The First Annual Hidden Treasure Blog Awards

Via Dewey's Treehouse, here's a blog award project I can link to without reservation (yay!). From everyday mommy:

Your mission is to scour the mommy blogosphere for hidden treasure. Read through archives, visit new blogs and find that well-written gem. This can come from a favorite blog which you already read or a blog you've discovered during the treasure hunt. But, the idea is to find well-written posts which are off the beaten path.

The categories are: Children & Family, Faith, Marriage, Motherhood, Homemaking, Humor, Current Events and Life. No profanity, questionable or offensive material is permitted...

Nominations will be accepted Feb. 1 through 7. Then the voting begins. More info here.

DVD note/Book note: My Man Godfrey

I just got through watching My Man Godfrey (1936) with William Powell and Carole Lombard, for the second time this winter. (It's one of those movies with enough going on that you can miss some rich details the first go-round.) I went looking for information about the movie after I watched it the first time - but found that most of the reviews gave away too much information. So... I'm not going to repeat that transgression here. Suffice it to say that it usually gets listed as a screwball comedy, but it's rather more than that. That isn't to say it doesn't have its screwball moments (lots of them) or that Lombard's character isn't one of the ditziest females ever to grace a screen. It is to say that it's a movie you can laugh at - with your kids, even - but that slides a few ideas about right and wrong into the mix, and takes jabs at the spoiled 'sophisticates' of its day. This is from a Hollywood that still knew how to laugh at itself as well as the world around it.

My copy is on a DVD I don't see listed for sale online (it's one of those clearance-priced four-movie-pack specials, selected out of a larger collection, I think), so I've linked to one that supposedly has both the colorized version and the black and white. (I always choose the original black and white, given a chance on old movies. But to each his own on that.) I understand there was a David Niven 'remake' in the 1950s, with an altered plotline. No thanks. Powell is the perfect Godfrey.

Add the novel the movie was based on to your treasure hunting list. It seems to be scarce enough to have sent some copies into the several hundred dollar range. The author is Eric Hatch. If you find a hardback first edition with a dust jacket, well, now you're talking four figures, probably, depending on condition. At first glance at the markets, I'm guessing at this point that the true first edition was published 1935 by Little, Brown, and Company of Boston (which is funny, given the skewering the Eastern upper crust crowd gets in the movie), with a Grosset & Dunlap edition out later the same year.

Update: The Common Room lists other fun movies.

Prognosis: "at the very, very best she will be a vegetable for the rest of her life"

Oh, yeah?

Three cheers for Batya Feigenbaum and the people who didn't give up on her.

Book market note: Books by Augusta Huiell Seaman

In the stack of used books that I'm getting ready for sale, I came across a book from 1947. It hasn't aged particularly well. The pages are still soft (flexible, not brittle), but they are browning. As far as the boards go, there's wear to the corners and the head and tail of the spine; not real bad, but enough to be unhappy about. If there ever was a dust jacket, it's long gone.

But this turns out to be one of the harder to find books by the prolific author Augusta Huiell Seaman (1879-1950), once quite popular with kids and teens, and now apparently popular with collectors. Even "reading copies" (i.e., ugly but all there) are selling for $25 and up. Hmmm. That's a nice surprise, from a seller's point of view.

I did a quick look around and it looks like several of her titles are scarce, well worth keeping your eye out for when you're at garage sales and thrift stores, etc.

For a lengthy article on the author and her work, plus a bibliography, see Nancy Drew for Smart Kids: Mysteries by Augusta Huiell Seaman by Christine M. Volk.

Eggs not all in one basket

The lead on this morning's local radio news was that a small town north of here suffered a broken water main, and is without water - but, at the same time, isn't without water.

The city water supply is temporarily toast, but (the mayor explained live) there was one citizen inside the city limits with a private well who was providing water to everyone, as were a few citizens outside the city limits with wells.

The mayor also assured everyone that there was a back-up plan should the community suffer a fire before the water lines were back in service. He declined to give even an outline of that back-up plan. (Not that I particularly wanted one. I'm a big fan of not letting bad guys know how cities are set up to deal with things like compromised water systems.)

The hope is that city water will be restored sometime today. In the meantime, hooray for the maverick with an in-town well.

Glimpses of the past

All right, so I set out to do a bit of research on author Alice Hegan Rice, and along the way I stumbled on the Kentucky Library and Museum online site. This was not a good site to stumble upon on a busy day. ;)

See, for instance, the vintage postcard collection...

