Full article hereMy husband is reading "The Secret Garden" aloud to our boys. They are at the part where Mary Lennox has told Colin that she's found the garden his mother loved. It's an exciting moment. But the passage I'm waiting for is a few chapters on, after Colin has tasted his first breaths of fresh moorland air and Mary has grown strong running in the garden. It's just a detail, but my kids will notice it: a luscious description of roasted potatoes and eggs.
We have a tradition of trying foods from the books we read aloud. It started when we read Elizabeth Enright's "The Saturdays," and one of the boys asked, "What are petit fours?"
An answer, my husband and I felt, wouldn't be as good as a sample. So one Saturday we all sat down to tea and little cakes, iced in pink, green, and yellow. It was exciting for the boys to try a dessert they had learned about in a book...
Service and pension records for more than two million soldiers who fought in the British army in World War I are being put online for the first time.
The documents provide a broad range of detail, from name and next of kin to wounds suffered and conduct record.
The release by the Ancestry website, working in partnership with the National Archives, is taking place in stages over the next two years.
The images are available to view on a subscription or pay-per-view basis.
All the records are already viewable on 28,000 rolls of microfilm at the National Archives in west London, but it is hoped the digitisation process will make them available to a much wider audience.
In a world threatened by war and famine, a little boy builds a frail security for his most cherished possessions, two spindly goats. Their world is China, but it might be anywhere, for this poignant story tells a universal truth about the way a child grows in maturity by taking care of something he loves.
So Beng Gow became a goatherd. His mother never understood it, although she was always explaining it to people. All the women came with their babies tied on their backs to have it explained to them. A teacher at the Big School had heard about the virtues of her son, who certainly was not worthy of such fame, and went out driving one day to look for him. He found her worthless son sitting on a grave, minding the geese for Ah Lok, who was no account at all minding geese, and he drove her son away in the automobile to give him anything in the world he wanted. But her undeserving son wanted nothing for himself, only to serve the Gow Sow, and so he became the Gow Sow's goatherd, and was so self-denying that he would accept no more than five hundred yen every seven days.
Ah Lok's mother did not like this story, and she told one of her own. One day her son had been out obediently tending the geese, and Beng Gow, whose mother had no geese to tend, nor anything else, came along looking for something to do, and threw a stone and killed a goose. A teacher of the Big School then came by in an automobile and, taking pity on her weeping son, seized Beng Gow and took him to town to make him buy something for Ah Lok. But Beng Gow had no money, of course, so the Gow Sow bought the goats, and Beng Gow was being forced to take care of them for Ah Lok by way of payment until they were big enough to eat. As for the five hundred yen, this did not exist.
Everybody doubted both stories and modified them, and many versions were told. And indeed Beng Gow was not able to bring home the money very often, for the Gow Sow could not remember it. Sometimes he remembered and paid a thousand at once, and then Beng Gow's mother would buy a very large fish, which she showed to everybody as evidence of what she had told.
Months and months ago, I'd read the first two, and later had made a stab at The Horse and His Boy. (Some emergency or something came up, and I'd given up on finishing it, if I recall correctly.) It was no good trying to pick up The Horse and His Boy from where I'd left off - too much time had gone by to remember what I'd read. So I started at the front of that one. And that was Sunday afternoon, and here it is Tuesday afternoon and I've read The Horse and His Boy and Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Not quite in one gulp, but close enough. Whew. I even took a not-quite-full-load of laundry to the laundromat yesterday so I could pretend I was working while I read. :)
I suspect that if I'd tried to read this series when I was young (even into my twenties, and possibly probably thirties) I might have thrown the books down in disgust (being something of a pacifist cum feminist on the one hand, and definitely being squeamish on the other, amongst other reasons) or in despair (from not understanding enough of it). But I've finally grown into them I guess, because I'm getting a great deal out of them besides rip-roaring adventure and mind-bending flights of imagination.
Scho late schmart.
