Bookworm Room

Tweet Patrick Thornburg, through a loving essay and some tragic photographs, takes on a a visit to a small Iowa town that may not rise again.

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Tweet We all know the story of penicillin’s discovery:  it arose from a lab accident when Alexander Fleming noticed that an accidental mold was killing bacteria.  That coincidental discovery changed the modern world.  It looks as if we can be seeing another pencillin moment, with an accidental fungus leading the way in the fight against [...]

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Tweet “Mensch” is a fairly unique Yiddish word, in that, in this single word, Jews have managed to encompass vast discourses on our fundamental humanity — or lack therefore. For those who know German, “mench” is a prosaic word that simply means person.  For Jews, however, the notion of what it means to be a [...]

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Tweet We went yesterday to see Pixar’s newest offering — WALL*E.  I can tell you that everything the critics have said about it is true:  It’s amazingly beautiful, with animation of such sophistication that one is continuously impressed; and the story is imaginative and goes far beyond the usual children’s fare of screams and pratfalls.  [...]

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Tweet This is the second in my series of marriage posts.  My first draft, which was a failure, tried to trace the history of marriage, something that’s much better done by better informed people.  What I realized from that valiant, although pointless and time-wasting effort, is that what I’m really interested in is a religion’s [...]

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Tweet Oh, my gosh!  Was it a busy weekend.  I’ve got lots ot tell, including giving my impressions of the self-defense class I took, and a quick review of WALL*E. There are, however, still a few barriers between me and blogging.  I have to tidy the house for the cleaning ladies (they’re here to clean, [...]

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Tweet If you haven’t already heard it, please listen to Dennis Prager’s June 26th interview with Dick Morris about Morris’ new book Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies … Are Scamming Us … and What to Do About It.  You can [...]

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Tweet Sadly, since my husband is incommunicado, I haven’t yet had the chance to tell him this story, so I’m still sitting under the sword of Damocles. On the way home from a swim meet, I stopped to get gas.  The entry way into the gas station was very narrow.  I saw that there was [...]

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Tweet In another of those hastily called School Board meetings — a tactic used to ensure that JROTC supporters will be less likely to attend the meeting — the SF School Board cut the legs off the JROTC program by denying it PE credits: San Francisco public high schools will no longer award physical education [...]

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Tweet I don’t need to tell you that Obama’s lies are catching up with him.  What I wanted to point out is that others are catching up to the unique nature of Obama’s lies, something I blogged about here and here.  My example is Ed Morrissey, who says neatly in one paragraph what it took [...]

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Tweet If only these products (especially the laundry machine) were real, and not just more items from the prodigious collective imagination of the Pixar crew.  I’m getting the feeling that WALL*E is a movie worth watching, if only for the extraordinary visual beauty about which each critic rhapsodizes.  It’s not often a movie gets a [...]

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Tweet What with heat waves, smoke filled air (from semi-local fires), and wind storms, I’ve been having fairly constant migraines for the past week, and if that’s not a drag, I don’t know what is.  I have learned something this past week, though.  No matter what it feels like, your eyeballs don’t really explode, nor [...]

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Tweet W”B”S sent me this marvelous old photograph, taken at Camp Dodge, in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1918.  Click on the thumbnail to enlarge:

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Tweet As I’m sure many of you have noticed, summer has me turned around, with my bloggin taking place in the afternoon and evening, rather than the morning.  That’s because the morning tends to be devoted to the kids’ concerns.  I simply can’t get any sustained time at the computer before about 3 in the [...]

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Tweet People around the world are facing food shortages but, in the magical bureacracy that is the EU, food is being destroyed for being a millimeter off of Brussels regulations: A market trader has been banned from selling a batch of kiwi fruits because they are 1mm smaller than EU rules allow. Inspectors told 53-year- [...]

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Tweet It seems I’m not the only one who looks back on the early 1980s as a good era musically.  So, for fun, here are a few other songs. First, Philip Bailey and Phil Collins with 1985′s Easy Lover: Second, Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called to Say I Love You from 1984: Third, and last, [...]

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Tweet From 1987 through 2003, I listened to NPR with religious fervor.  It was my church.  Everything I knew, I knew from NPR.  In 2003, I discovered the internet and began following up on stories I heard on NPR.  I learned for the first time that NPR had not only an anti-Israel bias — one [...]

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Tweet There has been speculation lately from those with little us to occupy their brains about whether the snazzy red loafers that adorn the Pope’s feet are Prada.  It turns out that they not.  Never say that the modern media isn’t heavy on the investigative reporting, right? This inordinately silly story would not be noteworthy [...]

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Tweet Do you believe in love at first sight?

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Tweet Just wanted to give you a heads up that there is a new site taking on the Digg crowd (which has pretty much become an all Progressive forum).  It’s called R-igg.  Check it out here and feel free to promote my posts there, if you desire.  All you have to do is register, and [...]

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Tweet Just in time for July 4th, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says. I personally am not now, nor have I ever been, a gun owner.  I keep meaning to go the local firing range and take lessons (operating on the principle that, since [...]

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Tweet A couple of days ago, I let you know about a way you could support the troops by sending words of thanks.  Today, I want to remind you about the Webathon for the troops.  Michelle Malkin describes it thusly: I’ll be in beautiful Mountain View, CA all day today for “From the Frontlines,” our [...]

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Tweet While I was sleeping, Obama and Co. threw another long-time associate under the bus. What I’m waiting for is the moment when these former friends and acolytes pull a McClellan and turn on him. It won’t be soon. Since they’re true believers, they’ll keep their mouths shut until their man is safely in the [...]

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Tweet Here’s what I’ll be reading in the next 24 hours from the Watcher’s Council: Council links: More Quincy Done With Mirrors Moonbat Kucinich Wants to Impeach Bush The Colossus of Rhodey Left Continues Denigration of McCain’s Military Service, POW Heroism Rhymes With Right South Africa’s Neville Chamberlain The Razor Dick Morris Gets One Right [...]

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Tweet Two anecdotes, and then I’ll get to my point (and the anecdotes do relate to that point): Anecdote 1:  I get my medical care from Kaiser and feel that I get great care.  Within its four walls, Kaiser is an extremely efficiently run organization that takes surprisingly good care of vast numbers of people.  [...]

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