessory prices tend to drop at the end of December and bed linens and towels go on sale in January.

8. Don't be fooled by credit card discounts offers
This holiday season, nearly 30% of consumers plan to use a credit card for most of their holiday gift purchases. Unfortunately, store credit cards are among the worst debts consumers can carry. Interest rates are almost always 20% or higher. And store cards have low credit limits, usually below $1,000. When consumers use these credit cards, the balance they carry is likely to make up a large percentage of their credit line, which can lower their credit score.

9. Watch out for your fellow shoppers
Black Friday's limited inventory and crazy crowds can bring out the worst in people. Experts say tug-of-war fights over merchandise and stolen shopping carts are more common than you think. That's why they recommend that shoppers never leave their carts unattended -- even for a minute.

http://www.smartmoney.com/spend/family-money/10-things-black-friday-wont-tell-you-1321569068898/?link=SM_hp_ls1e

Ann Beattie’s 7 Truths About Writers:

1. They take souvenirs of Important Evenings for their “mother.” This is like taking leftovers home for the “dog.” Of course, some mothers do get the souvenirs and some dogs do get the scraps. However, it is not likely.

2. If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.

3. It makes the writer’s day if he or she can include the opinions of a truly stupid character or text in the story, punctuating those announcements with exclamation points, which are the icing on the cake. For particularly adept and judicious uses of the exclamation point, see the works of Joy Williams and Deborah Eisenberg.

4. Without these things, many contemporary American short stories would grind to a halt: fluorescent lights; refrigerators; mantels. They are its gods, or false gods. In that it is difficult to know Him, these stand-ins are often misspelled.

5. Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The habits of playwrights are unknown.

6. Writers are very particular about their writing materials. Even if they work on a computer, they edit with a particular pen; they have legal pads about which they are very particular—size, color—and other things on their desk that they almost never need: scissors; Scotch tape. Few cut up their manuscripts and crawl around the floor anymore, refitting the paragraphs or rearranging chapters, because they can “cut” and “paste” on the computer. As a rule, writers keep either a very clean desktop or a messy one. To some extent, this has to do with whether they’re sentimental.

7. Writers wear atrocious clothes when writing. So terrible that I have been asked, by the UPS man, “Are you all right?” An example: stretched-out pajama bottoms imprinted with cowboys on bucking broncos, paired with my husband’s red thermal undershirt and a vest leaking tufts of down, with a broken zipper and a rhinestone pin in the shape of pouting lips. Furry socks with embossed Minnie Mouse faces (the eyes having deteriorated in the wash) that clash with all of the above.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/

Do you like dogs ...
Check the webcam at

http://24.106.243.42:50018/ViewerFrame?Resolution=320x240&Quality=Standard&Size=STD&Language=0&Sound=Enable&Mode=JPEG&RPeriod=3&SendMethod=1&View=Full

One of the two little doxies is blind ...
Can you guess which one
???

The 1940 U.S. Census Will Soon Be Online

The U.S. National Archives and Archives.com are working together to put the 1940 U.S. Census online and free of charge for the first time. The long wait involves a Federal 72-year privacy restriction. The 1940 Census contain the names of over 130 million U/S. residents. That Census Day was April 1, 1940, so records will be open and available on April 2, 2012 on a new website yet to be created.

Details are on the National Archive site:

http://www.archives.gov/research/genealogy/

Details also found on the Archive.com site:

http://www.archives.com/

Thanksgiving In Maryland

The cookhouse on Waltz Farm sits 50 yards from where John and Sally Waltz live in Smithsburg, Md. Windows, candles and a fireplace provide its light and heat. Built in the mid-1800s, the 12-by-24-foot wooden structure bears patinas and aromas of the past. John’s ancestors did their laundry there, butchered their hogs, rendered lard and made scrapple. And they cooked in its well-proportioned hearth. Sally fell in love with the idea of it all as soon as she got to explore what was inside.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, having a separate building to prepare food helped keep the main house cool in warm weather and reduced the chances that a kitchen fire might destroy the whole house, Sally says. “I made a deal with John way back when: ‘If I can have this for cooking, you can build other buildings on the property,’ ” she says. They use the cookhouse about four times a year. At Thanksgiving, it comes to life as they produce a fine feast.

Inside the kitchen in the main house, a hutch holds Sally’s collection of redware, earthenware pottery that turns brownish-red when it’s fired in the kiln. Some of the casseroles, round-bellied stew pots, bowls and plates are plain, and some are adorned with Old World flourishes. The redware prompts a story; both she and John, have a way of charming a visitor with their gentle humor and thoughtfulness. Nuggets of history are dispensed like treats. Sally puts this talent to work as a volunteer docent for the Rural Heritage Museum in nearby Boonsboro.

The Waltzes ferry much of their redware down to the cookhouse when they prepare for Thanksgiving, stacking it next to where cast-iron Dutch ovens and skillets sit in front of a tall cupboard full of irreplaceable farm relics. Corn bread molds and baskets hang from the rafters. As part of the Waltzes’ rehab, the cookhouse walls have been insulated and spackled to look like old plaster. To the left of the fireplace, John has stacked two wheelbarrows’ worth of wood, which he estimates is about the amount it takes to cook food all day on Thanksgiving, starting with breakfast.

“We’re usually up at 5 and get a good fire going to heat up the building,” Sally says. By the time relatives arrive at 9 a.m., a hunter’s stew is bubbling, the hominy has cooked down and the griddle for making pancakes has glowing coals beneath it. She began cooking regularly after she attended a workshop at a Lancaster, Pa., museum. The instructor roasted a turkey in a reflector oven. “It’s ingenious, really,” she says. Lightweight and made of tin, the oven’s demi-barrel shape accommodates a bird or roast that’s secured to an iron spit. The oven is placed near — not over — the fire. The secret to open-hearth cooking is maintaining steady, low-level heat.

When Sally cooks an 18-to-20-pounder she loosely stuffs the cavity with celery, carrot and onion. She skips salt and pepper. Over the course of five hours or so, the bird’s dripping juices collect in the bottom curve of the oven, where they can be drained into a gravy boat via the oven’s built-in spout. The turkey browns evenly without the cook’s having to turn the spit or reposition the oven. A hinged door on the back affords an easy glimpse. The turkey that John carves has a slight smokiness. By 4:30 or 5, when everything’s ready, Sally says, it’s dark enough that she has to hold candles close so her husband can see what he’s doing.

She relies on time-tested recipes for the rest of the meal, which includes green beans slow-cooked with bacon and onion; a rich sweet potato soufflé ; a simple, moist corn bread; mincemeat pie, whose filling is drier and meatier than most fruity, stewed variations, plus pumpkin and apple pies; and fresh apple cider. Sally has baked pies inside kettles at the hearth, but the Thanksgiving pies are made 24 hours in advance in her kitchen.

Dinner is served by the warmth of the cookhouse fireplace, as guests sit cozy at the table or settle into the room’s rocking chairs, wooden settee and benches. Candles glow at the windows. The spread includes a dish familiar to folks who live in rural Maryland and Pennsylvania, but it raises the eyebrow of a city dweller: a pot of pickled beets, with peeled, whole hard-cooked eggs mixed in.

Linked recipes at the end of the article include: Green Beans and Bacon … Open Hearth Turkey … Sweet Potato Soufflé … Mincemeat Pie … Red Beet Pickle … Reflector Oven 101 … and … Secrets of a Perfect Pie Crust
.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/thanksgiving-in-maryland-happens-in--and-around--the-hearth/2011/10/21/gIQAbIaCPN_story.html

Oh ... excuse me ...
I did not even know about a "new" Soapbox

It works for me ... ??? ...

The Soapbox

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Vintage Clothing - The $78,000 Zoot Suit

This month in New York a zoot suit sold for $78,000. It was a world-record performance made all the more surprising by the disparity between the value printed for it in the auction catalog: $600-$900. “I like to always be on the conservative side with my estimates,” says Karen Augusta, who owns the highly regarded Augusta Auctions, the vintage clothing company that sold the suit. “In my heart I thought it could sell for as much as $5,000, maybe more. And then when I was deluged with phone calls from pretty major museums in the country, I thought well hmmmmm this is going to sell for way more than I expected.”

Indeed. The cream-colored [pictured in the article] woolen outfit is the only zoot suit known to have been sold at auction in the United States. One buyer from a large museum said she had been waiting 40 years to find something like it. Augusta, who has represented collections for the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, bought it from a man who found it at an estate sale in Newark, N.J. With its cranberry-colored rayon lining and enormous shoulder pads, it had been used as a clown costume. The man bought it for less than $20.

The two-day auction preceded two days of men’s vintage sales in Manhattan, part of an increasingly popular enthusiasm among designers and street-style scions for men’s clothing. David Orstein, who runs the Manhattan Vintage Clothing Show, described the mood at the Metropolitan Pavilion as “euphoric.” “People are just so appreciative,” he says, adding that he invited more than 900 representatives from men’s fashion designers in the New York area alone. “You’d be surprised how many women’s designers do men’s clothing. Many designers do men’s clothing.” The trend is driven both by museums flush with funds to fill out their collections and by newly enamored consumers who have come to appreciate the subtleties of menswear. Rock-a-billy, motorcycle, Western, military, and Ivy League styles have become especially popular, both for natty men to wear and for designers (Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein) to emulate. One attendee at the show saw several buyers for Ralph Lauren leaving with bags full of Madras prints. A word to the fashion-forward: Watch for that next season.

The zoot suit in particular is special because of its extreme rarity. Suits like this were worn typically by African American, Hispanic and Italian men in the eastern U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. Their ample folds and drapes were considered outlandish in a time when wool was rationed and silk was forbidden–every spare bit of cloth had to go to the war effort. “I mean it was pretty much illegal,” Augusta says. “There were tailors that would make them, but it was a black market.”

The New York suit was purchased by a large museum that aggressively outbid a second, eager museum contender. Each had carefully researched the piece and felt it would be an essential component for their permanent collection. That’s really the bottom line driving this particular sale, Ornstein says. It just hasn’t been seen anywhere, ever, until now. “Everything is supply and demand, you can’t get around it,” he says. “Not that the demand of the zoot suit is high–there’s not that many people–but it’s so rare that you only need a couple of big buyers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2011/11/11/mens-vintage-roars-to-life-the-zoot-suit-that-cost-as-much-as-a-bmw/

LOL ...
No ... I don't remember the Grapenuts
But Gibbons was "gold" with his books in the 1960s ...
He hit his stride with Hippie / "natural" movement ...
He has a biography that I never read ... quite a guy

Stalking the Wild Asparagus the first foraging book by Euell Gibbons

The Food at Our Feet … A Forager’s Diary

I spent the summer foraging. The pursuit of wild food has become fashionable.

JUNE

I began working my way north as soon as I arrived in Italy. I unpacked a carton of books with titles like “Nature’s Garden” and “The Wild Table.” I bought new mud boots and enlisted a mentor, John Paterson, who looked at my boots and said, “What’s wrong with sneakers?” Paterson is the kind of spontaneous forager who carries knives and old shopping bags and plastic buckets in the trunk of his car. (I carry epinephrine and bug repellent.) Being lanky and very tall, he can also leap over scraggly brush, which I, being small, cannot. Paterson got his start foraging as a schoolboy. Today, he has a Romanian wife, two children, and a thriving restaurant of his own—the Antica Osteria della Valle—in Todi. In early June, I was finishing a plate of Paterson’s excellent tagliarini with porcini when he emerged from the kitchen, pulled up a chair, and started talking about the mushrooms he had discovered, foraging as a boy.

A week later, we set out for some of his favorite foraging spots. We stopped at the best roadside for gathering the tiny leaves of wild mint (“Fantastic with lamb”) and passed the supermarket at the edge of town, where only the day before he’d been cutting wild asparagus behind the parking lot (“Great in risotto, but it looks like I took it all”). Then we tried the field where he usually gets his wild fennel (“The flowers are lovely with ham and pork”) and found much of that delicious weed. I was hoping to find strioli, too. Strioli is a spicy wild herb that looks like long leaves of tarragon. It grows in fields and pastures in late spring and early summer and makes a delicious spaghetti sauce—you take a few big handfuls of the herb, toss it into a sauté pan with olive oil, garlic, and peperoncini, and in a minute it’s ready.

One tumbledown house spoke to Paterson. He jumped out of the car, peered over a thicket of roadside bush and sloe trees, and disappeared down a steep, very wet slope before I had even unbuckled my seat belt. Tthe wild asparagus, which usually hides from the sun in a profusion of other plants’ leaves and stalks, was so plentiful that you couldn’t miss it. We filled a shopping bag. Paterson had spotted a patch of leafy scrub and pulled me toward it. He called it crespina. It’s a spiny sow thistle—a peppery wild vegetable whose leaves taste a little like spinach and a lot like sorrel. Free food! There’s nothing like it. It always tastes better.”

That is the sample start of a seven page article with July, August and September to go. You are welcome to read more because “Most of us eat only what we know. It’s time to put on your boots (or our sneakers) and look around.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/21/111121fa_fact_kramer?currentPage=all

Book Review - Old Connecticut’s Darker Side

By Jaime Ferris

Readers know they are in for true historical intrigue and adventure through the darker side of Connecticut’s Colonial history upon reading the William Faulkner quote on one of the first pages of his new book, Tales of Old New Milford: Slavery, Crime and Punishment on the Connecticut Frontier. “The past is never dead,” it reads. “It’s not even past.” This is a truth that the author, Michael John Cavallaro, knows well. He spent years researching New Milford’s colorful and eventful early history. He takes you on a wild ride through the dark side of Colonial history; from the enslavement of the Native Americans to the introduction of African American slaves in the early 18th century, the story of Connecticut’s earliest plantations is examined. The history of the nation’s first detention facility, Newgate Prison is told in all of its graphic detail.

These mysterious stories in their ancient form demand to be unraveled. Research into slavery led to the discovery of some heartbreaking tales, but also inspiring stories of freedom. One of the more uplifting stories revolves around Partridge Thatcher, a farmer and lawyer who lived in town. Partridge Thatcher and his wife, Mary were unable to have children of their own, acquired two African children, Jacob, 11, and Dinah, 10, in June, 1749. The Thatchers raised the children as their own. The Thatchers would have had to examine the social climate of the time and … how their peers in New Milford would view the new addition to their family and the commitment of the choice they made on that day.

Though there were slaves in the area Litchfield County was anti-slavery, as evidenced by the freedom documents unearthed. The first slave freed in New Milford was in 1754, something that then-town clerk Elijah Bostwick noted with beautiful penmanship in the freedom documents he penned. These freedom documents are a beauty to behold. People can find these documents for themselves in town records. Bostwick’s penmanship was extraordinary. You can tell he was proud of his job. It shows in every freedom document he wrote.”

Through research, Mr. Cavallaro also discovered America’s first mass murder. According to his initial research, on Feb. 3, 1780, 19-year-old Barnett Davenport of New Milford entered the home of Caleb Mallory and violently killed him and four other family members. Known as “The Mallory Murders,” Davenport’s crime was so shocking and gruesome that the news spread from Maine to Georgia in a matter of days.

But the story of the Mallory murders became a regional legend of sorts. Research turned up incorrect or conflicting information. Trial records disappeared from the Litchfield court, and Davenport’s confession was missing. It took two years and a lot of detective work to, once and for all, resolve the myths and mysteries swirling around this heinous Litchfield County crime. But it finally cleared up inconsistencies and made some interesting and rather disturbing discoveries. Now, the truth has been exposed for the first time in more than two centuries.

And that led the author to the third subject of the book, Newgate Prison. “One thing led to another … and I became inexorably drawn into the vortex of these intriguing tales,” the author explained. “At every turn, the subject of Connecticut’s Newgate Prison arose. Those references drew me to the story of America’s first state prison, and I found myself fascinated with how the themes of crime, society and the need for a prison were interwoven in early American Colonial history.

The prison, built in Simsbury (now East Granby), was a converted copper mine, and was not a pleasant place. “Most of the ruins above ground are gone now … and the tunnels are too dangerous to explore, but there are many stories about Army deserters, murderers and village idiots who, in Colonial times, were mentally ill persons.”

The book is available [in CT] at the Bank Street Book Nook in New Milford, The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington, House of Books in Kent, the Gaylordsville Market and at http://www.local-author.com. [As of this date the book is not available on Amazon - ISBN 9780981678153]

http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2011/11/12/news/doc4ebf5504553b8271474549.txt?viewmode=fullstory

New Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn't Honey

By Andrew Schneider

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing. The results show that pollen has been filtered out of products labeled "honey." The removal of these microscopic particles makes the nectar flunk the standards set by the World Health Organization, the European Commission have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources. In the U.S., the FDA says that any product that no longer contains pollen isn't honey. However, the FDA isn't checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.

Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of honey - some containing illegal antibiotics - on the U.S. market for years. U.S. groceries are flooded with Indian honey banned in Europe as unsafe because of contamination with antibiotics, heavy metal and no pollen which prevents tracking its origin.

Food Safety News purchased more than 60 samples of honey in 10 states and the District of Columbia. 76 percent of samples bought in groceries had all the pollen removed, These were stores like Safeway, Giant Eagle, Kroger, A&P and Stop & Shop. 100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens, Rite-Aid and CVS had no pollen. 77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores like Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart and Target had no pollen. 100 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual service portions from Smucker, McDonald's and KFC had the pollen removed. But every one of the samples Food Safety News bought at farmers markets, co-ops and natural stores like PCC and Trader Joe's had the full amount of pollen.

The above is a sample of a very long article with even longer comments. It prints out to dozens of pages as it persues the following questions:

Why Remove The Pollen?

What's Wrong With Chinese Honey?

The FDA’s Lack Of Action - Why The FDA Ignores Pleas?

Pollen? Who Cares?

Here Are Just A Few Of Many Dozens of Comments

This is food system investigative journalism at it's finest -- exposing the dirty BIG secrets of industrialized agriculture. In this case "honey" that ISN'T honey is laundered through business-as-usual relationships via untraceable multiple brand names to a supermarket, restaurant, convenience store, drug store, fast food outlet near you. The fact that the FDA knows all about it but minimally inspects is also the story. Think of all those dubious apples (arsenic in imported apple concentrate) pesticide-laden fruit, maple syrup (cane sugar), seafood, garlic, veggies and processed products coming in to the US from China and other exporters at low prices bolstering food corporation bottom lines while putting honest farmers and producers out of business...

So -- Run, don't walk, to your nearest local beekeeper and stock up on the Real Thing and taste the difference -- and you'll be much the healthier. And, oh.... BTW we NEED US bees for pollination purposes as well -- our food supply depends on it. Now if an investigation would only pin down another major industrial ag malady --colony collapse disorder -- while the usual subjects (pesticides, GMOs) go on and on with agribusiness as usual....

Just one more reason why "organic" is an expensive joke. Want good honey, buy from your local beekeeper. 'Organic' provides zero assurance of quality.

Never put honey in the microwave or the refrigerator. It is best stored in a nice warm place. All honey over time can have some crystallization but placing it in a pan of hot water will restore it to it's liquid state.

I am a small berry farm operation using organic growing methods with several colonies of honey bees. They are indeed one of the most amazing insects and the only insect that makes food. We owe much to the tiny honey bee. Do you know that a single bee will only make 1 teaspoon of honey in it's lifetime and that it makes hundreds of trips out to gather the nectar to make that teaspoon. Raw honey has numerous health benefits. It's an excellent wound healer, good for coughs, skin and hair, an energizer and full of antioxidants. Eating local raw honey is wonderful for allergies, a good digestive aid and it's full of vitamins and minerals. I use honey on a bee sting and it never swells or gets irritated.

The company whom I worked for in a management capacity know full well the honey it sells comes from Chinese suppliers but their main interest is their bottom line. Don't fall for their advertising spin folks. Buy your honey from small dealers and you won't get poisoned with Chinese chemicals.

Want the best honey which will help reduce allergies in your area? Buy directly from the beekeepers or jars with a local beekeeper's address on it (some of us DO sell through local groceries and other stores). If you're suspicious, make an appointment to come see the beekeeper's facilities. Many/most of us are proud of our hives and are happy to show them off.

No, Chinese honey isn't safe honey, or, indeed, honey at all because they adulterate it with HFCS and other versions of sugar water. It's not SAFE honey because they allow the use of pesticides that we don't allow here and because of the antibiotics they use.

Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey

Travel Books - Holiday Gift Suggestions

By Beth Harpaz

Is there an avid traveler on your gift list? Or someone who loves reading about faraway places and other cultures? Here are a few ideas and recommendations:

Pauline Frommer, a travel book writer, lists Map Head, by Ken Jennings the legendary “Jeopardy!” winner. He is a very witty, insightful writer and has written an entertaining and educational book about maps.

City Secrets, a new series of small hard covers for travelers, has new guides out this year for London, Rome and Florence/Venice, with City Secrets Manhattan due in late November. “Writers, artists, curators, and others reveal their favorite strolls, hidden gardens, buildings, shops, and restaurants“, says Pat Carrier of the Globe Corner Books in Brookline Village, MA.

Her other suggestions include City: A User's Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of Urban Life by P.D. Smith - “a collection of essays about urban life on everything from skyscrapers and shantytowns to street food”, She recommends two cookbooks with a sense of place, Mourad: New Moroccan, by Mourad Lahlou and Saraban: A Chef's Journey Through Persia by Greg and Lucy Malouf.