I think I'll let these books digest a bit before I try to finish the series. (Besides, I have a friend who likes the series up to this point, and doesn't like the ending at all. It makes me hesitate, just a bit.)
What's rather hard about these books is that so much of what's in them seems so applicable to other people - try telling me you haven't dealt with Dufflepuds, for instance - but, of course, in the spirit of the thing one probably shouldn't go around calling other people Dufflepuds (for instance), since one has one's own shortcomings to work on...
(And how did C.S. Lewis know what my shortcomings are, anyway? ;)
I can see how the Narnia books could easily annoy the stuffing out of a wide variety of people, from "I am woman, hear me roar" feminists (I expect they'd have heart attacks, some of them; at the very least we're talking major hyperventilation attacks) to a stricter or easily-ruffled sort of Christian (the books are crawling not only with magic, but with ancient myths that aren't at all Christian). But, for me, Lewis handles the myth and magic well, using them to tell his story and make his points, and I don't find it objectionable at all. And I like that the girls are heroines in their own right, while being treated as special and worthy of protection by the heroes.
I am in awe, by the way, of the way Lewis could be blunt but gentle and understanding at the same time. I'm enjoying his method, and his manners, immensely.
One downside, such as it is, is that the way the characters speak is almost contagious. I find myself wanting to say "Oh, bother" and "rot" and "he's a brick" and so on. Actually, I do say "Oh, bother" and "rot" anyway, but this "he's a brick" business might seem odd to people who know me. (I have more or less the same trouble when I read Wodehouse, by the way.)
So I'm guessing other states have services like this?Librarians online work at libraries all over Oregon.
You can learn more about who we are by looking at our profiles.
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Evenings, weekends, and early mornings you will be connected to librarians all over the United States. You may also be connected to a librarian from outside Oregon if L-net is busy.
The person you are talking to may not be local, but will still be able to help you with resources at your library...
European Union officials yesterday blamed "mixed up" people for letting emotions get in the way of a proper appreciation of the euro.
The remark came in response to a new FT-Harris poll which shows that most of the eurozone's citizens would like to have their old, comfortable national currencies back.
Feelings are particularly strong in Germany, the present holder of the EU's rotating presidency and Europe's largest economy.
Two thirds of Germans now prefer the Deutschmark to the euro and more than half believe that the European single currency has damaged their country's economy.
But the European Commission insists that ordinary people are simply failing to grasp the benefits of the single currency...
"[The survey] results will disturb the European Central Bank, which has faced stiff criticism in recent weeks from both Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, the main candidates in April’s French presidential elections, who accuse the central bank of hampering growth. The ECB regards its public credibility, and that of the euro, as essential to its battle against inflation, which is sees as the prerequisite for growth.
The survey also shows that most adults in the largest European countries think migration has reduced wages and only a quarter have a positive view of the entry into the European Union this year of Bulgaria and Romania.
However, eurozone citizens generally see wider benefits of the euro. More Germans, Italians and Spanish see a positive impact on the EU economy than a negative effect, according to the survey. That suggests they see others benefiting rather than themselves. The exceptions are the French, more of whom see a negative rather than positive impact.
The results come at a time when eurozone growth prospects have brightened, thanks largely to a pick-up in Germany, the largest of the region’s 13 member countries. The ECB is expected next week to prepare financial markets for another interest rate increase in March.
This FT/Harris Poll was conducted online by Harris Interactive among a total of 5,292 adults, within France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. The survey was conducted between January 10 and January 22 2007.
Schwoyer runs Wellspring — easily America's nicest homeless shelter. Families who stay there are considered guests. They eat the same food at the same time and table as the staff. And they can stay as long as they need to.Saying "never" about people who are still alive is always stretching your luck, but still, that's one amazing success-rate-so-far, isn't it?
Schwoyer says she does it "because it's the human thing to do."
So how does she get people to leave? Not a problem. "Oh, as beautiful as this is, it's not their own home," she says.
