Bookworm Room

Tweet Some in the town of Grand Rapids took umbrage at being tagged as a “dying” American city in some magazine or another.  One man, who has a reputation for showmanship, raised $40,000, and got 5,000 people to participate in this amazing ONE SHOT video:

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Tweet This is a miracle of modern science that will make you smile: Hat tip:  Hit & Run (Reason Magazine)

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Tweet I’ve written about the warriors among us.  By that, I do not mean people who are simply willing to kill.  That’s easy, if you have the right mind set.  Instead, I mean people armed with an overwhelming sense of justice and morality, who will push themselves far above and beyond ordinary people in order [...]

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Tweet Yeah, I know it’s not quite Memorial Day yet, but sometimes things come my way that I can’t wait to pass on.  This morning, it’s two posts from Greyhawk, at the Mudville Gazette.  The first one is both a memorial to the dead, and a bit of background to the second one, which honors [...]

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Tweet I got an email from a friend about Ed Freeman, a Medal of Honor winner due to his courageous and inspiring service during the Vietnam War.  The email implies that Freeman died recently, which isn’t true — he died in August 2008.  Nevertheless, having learned of his service history, I would be remiss if [...]

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Tweet I love the old Lerner and Lowe song: What a day this has been, What a rare mood I’m in, Why, it’s almost like being in love…. As I get older, though, the song has become somewhat bittersweet. One of the shames about growing older is that emotions don’t feel as strong. It’s nice [...]

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Tweet I remember the floods and slides of 2005.  Significant parts of Marin were inundated with water.  One of my friends, an elderly lady, was homeless for almost a year (living in various friends’ houses) while her house was being repaired.  Harold Lezzeni’s house was under repair for four years, but it wasn’t a dilatory [...]

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Tweet You have to meet Dan Cnossen, who found himself in the middle of an IED four months ago.  I won’t say much more.  Just go and check it out (with specific attention, perhaps, to the climbing wall incident on December 9, 2009).  What a truly admirable human being, although I think it must help [...]

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Tweet It’s palette cleanser time.  This time I’m not whining about the political scene.  Instead, I’m leading to the stories of two brave people.  I’ll start with the more recent, less complicated story first.  Once upon a time there was a very pretty young lady who worked at a little coffee kiosk.  And once upon [...]

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Tweet The year 2009 has been a trying year for many of us.  In our personal lives, the recession has hurt people’s jobs, diminished their savings, and placed enormous stresses on their day-to-day functions.  Nationally, watching the Democrats at work at home and abroad has provided us with all the thrills of watching a polar [...]

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Tweet Go to Tom Elia’s post, following the link, and then feel inspired for the rest of the day.

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Tweet There are some very special people out there.  This woman is one of those people. Hat tip:  Brutally Honest, who saw it at Confederate Yankee, who found it at Argghhh!

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Tweet The Anchoress is right.  You’ll LOVE this video.

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Tweet A thrilling surprise awaits you here: Hat tip:  Radio Patriot

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Tweet This is not a silly political slogan.  This is the real “yes, you can”: Hat tip:  Earl

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Tweet I’m a nincompoop when it comes to learning languages.  My pronunciation is flawless, but my inability to grasp foreign language grammar structures (despite being quite adept at my own), coupled with my lazy memory, mean that, despite have studied myriad languages, I’ve never mastered any. Daniel Tammet is a linquistic horse of a different [...]

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Tweet The very first time I met Sol Shankman, at my wedding, many years ago, he told me that he’d walked the length of the California coast.  I didn’t realize that this wasn’t the only walking he’d done.  Nor did I know, when I saw him a few years ago for his 90th birthday, that [...]

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Tweet Courage and a clear head.

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Tweet In the wake of Sarah Palin’s appearance on the national political scene, some Obama supporters made some pretty deranged statements about the Palin family decision to go ahead with a pregnancy when they knew that the baby would have Down Syndrome.  There was a lot of eugenics-type talk about the social utility of handicapped [...]

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Tweet Read and be uplifted.

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Tweet You’ll see why if you watch this video.

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Tweet I think most of us watched Randy Pausch’s last lecture, delivered when he was retiring due to terminal cancer.  Although the cancer finally claimed Pausch, the messages about getting the most out of life, about living with joy and immediacy, linger on.  Charles Lipson, himself a teacher, concludes that Pausch not only taught life [...]

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Tweet Tony Snow, writing in 2005: The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don’t. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of [...]

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Tweet Children are not fungible — you can’t lose one and just replace it with another. Nevertheless, no matter the tragedy, life goes on and sometimes it seems as if a greater force than mere human will is determining the outcome.

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