Lonely Planet has published a series for children on Paris, London, Rome and New York. These paperbacks are packed with tidbits on local history, geography, the arts and pop culture. Not For Parents: Paris, Everything You Ever Wanted To Know, for example, mentions everything from crepes and the origins of plaster of Paris to a look at a bizarre showcase for taxidermied animals. Lonely Planet's new books for adults include Great Journeys, a coffee-table book about “the world's most spectacular routes,” from the trail to Peru's Machu Picchu to America's classic Route 66. New also is a collection of stories by celebrities called Lights, Camera, Travel! including Brooke Shield's tale of her wintertime visit to the Arctic.

Distant Lands, a travel bookstore in Pasadena, California is recommending Lonely Planet's 1000 Ultimate Sights as the “quirkiest” of new travel must-see books. “If you like golden things, for example, there's a section on `Golden Greats,' encompassing such attractions as the Golden Buddha in Bangkok, the Golden Mummies in Egypt's Western Desert, and Dawson City's Bonanza Creek. Another favorite topic is ‘Most Eye-Opening Workplaces' and `Most Astounding Ego Trips,' from Versailles in France to a 65-foot-tall monument to North Korea's Kim Il Sung. They also recommend Monumental Paris by Herve Champollion. The panoramic photos bring you to many hidden corners ... gardens, canals, parks, and secret waterways that make Paris one of Europe's most endlessly fascinating and enchanting cities.”

Also on Distant Lands' list: Braun & Hogenberg's Cities of the World: Complete Edition of the Colour Plates of 1572-1617 which offers snapshots of how people lived in cities in Europe, Africa, Asia and Central America in drawings and text.

There is a new edition of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. This version adds 200 new entries, including countries not in the original edition, like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Nicaragua, Qatar and Mozambique, plus suggestions for lodging and food. An interactive companion for “1,000 Places” offers photos, maps and a way to log your past and future travels. The full app is free with a code included on the first stickered printing of the book.

America's Great Railroad Stations is the perfect gift for train buffs, a coffee-table book with 250 photographs plus vintage black-and-white pictures and text by Ed Breslin. The book tells the story of the role these buildings played in the lives of the people and cities they served, from Beaux Arts monuments in New York and Washington to adobe structures in the Southwest, from the Union Pacific to Michigan Central. Another beauty is The World's Must-See Places: A Look Inside More Than 100 Magnificent Buildings and Monuments with photos and 3-D cutaways and diagrams of places like Beijing's Forbidden City, Mexico's Chichen Itza and Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock.

The Scattered Tribe: Traveling the Diaspora from Cuba to India to Tahiti & Beyond is Ben G. Frank's account of Jewish communities from a new synagogue in Tahiti that serves expats and tourists to the nearly gone remnants of North Africa's once-thriving Jewish communities. The survey includes the likes of Vietnam, India and Burma. And the snapshots offered will interest readers with a passion for Jewish history.

A new book is out for fans of Manhattan’s High Line: High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky by Joshua David. The first half is a written conversation about the discovery of the old rail line and how it was shepherded against all odds through city bureaucracy from a decaying dinosaur to a vibrant public space. The second half is a collection of photos, both historic and recent, showing the High Line's history and transformation.

Finally, Travel + Leisure is out with lovely photos and engaging text in Europe: The Places We Love, from the “Sweet Life in Capri,” to “Secret Villages” like Norcia, Italy, and Marvao, Portugal.

http://www.nativetimes.com/life/travel/6367-books-for-the-traveler-holiday-gift-suggestions

Bil Keane - 'Family Circus' Comic Creator - Dead at 89

Bil Keane was creator of "The Family Circus," the gentle, long-running comic syndicated in almost 1,500 newspapers. Mr. Keane died Tuesday at age 89 at his home in Arizona. He had become a wry poet of the innocence of childhood with his single-panel cartoon portraying the joys and travails of growing up. Except that his characters, based on his own family, never aged at all.

The themes stayed constant for the more than half-century Mr. Keane wrote and drew the comic: The children play with their pets, track snow into the house, have tantrums, kneel for their prayers, and tire out their long-suffering, ever-affectionate mother, "Mommy." The cartoons were more sharply observed than ha-ha funny. "I would rather have the readers react with a warm smile, a tug at the heart or a lump in the throat as they recall doing the same things in their own families," Mr. Keane once said.

A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Keane taught himself cartooning by copying New Yorker artists like Peter Arno and George Price. During World War II, he served in the Army, drawing a strip called "At Ease With the Japanese" for Stars and Stripes. In 1945 Mr. Keane became a staff artist for the Philadelphia Bulletin. In 1954, he launched his first syndicated comic, "Channel Chuckles," which highlighted the lighter side of the emerging medium of television.

He founded "The Family Circus" in 1960, and it caught on quickly. Mr. Keane modeled the mother on his wife Thelma, whom he met in Australia during the war. "When the cartoon first appeared, she looked so much like 'Mommy' that if she was in the supermarket, people would come up to her and say, 'Aren't you the Mommy in 'Family Circus?' Mr. Keane had friendships with several other cartoonists, including Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, and was close to newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck, illustrating one of her books.

Because so many found "The Family Circus" guileless the strip was a frequent target of satires, many of which Mr. Keane professed to like. But in 1999, Mr. Keane insisted that the website "Dysfunctional Family Circus," which contained astringent captions to his drawings, be taken down. Fellow cartoonists also occasionally paid tribute to the comic, and as a stunt Mr. Keane and Scott Adams, creator and author of "Dilbert," briefly swapped roles. "Bil gave me the best career advice of my life," said Mr. Adams. "When Dilbert was in only a few dozen newspapers, he told me to stop making comics that appeal to cartoonists and start writing for the audience."

He was helped in recent years by his son, Jeff, who handled the final inking duties and plans to continue the comic, according to King Features Syndicate. When they were growing up, the Keane kids "thought our dad really enjoyed being around us," Jeff Keane said. "Later we realized he was getting ideas from us all the time."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204224604577028270146466162.html

Library of Michigan Wraps Up its Book Sale of 75,000 Volumes

By Bill Castanier

You won’t hear the bang of an auctioneer’s gavel, but when bidding closes online this week for the final lots of books being auctioned off at the Library of Michigan. Since midsummer, the Library of Michigan has been selling more than 75,000 books. (mibid.bidcorp.com). Some of the books date back to the late 19th century.

Early in its history the library collected books within broad categories of topics and circulated them across the state in areas where there were no libraries. The books in the collection were categorized under the Dewey Decimal System. In 1987 the Library of Michigan converted to the Library of Congress system. But those original Dewey books were never rolled into the new system. In the last several decades this collection saw little or no use.

When the state was looking for ways to save money it determined the library was an easy target and it was hit with more than $1 million in cuts. It was able to maintain its Michigan and Genealogy collections, but pretty much everything else was determined to be expendable, including staff: The library once had more than 130 employees, but that dropped to 32.

Since late summer the library has sold off books ranging from “Who Put the Bomb in Father Murphy’s Chowder” to books on the nation’s rocket program. The books were auctioned off by ascending Dewey classification numbers, and the final Dewey category, the 900s, was put on the auction block last week, along with some American, German and French literature.

The auction has generated approximately $15,000 in revenue. It was an easy way to dispose of the books since the winning bidder has to haul them away. The majority of books were sold to book dealers who had the ability to handle large quantities. The biography lot of nearly 9,000 books offered in the most recent sale took upwards of 350 boxes and a big truck to move. Most of the books were sold in the range of 50 cents to $1 per book.

Ray Walsh, proprietor of Curious Book Shop in East Lansing, was the winning bidder of the Dewey category Greek literature, consisting of approximately 476 books. He said he has seen some of the books sold at the earlier auctions turn up in local antique markets. “The library should be commended for disposing of these books under the circumstances,” Walsh said. “They’d run out of money and out of space.”

Walsh said many libraries have always practiced deaccession, selling unwanted volumes at periodic book sales. That has not always been the case. Walsh remembers watching a library toss books into a Dumpster 25 years ago. He said he was able to rescue bound copies of periodicals from the 1800s.

It’s bittersweet seeing the materials go, but then again, there hasn’t been any demand for these materials. One book in the lot of the Africa section is “The Journals of Major-General C.B. Gordon at Kartoum,” published in 1885. Two copies of the title are advertised on Amazon at $30 and $45. It’s likely another one will join them soon

http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/article-6573-turning-old-books-into-new-revenue.html

An Interview with Sarah Hinman Ryan

Sarah Hinman Ryan is a research director at the Albany Times Union. She is a blogger. bringing sleuthing skills and a knowledge of databases to news stories every day. She approaches an investigative story like a bloodhound on a trail.

What’s your work?
I’m a journalist who specializes in using public-records and data-based reporting to look for patterns and connect the dots. I have a knack for what I like to call “forensic interviewing” using electronic sources like court documents, property records and financial records to build a database that lets me figure how and who got the money and how they spent it.

The word ‘librarian’ seems to have fallen out of favor?
Unfortunately, people just can’t let go of the silly, so-yesterday stereotype of a mean lady with spectacles who wields a wicked “shhhh.” “With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging.”

What do you do when you’re not working?
I do some volunteer work with animals and I recently became a card-carrying member of the Mohawk Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. (I am passionate about history and genealogy and this is a great combination of both.)

You recently posted a blog about Petey, a pit-bull-mix puppy that was abandoned and later found. How is he doing?
Petey has won the puppy lottery, thanks to the several dog lovers and local pit-bull rescue Out of the Pits, from which I adopted my dogs. He is in a foster home with another foster puppy, two grown dogs and a little boy, who dotes on them all. The veterinary surgeon who examined him believes that his deformed paw may have been the result of an injury rather than a birth defect.

Speaking of animal protection, what are the big issues and what are the remedies?
Three issues jump out: animal overpopulation, irresponsible owners and an under funded system that struggles to catch animal abusers and prevent them from offending again. My own analysis of data related to animal abuse, “dangerous dogs” and dog bites is getting people to spay/neuter their animals, which could be helped along by increasing license fees for un-fixed animals. This would do wonders for public safety as well, as data shows that the majority of dogs bites involve un-neutered male dogs. Another step would be cracking down on bad people who get animals for the wrong reasons and mistreat them.

Last year, Michael Vick said: “I would love to get another dog in the future. I think it would be a big step for me in the rehabilitation process.” Your thoughts?
I would like to believe his statement is more than a public relations ploy, but I find it hard to do so. Last month I interviewed Rebecca Huss, the court-appointed law guardian for the “Vick dogs” while they were being held as evidence. I learned that, in addition to fighting and brutally breeding dogs, Vick personally tortured pit bulls to death by hanging, beating and drowning them.

What advice would you give to other bloggers?
Relax and have fun. Don’t worry too much about crafting the perfect post.

What books are you reading?
I love historical fiction and crime novels. Recent books in my stack are “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane” by Katherine Howe and “Lethal Legacy,” a fantastic – and library related – police procedural by Linda Fairstein.

Are you ready to give up ink-on-paper books for an eBook?
No, I think I’ll always enjoy a mixture of print and digital media. I guess I’m an info-omnivore. If I’m sitting on the couch on a Sunday morning, I want the print newspaper. If I’m flying on a plane or sitting in a coffee shop, I want my laptop.

Favorite quote?
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Emerson

Blogger of the week: Sarah Hinman Ryan

bookleaves ...
Great Flea Market Report as usual ...
But I was confused about the broken books being tied together with hemp ...
Was that the covers or the text blocks ...
LOL ... I need a "picture" of that one ...

Of course the following post was written by Simon Beattie for his Book Blog

A Different Sort of Ephemera

I couldn’t resist buying this when I saw it. Someone writing about the death of his squirrel? In 1826? Come on, who wouldn’t? There’s even a picture of the poor creature.

http://www.simonbeattie.kattare.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Hadfield-245x300.jpg

I first thought it was perhaps written by a child, but in fact the history of the poem proved much more interesting. I soon discovered that the author, James Hadfield (1771–1841), was a patient at London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital, or ‘Bedlam’ as it’s more popularly known, the world’s first psychiatric hospital. He even gets an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. Why? Because, over twenty-five years before he composed his poem, he had been committed to the Hospital after attempting to kill the King. Hadfield had fallen under ‘the sway of a millenarian cult, becoming convinced that his death at the hands of the state would effect the second coming.

He apparently reasoned that treason—or even attempted treason—would carry mortal punishment, and thus conspired with Bannister Truelock to assassinate George III at Drury Lane Theatre on the evening of 15 May 1800. As the king acknowledged the orchestra’s playing of the national anthem, and the audience rose to its feet to welcome him, Hadfield climbed on a seat and fired a horse pistol at the royal box. The assailant’s actual intention remains a mystery because when the king, unhurt, insisted on speaking to the self styled assassin, Hadfield greeted him by saying, “God bless your royal highness; I like you very well; you are a good fellow.”

Tried for high treason nevertheless, Hadfield had as his defense the leading barrister of the day, Thomas Erskine, who secured an acquittal by arguing partial insanity. This was a first in an English criminal trial. Hadfield spent the remaining 41 years of his life in a cell. Patients at Bethlem were allowed visitors, and Hadfield, perhaps due to his notoriety, seems to have attracted many. One such visitor wrote,

“He lives in a small room and he is not averse to passing the time of day with visitors. We had rather a long visit with him; his conversation and his habits denote a sentimental and loving heart, a pressing need for affection, and he has had in succession two dogs, three cats, several birds and finally a squirrel. He was extremely fond of his animals and was grieved at their deaths. His beloved creatures all have epitaphs in verse which express his sorrow. Above the verses for his squirrel there is a colored image of the friend he lost. I might add that he does a brisk little trade with his feelings, handing out the epitaphs to visitors who in return give him a few shillings”

The archives at the Bethlem Royal Hospital have various examples of Hadfield’s squirrel poem. I wonder how many others survive?

A souvenir from Bedlam

Another Collecting Niche - Government Comics

Richard Graham’s first foray into comic books was a 1979 Army Training manual featuring a blonde bombshell going through key points on tire pressure, cooling system filters and payload limits. The dry subject matter contrasts oddly with the gorgeous illustrations courtesy of Will Eisner, one of the most beloved comic book artists of all time. Graham was just a boy growing up on an Army base in Germany when his old man handed him that comic.

Graham, now a 37-year-old professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has made government comics one of the focuses of his career. A few years back, he began a project scanning and digitizing hundreds of comics. This peculiar genre of comics ranges from Army-issued manuals on landmines and assault rifles to pregnancy pamphlets to guides on how to spot a bootlegger. Bert the Turtle taught kids how to prepare for the Atomic Bomb. Dr. Seuss drew a sultry mosquito for a soldier’s manual on malaria.

Graham has now parlayed his archive into a book, Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s-2000s. [Paperback ISBN-10: 1419700782] The book contains not just the comics, but also plenty of historical context and anecdotes from Graham. He chronicles the genre’s fascinating inconsistency and inherent contradiction. “They can be really kitschy,” Graham said of government comics. “Anytime the government uses popular culture, it’s like your teacher cussing in the class, trying to be cool. But there are some beautiful as well as some horrible artwork.”

Dr. Seuss drew his malaria comic as an enlisted man. In a lot of the comics, the agencies would pay to have a popular comic character like Captain America or Superman warn readers about the perils of drugs or landmines. The delicious irony is of course that in the 1950s as the government used the comic book form to educate audiences, it also was trying to ban the American comic book. Some schools banned and burned them. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” claimed comic books were a dangerous form of popular culture promoting violence.

And yet all the while, government agencies couldn’t deny the usefulness of this bright and easily digestible format. “It’s strange,” Graham said. “In one way, the government was bringing the medium down by trying to get involved with it. But, on the other hand, it was also bringing some legitimacy to it. The government recognized comics as an effective communication medium, one to bring the message to the masses.”

http://journalstar.com/entertainment/arts-and-culture/books/article_f153acdc-1aa3-50cd-a0e1-edf49148e8d3.html

We asked Richard Graham to pick out a few of his favorite comics and tell us about them.

Fishing Fun is Just Around the Corner
Many colorful characters have been employed by the U.S. government as conservation and outdoors advocates, including Woodsy Owl, Mark Trail and the famous Smokey Bear. Fishing Fun is Just Around the Corner was distributed by the Illinois Department of Conservation. This comic uses the step-by-step illustrative nature of comics to demonstrate the proper way to tie a hook, as well as cast. It also points out the various parts of a rod and reel.

Time of Decision
Time of Decision is the story of a loner at a State University. His popularity and self-confidence increase after he joins ROTC. This comic involves the Pershing Rifles, a drill company started by Gen. John J. Pershing at the University of Nebraska. And like many military recruiting comics, this one showed that “real men” participate in parades and implied that girls would find men in uniform irresistible.

Operation and Preventive Maintenance The M16A1 Rifle by Will Eisner
One of the last military projects Eisner worked on dealt with the use and care of the M-16 rifle. The weapon had developed a reputation for unreliability. Full of double entendres, Operation and Preventive Maintenance The M16A1 Rifle is a classic example of Eisner's incredible ability to combine effectively informational/instructional design with graphic design.

http://journalstar.com/article_7a3b0d47-e8cd-5e1f-9680-7e0a311106b6.html

An Amazon Review of Government Issue: Comics for the People 1940s-2000s

“Since the 1940s, federal and state government agencies have published comics to disseminate public information. Comics legends Will Eisner and Milton Caniff produced comics for the army. Li’l Abner joined the navy. Walt Kelly’s Pogo told parents how much TV their kids should watch, Bert the Turtle showed them how to survive a nuclear attack, and Dennis the Menace took “A Poke at Poison.” Smokey Bear had his own comic, and so did Zippy, the USPS mascot. Dozens of artists and writers, known and unknown, were recruited to create comics about every aspect of American life, from jobs and money to health and safety to sex and drugs. Whether you want the lowdown on psychological warfare or the highlights of working in the sardine industry, the government has a comic for you! Government Issue reproduces an important selection of these official comics in full-reading format, plus a broad range of excerpts and covers, all organized chronologically in thematic chapters.”

Diane furtima or anyone else thinking of divesting of a pile of CDs …
If you like surprises I’ll trade you CDs … one for one … I have thousands
And I can accommodate any mainstream interest like rock … country … show tunes … classical … etc.
Or if you have eclectic tastes I can put together a surprise package …
I can also do the same thing for 45 RPM records if you have a jukebox
Or if you just like to play the little records with the big hole …
This is all good clean stock … most of it grades very good or close to mint …
So … 5 … 10 … 20 … or more … whatever … the price of Media Mail postage gets you some “new” sounds …
Email me if you are interested in trading (no selling)
adderbolt@aol.com

Rin Tin Tin … A New Biography

He was a silent film star who could leap 12-foot walls. He could charm Oscar voters and inspire devotion from obsessed humans, Rin Tin Tin "never died," says this new biography. "He was an idea, an ideal, a hero, a friend, a fighter, a caretaker, a mute genius, a companionable loner," Susan Orlean writes in Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. [Hardbound ISBN - 1439190135} Maybe Lassie was prettier, but Rin Tin Tin was a real hero on a World War I battlefield in France. The German shepherd and his littermates were rescued in 1918 from a bombed-out kennel. The American who found him devoted his life to the dog.

Only six silent films survive of the 20-plus Rinty made, helping Warner Bros. prosper. In the 1920s, the dog earned almost eight times what Warner paid human actors. Orlean spent eight years researching Rinty and intertwines his story with American culture: the movies, TV, treatment of animals, favorite breeds, publicity stunts and lawsuits over rights to the Rinty's legacy. Orlean is on a book tour. Here is an edited version of an interview.

Q • What is the main reason for Rin Tin Tin's appeal?
A • I have a couple of answers for that. He had charisma. He also had the devotion of not just Lee Duncan (the soldier who found him), but Burt Leonard (the movie producer). These people were devoted to the idea of keeping his story alive. Lee Duncan felt this dog had a magic that was exceptional.

Q • Why didn't being a German shepherd, count against him during war years?
A • German Shepherds were the U.S. Army's official dog. Their identity canceled out the identity of them as "German." The Hollywood version of Rin Tin Tin's origins often skipped delicately over the fact that he was born as a German war dog. I think people understand that dogs have no real nationality.

Q • Do young kids know who Rin Tin Tin is?
A • Depends. A film came out a few years ago, and there was a TV show in the '80s called "Rin Tin Tin: K-9 Cop." Rin Tin Tin isn't well-known, but there is something interesting to say about him.

Q • Lassie, is better known than the action hero Rin Tin Tin. Did you watch "Lassie" as a child?
A • Oh, yes. I loved Lassie. My sister was a Lassie person, so I had to be a Rin Tin Tin person.

Q • Have the descendants of Rin Tin Tin escaped the health issues of the German shepherd breed?
A • They were carefully bred with consciousness of their value. The direct line of Rin Tin Tin dogs, as far as I know, was quite healthy. None of the descendants had quite as much charisma as the original. Also none had that “magic” connection with a human.

Q • Why do most recent dog books or movies seem goofy ("Snow Dogs," "Beethoven," "Marley & Me," etc.), not necessarily heroic?
A • That is a big change. You don't see that same figure of a heroic dog. Dogs are more comic, more playful and they're companions. And a lot of the dogs in pop culture now are naughty dogs, bad dogs. There is some enjoyment in the idea of the naughty dog. We find increasingly that the only heroes are cartoon characters. It's a different world. The other thing is that technology for film has made the sort of "feats" of a dog less amazing. ... You're sort of marveling more at the accomplishments of technology.

http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/orlean-explains-rin-tin-tin-s-appeal-in-new-book/article_35cfe54e-2cc2-5f0b-a687-6a2e252aa27d.html

“Fascinating . . . The sweeping story of the soulful German shepherd who was born on the battlefields of World War I, immigrated to America, conquered Hollywood, struggled in the transition to the talkies, helped mobilize thousands of dog volunteers against Hitler and himself emerged victorious as the perfect family-friendly icon of cold war gunslinging, thanks to the new medium of television. . . . Do dogs deserve biographies? In Rin Tin Tin Susan Orlean answers that question resoundingly in the affirmative . . . By the end of this expertly told tale, she may persuade even the most hardened skeptic that Rin Tin Tin belongs on Mount Rushmore with George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, or at least somewhere nearby with John Wayne and Seabiscuit.”