Wellspring started in 1981 when Schwoyer and a group of friends from church decided to buy a house, live in it together and share it with homeless families. "And support them in whatever they needed to get on their feet," Schwoyer adds.
Since then, through donations and grants, Wellspring has expanded its building and its scope. It now offers everything from classes on finding jobs to the clothes for landing them. Perhaps because Wellspring is so comprehensive, its success rate is phenomenal: 80 percent of people who come to the homeless shelter are never homeless again.
The numbers are too big for me to get my head around, but I like that "over the past three years the federal deficit has shrunk by 58%" bit, and the debt burden falling business...Politicians are typically late in picking up trends, so it will be interesting to see how long it takes Washington to acknowledge the big story in the Fiscal 2008 budget that President Bush unveiled yesterday: To wit, with a little spending restraint, Congress could balance the budget in no time.
You wouldn't know this from all the garment-rending yesterday in response to Mr. Bush's proposal to spend the not-so-meager sum of $2.9 trillion. Our favorite agonist is Kent Conrad, the Senate Budget Committee Chairman, and he didn't disappoint. "The President's budget is filled with debt and deception, disconnected from reality, and continues to move America in the wrong direction," said the Senator who was himself blocked from sneaking nearly $5 billion in "emergency" farm spending into a military construction bill in the final days of the last Congress. The North Dakotan needs to keep shouting disaster in a crowded political theater so he can justify his desire for a big tax increase.
The news Mr. Conrad won't broadcast is that over the past three years the federal deficit has shrunk by 58%. The Congressional Budget Office--not the White House--is estimating that the current year's deficit (for fiscal 2007) will fall to $172 billion. That's not bad given continuing Katrina relief spending, $30 billion for homeland security, and a couple hundred billion or so to fight the war on terror.
The White House is projecting that its new budget will eliminate the deficit by 2012 assuming Mr. Bush's tax cuts are extended after 2010. We don't put much stock in future budget forecasts because they depend on so many variables. But even CBO predicts the deficit should remain near or below 1% of GDP for the rest of the Bush Presidency. That's well below the 40-year average of 2.4% of GDP.
This also means that the federal debt burden will continue to fall...
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The other news you won't often hear concerns the soaring tax revenues in the wake of the 2003 supply-side tax cuts. Tax collections have risen by $757 billion, among the largest revenue gushers in history...
I say it's time to bring back the apron - and I don't mean the unisex cloth chef's apron, but the frilly feminine - even to the point of useless - kind.
As I told you in the beginning, I just started wearing an apron a year ago. It was only after the contest began that I "got" the significance of the apron - how feminism had changed it into a symbol of oppression. Funny how all those little womanly things that were passed down for generations were thrown out the window and now people like Martha Stewart make a fortune teaching us how to do them again :)
So my question is, have any of you had any further thoughts on the significance of aprons? Have any of you tried them for the first time and found them to be empowering? How about the fact that your clothes stay cleaner? :)
There is an apron renaissance going on out there and much of it is recorded on the internet. Women everywhere are taking pictures of their aprons and posting them on certain blogs. They are scouring the internet looking for vintage patterns and materials. They are writing about what being a mother and a housewife means to them. These women aren’t depressed. They don’t need valium or to secretly drink or to watch a wildly popular television show that is a diabolical inversion of their lives.
I think a National Wear an Apron Day should be May 14th during the month of Immaculate Mary and the day after Mother’s Day. Amidst the quiet drama of our everyday lives, we can celebrate in gratitude our homes and families by toasting each other with tea and homemade cookies and fresh buttered bread. And go ahead, on Career Day at your local school, invite a girl over to see what your life is like. She most likely will have no idea how to hold a baby or how to make a stew or how to bake a casserole to take to a bereaved family or how soft your apron is for drying tears.
The devil very well may wear Prada but authentically feminine women wear aprons!
If you support a National Wear An Apron Day, please email the Kitchen Madonna...