Too fun.

Hillary wants a conversation, Jim Geraghty obliges

I don't often link to "fisking" but Hillary Is 'In It.' Last Name to be Determined Later (the hillary spot, National Review Online, Saturday, January 20, 2007, Jim Geraghty reporting) is too spot-on to pass. And, besides, it's not quite "fisking" -- is it? It's more like a conversation... ;)

Let's see, if you count 15-year-olds as women, and exclude husbands in the military, and... (Updated)

*Scroll down for a closer look at the numbers by Michael Novak.*

From Journalistic Malpractice in "Marriage is Dead" Report by Michael Medved:

On Tuesday, January 16th, 2007, the American people awoke to startling and disturbing news: for the first time ever, the majority of women in the country were living without a husband.

All the TV networks, radio news broadcasts, pundits, talk show hosts and leading newspapers reported on the devastating milestone, and saw it as yet another indication of the ongoing collapse of the traditional family. Some commentators hailed this development as an encouraging sign of newfound freedom, while others decried it as a reflection of decadence and dysfunction.

With all the debate and pontification about the new minority status of married women, it’s just too bad that no significant media outlet (beyond this writer, on my nationally syndicated radio show) made the single most important and salient observation about the big news--

That is, it’s not true.

According to Medved, you have to include "some 10,154,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19" in the pool of "women" before you can approach the figure used by reporter Sam Roberts in the article run in the New York Times.

(Personally, I hope most "women" in the middle of adolescence are still single. Silly me.)

It gets worse:

Yet even the ridiculous inclusion of his ten million unmarried teenagers couldn’t give Sam Roberts the story he wanted to report – that most American “women” are now unmarried. As a matter of fact, the Census Bureau shows that among all females above 15 the majority (51%!) are still classified as “married.”

So the New York Times required yet another sneaky distortion to shave off that last 2% from the married majority, though this bit of statistical sleight-of-hand Sam Roberts had the decency to acknowledge. “In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military, or are institutionalized,” he writes. In other words, in his brave new majority of “women” without spouses, he includes all those thousands upon thousands of wives and mothers who are waiting and praying at home for the return of their husbands from Iraq or Afghanistan. By arbitrarily removing this 2% of all females (2,400,000 individuals) who are classified as “married/spouse absent” from the ranks of the married, and then designating as “unmarried” his millions of middle school and high school girls who are living with their parents, together with some 9 million elderly widows who have devoted much of their lives to marriage and husbands (42% of all women over 65 are widows), Roberts can finally arrive at his desired but meaningless conclusion that “most women” now “are living without a husbands.” Eureka!

Full Medved article

hat tip: The Alliance Alert

Update: Michael Novak also runs the numbers (Married Women and the New York Times, First Things, Feb. 7, 2008):

...An impressive 58 percent of white non-Hispanic women were married with husbands present.

Looking at these numbers another way, add to the 58 percent of white non-Hispanic women with husbands present, the 12 percent that had been divorced as of 2005, and the fewer than 2 percent separated, plus the 1 percent married but with husbands absent. Also add another 11 percent who were, not by choice, living as widows. Therefore, the total of white non-Hispanic women over twenty who were or had been married was 85 percent. It is obvious that, in that year, marriage was the overwhelmingly preferred choice of American white women over the age of twenty. In addition, a significant proportion of the not-yet-married women over twenty will also enter into marriage in the future. The proportion choosing marriage, then, easily exceeds 90 percent.

Because these numbers do not include black, Hispanic, and Asian women, they do not give an accurate picture of the whole U.S. female population. But they do give a clear picture of the largest culture, as a point of comparison...

f a i t h * i n * f i c t i o n's short story contest

David at faith*in*fiction is co-hosting a short story contest, built on the theme of "daily sacrament":

As always, we're not going to completely pin you down on what this means. It could be the daily made sacred (like Andre Dubus) or the sacred explored in terms of daily life (as Marilynne Robinson does so eloquently in Gilead...

Encyclopedia info sought

One of Danielle Bean's readers is looking for a set of encyclopedias that's not hostile to Catholic values. So far, people are recommending older editions and the internet. Surely there's something contemporary that hasn't been co-opted by social engineers, so to speak? The discussion is going on here.

My understanding is that the encyclopedias don't need to be Catholic, per se. What's wanted is something that presents knowledge without undermining morals.