New York Times Book Review

A John Grisham Interview

John Grisham isn’t sure that there will be another John Grisham. He recently published a new novel called The Litigators. Grisham says that his early success was driven by word-of-mouth in brick-and-mortar bookstores. With stores closing because of the e-book things have changed. “Spreading the word on a good book may be more difficult without the bookstores,” Grisham said in a recent interview, “On the other hand, it may be easier online. No one knows.”

How did you come up with the characters in “The Litigators”?

These are compositions of many lawyers. I got the idea for the guys from watching all the TV advertising done by lawyers. It’s epidemic. You see these guys on television appealing for injury cases and all these drug cases.

Did you come away with more sympathy for ambulance-chasing lawyers?

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the ambulance chasing that you see today. Thirty years ago, we didn’t like those guys. We had a certain ethical structure to the practice of street law. That’s been completely eroded. Now it’s non-stop TV advertising that is unseemly and sleazy. When the BP oil spill happened last summer the advertising by the lawyers was disgusting. They were just all over the place begging for cases.

When the BP oil spill happened, what were your thoughts on it?

It’s easier to criticize offshore drilling and oil companies than for all of us to cut back on oil consumption. That was my reaction to it. I had no sympathy for BP….But it’s going to happen again. We didn’t solve any problems.

How did you come up with the idea of ‘The Litigators’?

A little of it was British Petroleum. When that happened, a bunch of trial lawyers swept in. We were bombarded with ads soliciting clients for a whole list of bad products. So I had the idea, what if the product doesn’t do all the damage it’s thought to do? I like to create fictional scenarios about lawsuits or trials or whatever. I’ve been sued several times. A lot of my own experiences went into this book, being a defendant.

Have all the legal shows on TV demystified the law?

People have this insatiable appetite for stories about the law, trials, law firms, litigation, criminal cases, civil cases. We were born with so many rights and if someone messes with our rights, we’re going to protect ourselves. It’s a very litigious society. I don’t know if the public is any smarter about the law because of those shows. But they want to hear these stories.

Are bankers replacing lawyers as our cultural villains?

I think bankers are going through a rough patch, but the truth is the average American is going to have very little contact with a Wall Street banker. But sooner or later he’s going to have contact with a lawyer. Something is going to happen. Hopefully it’ll be a good experience, but it probably won’t be.

How do you come up with and develop your ideas?

First of all, an idea comes up. I carry legal pad in my briefcase. I put it in the computer when I get home. I have thousands and thousands of pages of old notes, ideas for books, names, scenes. I’m always on the prowl, that’s just what I do. It’s second nature. At some point I got the idea of a young lawyer joining the firm of ambulance chasers. It was a very gradual process. Some ideas hit real fast and the stories are clear. Others sort of fester for months or years.

Do you know the endings of your books when you start?

I know the final scene before I start. If you know that last scene, it’s hard to get lost. You can’t outline everything and the spontaneous stuff happens in the context of a structured outline. I have the beginning, middle and end. I have the characters, the main plot, two or three subplots, and that’s what I work off of. But you can’t predict everything that’s go to happen in a book. And you don’t want to.

What’s your take on e-books?

My last book came out a year ago, “The Confession.” A year later we’re running about 60 percent hardback and 40 percent digital. If it gets to be 70-80 percent, a lot of publishers are going to go under, bookstores are going to go under. I do think there will always be books, but it’s just too chaotic right now to predict. Amazon sent me a Kindle a couple years ago, and I read a couple books on it. If I spent some time with it I’d get good with it. But I love books on a shelf. I collect first editions. However, back in January I went to a resort in the Caribbean and I was astonished. 80 percent of the crowd had Kindles or iPads. It was very unscientific research, as to where the future is going.

How is the TV version of “The Firm” coming?

They’ve filmed eight episodes so far out of 22….The buzz is really good. High expectations. NBC is behind it big time.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/11/03/will-there-ever-be-another-john-grisham-john-grisham-has-some-thoughts/

Kacey was a special person ...
Her non judgemental view of those people she cared about was something most rare ...
Somewhere out there I feel her light touch and hear her laughter

Small-town Bookstore Making Rare History

Booksellers everywhere are trying to gain traction in this slippery economy. The big guys are struggling and those little brick-and-mortar stores in small towns are vanishing as fast as the morning fog. But the owners of Pratt's Books in Graham, Texas, have found their footing catering not to the changing appetites of readers, but to those who long for a library all their own. Owners David Pratt, a Graham native and his wife, Gayle, 41, have taken that a step further. They have published a limited-edition book about one of Texas' biggest ranches and they are betting collectors will see these books as gems that will become more valuable with time.

History of the Waggoner Ranch, by Knox Kinard will roll out Saturday at a big party at Pratt's Books. Illustrated with 16 tintype photographs of modern-day cowboys from the Waggoner Ranch. This little book measures just 61/2 inches by 9 inches and each volume is a work of art, a showcase for a number of Texas talents:. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry wrote the forward. Award-winning Four-O Press of Abilene produced the book, and Jace Graf of Austin's celebrated Cloverleaf Studios designed it. Well-known tintype photographer Robb Kendrick added the 16 tintypes that illustrate the text.

Most of the books will go for $125. Each has a "quarter bound cloth" cover featuring the Waggoner's famous backward Triple D brand in silver ink. But 16 deluxe editions are valued at $3,500 each. These have a "quarter bound leather" cover with foil-stamped gold lettering and green silk cloth. Each is numbered and presented in a "rare books box." An original tintype is included. Tintype photography dates from roughly 1855 to 1900 and uses a metal plate to reproduce the image. There is no negative. Daguerreotypes were from a little earlier and use a glass plate.

The author's credentials are local. Born in 1896, he spent his working life as an educator in Texas schools. He had written about the fabled Waggoner Ranch for his master's thesis in and later he used that material to write a long article for The Panhandle-Plains Historical Review. With all the proper permissions, that article has become the text of this book.

"The ranches are so important to Texas history, and there's very little available about them," explains Gayle Pratt. Her dark eyes shine and her hands busily punctuate her words. "There's so little out there about the Waggoner Ranch or any of the big ranches.... We thought it was important to preserve this and make it available." In fact, the Waggoner Ranch is the stuff of Texas legend. Sprawling over more than half a million acres and any number of counties, it is second only to the King Ranch in size.

Dan Waggoner began accumulating this land in the 1850s when the few plains settlers were forever in conflict with the Comanche and Kiowa that roamed the vast prairie south of Vernon. Dan soon took his son, W.T., as a partner and together they built an empire. They were friendly with Comanche war chief Quanah Parker and went hunting with U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt. They lived big lives and produced an interesting and flamboyant family. But readers won't find anything about the more recent history of the ranch or the bitter squabbles among the Waggoner heirs. This book predates the lawsuits and rulings of the past few years and focuses on the ranch that was the dream of two men tough enough to hold on through the hard times.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/11/02/3494765/rare-history-small-town-bookstore.html

Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best

The market for maple syrup is very odd. The thin, pale Grade A Light Amber syrup commands the highest prices. The thick syrup marked Grade B bursts with maple flavor, but sells at a significant discount. Why does the nominally inferior grade offer decidedly superior flavor? The answer lies in the history of maple syrup. The sap that runs at the beginning of the season, with the spring thaw, is clear. Twenty to thirty gallons, boiled down, will yield a gallon of light amber syrup. As the season extends, the sap grows watery. More of it must be boiled down. Concentrating that sap also makes late-season syrup darker, thicker, and more flavorful.

Early colonists were less interested in liquid syrup than in granular sugar. The pure, white imported cane sugar was an expensive luxury. Maple sugar offered an affordable substitute. These colonists took the concentrated maple sap and poured it into conical molds, refining it into white sugar loaves The clearest syrups and whitest sugars commanded premium prices.

After the Revolution, Americans looked at the maple tree in a new light. Here was a commodity that could compete in a global market. It tapped an abundant resource, required only a small amount of labor, and used supplies most farmers already owned. Best of all, it would destroy the market for Caribbean sugar cane, produced by slaves laboring in horrifying conditions. But all of these efforts failed commercially. As a refined commodity maple sugar simply could not match the low-priced products of the cane plantations. The late-season sap, with its strong flavor, was not capable of attracting consumers who had access to more refined alternatives.

Most maple syrup continued to be turned into sugar by frugal farm families for use as a home sweetener. And as a symbol of freedom, it remained potent. People shunned the products of slave labor, and sought out maple sugar. From a Vermont almanac in 1844. "So long as the maple forests stand suffer not your cup to be sweetened by the blood of slaves." But by the end of the nineteenth century, the Department of Agriculture scorned the idea of refining maple sap into white sugar, noting that maple syrup was "prized for their peculiar flavor, and are luxuries rather than staple articles of the daily diet."

The emphasis on a light, delicate flavor made the product susceptible to adulteration. Syrup was cut with glucose, sorghum, or corn. Some purveyors relied on appearance alone, boiling brown sugar. So maple syrup became a symbol in a crusade to secure the authenticity of the food supply and helped rally support for the Pure Food and Drug Act. The law was passed in 1906, and the USDA set about cleaning up the nation's grocery shelves.

However consumers sought out cheaper alternatives. Pancake syrups proliferated. Brands like Log Cabin pitched themselves by stressing the science and research that had gone into their production. The big boom came after the Second World War, with the introduction of brands backed with corporate heft, like Aunt Jemima and Mrs Butterworth which included only trace amounts of actual maple syrup. The old dream of the maple replacing the sugar cane had been reversed. Sugary syrups now threatened to push the maple off of American shelves.

Production declined steadily from the beginning of the century into the 1970s, but in recent decades has rebounded. Small producers boosted their efforts to market their wares. And many others felt the call back to the land, inspired in part by Helen and Scott Nearing's Maple Sugar Book, equal parts manual and manifesto. Sugaring is still a seasonal sideline, a way to earn a little cash and it fills a crucial cultural role. As an ode and an explanation, Noel Perrin's Amateur Sugar Maker remains unsurpassed. Sugaring, Perrin observed, "is not really a commercial operation. It is that happiest of combinations, a commercial affair which is also an annual rite, even an act of love."

And, as a result, grade inflation has come to the world of maple syrup. The industry has proposed that all syrup sold at retail be relabeled Grade A, and then sorted into four colors: Golden, Amber, Dark, and Very Dark. No longer will the weakest syrup be assigned a higher mark for approaching the perfect purity of utter blandness, or the most intensely flavorful syrup get graded down for daring to taste like maple. The new system will eliminate the current discrimination against darker syrup. By 2013, the new international standard should be fully adopted, and consumers given the clear choice of syrups. So if you happen to relish the taste of maple syrup, you may want to find a bottle of Grade B while you still can. Soon the rarest, most flavorful syrup will likely command at least as dear a price as its more abundant cousins.

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/05/making-the-grade-why-the-cheapest-maple-syrup-tastes-best/239133/

Help Wanted

Thomas Heneage Art Books seeks a bookseller-administrator-manager keen to develop a career in both the arts and book selling.

You must have the imagination and drive to help transform, a traditional, high end bookshop selling both new and antiquarian art books, into the modern idiom. The right candidate will be encouraged and be expected to take on a significant degree of responsibility. You will be involved in everything from generating sales to the organization of the business. Supervision and delegation of staff and the day to day running of our prestigious book shop are all part of this remit.

The books you sell will be predominantly Western European and it would be an advantage if you spoke at least one language other than English, preferably German, Italian, French or Spanish as you will be selling to a varied clientele from all over the world. You will report to and work closely with the Directors and must liaise with the accountant.

Sales & Marketing: It will be your prime responsibility to develop and expand: Retail; Mail Order; and Internet Sales, as part of this you will be expected to play an active role in the development of our new website.

Fairs: We exhibit at TEFAF Maastricht. The organization, administration and successful operation of any fairs at which we exhibit is part of your remit.

Salary: dependent on experience and performance.

To apply please send a cover letter to Thomas Heneage, 42 Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6DJ or to abs@heneage.com

Deadline for applications: 30 Nov 2011

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/jobs/Details.aspx?itemID=24903

For Self-Employed Authors
Print journals that accept on-line submissions

http://networkedblogs.com/30vt8

Wow ...
Do I feel dumb ... I went to vote this morning ... everything was dark ... elections are NEXT TUESDAY ...

Great flea Market report, bookleaves ... can't wait until next year

Got Milk?

Ten law enforcement agencies dedicated hundreds of hours to track the suspects. They used high-tech video equipment hidden on a utility pole for round-the-clock surveillance and used undercover agents to make covert buys. This wasn't a major narcotics investigation; it was a crackdown on the illegal trafficking of raw goat milk, cheese and yogurt.

The arrests of a Ventura County farmer and the operator of a Venice health food store have become a rallying cry for raw-food advocates for what they describe as the government's hard line on nontraditional food sources. In the months since the arrests, new details have emerged about the lengths that authorities went to build their case.

Defense attorneys said they've learned through the prosecution that the investigation included hours of secretly recorded video, "decoy" buys at the Rawesome Health Food Store and at other farmers' markets. The one-year investigation is documented in thousands of pages of reports, they said.

The suspects, the "Rawesome Three, are free on bail and scheduled to return to court Dec. 1. "If this were a terror plot against the LA Airport, I could understand it," said L. Arik Greenberg, who used to shop regularly at Rawesome. "But these are people who want to get milk from a farm and drink it."

Defense attorneys described Rawesome as a private food club where members could buy raw dairy products as well as organic produce, meat and honey. Members paid dues that enabled them to own the animals that produced the raw dairy products. They say the store gave them a healthy alternative to mass-produced, processed foods that fill supermarkets and fast-food outlets.

Prosecutors say raw milk poses significant risks of contamination that can cause illness or death. They say the three suspects violated the law by operating without required licenses, which meant regulatory agencies weren't able to inspect them for safety and cleanliness The law requires raw dairy processing plants to be licensed, animals to be inspected by veterinarians, and facilities and equipment to meet sanitation requirements, prosecutors said.

Six of the charges are felonies and include operating an unlicensed milk plant, conspiracy to sell unlawfully produced milk products, producing milk products in unsanitary conditions and tearing down a health department closure notice and reopening the store. The three suspects have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Legal experts said they were not surprised by the extent of the investigation. It may sound like overkill. But from the agencies' perspective, they want to show they can do their version of a major case. said Law School professor Laurie Levenson. They don't want to lose it. They can say is they're saving human lives, and so it's worth it.

"It's a tremendous misuse of resources and a waste of time," said the attorney representing the store and the farm. "The kind of investigation that was done in this case is similar to what you see in a violent criminal enterprises, something the mob would be involved in."

The arrests and closure of Rawesome have led members to scramble for alternative sources of raw milk, sources that many members decline to disclose. They wonder why tax money is being used to police the production of health food. "It's very misplaced," said Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a Malibu nutritionist and creator of the "Primal Diet," which advocates raw meat, produce and dairy. "We're throwing money to people on Wall Street and not taking care of those criminals and at the same time spending all this money to go after raw milk."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-raw-milk-investigation-20111028,0,4560029.story?track=lat-pick

The Cuala Press

The Cuala Press was an Irish Private Press set up in 1908 by Elizabeth Yeats with support from her brother William Butler Yeats. Cuala was to play an important role in the Celtic Revival of the early 20th century. In 1902, Elizabeth Yeats and her sister Lily joined their friend Evelyn Gleeson in the establishment of a craft studio near Dublin named Dun Emer. Dun Emer became a focus of the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, specializing in printing, embroidery, rug and tapestry-making. Elizabeth Yeats ran the printing operation, and Lily managed the needlework department. In 1904, the operation was reorganized into two parts, the Dun Emer Guild run by Gleeson and Dun Emer Industries under the direction of the Yeats sisters. In 1908 the groups separated completely. Gleeson retained the Dun Emer name, and the Yeats sisters established Cuala Industries at nearby Churchtown, which ran the Cuala Press and their embroidery workshop.

It was intended that the new press would produce work by writers associated with the Irish Literary Revival. They ended up publishing a total of over 70 titles before they closed in 1946. Cuala was unusual in that it was the only Arts and Crafts press to be run and staffed by women and the only one that published new works rather than established classics. In addition to William Butler Yeats, Cuala published works by Ezra Pound, Jack B. Yeats, Robin Flower, Elizabeth Bowen, Oliver St John Gogarty, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, Lionel Johnson, Patrick Kavannagh, Louis MacNeice, John Masefield, Frank O’Connor, John Millington Synge, John Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore and others.

After Elizabeth Yeats died in 1940, the work of the press was carried on by two of her assistants. The final Cuala title was Stranger in Aran by Elizabeth Rivers which was published in 1946. In 1969 the press was taken up by W. B. Yeats' children, Michael and Anne Yeats, with Liam Miller. Some titles were run in the 1970s. Valuable archives are still held by the press.

Above from Wikipedia

Some limited editions of books and broadsides printed by the Cuala Press

http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Cuala%20Press%20Broadside%20Collection/

bookleaves ...
Do you remember the most famous refrigerator door story ...??? ...
Appliance makers have to make the boxes in two styles: the door opens from the right ... and the door opens from the left side ...
In 1954 Philco ended that "nonsense" with a model that opened from either side ...
It was an engineer's dream ... but in reality a nightmare ... the doors kept falling off
And Philco soon went back to the old reliable standard: left and right handed doors

Bram Stoker’s Journal

For almost a century Bram Stoker's private journal sat unnoticed in England. Full of notes the unmarked book had probably been lugged down from the attic in Noel Dobbs' home. Dobbs is a descendant of Stoker. Then a researcher working on a project about Stoker got in touch with Dobbs to ask if he might know anything about a journal his famous relative kept. Dobbs looked around and finally popped open this tiny book. It was signed "Abraham Stoker."

Dacre Stoker, is Dobbs' cousin and a professor in South Carolina. He has written a book about Bram Stoker. When the news reached him that the journal had been discovered, he cajoled his cousin into sending him photographs of a few pages. "When I saw it, I was amazed," Dacre Stoker said. Scholars and hard-core fans have wanted to know what made the man who wrote 'Dracula' tick.

The journal will be published next March as The Lost Journal. The publication will mark 100 years since the author died in April 1912. Dacre has worked with Bram Stoker scholars to annotate The Lost Journal, which also offers quirky bits of folklore from Stoker's homeland, Ireland. There are 305 entries, some pages-long, others just a few sentences.

Bram Stoker was in his early 20s when the journal began in 1871. He had graduated from Ireland's Trinity College. It would be more than a decade before he learned about the inspiration for his Count Dracula, "Vlad the Impaler." The real-life prince of Wallachia who ruled during the Ottoman Empire, Vlad earned his nickname by impaling his enemies. His viciousness became notorious in Europe where tales spread of a man-monster who lived off blood. "Dracula" means son of the Dragon.

The last entry of Stoker's journal in 1881 hints at a major character he would use in "Dracula." In the novel, Renfield has delusions that compel him to eat living beings to gain their life force. The vampire Count Dracula seizes on Renfield's weakness and offers him as many creatures as he can eat in exchange for his eternal devotion. It doesn't work out well for Renfield in the end.

In another passage, Stoker seems to be alluding to a vampire's inability to see his own reflection. Stoker's interest in spookiness shows up in other journal entries. "A man builds up his shadow on a wall bit by bit by adding to substance," he wrote. "Suddenly the shadow becomes alive." The journal also contains romantic poems. There are some very sweet moments here. One note in the journal alludes to the writer's fascination with children.

Stoker was fascinated with the theater and the act of observing. He traveled a lot, a rare thing for his time. Journaling and touring are central in "Dracula." The novel's narrator, Jonathan Harker, writes in his journal as he travels across Europe, witnessing and questioning superstitions and trying to make sense of his own bad dreams and supernatural encounters. The novel also centers on Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England.

Bram was curious. He loved to ask the questions: What is real and what is myth, and where do they meet? Though Stoker died before his Count Dracula became internationally famous in film. The author would be flattered by how his character has stayed relevant over the years. From Bela Lugosi to Anne Rice's Lestat and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to "Twilight" and "True Blood," Stoker's main question: "What does it mean to live forever?" has proved eternal.

And in true Bram Stoker style, he left one more mystery. The author alludes to another diary where he writes about an upcoming trip to London where one can get work as a writer. The journal of writing and notes that was recently found in Noel Dobbs’ home is not that diary. "There's something else out there. Some are dying to know where it is.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/29/world/dracula-journal-discovered/

A Howling Good Poetry Reading

By Steve Heilig

Walt Whitman’s legendary epic poem Song of Myselfwas self-published in 1855 by the then-unknown journalist who was 37 years old. According to Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, “it was an astonishment, perhaps the most unprecedented poem in the English language.”

Many students read Whitman in high school. Hundreds of people attending a mass reading of the poem last Sunday in West Marin, CA. Some said that was the first and last time they had looked at it. But I think it a fair guarantee that nobody present will forget it. As conceived and conducted by artist, author, Eric Karpeles, this was a literary event for the ages.

Hass himself introduced the poem and then without fanfare launched into the first section, beginning “I celebrate myself…”. Sitting in rows behind him, readers took their turns at two podiums. There were 52 sections of the poem to be read. Those reading were poets and writers, but also carpenters, dancers, naturalists, winemakers, philanthropists, scientists, doctors, lawyers, actors, artists, ranchers, scholars, surfers, farmers, and more.