I need to clarify that while I love aprons, they also symbolize something THAT DOESN"T REQUIRE AN APRON TO ACHIEVE OR TO BE. You can be authentically feminine and not wear one. Don 't have to. I'm just taking a homey, common object and trying to say what women do in the home is so important...
Starting in the 1960s, virtually all new public housing projects in eastern Europe were pre-fabricated tower blocks. Millions of people continue to live in the buildings, which were built in an age when saving energy was low on the list of priorities. Now a group of researchers from the University of Kassel is doing their best to make the towers more environmentally friendly.
Engineer Hartmut Hübner and his colleagues have been working in Dunaujvaros, south of Budapest, to convert Communist-era high-rises into environmentally friendly housing. The high-rises aren't just inefficient in terms of energy consumption, they are also a potential source of social conflict, according to Hübner.
"Here in Hungary, as in other eastern European countries, heating costs are still subsidized," he said. "But that will change. And with rising energy costs, it'll be difficult for the people here to pay their heating bills."
The Solanova Project, of which Hübner is a part, has already succeeded in retrofitting a seven-story building in the small town. The biggest problem was that prefabricated components for the buildings no longer exist, so the engineers had to experiment with parts such as solar panels or energy-efficient windows.
...It’s no wonder that young people shy away from the thought of a vocation if they think it means being perfect. Yes, we need to teach them a respect for priests and religious, but we also need to help them see that all people, including priests and religious, struggle with the call to holiness…a call we ALL share. In a sense, to be holy is to be perfect but God alone is holy (perfect). When we refer to people as holy, we are saying that God’s presence is revealed in that person. We can all strive to reveal rather than conceal God’s presence in us.
Conceived in partnership with the Library of Congress - the great library of Washington - La France en Amérique/France in America is a bilingual digital library made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th Century to the end of the 19th Century.
Through direct digital access to complete books, maps, prints, and other documents from the collections of the partner libraries, the project illuminates two major themes in the history of relations between France and the United States: the major role played by France in the exploration and settlement of the continent and its participation in several events which indelibly marked the history of the United States: the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the cession of Louisiana. The site will be completed in fall 2006 with a panorama of economic, scientific, literary and artistic exchanges between the two nations in the course of the 19th Century.
The missions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress are to make their resources available to ever growing numbers of people and to preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. La France en Amérique / France in America is the newest addition to Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France's digital library. With some 76 thousand digitized texts and 80 thousand images to date, Gallica offers the online public an encyclopedic reference collection as well as sites dedicated to particular themes. The companion site at the Library of Congress is part of the Global Gateway project, whose mission is to establish cooperative digital libraries with national libraries from around the world.
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This digital collection takes its place alongside two other websites brought online since 2003 dedicated to the shared history of France and North America: La Louisiane française, 1682-1803 (http://www.louisiane.culture.fr/en/som.html), produced by the Ministry of Culture as part of the "National Celebrations" collection; and the French-Canadian site Nouvelle-France, horizons nouveau (http://www.archivescanadafrance.org/), undertaken by the initiative of the Direction des archives de France, the Library and Archives Canada, and the Canadian Embassy in Paris.The Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress present these documents as part of the record of the past. These historical documents reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The two libraries do not endorse the views expressed in these collections, which may contain materials offensive to some readers.
As one of my little ones used to say, I'm so a-cited! It's almost time to begin a new season of happy hunting with the Journey North Mystery Class. Ten classes of schoolchildren around the world have been chosen to be Mystery Classes, and it's up to the rest of us to track down their location. You too can join in the fun!
Here's how it works...
Will Smith's latest movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, stands as an extended argument underscoring the truth of conservative values. This may sound like an improbable anomaly given the traditional political, ethical, and social allegiances of Hollywood, but the power of the story lies in its basis in fact, and this in turn prevents it from being appropriated as a tool for liberal political ideology.
The narrative is inspired by the true life experiences of Christopher Gardner, a struggling and homeless single father turned successful stockbroker and CEO. The story begins in 1981...
