A grateful salute to the Patriot Guard Riders

My thanks to the Patriot Guard Riders who are showing up to help keep any protestors away from the mourners at the memorial service for PFC Thomas Tucker Saturday. I appreciate it.

Book Note: Designs on the Heart by Karal Ann Marling

American Profile, a newspaper supplement, carried an interview with the author of a new book on the beloved American artist Grandma Moses in its June 25-July 1 issue. You can read it online at Grandmother to the Nation. The interview was conducted by Jack Kelly.

The book is published by Harvard University Press.

To go to Barnes & Noble, click the bookcover below.


Designs on the Heart: The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses

When I was growing up, we had four Grandma Moses plates displayed on the wall in the family room, depicting the four seasons. I could see them from where I sat when we ate. Nice stuff.

Bookselling News: Tattered Cover pulls off big move

From the American Booksellers Association's Bookselling This Week, Tattered Cover at Full Speed in New Location:

At 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 24, Denver's Tattered Cover closed its Cherry Creek store and by Monday at 9:00 a.m., the new Tattered Cover at the historic Lowenstein Theater was fully stocked and open for business. More than 100,000 titles had been moved by staff and 300 volunteers to the transformed multilevel theater that still boasts balconies and an orchestra pit. "We're all tired but thrilled," said Tattered Cover's Cathy Langer...

[snip]

Langer told BTW about the feat of moving a 30,000-square-foot store into 24,000 square feet over the course of not quite a day and a half. "Linda Millemann [Tattered Cover's general manager] had fine-tuned everything to military precision," she said. "She figured out how many seconds it took to pack a box, how many boxes we needed, how many volunteers. It was just brilliant. [Project manager] Regina Bullock also was a mastermind of the move." Of course, having 300 volunteers helped. "We're so grateful to the community for their support and for physically helping us," she said. Langer also noted the support of the bookselling and publishing industry.

The long vacant historic Lowenstein Theater, at East Colfax and Elizabeth Street, first opened in 1953. The bookstore has maintained its architectural and historic integrity, said Langer. "The space has a rather large footprint and a very high ceiling. We kept a lot of the theater's architectural elements partly because they're so cool and partly because the National Parks Service is overseeing it as a historic project."

The orchestra pit is one of the elements that the Parks Service required to stay. Bookshelves surround it, while the pit itself is used for Tattered Cover's theater section. Balconies, overlooking the main floor, serve as a place to read and to bring coffee from the bookstore's cafe. The lower level, formerly the cabaret, is now the children's, bargain, and travel sections...

Book note: Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel

In a gutsy and/or self-assured and/or amazingly objective move for a news company, ABC News reprints the chapter on "clueless media" from John Stossel's latest book.


Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel - Why Everything You Know Is Wrong

Oregon State Wins College World Series

In passing, I would like it noted that a baseball team from Oregon won this year's College World Series. That would be the Beavers, to be specific, not the Ducks.

BBC News starts a blog

Editors with BBC News have their own blog now, called, appropriately enough, The Editors. Giles Wilson has some background on the project.

Representative government versus a direct democracy

What she said.

Grandpa's Scrapbook

The Common Room has a series going where they share old newspaper clippings -- editorial cartoons mostly. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, for all the posts I found for June.

Aubrey and the Terrific, Amazing, Quite Good, Very Great Day

Folks in Boise pulled the stops out to help the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Idaho make a dream come true for a little girl. Bravo, Boise.

Hat tip: The Paragraph Farmer

Ladies and gentlemen, crank your engines...

OK, so not all the vehicles in Great Race 2006 are old enough to require crank starting, but surely some of these require skill, patience, and perhaps muscle to start??? Certainly, there are some wonderful old cars in this year's race, which has just over a hundred entries.

The race starts June 24 in Philadelphia and ends July 8 in San Rafael, California.

hat tip: Focus on the Family (watch for their 1941 Cadillac convertible...)

Red Cross. Red Crescent. Plus...now the Red Crystal

BBC NEWS: Israel allowed to join Red Cross reports that the Israeli Magen David Adom society has just been voted into the Red Cross movement over the objection of some Arab states. It will operate under a new symbol, the red crystal (picture with article). The resolution, voted on at a Red Cross and Red Crescent conference in Geneva, also allowed the Palestinian Red Crescent into the alliance.

The American Friends of Magen David Adom Society website is here.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has more information on the "red crystal" emblem.

Book note: Victory in Tripoli, by Joshua E. London

Via Olasky at WorldViews, here's a May 9, 2006, Jamie Glazov interview of Joshua E. London, about his book Victory in Tripoli.


Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation

Previous "Barbary Pirates" posts: New Book: The Pirate Coast, by Richard Zacks (April 25, 2005) and The Thomas Jefferson Papers - America and the Barbary Pirates (March 13, 2005).

Jonathan Witt's new book available for pre-order

In Wittingshire: Good Art versus Bad Art, Amanda Witt writes:

...This raises an important question: for the philosophical materialist--that is, for the person who believes that all reality boils down to atoms in the void--what justification beyond personal preference is there for holding up Shakespeare over schlock? Are our standards of what constitutes great art based merely on taste or fashion, or do we have permanent, transcendent reasons for recognizing genius?

Jonathan and his co-author, Benjamin Wiker, tackle this question in their new book, A Meaningful World.

That would be Jonathan Witt, her husband.

More on the book from the publisher here.

To go to Barnes & Noble, click the book cover.


Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature

Improving health care on two different fronts

In newsobserver.com A passage to India for surgery, Rick Martinez reports on a new way for American companies to provide less expensive, but very good, health care for their employees. Visits to the Taj Mahal included upon request. No, really. India is marketing health services to Americans who want to cut costs, and Europeans and Canadians who want access to better care. More power to them, I say.

hat tip: Carolina Journal (via Betsy's Page.)

Meanwhile, in the United States, Jane Erikson of the Arizona Daily Star reports that the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's "100,000 Lives Campaign" appears to be reducing hospital errors and preventable deaths.

Cuban props

Elephants in Academia: Go-go Che at the V and A relates a visit to the "Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon" exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, plus some thoughts on the exhibit and its subject.

Brothers Judd: If Only There Were A Futures Market For Nations excerpts a Miami Herald article by Guy Hedgecoe about members of the families of Cuba's ruling class who have moved to Spain but preserve family ties.

Word of the day: eleemosynary

Since as often as not I show up in online stats as coming from Monroe, Louisiana, (showing where CenteryTel is, not where I am, I guess), I thought I'd take a little time to get to know the place in which I supposedly live. In my spare time, I've been strolling through various online sites, getting a feel for the place.

Mostly I've been on Chamber of Commerce and tourism sites, but on the theory that you can tell a lot about a place based on how heavy-handed city officials are -- or hope to be, at any rate -- I went to the municipal code site. (Like I can decipher most city codes? Who am I trying to kid?) Long story short: trying to read through the bureaucratese made me cross-eyed and I soon gave it up as a waste of time, but not before I learned a new word (bolding mine), in a section titled "Charitable Raffles, Bingo, and Keno":

For the purposes of this chapter, the following definitions shall apply:

(1) Charitable organization shall mean a nonprofit veterans, eleemosynary, benevolent, educational, religious, fraternal or civic and service association or corporation domiciled in this state. Any such organization or corporation shall have qualified with the United States Internal Revenue Service for an exemption from federal income tax under Section 501(c)(3), (4), (8), or (19) of the Internal Revenue Code.

I didn't see a definition of this amazing word there, so I pulled out my Penguin English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, which I imported to this country with the help of an Internet seller based in the UK (and a good investment it has been):

...adj of, supported by, or giving charity. [medieval Latin eleemosynarius, from late Latin eleemosyna alms, from Greek....

...The Greek word requires letters I don't know how to do with my set-up, I'm afraid. The closest I can approximate it with what I've got is eleemoysine. At the end of the definition, it says: see ALMS. By golly, "alms," it turns out, has the same late Latin root. Alms, however, is easier to say, for my money, which might be why it caught on better. Just a guess.

I grab my Oxford American Dictionary, Heald Colleges Edition, mass market paperback edition, which would be my favorite everyday dictionary, I think, if it weren't printed in a typeface that globs in boldface, sometimes making it impossible to tell what the letters are (a serious defect in any book, but especially in a dictionary, I think). It also shoves text into the gutter (the inner margin, going to the spine), which also makes it hard to read. (You might as well know, text shoved into the gutter is one of my pet peeves, since it makes a book hard to read and almost guarantees the spine will be broken even with normal use...) Anyway, it has the word, too, defining it:

adj. of or dependent on charity, charitable.

So, I still don't feel I'm ready to use it in casual conversation, much less in writing, but at least now I have a clue.

Have any of you ever seen "eleemosynary" in any context besides bureaucrat-speak? I suspect it might be good to know for playing Scrabble, but otherwise I'm not sure how useful it might be...

The King Canute of the book world...

In The Common Room: Excerpt From a Book, Pipsqueak shares one of the best descriptions of a bookstore ever :).

I have been in bookstores like that. For that matter, at times our bookstore has threatened to become something of the sort. (Ahem.)

The 2996 project looking for bloggers to honor a life on Sept. 11, 2006

Over at A Rose By Any Other Name, I saw a button in the sidebar I hadn't noticed before, and so wound up at 2996, which is a project to have 2,996 volunteer bloggers each honor the life of a person killed in the 9/11 attacks with a tribute on their blog.

This is a very young project, but according to the latest post, The Global Community, there are almost 400 bloggers signed up already, with participants from around the world.

The hope is to have every person who was killed assigned to a blogger in time for each victim to be remembered on September 11 of this year.

I'm not planning to sign up, but I thought some of you might like to.

On patriotism

Neptunus Lex : On patriotism notes, "...we are not born loving our land and laws, our kith and kin, it is taught to us. Or else it is not..." He finds that often, these days, it is not. A thoughtful essay. (Via Real Clear Politics.)

Over at Expat Yank, Robert has a post called Great Thinkers Gathered, which compiles statements about patriotism from around the world.

Speaking of contemporary art...

... did you know that the Royal Academy this year accidentally gave an award to a base that somehow got separated from the artwork it was meant to display -- but stands by its award on the grounds that the slate slab and a bit of wooden prop found with it were "thought to have merit"? Lionel Shriver has the story. (He also thought the sculpture that went with the base was well rendered, and "exudes a sense of joy and hilarity." The laughing head, though, got no award, alas...)

Parental note: Mr. Shriver lampoons the Royal Academy by doing a high-falutin' review of a brick placed on his desk. Staying true to such things, he finds things to say that are, uhm, odd, let's say, moving this article from what some parents I know would consider a G to a PG.

Update: The Common Room has more, much more, on this, using other sources.

Addition: Somewhat-related previous post. (I am, by the way, still waiting for someone to tell me if that plaque Billy Rose wrote about is still there "on the house next to the corner, Fifth Avenue and 86th Street" in New York. And if it is, if people remember the story behind it?)