Younger and older, each reader brought their own personality to the poem, ranging from quiet and meditative to booming and dramatic. The reading flowed seamlessly, for almost two hours. As each person ended, quiet murmurs of appreciation could be heard; some of the lines prompted laughter; sometimes the mood was somber. But the poem is built like a symphony; the power of it was really astonishing by the end, a celebration of life and love and nature and most everything, including death. The end neared; Karpeles rose to read the poem’s final section and read, quietly:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flash in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
-
At the poem’s final word the whole room erupted into loud applause and cheers. There was a sense of shared purpose and accomplishment. We all stood, cheering for one another, and for Whitman. We had “fetched” him. Walt himself was in the room, in one form or another, for as the very first stanza of his poem holds, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

I found myself wondering what Whitman might have thought of his beloved America now, the crowded, sprawling, noisy, full of electronic news and nonsense and political insanity. Who knows. He did experience the carnage of the Civil War firsthand so perhaps he would not be very impressed. But his perspective seemed to encompass both impermanence and what lasts, and on nature in all its guises. I think he would love West Marin surrounded by the natural splendor he celebrated. In fact, I bet he would live here. Maybe he does. He certainly did on Sunday afternoon.

People still talk of the legendary San Francisco “Six Gallery” reading that some say launched the Beat “movement” in 1955 with Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his Howl. I wonder if, over 50 years from now, this reading might join that one as a truly historic event. Again, who knows? Afterwards, I asked an elated-looking Hass if, in his long poetic career, he had seen and heard anything like it, and he replied “No. This was just amazing.” It was an astonishment.

The Greatest Poetry Reading Ever?

You Say Tomato and I Say Tomato

Book Review by Reenie Rogers

It’s hardly news that tomatoes sold in grocery stores are mostly tasteless. And it’s barely news that migrant field workers who come to work in Florida, often find themselves working under terrible conditions. Author Barry Estabrook's book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit [ISBN: 9781449401092] is a riveting tale. Tomatoland is a place of greed and cruelty that’s barely believable.

Estabrook, an investigative food journalist was inspired to write Tomatoland because of two questions he had.
1. Why can’t modern agribusiness deliver a decent tasting tomato?
2. Why can’t today’s tomato be as nutritious as the tomato grown in the 1960s?
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, today’s tomato has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than the fruit of the 1960s. One nutrient that today’s tomato has more of is sodium: 14 times as much.

Estabrook traveled to the tomato fields in southwest Florida to see how tomatoes are grown. Tomatoland is a page-turner. Heroes and villains are alive in the fields of Florida’s tomato agribusiness. Top villains include Ag Mart Produce, Inc.; the Florida Tomato Committee; various cruel and abusive field bosses, and those involved in human trafficking.

Field bosses berate, beat, punish, and cheat their laborers, many of whom cannot speak or read English. They force them to stay in the fields even while pesticides are being applied, without respirators or appropriate clothing. Pregnant workers must to stay and work and be exposed to chemicals known to disrupt fetal development.

Tomato field workers often come from other countries illegally, [Hispanic, Haitian, and Mayan Indian immigrants] with promises of housing and good wages. What they too often find are dilapidated trailers and cruel bosses. The heroes in Tomatoland include the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) who strive to end farm worker abuses, and other people who risk their lives to help fellow workers.

Florida tomatoes, at the center of the story, are bred to withstand the journey from field to market. At harvest time, they are picked green, “green tomatoes so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine, At packing time, pallets of green tomatoes go into warehouses for a treatment of ethylene gas which turns them red and ready for the market.

Tomatoland exposes the extraordinary powers that are wielded by a group called the Florida Tomato Committee. The Committee’s concern is for the tomatoes having uniform shape, size, and yield. There is no consideration for a tomato’s taste. Further, the regulations of the Committee prohibit growers in south Florida from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their color and shape don’t conform.

To grow Florida tomatoes, many chemicals are applied throughout the season. In Florida, 8 million pounds of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were applied to tomatoes grown in 2006. California used 1 million pounds to grow the same amount of tomatoes. The Sunshine State might be better called the “Pesticide State.

Estabrook also offers success stories of unique individuals doing large-scale growing of organic tomatoes. While these offer hope, the distressing images in the other fields does not easily fade. One cannot help but contrast the humane farms with farms where slavery, birth defects, workers soaked with pesticides, and bosses cheating workers of their hard-earned wages, occurs.

The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs appears to have poor oversight. The horrors play out in the tomato fields unbeknownst to consumers who wouldn’t imagine that the tomatoes in their sandwiches, and salads were grown under such sad conditions. One third of all tomatoes sold in the United States from October to June come from Florida.

A reader’s trip through Tomatoland proves that this is a dreary business that needs to be closed for good. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a giant beacon of hope, and a group actively helping to end abuse to farm workers. And yes, organically-grown tomatoes tended by humane growers who treat their farm workers fairly and decently is the way of the future

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/arts-entertainment/book-review-tomatoland-how-modern-industrial-agriculture-destroyed-our-most-alluring-fruit-63365.html

Florence Parry Heide

Prolific children’s book author Florence Parry Heide, whose work was illustrated by such notable artists as Edward Gorey, Jules Feiffer and Lane Smith, has died at her Kenosha, WI, home at age 92. Heide died in her sleep Sunday night; she was in good health, and her death was unexpected. Daughter Roxanne Pierce said, “It came as a huge shock to me this morning. We had such a wonderful evening last night together. We watched a movie, made popcorn, laughed our heads off. It was very, very good, cozy and comfy. It made me feel good.”

Gilliland said her mother was the author of more than 100 children’s books. Heide’s works include mostly children’s books, lyrics and poems She also wrote under the pseudonyms Alex B. Allen and Jamie McDonald. Her most critically acclaimed work was The Shrinking of Treehorn in 1971, which was illustrated by Edward Gorey. The New York Times named it one of the best illustrated children’s books of 1971.

Carthage College professor Marilyn Ward recalls times that she brought her entire class to the author’s house. “She was everybody’s favorite, and she was such a fun person, always enthusiastic; she had a real zest for everything she did.” Heide was well known for the Fourth of July parade she organized each year: hundreds of children with their bikes decorated would gather outside her home and ride twice around her block to the beat of a drum

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/kenosha-childrens-book-author-florence-parry-heide-dies-at-age-92-wrote-more-than-100-books/2011/10/25/gIQAKXZzGM_story.html

Biography

Florence Parry Heide was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 27, 1919. Her father was David W. Parry, a banker, and her mother was Florence Fisher, a columnist and actress. In 1943, she married Captain Donald C. Heide, a lawyer, with whom she had five children: Christen, Roxanne, Judith, David, and Parry.

Florence Parry was educated at the Ellis School in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood before attending Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Two years later, she transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles in 1939, where she earned her B.A. in English. After graduation, Heide moved to New York City with hopes of finding a job. In the years prior to World War II, she worked at R.K.O. in New York, as well as at various advertising and public relations agencies. She later returned to her hometown and worked as the public relations director of the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

Children’s stories, mysteries, poetry, and lyrics are all represented in Heide’s bibliography, though she did not start writing until all five of her children were in school. Heide has been praised for her whimsical sense of humor and her keen insight into the lives of children. While her lighthearted children’s stories have garnered her the most renown and critical acclaim, Heide is also known for her ability to accurately portray the emotions of young girls facing the difficult transition into adolescence in such books as When the Sad One Comes to Stay, Growing Anyway Up, and Secret Dreamer, Secret Dreams. Heide co-wrote many of her books with Sylvia van Clief and continued co-authoring books with her own daughter, Roxanne, after van Clief died. She also co-wrote books with her brother David Fisher Parry as well as another daughter, Judith, and her son David.

Heide has received numerous awards for many of her works. Her most critically acclaimed work was The Shrinking of Treehorn, named by the New York Times as the Best Illustrated Children’s Book of 1971 and winner for the Best Children’s Book in Germany six years later. The Day of Ahmed’s Secret received the Editors’ Choice Award from Booklist in 1991, a prize also awarded to Sami and the Time of the Troubles in 1992. Other honors for her books include several Notable Book citations from the American Library Association and Best Book citations from The School Library Journal. She was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature by Carthage College in Wisconsin in 1979.

From the Internet

How Zombies Conquered Highbrow Fiction

Something is happening in literature, thanks to writers like Justin Cronin, Benjamin Percy, and Colson Whitehead. The trappings of genre fiction: monsters, masked marvels, and gumshoes are no longer just popular fiction. Horror, mystery and science-fiction books have moved to the literature section.

To understand why this is significant, it's important to stress how rare this was in late 20th-century fiction when serious writers trafficked in realistic tales, simply told. Led by Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, Richard Ford, Anne Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, these authors explored the everyday problems of everyday people.

That literature unfolded in diners, automobiles, and living rooms with the writing about modern-day people in believable situations. But eleven years into this new century our literary culture has undergone a change. A group of writers have fled this place we call "real life”. Literature shelves now commonly feature: zombies, werewolves, vampires; and space aliens.

Colson Whitehead is just one example of a good writer going rogue. Zone One is his crack at the zombie mythology. In Whitehead's story, a plague disrupts civilization in the very near future, spreading rabidly and transforming victims into cannibals. In the course of one long and blood-drenched night, civilization as we know it ends.

Raymond Carver, he isn't yet Zone One was heralded with equal eagerness in "serious" venues such as New York Magazine. How did we get here? The seeds of realist discontent can be seen in two recent genre-bending fiction anthologies, published by McSweeney's that included work from both Michael Crichton and Aimee Bender. In his introduction to McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, Michael Chabon argues that "serious" fiction had become sterile through too much inbreeding. He called for a new American literature that would "haunt the boundaries and secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore."

Then, the Pulitzer was awarded to works of fiction with strong genre overtones. Cormac McCarthy's The Road unfolds in the ash pit of a nuked-out future. In Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life Of Oscar Wao, geekdom reached new heights. This is the first Pulitzer-winning novel to take its epigraph from a comic book.

One book in particular helped break the genre barrier. By now, everyone has heard of Justin Cronin's fantasy smash The Passage, which combines an apocalypse and bloodthirsty vampires with complex characters and top-flight prose. The book sparked an unprecedented bidding war between publishers and the movies. The era of the literary-genre hybrid novel has undeniably arrived:

Our are day-to-day lives are becoming more science-fictional

The world of personal computing makes leaps forward with every passing month. Dick Tracy's two-way video wristwatch—unfathomable in the 1950s—is now no further away than somebody's iPhone. If you look at what's been on bookshelves since 9/11, there's been an abundance of apocalyptic narratives. All of them have to do with our fear of disease, our fear of environmental devastation, our fear of nuclear annihilation. Maybe because the end of the world has never seemed so possible."

Pop culture influences are now important literary influences

Previous writers took their cues from the past. But now our literary landscapes are unprecedented vast and various. Not only that, but appropriation has become an important artistic currency. We define our cultural moment in terms of media consumption. We are seeing the first tremors in a seismic shift of influences. Novelists and short-story writers are no longer afraid to embrace the pop cultural influences that excited them as kids. Culture has changed. Look at the phenomenon of the blockbuster like Indiana Jones, or something like Star Wars and Star Trek. You're exposed to that pretty early. It's just one of many influences that makes the writer of today.

Literary tastes are becoming increasingly global

American literature has diversified in a broader pool of voices. Latin American magical realism, as well as Japanese horror and science-fiction have already had substantial effects on American art. The increased availability and viability of contemporary works in translation also opens up new avenues for exploration.

Stories with mythic dimensions are timeless

We've been telling monster, science-fiction stories, superhero, horror and apocalypse stories for a long long time. Perhaps the appearance of modern myths in mainstream publishing is just a return to form. Cronin insists that this is good for literature, and that the best mythic archetypes will continue to appeal..

Financially and aesthetically; genre pays.

It would be naive to say that modern writers aren't aware of the financial gains of embracing genre. What starving artist hasn't at least once looked at J.K. Rowling's massive royalties. But there was a vampire soap opera on television in the late '60s called Dark Shadows that everybody went home and watched after school. Vampire comic books, the original Bram Stoker, this stuff has never gone away. It never will.

In the worst of today’s genre fiction, you see hollow characters, you see transparent prose, you see the same themes and archetypes occurring. But if you look at the best of genre fiction, you see this incredible desire to discover what happens next. Genre will always have its critics. An original review of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five acknowledged, "You'll either love it, or you'll push it back into the science-fiction corner." This is a matter of taste; some audiences will bristle at the strange or otherworldly scenarios that other readers instinctively seek out. The same can be said for any book that contains readily identifiable character archetypes: detectives and spacemen, cowgirls and zombies.

If widespread genre cross-pollination results in a new breeds of literary chimera, our literature will benefit. Establishment writers will open up new worlds of possibility, and gain an ability to explore myth and magic. And genre writers with undeniable talent will earn a place in the annals of literature.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/how-zombies-and-superheroes-conquered-highbrow-fiction/246847/?single_page=true

Irene ...
I thought that the header was just clip art ...
Wow ... now I'm impressed

A Fairy Tale Life

Prominent families usually when they have a problem, secretly bringing in advisors to help them resolve their issue. The families convince themselves that their problems are somehow so unique and rare that only outside consultants can help. They wind up spending a small fortune in the process.

But this “needed” wisdom can be had for much less money. Consider the low price of Pantheon’s The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a lovely translation of the “Brothers Grimm” published in 1944. It is beautifully illustrated by Josef Scharl and includes commentary by the late, Joseph Campbell.

Take the issue of family succession. It is perhaps the most painful of all family businesses. How do you train your kids to take over your business? How do you decide which of the kids gets handed the keys? “The Three Brothers” tale is only two pages long yet passes on all the wisdom any family could need to solve their succession issues. Here’s a recap of the story:

There was a man with three sons and he had only a small house to give away at his passing. All the sons wanted the house, but he loved them equally. He could sell the house and divide the money among the boys, but this was the house of his father and he couldn’t bear to dispose of it. Instead, the man turned to his sons and said, “Go into the world, and each of you try to learn a trade, and, when you all come back, he who makes a masterpiece shall have the house.”

The three young men thought that was a fair arrangement and went out into the world. The oldest son found a master who turned him into a skilled blacksmith. The second son learned the barber trade. The third became a fencing-master. Each was convinced the house would be there’s as such was the skill they acquired.

At the appointed time they returned to their father. As they were sitting and trying to figure out how to demonstrate their skills, a rabbit darted across the field. The barber instantly took his basin and soap and lathered up, and as the hare dashed by, he shaved off its whiskers while it was running at top speed, never once cutting the animal’s skin.

“Well done,” said his father. “Unless your brother can do better, the house is yours.” Right then a nobleman came clattering through in his carriage, and this time the blacksmith jumped up, and changed all four shoes on the horse as it was galloping. The father was again suitably impressed, and told his blacksmith son he was a “fine fellow and as clever as your brother. I don’t know to which I ought to give the house.”

The third son asked if he could take his turn, just as it started to rain. He flourished his sword backwards and forwards around his head, at such speed, not a single drop fell on him, no matter how hard it rained. When his father saw this he said, “This is a masterpiece, the house is yours.”

His brothers agreed with their father’s decision, “because this was agreed beforehand, and as they loved one another very much, they all three stayed together in the same house, followed their trades, and they earned a great deal of money.” When one brother died, the others mourned so hard they quickly followed, and they were “laid to rest in one grave.”

The moral of this tale is to be clear, to be fair, and a house will remain harmonious. Kids should be clearly made to understand the that family house will only be their’s on the basis of merit. Instead of letting children go directly from college to a position in the family business, this tale suggests they should first make their way in the “real world” where the family name is meaningless. One prominent family we know, already following this practice, has further stipulated each kid must get at least one promotion before they can return to the family business.

Furthermore, make it clear to your children that the child ultimately given the keys to the kingdom will be chosen not through favoritism, but through an open process that fairly evaluates each kid’s talents. If all the children know from the outset that merit will win the day the sort of bad blood that accompanies so many botched succession plans will probably not become an issue.

Time to dust off your Grimm’s fairy tales? This is just one example of the priceless wisdom of the ages found in the book that should be in every family’s library.

http://blogs.barrons.com/penta/2011/10/24/penta-on-books-grimms-fairy-tales/

Besides total miles/year an insurance company might be interested in how far one drives from their home base and how often

jhill ...
Are you dusting off your Organic Hemp Eco-Friendly Tie-Dyed Hippie Gown to join Pete and Arlo at the demonstration ???

Iran’s Bestseller

Which author sells the most books around Tehran. Everyone seems to want a copy. It's not Ahmadinejad. It's not the Ayatollah. It's Gabriel García Márquez who hasn't published a book in years. But back in 1996 he wrote News Of A Kidnapping. [Paperback: ISBN-10: 0140267832]. Iranian bookstores are sold out. You might be able to find a bootlegged version for three times the cover price. What in the world is going on? Mir Hossein Moussavi is an opposition leader here. He's been under house arrest since February. In a recent meeting he compared his detention to Márquez's account of abductions by a drug cartel in Colombia. The word spread. And just like that, News Of A Kidnapping went viral.

Hundreds of activists, journalists and students have been imprisoned in Iran for taking part in demonstrations since 2009. More than 200 executions have been announced this year. Barring China, no other country metes out the death penalty more often. So why aren't we seeing any pushback? After all, it's the year of the Arab Spring. Where are Iran's famous protesters? The Iranian regime has learned its lesson in 2009. Now it crushes the first signs of dissent and it won't let hundreds of people gather in public places.

But the likes of Libya and Syria tried that too. What's different here is that Iranians are not Arabs. They're a great civilization with a political system that seems to have failed its people. Iran arouses suspicion in the region and around the world. Iran is subject to the most stringent international sanctions. There is clearly suppression and discontent, but even if Iranians were to revolt once more - what is it they want instead? They are wary of revolution. What is the alternative? And will it be any better? There's isn't a simple answer.

Clearly some Iranians support this regime for reasons of religious loyalty and belief and because of tangible material rewards. Others fear it. And still others are waiting for the opportunity to reform or even replace it. The people who can read Márquez are surely a signs of a county where people are gasping for freedom.

Tehran's unlikely bestseller

From Library Journal

Garcia Marquez, Latin America's Nobel prize-winning novelist, turned his hand for the first time to nonfiction to explain the widespread kidnapping in Colombia. The author captures the political intricacies and strange, deep involvement of drug dealers in Colombian life, turning what as easily could have been an imagined story into a fascinating exploration of contemporary culture, politics, and drug lords.

From The New York Times

The cocaine boom was born sometime in the 1970's, by Carlos Rivas, a former automobile parts smuggler. He took to importing cocaine, and, using the old methods of smuggling emeralds or orchids, he grew vastly rich. The rest is very bad history. Before long a number of cartels were exporting refined cocaine to the USA. The original cartel operated out of Medellin. There were others, one based in Cali and one in the capital, Bogota.

American pressure put the Columbia authorities in a very difficult situation. Let us imagine that we have a President who carries five bullets in his body as the result of an assassination attempt. Let us imagine that Lady Bird Johnson and Amy Carter have both spent time in the hands of kidnappers, living on tortillas, in fear of their lives.. Two popular Attorneys General, have been gunned down, as has several heads of the FBI and the DEA, as well as numerous Congressmen and Senators. All over the country, prosecutors and judges are being offered the choice of being rich or dead. This is the situation underlying the story that Marquez, tells in his nonfiction book. The object of these kidnappings was to pressure the Government from sending drug lords to the prisons that awaited them in the USA. The drug bosses were on the receiving end of a few kidnappings themselves, carried out by rebel groups like the M-19. The cartels dealt with them by forming a Death to Kidnappers organization. And by a series of murders and tortures, they discouraged the practice by their enemies. And the dignity of their office did not prevent the police from employing brutal and fatal methods in their treatment of those associated with the cocaine distribution.

Marquez wrote ''News of a Kidnapping'' to document the suffering bravely endured and to alert the world to Colombia's crises. Mr. Marquez is a former journalist, and his book resembles good newspaper journalism, with a quick eye for the illuminating detail and facts. The horrors and absurdities, the touches of tender humanity and the stony cruelty are all part of this story. Both the head of Colombia's Department for Security, and cartel leader Pablo Escobar, were trying to kill each other. Both believed they owed the preservation of their lives to the Holy Infant of Prague. This inflicted a woeful conflict of interest on the tiny Savior. Other kidnappers almost come to blows over their respective opinions of the Pope. In keeping with his role as objective journalist, Mr. Garcia Marquez makes very little comment on these and other conditions that underlie the intense pathology he describes.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/970615.15stonet.html

The Future of Punctuation

Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries strove to limit this miscellany. Many punctuation marks are less venerable than we might imagine. Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520.

Other marks enjoyed briefer success. There used to be a clunky paragraph sign known as a pilcrow; initially it was a C with a slash drawn through it. Similar in its effect was one of the oldest punctuation symbols, a horizontal ivy leaf called a hedera. It appears in 8th-century manuscripts, separating text from commentary, and after a period out of fashion it made an unexpected return in early printed books. Then it faded from view.

Another mark, now obscure, is the point d'ironie, sometimes known as a "snark." A back-to-front question mark, it was deployed by the 16th-century printer Henry Denham to signal rhetorical questions, and in 1899 the French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested reviving it. More recently, the difficulty of detecting irony and sarcasm in electronic communication has prompted fresh calls for a revival of the point d'ironie. But the chances are slim that it will make a comeback.