I'm looking for someone who might be able to do some simple animation to tell economic stories. For example, I have an idea for a narrative that would show how the minimum wage hurts the workers with the lowest skills. You could make it a full-blown documentary or animated story. But what I'm thinking of is a low-level of visual sophistication (stick figures or crayonesque drawings) that would have a certain stylish simplicity so that you could create this kind of visual story quickly and at relatively low cost. But it would be fast-paced enough and entertaining enough that people would want to watch.
The Queens Library is that rare New York phenomenon: a government-funded social-uplift program that works. It succeeds by doing what it has done for over a century: giving New Yorkers with ambition (however modest or grand it may be) the tools they need for self-improvement. These tools get real results in Gotham, where people can earn an incremental reward for each skill they obtain. Learn English, and move from a kitchen job to an office job. Master math, and pass the GED and start technical college. The Queens Library’s crowded branches suggest that many poor and immigrant New Yorkers understand the city’s opportunities for upward mobility and that they see themselves not at all as victims trapped by circumstance but as individuals possessing the independence, the self-discipline, and the chance to get ahead.
Because nearly half of the residents of Queens are foreign-born, one of the library’s most practical services is to help the borough’s African, Asian, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern immigrants assimilate into American society, just as it helped German, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants become citizens a century ago. The library is particularly effective at this task, because it recognizes a key truth lost on many contemporary immigrant-advocacy groups: newcomers can’t succeed in America unless they speak English. Hence the library’s wildly popular, and free, English-for-Speakers-of-a-Second-Language program—the largest such initiative in the nation, serving 3,000 students annually. Each semester, the program must turn people away, sometimes two prospective students for every one who gets a slot.
Nearly everyone, it seemed, carried a sign. They were both factory-made (big red octagon shapes saying "Stop Abortion Now") and homemade (I remember the quote from Dr. Suess' "Horton Hears a Who" on one: "Because a person is a person, no matter how small.").
I didn't have a sign. I could have asked for one, I'm sure, but I wanted something different - something that reflected why my husband and taken the time to come there.
Then I realized my sign was in my pocketbook. I pulled out my latest photo of our precious just-turned-two year old daughter, got a safety pin from my husband (one of those people who always, always has one in his wallet, because "you never know when you'll need one"), and pinned her picture to my coat.
And so I was driven, two days ago, into the arms of defiant El Greco. Today I give you Cezanne, along with an invitation: Bloggers, post something bright, something colorful, warm, and heartening, and let me know; non-bloggers (unbloggers?), if you run across something colorful and cheery in the next week or two, send me a link to it. I'll post the links, and we'll have a color feast to tide us over until Valentine's Day.
For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February,
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.
Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy –
You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;
And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,
That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over!
Washington is a city of many diversions, but very little surpasses the pure entertainment value of watching a senator--media chatter about his potential attractiveness as a presidential prospect ringing in his ears--commandeer the microphone during a committee meeting and then posture in a most forceful and statesmanlike way for the television cameras. Sen. Hagel did not disappoint last week. As the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations prepared to vote on the resolution expressing outright opposition to the increase in troops, Sen. Hagel, a longstanding critic of the war, was in ultra-dudgeon about what he apparently regards as an insufficient amount of Capitol Hill kibitzing on the president's conduct of the war.
"I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line" by having to make a "tough vote" on the troop increase, Sen. Hagel said. In a bit of bullying that instantly became the TV quote of the day, he then appeared to call out an unspecified number of his honorable colleagues as cowards: "If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes."
It's not clear precisely what the point would be of a resolution opposing the troop increase, other than letting legislators flatter themselves with the notion that they have some influence over the president's war-making strategy. Conducting a periodic opinion poll on Capitol Hill (for that's what nonbinding resolutions are) might be useful. Certainly historians would wish that during the Civil War the Senate had taken its temperature every few months regarding President Lincoln's prosecution of the war. Might have been interesting to compare their vacillations with his single-mindedness.