If at first you don't succeed, rabbit edition

Unbelievable.

What are libraries for?, revisited

Reader johng, responding at my previous post What are libraries for? (about libraries discarding books based on circulation stats, even if a book might be considered a classic or otherwise an important cultural heritage) wrote:

Kathryn, this article is timely. But such an insane practice has been standard in some libraries for at least the last decade. One librarian and I shared a laugh. She and others would 'check out' books essential to the library just to save them from the clutches of the library director, who was determined to turn the public library into a computer only center. That one check out would preserve the book until the next purge! Believe it.

We commiserated with another librarian. Hers was a newly opened public facility. The only books in the Young Adult section were recent publications, and a large number of them were objectionable to many parents. If there were classics, we didn't see them. Hers was a collection not usable for many families.

The holding of that which is good and beautiful, and necessary for civilisation--certainly a noble goal for our public libraries. And a lost role for many.

I have to admit that I feel rather silly for not having thought to suggest this before, but, really, it wouldn't take very many of us going to libraries and checking out books we don't want lost to the community, to save quite a few books worth saving.

Spread the word, eh?

Thanks, johng, and please thank those librarian friends of yours who battle for a good, healthy selection of books in their libraries.

Tsunami warning

There has been a major earthquake (currently listed at 7.9) east of the Kuril Islands off Russia. There are tsunami warnings/watches in effect for various places in and around the Pacific. More information is available at the USGS Earthquake Center.

Update: West Coast & Alaska Tsunami Warning Center (Event maps)
Update: Pacific Tsunami Warning Center

A splendid diversity

Although I don't share the alarmist tendencies of many people in the heirloom seed industry (several of whom aren't slow to tell you that we're doomed if we don't preserve old vegetable varieties), I do share their enthusiasm for preserving a wide and rich vegetable and flower heritage.

I'm also a great fan of commercial seed companies that have managed to develop plants that do well under a variety of conditions and/or that hold up well for shipment to distant markets.

And, no, I don't see a contradiction there. I think we need good commercial varieties, and I think we're far better off in both the long and short terms if we have great regional or niche varieties, too. I think we're better off from a safety standpoint if we don't become overly reliant on too few varieties or depend too much on a just a handful of seed sources. I know we're better off from the standpoints of taste and beauty and experience if we don't let our food and surroundings become too much of a sameness, so to speak.

All of which is prelude to saying that I am having a wonderful time reading the Seed Savers 2007 Catalog which came in the mail. I think my favorite info snippet this year so far is "Found growing in a street crack at 56th and College in Indianapolis, Indiana. First offered by SSE member John Hartman."

Oh, wait... you didn't think you had to be some sort of specialist or have membership in some sort of fraternity to help save and share great and/or interesting flowers and vegetables with the rest of the world, did you? You thought you had to have a horde of seeds from plants originally brought to America by your great-great-great-grandparents and zealously cultivated by your family ever since?

Think again. Those who stumble across plants worth propagating also play their part. The catalog is full of stories like that. Found in a market in Russia (or India, or wherever). Found growing at an abandoned farm. That sort of thing.

This is, as I understand it, in keeping with how many of the world's best loved flowers and food crops got established. Someone found them somewhere, and took them somewhere else where they might be appreciated or studied or improved. I have books on my bookshelf featuring stories of men risking their lives to acquire exotic plant specimens to take to collectors in fad-hungry Europe, for instance. More on that someday, when I've got more time.

For now, though, I just wanted to alert you to the catalog before too many of the offerings sell out.

Well, that, and I want to publicly thank those families that have quietly and patiently and doggedly saved the vegetables and flowers grown by their ancestors instead of letting them be lost to us. I haven't learned the art of saving seeds properly. But I admire those who have.

A note: Introducing plants from one part of the world to another has been known to unleash some awful pests in the new place. (Some parts of Oregon, Washington and California are horribly infested with Scotch broom, for instance, to the detriment of practically everything else in the vicinity.) Please, please, exercise some caution and common sense when importing plants, and keep an eye out for anything that unexpectedly looks to be on the verge of rampaging off your place. Thanks. I feel pretty safe promoting the Seed Savers stuff, because most of what they offer requires cultivation to survive, but, still, do keep an eye out, won't you?

P.S. The Seed Savers catalog also features a selection of books that's well worth a look.