In fact, Internet culture generally favors a lighter, more informal style of punctuation. True, emoticons have sprung up to convey nuances of mood and tone. Moreover, typing makes it easy to amplify punctuation: splattering 20 exclamation marks on a page, or using multiple question marks to signify theatrical incredulity. But, overall, punctuation is being renounced.

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness. Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang [often represented by ?! or !?] which signals excited disbelief. Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

One manifestation of this is the advance of the dash. It imitates the jagged urgency of conversation, in which we change direction sharply and with punch. Dashes became common only in the 18th century. Their appeal is visual, their shape dramatic. That's what a modern, talky style of writing seems to demand.

Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise "Rest Room's" or "Puppy's For Sale." People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.

Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings. The use of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that's also a connector—but it's a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.

More surprising is the eclipse of the hyphen. Traditionally, it has been used to link two halves of a compound noun and has suggested that a new coinage is on probation. But now the noun is split (fig leaf, hobby horse) or rendered without a hyphen (crybaby, bumblebee). It may be that the hyphen's last outpost will be in emoticons, where it plays a leading role.

Graphic designers, who favor an uncluttered aesthetic, dislike hyphens. They are also partly responsible for the disappearance of the apostrophe. This little squiggle first appeared in an English text in 1559. Its use has never been completely stable, and today confusion leads to the overcompensation that we see in those handwritten signs. The alternative is not to use apostrophes at all—an act of pragmatism easily mistaken for ignorance. Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.

The apostrophe is mainly a device for the eye, not the ear. And while I plan to keep handling apostrophes in accordance with the principles I was shown as a child, I am confident that they will either disappear or be reduced to little baubles of orthographic bling.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576641182784805212.html

Harold Herman, bookseller

By Franz Lidz

I read in the paper that, at the precocious age of 95, Harold Herman has died [October 8, 2011]. From 1964 to 1983, he was proprietor of the Whitman Book Shop. Later he owned Penn Center Books. He was Philadelphia's premier bookseller. A man of few words, most of them names. During the half-century I knew him, he always addressed me by my last name. In fact, we had entire conversations that consisted of that one word. Yet somehow he managed to say it with great affection. I was 9 when my family moved from New York to Philadelphia. Mr. H's son was one of my classmates in elementary school. As a kid, I loved to sit at the Hermans' kitchen table while Mr. H slowly enunciated the remarkable names of unremarkable ballplayers: "DOO-ley WO-mack." "JOHN-ny HERRN-stein." "COOK-ie RO-jas."He was a gruff, intimidating presence.

Mr. H may have been the first Philadelphia Jew to dab margarine on his bagels instead of cream cheese. Indeed, he may have been Philly's first foodie. In his case, though, taste took a backseat to color. "Pass the blue," he'd tell his wife, Flossie, pointing to a bottle of salad dressing. Or, "Flossie, you know I don't eat green Jell-O!" Actually, that would have been one of Mr. H's longer dinner conversations. Over the course of a one hour-long meal I attended at the Herman home in 1967, Mr. H muttered exactly three words from behind a copy of the Philadelphia Bulletin: "Salt." "Pepper." And "Flossie!" With the exception of my parents, Mr. and Mrs. H were the only married couple of my youth who, in their own daffy way, actually seemed to enjoy spending time with one another.

When my mother's cancer started to spread and she was spending more time in the hospital than out, I became a near-constant presence at the Herman house. I was playing football in their backyard on what turned out to be the worst day of my life. I still remember Flossie waving me into the house. "Your father is coming to pick you up," I knew that my mother was dead, because there wasn’t another word said. I went out front and stood watching for my father hoping he would never come. He waited until I got in the car before saying, "Your mother died this morning." He said nothing else during the short drive home. He looked straight ahead. I couldn't speak, and he couldn't speak. Our love for my mother had made us dumb. At the funeral, Mr. H shuffled over to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and murmured, with grim finality, "Lidz." That was all he said, and all he needed to say.

Mr. H had given me Webster's Third International Dictionary. It's the only bar mitzvah gift I still have. I like to think the Hermans were the first people to envision a future for me as a writer. I still recall Mr. H's instructions: After looking something up, leave the dictionary open to “M“. He explained, tersely, that leaving the book open to any other letter would ruin the spine. I checked this morning. Fittingly, it was open to the page that begins with the word maraschino, the kind of bottled cherry that always reposed on the top shelf of the Hermans' refrigerator.

The only wedding present my wife and I still have is a copy of Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler that Floss and Harold gave us. The novel, which remains one of my favorites, has a character who doesn't read. "They teach us to read as children," he says, "and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear." My mother used to say: that the most important lessons lay not in what you need to learn, but in what you first need to unlearn. She and Flossie and Harold showed me that the difficulty is not in new ideas, but in escaping the old ones. The philosopher Lao Tzu once divined, "To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things."

Somewhere in the coiled scrolls of the Talmud is an adage that says you are not required to finish studying, but you are not allowed to stop. The critic Judith Shulevitz observed that life, unlike fiction, has neither crisp beginnings nor redemptive endings. It endures, as Mr. H did, it endures until it doesn't. If there is an afterlife, Harold Herman’s passing makes it seem much more attractive. It will be a kick to hear him slowly enunciating: "Jer-e-MI-ah." "I-SAI-ah." "E-ZE-ki-el."

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20111021_A_bookseller_of_few_words.html

This is the 50th Anniversary of the movie, West Side Story ...
Does that not make you feel old

bookleaves ...
The first step into the front of my house produces a sound like a "human" sigh that is startling until you get used to it
And ... LOL ... the various house sounds at night are enough to make the average soul want to acquire a very big dog ...
Speaking of the night time ... I have somehow accidently set my Bose radio alarm to go off at midnight ...
Same with my EviraStation outside temperature monitor ... and I don't know how to "fix" either problem ...
Any help ???

I love old house squeaky floors at least in the daytime ... and
The night's darkness presents a different kind of mood

World War II Pocket Sabotage Books

I’d like to tell you about a book. It’s a book which, it seems, no one’s ever heard of and yet, when I included it in my catalogue Short List Number #1 last year, I had seven orders for it. It’s not a big book, not grand or imposing. In fact, it was expressly intended to be small, to be hidden away, and, if found, to deceive. The Germans would call it a Tarnschrift, a ‘camouflaged book’.

Masquerading as a little French–German dictionary, it’s actually a pocket sabotage guide produced by the French Resistance for distribution among French workers circa 1943. It includes instructions on how to ‘do your bit’ against the Nazis if you work in factories (sand in the lubricating oil will soon damage machinery, etc.), coal mines, on railways (if you work on the points, send trains the wrong way), roads, rivers, canals, and even on a farm.

The literature on books produced by the French Resistance tends to focus on the clandestine newspapers, presumably as examples of such exist in much greater numbers. There was nothing comparable illustrated in the recent book Collaboration and Resistance [ISBN-10: 0981969003], published to coincide with a 2009 exhibition at the New York Public Library. And yet, in their little way, books like this helped win the War.

But the story doesn’t end there. I have found, over the years, that working with rare books often throws up amazing coincidences, and here’s another to add to the list. That little French Tarnschrift is a rare book. Roger Stoddard, Senior Curator Emeritus of Harvard’s great Houghton Library told me that, in his time, he had seen a number of German Tarnschriften, but had never seen a French one. But then I came across three more French Tarnschriften, textually identical to the first one but with different covers: a volume of poetry, a book on war damage, and an almanac. So the Resistance evidently produced different covers for their book, perhaps further to help evade detection. After all, lots of little red pocket dictionaries suddenly popping up all over the place might have aroused Nazi suspicion.

I like books like this, books with stories to tell. And I am pleased to say that all four have found a home together in the same library.

From Simon Beattie’s blog, The Books You Never Knew You Wanted.
http://www.simonbeattie.kattare.com/blog/?p=48

A Review of Beyond the Cabbage Patch, The Literary World of Alice Hegan Rice

Reviewed by Carlton Jackson

On a cold day in the mid-1890s, a Louisville, Kentucky woman, Alice Hegan, was peering through a window in her house. She saw an old woman wearing tattered clothes searching garbage bags for food. Alice invited the woman, Mary Bass, into her kitchen. As Mary warmed up with cups of hot coffee, she told Alice her story of ramshackle houses, hungry children and drunken husbands. She was from a “seamy” part of Louisville known as The Cabbage Patch.

Alice Hegan was in such awe of this “wrong side of the tracks” in Louisville that she began regular visits to the area. She began writing descriptions of what she saw, heard, and sensed. The result was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, a book written in 1901. This account of the “Cabbage Patch” begat numerous plays and movies. Miss Hegan put Louisville on the literary map.

Now comes Mary Boewe with this wonderfully encompassing biography. While giving full attention to “Mrs. Wiggs,” Alice did go on to write another 17 books about various subjects. But it was always “Mrs. Wiggs” that readers remembered and treasured. It was like a movie star becoming so identified with a role and forever stamped with it. Such was, to a large extent, the rather happy fate of “Mrs. Wiggs.” Alice Hegan married a “serious-minded” poet, Cale Young Rice. Alice was light minded; Cale was serious. They made an interesting literary couple in Louisville for more than 40 years.

Boewe’s biography is valuable for its description and discussion of the turn of the 20th century literary activities. Many of the literati in Louisville were also a part of a national group of writers and editors. The Rices were in the midst of it. Among those included were S.S. McClure, Sherwood Anderson, Ray Stannard Baker, Edward Bellamy, Robert Worth Bingham, Henry Watterson, Van Wyck Brooks, Rachel Field, Mark Twain and others. One of Alice’s closest friends was Lincoln biographer, Ida Tarbell. The two corresponded with each other, sometimes on a weekly basis. Though the book is about Alice Hegan Rice, its insights into the literary scene in Louisville and the rest of the nation, add to the quality of this biography.

The Rices traveled a great deal. Each summer they sojourned in Maine. They also took worldwide voyages and were particularly intrigued by the Far East. These travels led to Alice’s The Lady of the Decoration (about missionary life) and to her husband’s poem, A Japanese Mother in Wartime. They also spent time in England and other parts of Europe. Each visit led to additional publications.

Like millions of other people, Alice and Cale suffered from the Great Depression of the 1930s. They sold their 1927 Franklin auto for a bit of revenue. They also rented out a part of their home. Nevertheless, the Depression and the onset of health problems for both of the Rices bode ill for the future. Alice had heart difficulties. She died on Feb. 10, 1942. Cale was totally lost without Alice. “The Road is so lonely I can’t go on,” he wrote in one of his poems. He ended his own life on Jan. 23, 1943. Thus, two of Louisville’s great literary figures were gone. Mary Boewe’s biography is extensive, with copious notes and a full index.

http://bgdailynews.com/articles/2011/02/13/features/feat4.txt

The New FCC's Net Neutrality Rules

Net neutrality - what does it mean? Will it have an impact on our lives? Will it affect how we access the Web? The short answer is: YES.

The Federal Communications Commission has approved the rules which will begin on November 20. Those rules give the FCC the authority to investigate and regulate how ISP’s manage their networks. The FCC hasn't released the rules yet, but they have provided an overview of what's included. It breaks down to three high-level rules:

1. Transparency: Does your ISP slow down its network at peak times? Does it have a usage cap? What about roaming fees? The transparency requirement basically requires Broadband providers to be more transparent about their activities: how they manage their networks, how well their networks perform, and details about their plan options and pricing. Most ISPs would argue that they already do this.

2. No Blocking: Much of this debate started in 2007 when Comcast was accused of blocking access to networks like BitTorrent because people using BitTorrent on Comcast's network were slowing down the experience for everyone else. Comcast denied cutting off access completely but said it did delay access to the sites during peak times. Under the new rules, an ISP would not be able to pick and choose apps or service to block in order to improve network performance. An ISP would not be able to block access to Netflix's streaming service, for example because a select few people were clogging the system.

3. No Unreasonable Discrimination: “Network management," governs how an ISP like Comcast or Time Warner Cable runs their operations. Under the new rules, ISPs can manage their networks, but they can't discriminate against specific applications. In other words, Comcast could slow down its entire network to handle an influx of users, but it could not cut off a specific, bandwidth-hungry service like Netflix. The FCC does acknowledges that network management is necessary to block harmful things – like mal ware and child porn – from making its way onto ISP networks.

Can I Report a Violation? If you think your ISP is violating these rules, you can complain to the FCC. The agency has two types of complaint processes: an informal consumer complaint and a more organized formal process. Consumers can go to the FCC Web site and file their complaint at no charge. This is mainly for those who suspect that something is going on, but lack the ability to pull together a more formal complaint.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374638,00.asp#fbid=pZbQ0nbYmW_

D.C. Court to Hear Challenges

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear the challenges to the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules. The new rules prohibit broadband Internet providers from deliberately slowing or blocking a subscriber’s network traffic. These regulations have been officially filed in the Federal Register, which allows them to be subject to legal challenges. Verizon has filed a complaint against the new rules feeling they overstep legal boundaries set by the law. The hearings begin in a few weeks before the rules go into effect.

http://www.radio-info.com/news/net-neutrality-update-dc-court-to-hear-challenges

Elements of Style

Perfection is unattainable and it is boring. A room decorated to where everything is just so is self-important and static. Style ought to be loose and easygoing, capacious and expansive, uplifting and amusing. If a room fails to put you at ease and welcome you, then, what is the point? Most stylish homes are ones that are comfortable and inviting. They are imbued with the life that goes on there. Here are 10 essential, things all these homes share. Embracing imperfection does not mean anything goes. It means beauty tempered by reality.

1. A Little Animal
People like cute things and animals are cute—it is so nice to have a small creature in figurine form in your house. A funny stuffed animal on a nicely made bed, a white porcelain monkey on your dining table, a painted Staffordshire dog in your bookshelf or a big gold piggy bank on your mantel. Pick up a nice, inanimate pet along your journeys, bring it home and see how you feel.

2. Jollifiers.
Jollifiers are things that spread a little joy every time you cast your eye upon them. They are among the easiest decorating tools, as they require no skill or sophisticated understanding. You basically set them out and, like talismans, they exude their subtle power. Certain motifs like hearts and polka dots can jollify, but it could be something as simple as a favorite snapshot stuck into the edge of a mirror or a child's drawing framed and hung "seriously" among other pictures.

3. Mollifiers
This is the stuff that you allow into your home because as awful as it may be, it makes someone else happy. There is a softening of attitude that comes from letting some of these things into your life. They show that you put love before style. A famous example is Jackie Kennedy's acceptance of President Kennedy's funny old rocking chair in the Yellow Oval Room. She vowed to her decorator they'd get it out of there somehow, but in the end, it completely chic-ed up the room by being quirky and unexpected.

4. The Odd Chair
An odd chair is used for its amusing demeanor. It is more like a piece of sculpture than a chair. Chairs have personality, like a little human, standing on four legs with outstretched arms. The odd chair is frequently diminutive, unusual-looking and solitary. These are "personality" chairs, and some think that every room should have one. The odd chair can hold a stack of books or a bunch of flowers or a lamp. And it can even be used like a chair when needed.

5. Shiny objects
We are attracted to bright, shiny objects, and for good reason: our homes need them. As our eyes flit around the room, they alight on and are delighted by those bright spots. A bit of sparkle brings a focused sharpness to materials and shapes. These objects can be in silver, gold, brass, or glass. In forms they can be anything from boxes to bowls to candlesticks to picture frames. Set them upon consoles, inside shelves, atop books and on pedestals. Mingle them, make tableaux of them.

6. Ethnic Textiles
Handcrafted fabrics bring coziness to a room and worldliness to a home. Some favorites include Central Asian suzanis and ikats, Indonesian and West African batiks, Moroccan wedding blankets and American quilts. These things can be draped over a table, laid on a bed, made into pillows or hung over the back of a sofa. Every room can handle one of these far-flung treasures,.

7. Not Too Much Brown Furniture
Furniture is not supposed to be made only out of brown wood. Too many brown pieces in a room is the surest way to suck the life out of it. One decorator allows no more than three brown pieces in any one room. Furniture should be a mix of tones and materials, like painted or stained wood, lacquer, Lucite, metal, glass or fabric.

8. Decorative Mirrors
Most rooms benefit from some extra sparkle. Choose glamorous mirrors with beautiful frames, like gilded wood or shiny lacquer. Convex mirrors have been used since classical times to reflect light. That is the point of any decorative mirror. Indeed, a big mirror over a fireplace or in a dining room can toss daylight around and multiply the light of a chandelier or the glimmer of candles.

9. Log Baskets
Even if you have no fire place and no use for split wood, you still might like the rugged texture of a big woven basket in your living room or front hall. A good basket cozies without cloying. It gives you something a little rough and adds a sense of depth to most rooms. Use them to fill the empty space under a leggy console, an extra place to stash things like magazines, toys, sports equipment, woolens in the entry or neat stacks of towels in the bathroom.

10. Some Patina
A home needs some softness of old wood, the dullness of aged metal, the subtle colors of an original paint job, or fabric faded by the sun. Without a little of this, a house feels cold and untouched by human life. A little decrepitude is just the thing for some fabrics and rugs and furniture. Life is messy and gloriously imperfect, and a few signs of wear and tear indicate a well-loved, well-used home. A home that looks well-loved and well-lived in usually is.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203499704576623322601626608.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The corpse is still warm

Name That Old/New Radio Telescope If You Will

The most famous radio telescope in the world is about to get a new name. The Very Large Array, known around the world, isn't what it used to be. More than a decade of effort has replaced the original, 1970s-vintage electronics with modern, state-of-the-art equipment. The result is a completely new scientific facility.

The VLA Radio Telescope:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0205/vla006_nrao.jpg

Construction on the Expansion Project began in 2001, and completion is scheduled for next year. The project replaced the 1970s-vintage electronic equipment, analog data-transmission system, and the central, special-purpose computing "heart" of the system with state-of-the-art electronics, an all-digital, high-bandwidth data-transmission system, and a new, super-fast central supercomputer with an innovative design that revolutionizes scientists' ability to optimize their observations and exquisitely analyze their results.

The new system is more than ten times more sensitive to faint radio emissions from distant astronomical objects than the original system, and covers more than three times more radio frequencies. The new receiving systems would be capable of detecting the weak radio signal from a cell phone at the distance of Jupiter, a half-billion miles away. As the project progressed, the VLA began to be called the Expanded Very Large Array or EVLA.

To date, more than 2,500 scientists from around the world have used the VLA for more than 13,000 observing projects spanning the range of astronomical specialties from our own Solar System to the edge of the observable Universe, billions of light-years away. And the future is even more exciting.

And so it's time, the Observatory has decided, to give this transformed scientific facility a new name to reflect its new capabilities.

An entry form for submitting name suggestions, along with rules, are online: http://namethearray.org/

Entries will be accepted until December 1, 2011, and the new name will be announced at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Town Hall at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, in January.

A Contest for Kids, Grandkids and some older “If I Only Had a Brain” Kids
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=34950

The Singular Art of Being a Woman

When I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. We had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life? Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count. I am told I have two grim-seeming options to face: stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons, I see now, valued emotional fulfillment above all else and the elevation of independence over coupling.

One of the many ways my generation differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, our students and employees and subordinates—a universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends in this brave new world, where boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing.

For thousands of years, marriage had been an economic and political contract negotiated among families, church, and community. It took two to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued highly. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while away. Other seasonal workers relied on their wives’ steady income as a domestic. Two-income families were the norm. Not until the 1950s, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s. We are also marrying less. Many think that marriage is becoming obsolete. We no longer need husbands to have children, nor do we have to have children if we don’t want to. Foremost among the reasons for all these changes in family structure are the gains of the women’s movement. Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on and surpassed men in education and employment. Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry,”

But while the rise of women has been good, the decline of males has been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. What does this portend for the future of the American family? America as a whole currently enjoys a healthy population ratio of 50.8 percent females and 49.2 percent males. But our shrinking pool of traditionally “marriageable” men is dramatically changing the social landscape, and the marriage market, in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. In many cases, the more successful a man is, the less interested he is in commitment.

Today we’re contending with a new “dating gap,” where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players. What’s happened to the black family is already beginning to happen to the white family. In 1950, 65 percent of African American women were married. By 1965, African American marriage rates had declined precipitously. This erosion of traditional marriage and family structure has played out among low-income groups, both black and white. Increasingly, this extends to the upper-middle class. Successful women are confronted with a shrinking pool of like-minded marriage prospects. When the available women significantly outnumber men, courtship behavior changes in the direction of what men want.

In 2010, the proportion of married households in America dropped to a record low. Fifty percent of the adult population is single (compared with 33 percent in 1950)—and that portion is growing. The median age for getting married has been rising, and for those who are affluent and educated, that number climbs even higher. When I embarked on my own sojourn as a single woman in New York City I was seeking something having to do with finding my own way, and independence. I found all that, but the single woman is very rarely seen for who she is by others, or even by herself Most of us internalize the stigmas that surround our status, though our cultural fixation on the couple is actually a recent development. “Pair-bonding” has been around for a million years.

Now that women are financially independent, and marriage is an option rather than a necessity, we are free to pursue the “pure relationship,” in which intimacy is sought in and of itself and not solely for reproduction. Everywhere I turn, I see couples upending norms and power structures, whether it’s women choosing to be with much younger men, or men choosing to be with women more financially successful than they are (or both at once). We are not designed, as a species, to raise children in nuclear families. Women who try to be “supermoms,” whether single or married and holding down a career, are “swimming upstream. I think about the years I’d spent struggling against the four walls of my apartment, and wondering what my mother’s life would have been like had she divorced my father.

A long article printing out to several pages … the above is just a “taste”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/4/?single_page=true

Public Bookshelves in Germany

Take a book, leave a book. In the birthplace of the printing press, public bookshelves are popping up on street corners, city squares and suburban supermarkets. In these free-for-all libraries, people can grab whatever they want to read, and leave behind anything they want for others. There's no need to register, no due date, and you can take or give as many as you want.

This project is open for everybody. The city of Cologne’s latest public bookcase, steel with acrylic glass doors, was put up two weeks ago next to one of the city's medieval towers. It is the fourth free shelf that the Cologne Citizen's Foundation, has placed outside; there are two more inside local Ikea outlets.

The public book shelves, which are usually financed by donations and cared for by local volunteers, have popped up independently of each other in many cities across Germany. Each shelf holds around 200 books and it takes about six weeks for a complete turnover, with all the old titles replaced by new ones, he said.

One 46-year-old Cologne resident who works in catering and event management, said she takes advantage of the free books all the time. "I have often left books here, but frankly, I have even more often taken books with me," she said, browsing through the latest new arrivals. "For me personally, this project is simply great, because I do not have much money left to spend on good literature."

Even commercial book stores and online book retailers seem to support the idea of free book exchanges. "We see this project rather as a sales promotion than as competition," said Elmar Muether, manager of one book store. "If books are present everywhere, it helps our business too," said a spokeswoman for buch.de, a German online bookstore comparable to Amazon. "Public bookshelves are in no competition with the online book trade. On the contrary, we are happy about any kind of motivation to read," she said.

So far, the Cologne book group has had few problems with vandalism or other kinds of abuse, though a used-book seller once scooped up every volume on a shelf to sell at a flea market. Another time the shelves kept getting stacked with material from a religious group. But propaganda is the only kind of literature not allowed on the shelves, whether it is right-wing, racist or proselytizing.

The book cases are like small treasure chests with an eclectic mix of anything from fiction to obscure self-help, travel guides or crime novels. Some spaces reserved the lower shelves for children's literature only. It is important that it is make easy for everyone to overcome their inhibitions and participate in this 'reading culture on the street'. While most of the shelves have so far been put up in upscale neighborhoods, volunteers who help look after the project are planning to put up future shelves in poor neighborhoods, where residents often don't have as much access to literature.

Nobody really knows where the idea for the public shelves originally stems from. What's certain is it's a popular grass-roots movement that's catching on -- even abroad. Just a few weeks ago the group was asked for help with opening public book shelves in poor rural areas of Mozambique.

A wonderful idea
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2011/10/14/public_bookshelves_spread_across_germany/

BTW ...
Kathleen ...
I understand that Harrisburg is going bankrupt ... LOL ...
Will they have to sell the Huston Capitol ... ???

National Book Award Finalists

The National Book Foundation will announce the winners at a gala in New York on Nov. 16. The finalists include:

Fiction:

"The Sojourn" by Andrew Krivak

"The Tiger's Wife" by Téa Obreht

"The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka

"Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories" by Edith Pearlman

"Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward:

Non Fiction

"The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism" by Deborah Baker

"Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution" by Mary Gabriel

"The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" by Stephen Greenblatt

"Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" by Manning Marable

"Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout" by Lauren Redniss

Poetry:

"Head Off and Split" by Nikky Finney

"The Chameleon Couch" by Yusef Komunyakaa

"Double Shadow" by Carl Phillips

"Tonight No Poetry Will Serve" by Adrienne Rich

"Devotions" by Bruce Smith

Young People's Literature:

"My Name Is Not Easy" by Debby Dahl Edwardson

"Inside Out and Back Again" by Thanhha Lai

"Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy" by Albert Marrin

"Shine" by Lauren Myracle

"Okay for Now" by Gary D. Schmidt

"Chime" by Franny Billingsley

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/10/national-book-award-finalists-announced.html

lludwig ...

There was a lot of talk in Little Switzerland about the "rogue" Amish ...
The five desparados are all now in custody of the county sheriff ...
Hopefully the judge in this case will end this "nonsense" with some 'stiff' jail time for the bad boys

Reading Beneath the Lines

Palimpsests are recycled handwritten books from the Middle Ages. Their interesting parts are always the original text that the recycler tried to erase in order to write a different book. A palimpsest that contains previously lost writings of not one, not two, but three significant texts dating back to antiquity is a freak. One such freak is about to go on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It is a palimpsest that mostly contains recovered writings of Archimedes, but it also includes two other recovered texts that exist nowhere else.

In 1229, a monk in Jerusalem wanted to make a prayer book. He took existing handwritten books, removed the binding, and used a knife to scrape off the ink as much as possible and started writing on them. Eventually he added a new binding, and this palimpsest was born. The monk had used parchment from several books, one a tome of Archimedes's treatises on math. Two others included entire speeches of the Athenian orator Hyperides, a contemporary of Demosthenes, as well as a detailed commentary on Aristotle's Categories. By the turn of the last century the palimpsest was in a monastery in Constantinople, where it was identified as the work of Archimedes. The prayer book later turned up in a private collection in Paris. But forgers had painted images of saints on seven pages.

In 1998 the daughter-in-law of the Parisian collector brought the Archimedes palimpsest, to Christie's in New York, where it was sold at auction for $2 million. Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters, wondered who was going to have to deal with it. She got an answer a few months later, when the anonymous buyer deposited the palimpsest with the Walters. Ms. Quandt was put in charge of preparing the work for digital imaging. The preparation, however, demanded a level of excruciating care. Just removing the binding and separating the 174 fragile folios took four years alone, followed by countless hours of carefully lifting mold and dirt. The worst was removing the paintings of saints, which lay atop the prayer book writing, which in turn lay atop the Archimedes undertext.

When a team of four digital-imaging experts from around the country began submitting folios to different wavelengths of light and the palimpsest began to give up its secrets.
Only the Archimedes text had been identified to that point, but now they started to see there were others. The others included entire speeches of the Athenian orator Hyperides, a fourth-century B.C. contemporary of Demosthenes, as well as a detailed commentary on Aristotle's "Categories," a fundamental text of Western philosophy.

The big find remained the Archimedes' math treatises; far more than previously known, and two exist that in no other form: the concept of absolute infinity; the other, combinatorics, a segment of math that plays a role in statistical physics and modern computing. No one knew Archimedes had ever broached either subject.

Hyperides was among the most influential orators of his time, but until now only fragments of his speeches existed. Already available for review, the recovered full speeches provide new evidence for the politics and legal practice of Greek city-states. Not much has survived regarding "Categories," which scholars know was the subject of intense philosophical debate in the first-century B.C. The commentary found in the palimpsest has offered a wealth of details about that debate, and as a result it enriches our understanding of an ancient and medieval interpretative tradition.

Whether you study philosophy or science or whatever, the Archimedes palimpsest breaks down boundaries between disciplines. It contains history, philosophy and mathematics. Because of all these things, history is still being written.

Yadayadayada
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204612504576608960149816094.html

Headed south to Holmes County yesterday (Tuesday) … There are several “cheese houses” (cheese factories) in Amish “country” … they all have an adjacent shop that sells their cheese plus other traditional “Amish” meat and food products … you can see the cheese house where I always go at http://babyswiss.com/… The Guggisberg store is about the size and shape of an old fashioned diner … and their back wall is one long window that “opens” onto the factory … and you can watch the cheese being made … the fascinating thing is that everything is stainless steel and spotlessly clean … the clerks are dressed in traditional Swiss folk garb …

Holmes County is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ohio … and people are constantly arriving … and they fill Guggie’s to try the samples and buy the fresh product … the smart folks arrive with coolers in their trunks to keep the cheese fresh or Guggies will sell you an insulated bag and ice to get you home … yesterday there were a couple of Amish men across the road … with their horse and buggies “parked” and the men were just sitting there … one selling homemade bread boxes and the other was selling quilts … both were getting business …

There is really too much to see and do in just one day … but … I also stopped at three antique malls … one book sale in a buggy making factory … I bought eight books … I stopped in Trail, Ohio to buy some Trail Bologna … which is a ring bologna with a very distinctive taste … great with crackers … I had lunch in a restaurant in Charm, Ohio … the waitresses are all Amish young women dressed in their long somber colored dresses and crisp white caps … and … LOL … they top it off with Nike shoes … a very strange combination … the day went by very fast and I wound my way back home “dodging” Amish buggies and cutters … getting back to “civilization” and arriving after dark

Bookbinding Workshop Teaches Old-School Skills

Downloading books to an e-reader is common in today's technology-savvy culture, but the art of handcrafting a book holds special appeal for some people. Those who have always wanted to create their own hardcover can do so during an upcoming workshop.

"Behind the Cover: Tour Denver Bookbinding and Build Your Own Book Workshop" includes a session where 15 people can craft a single-signature book to take home. The workshop is offered Oct. 19

Gail Lindley, owner of the Denver Bookbinding Co., says her clients often include graphic artists who create hardcover portfolios for clients, schoolteachers who make specialty books for their classes, and families who want to pass down heirlooms such as Bibles or unpublished books written by relatives. "Not only does making a book engage your brain, but it engages your hand, as well," says Lindley.

During the tour, attendees will be able to see a 400-year-old book made of cotton paper, as well as another volume made of sheepskin vellum. The bindery, which is celebrating its 82nd year in business, is the only remaining Colorado company that specializes in hardcover binding. There used to be five, Lindley says. Additional classes being offered at the bindery in upcoming months include making a pop-up card and crafting an Italian leather journal.

"I still have lots of young people in their 20s and 30s who are reading to their children because hardcover books were one of the experiences they enjoyed in their childhood," Lindley says

http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_19083111

The Guy Who Played with Puppets

Jean Patrick’s review of the new illustrated children’s book, Jim Henson: The Guy Who Played With Puppets

If you’ve heard of The Muppets, you might also recognize the name of their creator, Jim Henson. After reading this book, you’ll know him as well as Kermit the Frog.
Jim Henson: The Guy Who Played with Puppets, Random House - 40 pages - by Kathleeen Krull, presents Henson’s life story.

As a boy, Henson spent unhurried days by the river near his home in Leland, Miss. He daydreamed, took care of his pets (turtles, snakes and frogs), drew imaginary creatures, and played with his best friend, Kermit. When he reached his early teens, he developed an interest in puppets, thanks to seeing Kukla, Fran, and Ollie on television. It was definitely a turning point. “His father, a biologist, wanted Jim to prepare for a career in science,” writes Krull. “Too late. Within a few years, Jim was looking for a TV job. Playing with puppets seemed a promising idea.”

In high school and college, he performed on TV. To create a side character named Kermit, he cut up his mom’s old green cloth coat and made ping-pong ball eyes. From there, Krull covers the rest of Henson’s productive life. After studying puppetry in Europe, he returned to the United States to form a company called Muppets, Inc. (a combination of the words “puppets” and “marionettes”). Fifteen years later, in 1968, he was asked to help with a new television show, “Sesame Street.” Before long, Bert, Ernie, Oscar, and more Muppets were born.

As expected, Krull writes about Henson’s incredible imagination. But she also emphasizes other parts of his personality. He loved to experiment. The book is illustrated by the husband/wife team of Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher. Their paintings are soft and poignant, particularly the final scene that shows hundreds of people waving butterfly puppets at his funeral. Although the end is heartbreaking, the book’s last line affirms his goal. “Jim Henson had made a difference in this world.”

http://www.mitchellrepublic.com/event/article/id/57690/

Things That Look Like Nothing

There is nothing new under the sun
Baseball in many different forms has been played for thousands of years
Bases were only added to the game before the printing press was invented
And the baseball gloves came hundreds of years later in the nineteenth century
With a true vintage baseball glove being one made before 1910

Some of these old gloves look far worse than nothing … but they have value …
This is not an extensive written discourse or final word on the subject … but6
You may study these things as you wish … this is merely show and tell …
After all “a picture is worth a thousand words or so” and like incunabula
You may want to have mental images in your mind of these valuable items …

The first gloves were fingerless baseball gloves and generally worn in pairs …
These were leather gloves with the fingers cut off at the joint …
Genuine fingerless baseball gloves have reached the five figures sale prices:

http://baseballglovecollector.com/gallery/cache/19th-century/Fingerless%20Gloves%20Picture_800.jpg

http://baseballglovecollector.com/gallery/cache/19th-century/Fingerless%20Gloves%202_800.jpg

The precursor to today’s baseball glove; the single workman’s glove came a bit later …
Recently these fabric workman’s baseball gloves have sold for many hundred of dollars
And most look exactly like something I would wear to pick up dog poop in the yard

http://keymancollectibles.com/glovesmitts/images/wpeA.jpg

http://www.legendaryauctions.com/LotImages/34/47617a_lg.jpeg

These images are just the beginning of knowledge …
And there are many things of value that look like nothing …
Things that you would kick aside to get at a box of books in a basement
Or things you would throw away when you clean out an attic …
Things that look like nothing

The TTLLN Idea stolen from Joel (satnrose)

Don’t forget … The Post Office is closed today

A book for a buck?

Those Dollar Store books, so there must be some people who buy them"¦ right? How did these books end up at The Dollar Tree? Are they even worth buying or reading? If you're looking for decent reading material, look elsewhere, friends. I was actually kind of horrified at what passed for "books" in most dollar stores: Self-help books, like "Achieve Sales Excellence," by Howard Stevens. Or workout books like "Jerry Anderson's Joy of Fitness for Women," or "Knock Out Fitness with Mario Lopez." There were sleazy romance books, like "Tan Lines," by J.J. Salem. There were cheaply-made cookbooks published by the tiniest of printing houses; books printed by niche publishers.

There was a handful of books printed by honest-to-goodness publishing houses, but there was not one book— in any of the Dollar stores— that I would buy. Not. A. Single. One.
Actually, the only brick-and-mortar store with a decent dollar book selection was Target, which offered children's classics like "Little Women," by Louisa May Alcott; "Heidi," published in 1880 by Swiss author Johanna Spyri; "Frankenstein," by Mary Shelley; "The Time Machine," by H.G. Wells; and "Tom Sawyer," by Mark Twain.

Friends, if it's cheap used books you're looking for, look online. On the Internet, we're talking a whole other enchilada. Great books, from old classics to current New York Times Bestsellers—many for less than $1. I've noticed a growing number of books on Amazon or Kindle for 99 cents. Heck, if you dig around in Amazon's "Bargain" section, you can find a bunch of books for under a buck; I found some as cheap as a dime.
Of course, you have to pay shipping fees for Amazon books—but if you have a Kindle or an iPad, you can download books for a flat 99 cent fee.

I found books and e-books for a buck or two on Amazon, half.com and iBooks. If you're in the market for real, paper books, check out half.com.

The following classics are 75 cents on half.com:
"Things Fall Apart," by Chinua Achebe
"To Kill a Mockingbird," by Harper Lee
"The Catcher in the Rye," by J. D. Salinger
"Of Mice and Men," by John Steinbeck
"Lord of the Flies," by William Golding
"Fahrenheit 451," by Ray Bradbury
"The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Things they Carried," by Tim O'Brien
"Animal Farm," by George Orwell
"Slaughterhouse Five," by Kurt Vonnegut
"Their Eyes were Watching god," by Zora Neale Hurston
"In Cold Blood," by Truman Capote
"The Outsiders," by S.E. Hinton

Even these recent and former best-sellers were 75 cents on half.com:
"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," by Steig Larsen
"The Shack," by William P. Young
"Water for Elephants," by Sara Gruen
"The Kite Runner," by Khaled Hosseini
"Into the Wild," by Jon Krakauer
All the "Harry Potter" books by J.K. Rowling.
"Twilight," by Stephanie Meyer
"The Giver," by Lois Lowry
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime," by Mark Haddon
"The Road," by Cormac McCarthy
"Tuesdays with Morrie," by Mitch Albom
Again, the list goes on and on.

In conclusion, friends, if you want a good book, go to a book store. If you want a good, cheap, used book, go online. And if you need some wrapping paper, may I suggest The Dollar Store.

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111008/ENTERTAIN/110080308/1018/OPINION

What's the Right Price for Pet Food?

Early this year Petco created a new Certified Nutrition program that divides pet foods into three categories -- essential foods, natural foods, and advanced foods. Each of these groups fulfills a different requirement: essential foods include basic fillers like wheat or corn, while natural foods contain many familiar ingredients like meat, fruits and vegetables. Advanced foods, finally, are formulated for pets with special medical needs.

According to Petco natural food brands like Wellness, Halo or Natural Balance are the best choice because they promote health and longevity for your pet. On the other hand, they cost a little more than the basic kibble with fillers. For example, a 30-pound bag of a filler-based essential brand like Beneful costs between $26 and $35, while a natural brand like Wellness costs between $46 and $54.

Pet experts emphasizes nutrition: It is vital these days that the very first ingredient is a real protein -- not meat byproducts and definitely not wheat or corn," she says. "If you get high-quality, nutritional food, you're going to have fewer pet bills, and your pet is going to live a longer healthier life.

You can save on natural food by purchasing a less-known brand like AvoDerm. On average, that will save you about $10 to $15 per bag. Another great benefit of natural food is that your pet will eat a smaller quantity of it. This helps cut down on your bill as well as your pet's risk for obesity.

Consumer Reports found that stores like Target and Walmart had better prices than Petco, Petsmart , or online retailers like petfooddirect.com. However, you won't find natural food brands at general merchandise retailers. Stick with pet supply stores which also offer price matching if you find the product cheaper at another store.

Petco has a points program that provides discounts to returning customers. And, if you buy 10 bags of food within a year, you'll get the next one free. There's even a Pet Birthday Club, which sends yearly discounts to celebrate your pet's special day.

You may be tempted to stock up on pet food during a great sale, but it is recommended you don't buy more than a month's supply at a time. Don't go crazy and stockpile. You can buy a lot, but unless you have an airtight container, that food can become stale and not be as nutritious and cause stomach upsets.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/10/04/savings-experiment-whats-the-right-price-for-pet-food/

Luck of the Irish

There can't be many hotels whose opening is accompanied by a 240-page glossy coffee table book detailing its history and restoration. But then Ballyfin is not exactly your average hotel. This imposing neo-classical stone mansion is tucked behind thick, boundary walls deep in the heart of the lush green countryside about an hour and a half by car from Dublin.

Ballyfin was built in the 1820s by Sir Christopher Coote on the site of another pile previously occupied among others by William Wellesley Pole. But Ballyfin's fortunes changed and in the 1930s it began a new life as a boarding school. But a decade ago the house was bought by an American and his Irish-born wife. They were on the hunt for a restoration project that would also make the perfect hotel. No expense was spared when it came to the renovation ­- it took eight years and an undisclosed sum to return the house to its former Regency opulence. The owners' intention is for Ballyfin to hark back to its heyday as a fabulous country retreat - but with better plumbing and five-star service.

On Ballyfin's ground floor there is a series of opulent entertaining rooms, a dramatic, duck-egg blue stairhall and also a fabulous, wrought-iron Turner conservatory. The interiors are a sophisticated twist on traditional country-house style. The look perfectly complements many of Ballyfin's elaborate architectural details. There is silk upholstery and French antiques in the Gold Drawing Room, with its original stuccowork. There is a clubby feel to the library. All very grand but not intimidating.

On the first floor, there are just 13 bedrooms and two suites each with its own distinctive character. I checked in to The Tapestry Room, adorned with 17th-century Flemish wall hangings depicting sylvan scenes, set off by sage green carpets, buttermilk curtains and a four-poster bed. Bathrooms, mainly carved out of the original dressing rooms, feature separate showers and huge baths perfect for steamy soaks.

Ballyfin's gracious proportions are also the perfect foil for the owners' extensive collection of Irish art and antiques. There are pre-dinner cocktails in the library, but no pressure to socialize. Dinner is a grand yet relaxed affair in the magnificent State Dining Room with its oil paintings, chandeliers and views over the garden. The menu showcases Irish produce, including vegetables from the walled gardens, executed with a sophisticated French touch.

During my stay, though, the sun was shining, so Ballyfin's 600 acres of parkland and gardens beckoned. Much of the grounds pre-date the Regency mansion, such as the 27-acre lake and an 18th-century grotto. Well-maintained paths criss-cross through gardens, ancient woodlands of beech, oak and horse chestnut and swaying grass meadows that can all be explored by foot or on one of Ballyfin's complimentary bicycles. On a hill above the house is a mid-18th-century folly-style tower affording spectacular 360-degree views of the surrounding countryside. There is also an indoor swimming pool and gym.

Ballyfin is an expensive proposition, particularly in these prudent times. But the pleasure of a night or two here is to stay put and just luxuriate in the house and its surroundings. It's easy to stray into daydream territory and pretend it's the country pile you will never own without all the associated bills - just the one when you check out. Doubles include all activities. The two-night art weekend includes full board with a visit to Birr Castle and lectures.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/travel/article-23994890-the-luck-of-the-irish.do

When the Kindle is Free?

Amazon’s recent announcement of the Kindle Fire was what got the most attention last week, but the online retailer also made some other announcements at the same time, including a drop in price for the original Kindle to $79. Based on the consistent and gradual declines in Kindle prices, some have speculated that Amazon could soon offer them for free. Which raises an interesting question: What would free e-book readers do to the book industry?

Amazon’s rationale in offering a tablet or other hardware is the exact opposite of Apple’s. Apple makes most of its profits from selling hardware while Amazon uses hardware as a conduit for getting that content to as many people as possible. So the original Kindle, for example, is simply a pipeline for getting books to people.

Not-quite-books can be written and uploaded by anyone, and offered at whatever price point an author decides: as little as 99 cents, or even free making it possible for more writers to make a living from their writing. You might not think that authors — or Amazon, for that matter — would be able to generate much from 99 cent books, but you would be wrong. Amanda Hocking has become famous for making millions of dollars from her short Kindle books. Other self-published authors such as John Locke have sold millions of copies of their books. .As a result, Amazon has taken to doing an end-around publishers by signing up popular authors like Tim Ferriss. How long until it is Amazon signing deals with Kindle Single self-publishers like Amanda Hocking, rather than a traditional agency?