Not available in all pet stores

I have before me a flyer for King's Discount Stores, for a sale running January 8 through 14. Among the items on sale:

100 PIECE JUVENILE
JIGSAW PUZZLES
GREAT ASSORTMENT OF PETS

The accompanying picture shows a puzzle featuring dinosaurs.

Perspective

I was talking on the phone to an older lady who lives several states away, and she informed me that she'd looked in the mirror and finally seen a wrinkle. And so we both cheered.

She has, you see, been battling heart failure, and it had caused terrific swelling, and she'd been looking in the mirror and seeing what she called a pumpkin instead of her own face.

Being able to see your wrinkles is good.

What are libraries for?

John J. Miller, noting that many libraries are getting in the habit of discarding books that haven't been checked out in two years even if they're classics, wonders if librarians are becoming mere clerks instead of those who "shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends." ("Checked Out," OpinionJournal, Jan. 3, 2007)

It's a fair question, I think, although I'd like to invite Mr. Miller to check out bookstores like ours if he thinks bookstores only cater to the latest fad. For that matter, we generally sell quite a few classics over the course of any given year, often to people who made it through a public school education and/or college without being exposed to much Western Civ and who wonder what they've missed. Heh.

Blogs4Life conference Jan. 22

The Second Annual Conference of Pro-Life Bloggers will be Jan. 22 prior to and after the annual March for Life in Washington DC. More info here.

Author note: A. J. Cronin

I get the Scotsman.com's business news daily email, which always includes a Fact of the Day. Today's fact:

A J Cronin, the creator of "Doctor Finlay", was born today in 1896 at Cardross near Dumbarton. After completing his medical studies, Cronin became a Navy surgeon. He then settled in a mining area of South Wales, which was used as the setting for his novel "The Citadel", said to have been one of the inspirations for the setting up of the UK's post-war National Health Service. Other popular works were "Hatter's Castle", "The Stars Look Down" and "Keys to the Kingdom". Cronin died in 1981. To read about other famous Scots, visit heritage.scotsman.com

By guess and by gosh pumpkin custard

I love to experiment with recipes. Sometimes it works. Occasionally it doesn't. But it's fun.

I decided that since I'm the only person around here who eats pie crust, and I'm not crazy wild about it myself unless it's really, really good (which it rarely is), I decided to skip the crust and make something akin to a pumpkin custard instead of a pumpkin pie. I bought a can of Libby's Easy Pumpkin Pie Mix. I mixed it with eggs and evaporated milk as called for, but poured it into a casserole dish instead of a pie pan. (What? Custard cups? Who has that many custard cups? Who wants to bother with that many custard cups?) Then I went to bake it just like a pie.

Then I reconsidered. Probably having a starting temp of 425 for 15 minutes was to cook the crust, of which I didn't have any. Probably without a crust the higher temp was a bad idea. As if on cue, I started getting wafts of browning smells from the oven. Oops. I pulled the casserole dish out of the oven until I could get the heat down a bit.

My husband wandered through and mentioned his grandmother always used water baths for custard. Well, I almost always do too, but in the press of getting several things done at once I'd forgotten. It's not like I cook a lot of custard. (I should change that. We like custard, and it's relatively easy to make. But I digress.)

I did not have a big enough pan to put the casserole dish in a proper water bath, so I used a broiling pan and got water up almost halfway to the top. This is not at all as high as it should be, but did I mention I didn't have a big enough pan to do any better?

So, I put it back in the oven, this time at 350 degrees, in its half-bath, and cooked it until it was done. I can't tell you how long that was, because I just kept checking and adding time, but not keeping track.

But here's the kicker. It came out wonderful (if I do say so myself). It was light and moist and creamy and when you added a bit of Cool Whip it was one of the best desserts we've ever had around here. Forget trying to get pie pieces just the right size, too. With this stuff, in a casserole dish, you just scoop out as much or as little as you want. How easy can it get?

So.... do I have to do all that early-too-hot, water-bath-late-and-low stuff or can I get the same results by sticking it in the oven in a more or less proper water bath at 350 from the get-go? I'm going to try the easy way next time, in part because I'm not at all sure I could replicate the sequence-that-worked if I tried.

If you're wondering about my title: my neighbors in Wisconsin, back when I worked there, called cooking by the seat of your pants "by guess and by gosh" cooking. I hear it's a term commonly used in the Midwest. At any rate, that's definitely what this effort was.