Not everyone is happy about this state of affairs, obviously. Author Sam Harris wrote, “Where publishing is concerned, the Internet is both midwife and executioner. It has never been easier to reach large numbers of readers, but these readers have never felt more entitled to be informed and entertained for free… there are reasons to fear for the life of the printed book.” What I think Harris is struggling with is the fact that books don’t want to be free — they just want to be a whole lot cheaper than they are. And when you make books (not all books, but some) $4.99 or $1.99 or even 99 cents, people will buy more of them.

There’s even the possibility that books could be free and still make money: Amazon has an ad-supported Kindle, so why not extend that model to the books themselves? Magazine writers publish their content in an ad-supported medium, so why not books? Authors such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many of their novels on a monthly basis as magazine supplements.

Why not offer a subscription to an author, so that I can automatically get whatever he or she writes, regardless of length or format? This would blend the worlds of blogs, Kindle Singles, magazine-length features and novels into one stream of content, and I’d be willing to bet more people would read more as a result. In the end, that’s likely to be a good thing, not a bad one.

What happens to books when the Kindle is free?

Poets Look Good For The Nobel Literature

Two poets, one Swedish and the other Syrian, are leading the betting to win the 2011 Nobel Literature prize. British betting firm Ladbrokes have the 81-year-old Syrian poet known as Adonis at odds of 4/1 and Swede Tomas Transtromer, 80, at 7/1 to win the 10 million crown ($1.5 million) prize, to be announced on October6. Japan's Haruki Murakami was third at 8/1. The last poet to win the Nobel Literature prize was Poland's Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.

Khaled Mattawa, who has translated many of Adonis' works into English, said the Syrian -- named Ali Hamid Saeed at birth -- deserved to be recognized for his artistry.
"When I think of Adonis as a poet ... I think of people like Picasso or Matisse, people who opened up a new way of envisioning experience," Mattawa, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, told Reuters. Adonis was awarded Germany's prestigious Goethe Prize for literature in May.

Transtromer, whose subtle, multi-layered work often deals with the relation between man and nature or the conscious and unconscious, is a regular on the list of favourites to win the prize. "Transtromer is the person who stands head and shoulders above anyone else," said Neil Astley, founding editor at Transtromer's publishers Bloodaxe Books in Britain.

The Nobel prize sometimes results in a surprise choice of an artists who is little known outside a small circle of connoisseurs. One figure who would seem to be a very outside bet is Bob Dylan. Even so, his Ladbrokes odds have narrowed to 10/1 from 100/1 last week.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-books-nobel-idUSTRE7940B320111005

Love on the Internet

Online dating is real. The barrier to entry is zero. Women and men understand that the risks of looking at profiles, and meeting one of those people are low. The idea of meeting a stranger for a date is increasingly accepted. The technology has existed for years. Most dating websites are designed to encourage anonymous interaction. They are image-centric. Once a profile is created, the user has a virtually unlimited stream of people to consider. Potential matches can be sorted and filtered. The person you present yourself as can be critically altered. Though many websites require photos other information a user adds isn't necessarily accurate.

Indeed, what is the point of being a real person on a dating site? How would honesty even be achieved, if it were desirable? A person is not the same as a profile. Typically a kind of crisp ordering of cues leads to a type. Most people want their dating profiles to conform to an accepted form such as a casually-dating college student from California, or a bookish professional seeking a long-term partner, or maybe a sex-worker in search of clientele. But none of these profile types describe a person -- at least not a real one. These are descriptions that teach us something about desire. They tell us that desire requires brevity and lack of information. Digital desire specifically requires something close to a completely abstract longing for the sexual image.

One’s image is the center of this useful deception. The profile image is the first point of contact. These days, everyone understands advertising. The perversion of the human form by Photoshop or simple cropping is required. Desire comes from these images. When we desire an image, we are encouraged to act. Message her! Rate him! Wink! They begin to change human interaction, to focus desire, to coordinate the online image with the offline relationship. We become accustomed to meeting people on the Internet, because these sites design our lives.

Imagine creating a perfect dating profile. Imaging catching the eye of the perfect mate -- in a sense, unlocking the key to social happiness. These are astounding opportunities. This is not a certainty. This is a selling point for a website. This is new. These are ambitions that did not exist before online dating became mainstream. Which begs the question: What is this new Internet Love? Who made it? We used to get drunk or go to prom or have arranged marriages. People formed relationships based on family ties, based on proximity, based on debts owed. Who do we owe, for this digital chance at love? How did we earn this? It's not natural, but it might also be a huge opportunity, something we can't afford to miss out on.

Yadayadayada … The complete article
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/09/love-on-the-internet-dating-in-the-age-of-the-profile-image/245915/?

Love bookleaves' Flea Reports ...
Anyone who complains about them is off my Christmas card list

Doctors Sue Over Emergency Room Rationing in Washington

Physicians are suing the state of Washington in an effort to overturn the decision that low-income Medicaid patients will be limited to three non-emergency visits to the emergency room each year, which went into effect October 1. The suit seeks to get rid of the limit, which it says puts patients at risk.

The limit, which was created to reduce costs in emergency rooms, comes with a new list of 700 non-emergency symptoms, including difficulty breathing, dizziness, early-pregnancy hemorrhage, gall stones, abdominal pains and chest pains not related to a heart attack. Patients with any of the 700 symptoms are urged to visit the regular doctor's office instead of the emergency room. But doctors say patients may not be able to tell if their symptoms are indicative of an emergency.

For example, if a child burns himself on the stove, a parent may not know the difference between first, second and third degree burns. Doctors are opposing the limit primarily because of the list of diagnoses that the state is proposing to be non-emergencies, like chest pains and heart arrhythmias and dysrhythmias, which can result in sudden death, sudden blindness, and hemorrhages during miscarriage, Doctor Steve Anderson said. "Their proposal is dangerous. It's almost funny it's so scary they would have them on the list.

"I don't want people to sit at home and self diagnose. People should seek care early for true emergencies -- that's what the ER is for. We're open 24/7, 365 days a year, so if your chest pains started at 10 p.m., you shouldn't wait until the next morning to call your primary care doctor," he said. Sexually transmitted diseases are also included on the list of non-emergencies. "A lot of people don't want to go to their family doctor with these issues," Anderson said.

The Healthcare Authority of Washington has been in contact with 15 other states regarding the emergency room limit. If the limit works in Washington, these other states are considering implementing it.

Complete article
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/doctors-sue-er-limits-washington-state/story?id=14647658

Dr. Rosenbach and Mr. Lilly

Reviewed by Pradeep Sebastin

Few accounts of antiquarian book selling and collecting are as absorbing as Joel Silver's Dr. Rosenbach and Mr. Lilly. Fewer are even as finely focused, narrating a story of the book transactions between one impassioned collector and one renowned antiquarian dealer set against the backdrop of modern book collecting in its golden age. In the 1920s, J.K. Lilly, a pharmaceutical industrialist with a passionate interest in rare books, began buying most of his books from A.S.W. Rosenbach, who had become America's most famous antiquarian book dealer.

“Book collecting came naturally to Lilly,” writes Silver. “He possessed an eye for quality and detail, and a taste for the extensive minutiae that mark the highest levels of any collecting field”. Lilly had been reading Rosenbach's well written catalogues with great bibliophilic pleasure but as Silver notes, they couldn't take the place of actually meeting Rosenbach, which Lilly did in 1929. The young book collector couldn't help buying some nice editions before he left, so persuasive was the doctor. Later, Dr. R wrote him asking, “Have you a first Robinson Crusoe? We have just received a superb copy.” Lilly wrote to him asking for more details wanting assurance, and R cabled saying: “No copy like the above has been sold at auction in 75 years. It is the rarest of all the greatest books to find in perfect condition. This is probably the finest copy in existence …I am very glad to quote you the special price of $16,850. If we stocked this it would sell for 18,500, but I am giving you the first offer of it.”

Some of the other expensive and remarkable rarities he went on to purchase from Rosenbach was a Canterbury Tales printed by Caxton, Pride and Prejudice in original boards, a polychrome Grolier binding, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Francis Bacon's Essays from 1598. He turned down the 1611 quarto of Hamlet, and was never able to acquire (in his lifetime) two long desired items, The Bay Psalm Book and Pilgrim's Progress.

One reason why his book succeeds so brilliantly when most other antiquarian accounts have faltered is for how much the author trims out. Instead of another thickly detailed survey of book collecting practices, or one more definitive biography of either Lilly or Rosenbach, Silver turns in an elegant, precise, carefully detailed and expertly executed tale of antiquarian book collecting, buying and selling.

Why is this book so much fun for the bibliophile? Why does it excite and thrill so much? I think the enjoyment comes from the minutiae of book transactions that Silver knowledgably and engagingly describes in evocative prose: first reading about an individual copy in a catalogue or a bookseller's description, the suspended-waiting while you decide, and then the rush from deciding you definitely want it no matter the cost, making the purchase, and finally getting the book in the mail or having the book dealer hand it to you.

The ritual is repeated with each new buy and the bibliographical pleasure derived is not from just the buyer-collector's emotion but the emotion of the bookseller who acquires the hard-to-acquire copy, describes the book, prices it and then offers it to an individual collector who he knows might want it. Seldom have rare book transactions been written about with as much literary flair, controlled style, storyteller's skill and scholarly passion.

Written from deep inside the world of antiquarian rare books, Dr. Rosenbach and Mr. Lilly is a scholarly, yet literary account of one memorable book collector and one unforgettable bookseller that is destined to become a modern classic in the literature of antiquarian book collecting and dealing.

Yadayadayada
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/pradeep_sebastian/article2499988.ece

The Case of the Disappearing Documents

At age 10, Barry Landau wrote a letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, admiring his "very beautiful" wife and offering his assessment of where the general stood in the country's pantheon of great leaders. The boy got a card back from the White House, triggering a lifelong love of historical documents and a passion for accumulating them. He has since built what his lawyer calls the world's largest private collection of American presidential memorabilia. Now he's under house arrest, and items from his prized collection have been seized by federal agents. He is awaiting federal trial, accused of conspiring to steal historic documents and sell them for profit. Of the 10,000 pieces removed from Mr. Landau's New York home, at least 2,500 of them—potentially worth millions of dollars—were stolen from historical societies, university libraries and other institutions along the East Coast. The collection recovered appears to be far in excess of anything previously seized.

The alleged crime spree comes amid robust demand for rare American documents. Last year, Sotheby's sold a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Lincoln and once owned by Robert F. Kennedy for nearly $3.8 million. Lincoln's 1864 victory speech written in his hand—a document known as an autograph manuscript—sold for more than $3.4 million at Christie's in 2009. The overall auction market for rare American historical documents totals $30 million to $50 million annually.. Criminals are lured not just by big-ticket items but by artifacts whose origins may be tough to trace, like White House dinner invitations issued en masse.

The Landau case has cast an unflattering light on the lax security at many archives that preserve documents. Some of the archives allegedly targeted are cash-strapped, struggling to fully staff their reading rooms. Many smaller institutions allow relatively easy access: Until this summer, visitors to the University of Vermont's library didn't have to show identification.

Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein, sees far-reaching repercussions for archives. "They're no longer going to be so trusting," he says. Archive staffers are buying new cameras, locking bathrooms and improving sight lines in reading rooms. Locking original documents in vaults and handing out copies isn't a popular solution, either. Archives operate largely outside the digital realm, lacking the funds to make their entire collections available electronically. Besides, that idea runs counter to the mission of sharing the artifacts in all their yellowing, crumbly glory. "If the material is not available for people to use, then what's the point?" asks Richard Malley, head of research and collections at the Connecticut Historical Society.

Yadayadayada … quite a long but interesting article
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576596873383476078.html?

Technology changes the once simple cookbook

With a box full of carrots and a hankering for something vaguely exotic, Mary-Claire van Leunen turned to her computer for a recipe. "I looked for 'Turkish carrots' and I found it easily, in fact I found half a dozen." Everyone's fired up a search engine to deal with that mound of parsley or a bumper crop of cucumbers. But van Leunen wasn't randomly appealing to the online universe. She was searching the recipes in her own cookbooks, the roughly 2,000 volumes that line her shelves. Without ever cracking a single spine.

"In the past, I would have gone to the Central Asian section of my books and gone through the indexes," says van Leunen. "I would have looked in two or three cookbooks, and wound up adapting something for fennel or something to the carrots."

Today, the online cookbook indexing service called Eat Your Books lets her instantly search the index of nearly every cookbook she owns. When she finds the recipe she wants, the website tells her the book it's in. It's part of a new wave of digital tools that are changing the way home cooks explore new recipes, revisit old ones and create satisfying meals.

Eat Your Books, launched nine months ago, boasts a library of 88,000 books with more than 2,000 indexed volumes. Users just tell the site which cookbooks they own, then they can quickly peruse the recipes of the chefs and authors they already trust. Likewise, the website Cookstr [www.cookstr.com/] catalogues recipes from more than 500 chefs and cookbook authors and offers them to users — free of charge. And mobile applications and e-books, once little more than digitized versions of cookbook content, have begun adding features that make the experience interactive and highly personal.

"It is completely feasible today that a mobile device will be the center of the connected kitchen and Cookstr wants to be at the center of that connected kitchen," says Cookstr chief executive officer Art Chang. Cookstr offers roughly 8,000 recipes from 16 major cookbook publishers, each of them sifted by a team of food-savvy "curators" who categorize them by variables such as ingredient, nutritional information, even taste and texture. Want a chicken dish that's spicy, requires only one pot and has fewer than 500 calories per serving? Cookstr offers up 16 recipes, including West African chicken stew and a Thai green curry………. Yadayadayada … Long Article about “digital” cooking

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/cooking-recipes/story/2011-09-29/Technology-changes-the-once-simple-cookbook/50600438/1

The Last 2 Days to Nominate your Library to Win $10,000 in Books

As children across the country return to school, JetBlue Airways encourages readers to nominate their local library for a chance to win $10,000 in Random House Children's Books. Readers that nominate their local libraries will also be entered to win a great family vacation.

To nominate a library, simply visit
http://SoarwithReading.com
Or
http://soarwithreading.com/Sweepstakes.aspx

One lucky community library will win $10,000 in books,

A second library will receive $2,500 in books

Five additional libraries will receive $500 in books

Sweepstakes closes on September 30, 2011.

No purchase or payment of money necessary to enter or win this sweepstakes. A purchase or payment will not increase your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of the continental U.S. and the state of Alaska, who are 21 years of age or older and is void in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, U.S. Territories and where prohibited, and shall be governed solely by U.S. law. Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received. Void where prohibited. Sweepstakes ends September 30, 2011 at 11:59:59 PM EDST. See the official rules for complete details and entry instructions.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nominate-your-local-library-to-win-10000-in-books-from-jetblue-airways-2011-09-28

Bad Manners at the FOL Sale

At an FOL Book Sale you'll find dog-eared classics, homemade apple pie and maybe a fistfight. Recently “I saw it first!" has risen to a whole new level. Armed with electronic ISBN scanners and Santa-sized loot bags, people who resell books on the Internet camp outside the door, shove others out of the way and cover piles of valuable books with blankets. "They want to come in and crash the place," said the president of the Friends of the Public Library.

So as volunteers dust off the shelves for this autumn's round of book sales, they have found ways to ward off pushy buyers while still making a profit. Some sales are now only one day instead of three, so online booksellers have less time to raid their shelves. "It was chaos," one volunteer said. “They blocked fire exits, beeped hundreds of books with scanners that tell a book's value and left the discards strewn across the floor.”

"It was becoming very obnoxious," said another FOL volunteer in a nearby city. Some of them don't have the nicest personalities and the influx of sellers discourages local traffic“, she said. "They kind of come and try to hog the books," said the assistant director of a library, explaining how she's seen them "scooping books up and piling them up for later."

Libraries now have many anti-bookseller tactics: some hand out a sheet of rules, others outlaw electronic scanners, and some ask aggressive buyers to leave. And an ambitious few sell online themselves. Many libraries have a special pre-sale only for Friends of the Library. But booksellers simply pay the FOL joining fee.

Still, libraries appreciate the profit. "We're happy to have someone buying 100 books," Most people connected to area libraries agreed. "The average person spends $8 to $10 and the bookseller is spending hundreds," said the president of the Friends of the Library.

People can find lists of library sales online at websites such as http://www.booksalepirate.com, http://www.booksalemanager.com, and http://www.booksalefinder.com."Books are the plunder we pirates seek," says booksalepirate.com. Tom Oram, the creator of booksalefinder.com, said he and his wife just want to help other bookworms, but knows his site aids booksellers. He posts libraries' rules on his site. "No hoarding," says one library. "No grabbing shelves full of books," says another library.

His all-time favorite library rule? "You can't make our volunteers cry."

The Complete Article
http://www.milforddailynews.com/archive/x26166355/Booksellers-crash-the-party-at-local-libraries#ixzz1ZCEzLHfP

... 60 Minutes is tentatively set for October 2nd. ...

Perhaps an added bonus ... Sunday will be the final report by 92 year old Andy Rooney

The ALA Kicks Off Banned Book Week
.
This year, Banned Books Week kicked off on Sept. 24 and will wrap up on Saturday, Oct. 1.
According to the American Library Association, the following books are last year's most challenged titles on book store shelves and in library catalogs:

1. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. Reasons: Homosexuality, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Reasons: Offensive language, Racism, Sex Education, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group, Violence

3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Reasons: Insensitivity, Offensive Language, Racism, Sexually Explicit

4. Crank by Ellen Hopkins. Reasons: Drugs, Offensive Language, Sexually Explicit

5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group, Violence

6. Lush by Natasha Friend. Reasons: Drugs, Offensive Language, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group

7. What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones. Reasons: Sexism, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group

8. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Reasons: Drugs, Inaccurate, Offensive Language, Political Viewpoint, Religious Viewpoint

9. Revolutionary Voices edited by Amy Sonnie. Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit

10. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Reasons: Religious Viewpoint, Violence

For more information about Banned Books Week, check out the ALA’s website
http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpps/news/ala-kicks-off-banned-book-week-dpgoh-20110926-fc_15194614#ixzz1Z4uzrKGi

Kathleen ...
Sorry about the confusion ...
My doc does not requiire fasting for a cholesterol test by itself
But he does when they test for other things in conjunction with the HDL/Etc.: Glucose / Estimated Average Glucose / Etc. (sugar)...
There are about 500 different blood tests they can do ... I had 33 different the last go-round ...
Of course some of the tests are specific to gender ... but it would be "fun" to get all 500 ...
Give me something to talk about for a couple of weeks

In recent years I have been getting blood work done every six months and I typically fast for 18 hours (3PM to 9AM) drinking only water ...
I miss my morning coffee / tea but otherwise it is very easy

bookleaves ...

Love the pictures ... they really add a lot ...
From the picture I can't tell you about the horses ...
Do you know where to look for the Breyer's marks on the back leg and underbelly ...
Anyway ... IMHO ... except for those "top-of-the-line" and those MIB / NIB Breyers the market has soften considerably ...
But again ... your pictures are a joy ...

Ellen ...
Thanks for another great Flea Market Report ...

Author Autograph Etiquette 101

Before Martin Amis’s recent move to the United States, I was sitting next to him at dinner. In the buildup to this dinner I had long discussions with myself about whether it was O.K. to bring along a book and get it signed. It was a blatantly uncool thing to do, but I realized that I cared more about getting a book signed than I did about what my host or any of the other people at dinner thought about it. The only real issue was how many books I could reasonably take.

At the end of the dinner I produced my books and Amis signed them. Naturally I was the only person at the dinner who had brought along books to be signed. After Amis left, several of the remaining guests said they wished they had brought copies for him to sign so I was in the odd position of being an object of both derision and envy. The situation was further complicated by an undertow of regret. Having brought six books, I might as well have brought the lot so that I could experience the glow of completion.

These satisfactions, quandaries and anxieties will be familiar to anyone who shares the signage habit. People have their own little quirks and preferences about what they want signed and how, though few sink as low as the guy — he invites writers to hurl inscribed abuse at him in his copies of their work. But maybe he speaks for all of us because it is a rather sniveling compulsion. I mean, what kind of hobby is it? Autograph hunting combined with biblio-­fetishism? (The books signed by Amis were all first editions.) Name-­dropping in the form of name-hoarding? A little of both, certainly, but I think there is something about the solitary, wholly internalized nature of reading that makes one crave an ex libris tattoo as external confirmation of the transient intimacy of reader and book. This urge then acquires an addictive momentum of its own.

Of course dealers depart from the signing table with their value enhanced, mint condition firsts and put them straight on eBay. Even so, the fact that most people prefer value diminishing personalized inscriptions suggests that profit is not a motive. Occasionally I abstractly calculate the potential cash value of my collection, but since I have no intention of selling any part of it, this is totally meaningless. Beyond this, I don’t think it has a larger significance. I’m aware that, as with all my little obsessions, it substitutes for the lack of a larger purpose. Getting books signed makes me happy even though, like many sources of happiness, it is often indistinguishable from torment.

The Complete Article

And I hope that none of you use this article as an excuse to invite bookleaves out for a pizza and then spring all of her books on her to sign (LOL)

Her 50 Best Reads
By Stacie Michelle Williams, Bookseller
The Boswell Book Company. Milwaukee, WI.

Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood
I Hate to See That Evening Sun go Down - William Gay
Arturo's Island - Elsa Morante
Nine Parts of Desire - Geraldine Brooks
The Best Day The Worst Day - Donald Hall
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Willful Creatures - Aimee Bender
Things That Fall From the Sky - Kevin Brockmeier
Selected Poems: 1945-2005 - Robert Creeley
The Art of Living - Epictetus
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness - William Styron
Ghosts of Wyoming - Alyson Hagy
Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson
The Tsar's Dwarf - Peter Fogtdal
Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy
Smonk - Tom Franklin
Tales of a Female Nomad - Rita Golden Gelman
Deer Hunting with Jesus - Joe Bageant
Five Skies - Ron Carlson
Serena - Ron Rash
Lipstick Jihad - Azadeh Moaveni
Don't Sleep There are Snakes - Daniel Everett
Canine Body Language - Brenda Aloff
Pack of Two - Caroline Knapp
Coal Black Horse - Robert Olmstead
The Yacoubian Building - Alaa Al Aswany
The Attack - Yasmina Khadra
Blue Latitudes - Tony Horowitz
How Fiction Works - James Wood
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna st. Vincent Millay - Nancy Milford
Brothel: Mustang Ranch and its Women - Alexa Albert
Rapture of Canaan - Sheri Reynolds
Daughters of the North - Sarah Hall
Wake Up Sir - Jonathan Ames
Dogs of Babel - Carolyn Parkhurst
The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson
Under the Banner of Heaven - Jon Krakauer
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove - Christopher Moore
When I was Mortal - Javier Marias
Senselessness - Horacio Castellanos Moya
Mariette in Ecstasy - Ron Hansen
When Things Fall Apart - Pema Chodron
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Mystery & Manners: Occasional Prose - Flannery O'Connor
Arcadia - Tom Stoppard
Numbers in the Dark - Italo Calvino
Collected Letters - Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Keats, Welty, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Etc.

http://micawbers.blogspot.com/2011/09/list-13-stacie-m-williams.html

Readers and Non-Readers

The steady reading drop since the nineteen-fifties correlates directly with the rise of television and visual media, but much of the damage has been done in the past two decades, well after TV had solidified its place in Americans’ lives. Despite small gains, a solid half of the country still rarely, if ever, picks up a book for pleasure. The U.S. population now breaks into two almost equally sized groups—readers and non-readers.

Popular opinion and education experts alike suggest that we need to turn non-readers into readers. But do we? In a 2008 piece in Harper’s called Staying Awake - Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading, Ursula K. Le Guin offered a compelling argument to the contrary. Historically, Le Guin writes, most people couldn’t read, and those who did never did so for pleasure. But by the nineteenth century, with the push for universal education, books began to hold widespread social currency; she calls 1850 to 1950 “the century of the book.” Our sense of decline can perhaps be chalked up to the fact that we’ve moved on from that singular period. Le Guin's title comes from an AP survey of Americans’ reading habits—or lack thereof—in which one respondent complained that books made him sleepy.

Le Guin wrote that self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

Le Guin's argument is compelling, if a bit self-congratulatory: the masses learned to love books, but only a few of us remain in love with them—the implication being that we are those few (we’re reading about reading, after all). The idea that there are two classes, one of readers, one of non-readers, and that the non-readers shouldn't be forced to read, is the premise of another article on the topic, which ran a few weeks ago in the British journal Fortnightly Review. It is called Death to the Reading Class by the historian Marshall Poe. He narrows the “class” from regular readers to “people who hold degrees from famous universities; people who write, edit, and publish texts for a living; people who teach, research, and otherwise do ‘intellectual’ work; people who make up a good portion of the cultural elite in the developed world.” It’s a little stark, dividing the world up at the outset, but Poe follows through in an interesting way, charting the history of reading with more detail (“Humans achieved their modern form about 180,000 years ago; for 175,000 of those years they never wrote or read anything”), and tackling it from an evolutionary angle:

Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it at all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun.

Yadayadayada … the article continues
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/09/changing-reading-forever-again.html#ixzz1YrAi4hy9

Is the brooch 'modern' plastic or vintage celluloid which is sometimes referred to as French Ivory

What is your writing schedule and what is the one thing you must have to get in the writing zone? Chocolate? Coffee? Quiet?

As a working professional with a family, what has been effective for me has been to schedule a block of writing time a few days in advance. This allows me in off moments (like while walking to work) to free-associate about settings and conversations and themes in the upcoming chapter. Thus, when I sit down to do the work, I hopefully have a roster of ideas I'm eager to flesh out, rather than a chiding blank page.

The process of writing - of taking the moment of inspiration and crafting it into paragraphs - is one which entails contemplation, empathy, poetry, willpower and drudgery. So, once I'm at my desk, I definitely use a variety of tricks to establish a productive mood. I often write with a good cup of coffee and a pastry, (or a cigarette and scotch). I also like writing to music. Best of all, I like writing to albums which themselves are moody, groovy, thoughtful, and cohesive works of art - like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Stan Getz' Jazz Samba, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Joni Mitchell's Hejira, Hope Sandoval's Bavarian Fruit Bread, Coldplay's Parachutes, or Ray LaMontagne's Trouble.

If your house was on fire and you could only save one book, what would it be?

When you phrase the question that way, I suppose you mean which book as a physical object is irreplaceable for me. My grandfather gave me a volume from George Washington's library with Washington's bookplate and signature. I'd grab this one as the fire trucks approached.

But it would be a different answer were you to ask what book I'd like to be stranded with. Then, I would opt for Swann's Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust's Rembrance of Things Past. I would happily read that book over-and-over and, in my spare time, I'd try to write six subsequent volumes from scratch, in a manner that was different from Proust's six, but true to his first volume.

Just a taste of an interview with author, Amor Towles (Rules of Civility) … more at
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10753013

Rolling and Roiling on the River …Amazon Pushing Warehouse Workers to Keep Up

Amazon's calls its warehouses "fulfillment centers," but the online retailer's Lehigh Valley [PA] shipping facility didn't fulfill some basic workplace safety standards this summer, according to a hard-hitting expose by Allentown’s Morning Call newspaper. Working conditions at the Lehigh Valley warehouse hit a low point as the temperature rose during the hot summer months, Spencer Soper reported to the point that "Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress."

He interviewed 20 current and former workers at the Lehigh Valley warehouse … only one of whom reportedly called it a good place to work. Others interviewed by The Morning Call claimed they "were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain." Workers were threatened with termination if they couldn't keep up the pace set by Amazon, according to the newspaper, and some said they concealed pain to keep their jobs after they saw colleagues escorted away after being fired.

One worker, 34-year-old Elmer Goris, said that on hot days, he saw co-workers being brought out of the non-air conditioned facility in wheelchairs and on stretchers by paramedics. Temperatures inside the Lehigh Valley warehouse reached above 100 degrees on some hot days, according to The Morning Call. He said warehouse managers refused to open the facility's doors on hot days to let more air circulate through the space, citing theft prevention as the reason at meetings with employees.

A security guard at the warehouse told the paper that pregnant women were among those toiling in the brutal heat and a local emergency room doctor who treated overheated warehouse workers called the facility an "unsafe environment" in a June report to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA officials inspected the Lehigh Valley facility. Amazon reportedly installed more fans in the warehouse after that visit and contracted on-site emergency medical personnel on a temporary basis.

In a letter to OSHA obtained by the newspaper, Amazon's site safety manager described the measures taken to reduce the risk of heat-related health issues at the warehouse and said employees who had been penalized for missing work per Amazon's point system after leaving with heat-related problems had those demerits rescinded. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company had air conditioning in some of its shipping facilities but not in East Coast warehouses like the one in Lehigh Valley.

"At Amazon, the safety and well-being of our employees is our number one priority," the Amazon spokesperson said in an email. "We have several procedures in place to ensure the safety of our associates during the summer heat, including increased breaks, shortened shifts, constant reminders and help about hydration, and extra ice machines. "Our fulfillment team was dealing with record hot temperatures this past summer. We have air conditioning in some facilities — Phoenix, Ariz. for example — but we haven't historically had air conditioning in our east coast fulfillment centers. We're in the process of adding air conditioning to additional FC's so that we're prepared in case what we saw this past summer becomes the new normal."

But brutal summer working conditions were not the only grievance with Amazon voiced by the workers at the Lehigh Valley warehouse. They say that Amazon and local temp agency took advantage of high unemployment in the area to churn through a steady stream of temporary employees who were promised a path to permanent work with benefits that rarely materialized.

Reportedly forced to work mandatory overtime and subject to a point-based disciplinary system that deducted points for not "making rate" even in uncomfortably hot conditions, the paper's sources said that instead of getting a permanent job, most temporary warehouse workers were "pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster until they were terminated, they quit or they got injured." Thanks to the tough economy, such workers were easy to replace with "new applicants who were ready to begin work at any time," according to The Morning Call.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393303,00.asp?google_editors_picks=true

Ellen ...
Love the Flea Market Reports ...
Thanks

Ellen ...
Enough with the refrigerator already ...
Where's the Flea Market Report
???

Maurice Sendak Musing on his new Book ... His first Book in 30 Years

Maurice Sendak's new illustrated book is Bumble Ardy. It tells the story of a young pig named Bumble who throws an illicit, chaotic birthday party for himself to make up for a lifetime of uncelebrated birthdays. Bumble-Ardy begins with this unruly child protagonist who feels confined by the strictures of domestic life, and who invents a way to explore his wilder energies.

“I don't know how long Bumble took me in the long run—but this notion that I suddenly sat up in bed, had an idea, and sat down and did the book is kind of silly. It's been around my neck for a long time. And I'm so glad it's finished, it's published, and out of my life.”

“Bumble doesn't trust anybody. His betrayal of his aunt, which seems kind of minor, is typical of what I feel he is like. He's an orphan, after all. And why should he trust anybody? And to get a child's trust—you may know or not—is a very hard thing to do. They're so used to not believing adults—because adults tell tales and lies all the time. I wanted him to be suspicious. And I wanted him to be aggressive for his own needs. There wasn't any reason for him not to tell his aunt, it was just better in his own terms of life to frustrate her. He doesn't know why. And I don't know why. That's what a book is for me: a lot of questions, very few answers.”

“Most children fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that—you don't want to tell mom and dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child (I think). I was a liar. I was out to protect my parents from hard truths. Although what I assumed was a hard truth was really—hard to realize what it could be now.”

“Bumble is a tough little bastard. And he's had a hard time from the word "go." And he knows he's supposed to be good and kind and all of things that are expected of children. When he tells her that he'll never turn ten, it tells you how much he does not comprehend the business of living and dying. And that's something so much on the minds of children. They may not bring it up because they don't want to disturb their parents—but children do a lot not to disturb their parents. And they know a lot.”

“That's what all the fairy tales are all mostly about—about the vulnerability of children and how they figure out tricks and ways of living in the world and making up parents. Make-believe parents. And I think that's probably one of the hardest jobs in the world. Being a parent, and not succumbing to failure. I think people should given a test much like drivers' tests as to whether their capable of being parents! It's an art form.”
.
“Bumble’s Aunt Adeline is naturally good. She's a big, amiable woman—but even though Bumble is not her son, she will kill to protect him. And that's the only way these kids survive. The gift Aunt Adeline gives Bumble is a good one: the cowboy costume allows him to play. The costume allows him an entryway the realm of fantasy and imagination, so it's a good gift—even though he takes it too far.”

“Children have no money, so they can't go in and make their own choice. So mommy or granny or somebody nice brings them the books. And they will do anything to make the adult content, so they will like the book. Kids are very gracious. And they won't insult anybody by saying "I hate that book." Except when they write to me, and they said "I hate that book." Those are the most gratifying letters. I have pierced their armor. A little girl wrote and said: "why are there babies in Outside Over There? What the hell is the matter with them? And why do they all wear head covers? And why do they all wear big, swimmy clothes?" She was furious! She said, "Don't you know how to dress a baby properly?"“

“When a kid writes to me and says: "I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially." Well, the combination of "I hope you die soon" and "cordially" is wonderful. It shows how bewildering the whole thing was to her—and to me. She was allowing herself to hate. "I hate your book." But she'd learned in school that you're supposed to end your letter with the words "cordially" or "best wishes." And so they combine both without thinking there's something goofy in such a thing. But that's their charm, and that's what we lose by growing up—lose, lose, lose. And if we're lucky, it happens again when we're old.”

“My books have been banned in my lifetime. I was banned for In the Night Kitchen. Because the boy had a pecker. A boy without a pecker—that I something I would condemn. But that is such a mindless thing to get excoriated about. But you see, if it's a children's book—then you don't have a pecker. Well, bullshit. Boys are boys and girls are girls. What the hell are we fighting about?”

Yadayadayada … The Complete Interview with Questions and Answers:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/maurice-sendak-on-the-first-book-hes-written-and-illustrated-in-30-years/245342/

The FBI is saying little except thart the raids don't involve terrorism ...
IRS was involved so it might be "tax evasion" ...
The franchise owners of the restaurants that were raided all seem to be of Arab nationality

Surrogate Mom Is Left With Twins When Couple Changes Their Minds

I was fairly shocked when I heard about what happened to Canadian surrogate mom Cathleen Hachey. The 20-year-old woman was 27 weeks into her pregnancy -- with twins -- when she got some unexpected news from the British couple who'd signed a contract promising to adopt the babies.

The couple was in the process of splitting up. And oh, by the way … Cathleen could keep the babies. Now that they weren't going to be together, the couple didn't really want to be parents anymore. And it gets worse! Wait until you hear the way the intended parents broke the bad news! Okay, are you ready?? BY TEXT MESSAGE. Talk about bad manners.

Hachey was able to find a couple in Nova Scotia who were beyond thrilled to adopt the babies (especially because the young surrogate already has two children, aged 1 and 2, of her own at home). And she's not bitter about the experience -- in fact, she's planning on starting another surrogate pregnancy in January. This time Hachey will have her own lawyer, she says, a protective benefit she didn't have with the twins. Apparently, even though there are plenty of laws surrounding surrogacy, they're difficult to enforce, especially in the case of a "traditional surrogacy" like this one, when the baby(s) is conceived using the prospective father's sperm and the surrogate mother's egg instead of the prospective mother's egg.

Yadayadayada … The complete article
http://thestir.cafemom.com/pregnancy/125980/surrogate_mom_is_left_with

When Authors Really Wrote Their Own Books

The Ottoman Empire dates from 1299 to 1923. It controlled territory in Southeastern Europe, Asia and North Africa with the capital being in Constantinople. Books were important in those Ottoman times with any man who could read and write having more opportunities ahead of him. There were no printing presses that could reproduce the Ottoman script until the 18th century: everything had to be done by hand. And even later clergy opposition and vast numbers of out of work scribes shut many printing presses down.

The Ottoman author showed off his erudition, his grasp of the language and literally his clarity of hand writing. The idea was to write and then present a book to someone high up in the government and hope for approval and perhaps for a monetary reward or even a job. If a book was thus approved, the person to whom it was presented might wish to have copies made to give to others or for his own library. Copies weren’t always exact as later material might be added to the original.

Paper originated in China, but it was the Ottomans who brought it west with them from Central Asia. Paper making is similar to the making of felt – soaking plant fibers in water; pounding them together and letting the page dry in the shade. The addition of Arabic gum would make the paper white while including henna in the process would turn the sheets the color of cinnamon red. Cotton was the choice of fibers.

Ink was handmade. Candle soot was used for black although occasionally red ink was made. The soot would be refined and then purified water added. Boiled pomegranate juice helped the ink flow. The sap from vine branches added a glossy look. The ink would then be put in an ink stand that had raw silk in it. This protected the nib of the reed pen and it kept the ink from spilling out if it was overturned. There’s a room above the main entrance gate to Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey from which the soot of the fires used for winter heating would be collected. It was deemed especially efficacious.

Pens were made from sturdy reeds and each calligrapher had his own set of sizes and shapes. The reeds would be gathered and then buried for several years to harden. The end of the reed would then be cut at an angle. Even the slightest variation in the cut would mean that the pen could not be used for other types of calligraphy in a book. So the pen would have to be sharpened again during the course of writing. If the pen had been used to write the Koran, the shavings could not be thrown away. Such was the connection between the pen and the holy book of Islam.

Bookbinding became a craft at which the Ottomans excelled. These book covers were made of leather. From Central Asia through Iran and finally arriving in Turkey the development of bookbinding was particularly helped because of the high regard in which religious books were held. The binding helped preserve the bool. It not only covered the front, back and spine but also had an extra flap that wrapped over the exposed pages. The designs on the covers differed from place to place and were done by hand. Later molds were developed with which the leather could be stamped. Where and when the binding was made can still be determined today by the design.

Stolen from the Internet

The 2011 Autumn TV Cancellation Forecast

The networks have unveil their latest offerings. The majority of these new programs will fail. The only seeming guarantor for television success these days is to have NCIS in your title. Here is our totally biased guide to this season’s 25 new programs. They are rated from a worse chance of survival (first) to the better and best chances:

The Playboy Club (NBC, Monday 9/19, 10 p.m.)
The first of two ridiculously cheesy Mad Men rip-offs this fall, and by far the more ridiculous.
Man Up (ABC, Tuesday 10/18, 8:30 p.m.)
What’s the deal with all these women? This isn’t the only show bizarrely fixated on a perceived feminization of culture, but it’s certainly the worst.
Grimm (NBC, Friday 10/21, 9 p.m.)
Putting on a show about a modern-day fairy tale hunter raises the question: If a show is cancelled in a haunted forest, can anyone hear it?
Up All Night (NBC, Wednesday 9/14, 10 p.m.)
With this pricey cast it's hard to imagine the new NBC continuing the network's old guard sympathetic strategy of giving slow-starting sitcoms time to find their sea legs.
I Hate My Teenage Daughter (Fox, Wednesday 11/30, 9:30 p.m.)
Just when we thought that only men could be crammed into oafish, old-fashioned sitcoms Fox comes through with this female-fronted turkey.

Charlie’s Angels (ABC, Thursday 9/22, 8 p.m.)
Not much going for it other than Minka Kelly firing guns in skintight outfits and the potential audience for that is diminishing rapidly.
Suburgatory (ABC, Wednesday 9/28, 8:30 p.m.)
A classic family comedy tweener aimed at middle-America that does nothing but make fun of its potential audience.
Prime Suspect (NBC, Thursday 9/22, 10 p.m.)
A remake of the fiercely beloved edgy British cop show only with no swearing. What could possibly go wrong?
A Gifted Man (CBS, Friday 9/23, 8 p.m.)
It’s a show about a handsome doctor who sees ghosts. There is no chance that you will watch this. But there is a strong chance that your parents and other people you try to avoid will watch.
Free Agents (NBC, Wednesday 9/14, 10:30 p.m.)
Free Agents is a delightfully scripted remake of a very good British sitcom. We are rooting for it.
Whitney (NBC, Thursday 9/22, 9:30 p.m.)
NBC’s Thursday night comedies are highbrow pieces that are fiercely beloved by niche audiences. Whitney is none of these things. Dropping Whitney in this time slot is like relocating Howard Stern to NPR.

Revenge (ABC, Wednesday 9/21, 10 p.m.)
Imagine The Count of Monte Cristo set in Long Island. This highbrow suds from the ABC soap factory has definite hit potential.
Terra Nova (Fox, Monday 9/26, 8 p.m.)
Everything about this time-traveling adventure series is extra-large, including the expectations. For Terra Nova to succeed, it has to be a legit phenomenon.
Once Upon a Time (ABC, Sunday 10/23 8 p.m.)
The show about a small town in New England which is a magic mirror portal to a living, fairy tale universe makes absolutely no sense on paper.
Pan Am (ABC, Sunday 9/25, 10 p.m.)
Another Mad Men rip but remember: If Mad Men were on a network other than AMC, its low ratings would have gotten it yanked.
Hart of Dixie (CW, Monday 9/26, 9 p.m.)
In which Rachel Bilson takes her double-talk to a cornpone Southern fantasy land where good old docs leave their practices to untrained hotties. The producer has been down this alligator-infested road before.

Unforgettable (CBS, Tuesday 9/20. 10 p.m.)
It’s The Mentaladyist! Which is to say, it's getting renewed.
Person of Interest (CBS, Thursday 9/22, 9 p.m.)
Michael Emerson plays a mysterious power figure. And he’s empowering Jesus to take out future violent offenders with shotgun blasts.
Ringer (CW, Tuesday 9/13, 9 p.m.)
Sarah Michelle Gellar returns in twin roles; mysteriously troubled twins. The pilot promises plenty of twists and turns — the sort of scenario that could hook a devoted fan base and wildly alienate a large one.
How to Be a Gentleman (CBS, Thursday 9/29, 8:30 p.m.)
A predictable sitcom about meek dudes becoming mean dudes. This could run for the next decade whether you ever get around to watching it or not.

2 Broke Girls (CBS, Monday, 9/19, 9:30 p.m.)
This has a huge safety net in CBS’ Monday comedy block. A huge built-in fan base thanks to the hilarious Kat Dennings.
Allen Gregory (Fox, Sunday 10/30, 8:30 p.m.)
A cartoon on Fox and those tend to have a longer average lifespan than a redwood tree.
The New Girl (Fox, Tuesday 9/20, 9 p.m.)
This features Zooey Deschanel in nerd glasses and singing and flirting. It's what one half of the Internet was created for.
The Secret Circle (CW, Thursday 9/15, 9 p.m.)
This is a companion piece to The Vampire Diaries and about hot witches. A safer bet than government bonds.
Last Man Standing (ABC, Tuesday 10/11, 8 p.m.)
Marking the return of Tim Allen to a sitcom in which he complains about women.

Yadayadayada
http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/33722/your-fall-tv-cancellation-forecast