• 15:29 recommended: http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/08/climate-change-and-national-security
  Hopefully I will have time to follow + read linked pp -- they look tremendously interesting
• 20:19 Fascinating! http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect
  Someone asked (me?) about placebo the other day... who? Was it in SWAPA?
• 22:10 Our neighbors' cattle drive down Main Road followed by a hoedown: gallery.me.com/johnnylion1#100098 (wish I coulda been there!)

• 08:23 cnn.com/live in one room, NPR radio in the other. Er... maybe not the best plan. We'll see!
• 09:36 CNN: visual- views of DC, intensity of event
  NPR: audio- wider perspective -- BBC interviews, folks that voted for McCain, etc.

When Alaistair Fowler provides comments on Paradise Lost, you know that he's a scholar who has spent decades studying, teaching, and reading scholarship about Milton. He may not always be right, but his expertise, and the fact that a scholarly press edited and vetted the book lends his annotations and marginalia legitimacy. When Joe Internet provides his annotations "proving" that Shakespeare didn't write the plays, they were written by Francis Bacon, Thomas de Vere, or the Loch Ness Monster, the information can be both misleading and a waste of time.

Fan created annotated books will have to be approached with the type of skepticism that we currently approach—or should approach—blogs and web sites. At their best, amateur annotations and marginalia have a promising future with the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, allowing readers to participate more deeply in literature, but they rarely, if ever, go through the vetting process and face the unfortunate possibility of being entirely false.

lepi

turbocat

A Proposal From the handmadetoyalliance.org:

In 2007, large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public's trust. They were selling toys containing dangerously high lead content, unsafe small parts, and chemicals that made kids sick.

The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in children's products, mandates third party testing and certification, and requires manufacturers of all goods for children under the age of 12, to permanently label each item with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational companies to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each item have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and updating their systems to include batch labels. Small businesses however, will likely be driven out of business... More...

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen ... without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice. So let us summon a new spirit, of patriotism, of responsibility ...to look after each other... We rise or fall as one nation, as one people.

...the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

jaipur

the idea that only the ugly is real.

The same notion applied to people appeals to those who, like your co-worker, want to justify their own rudeness on the grounds that they are being natural, honest and true to themselves. As they undoubtedly are, more's the pity for the rest of us.

Manners, your colleague doubtless points out, are artificial. So are other forms of learned behavior, such as literacy, toilet training and, indeed, civilization itself.

LadyBug's Witchy Hat: I did this for Children's Illustrator's October theme over at deviantArt. Fun to sketch, easy to paint. Yeah, yeah, I was lazy, I was coloring (this is what I call it if I have outlines to fill in, unlike what I was after with "Stone Window", say). Watercolors on some rather cheap watercolor paper. Letting the paint do the work, more though -- I can see it in the intensity of the colors.

I had a thought about my "too many layers" comment the other day. I think if I either used more transparent paint in them or perhaps let them dry slightly less, they wouldn't seem so obvious to me.

Also unrelated to "LadyBug", I'd like to give a shout-out to Marianne over at Enchanted Folk, for giving me some really terrific technique-feedback the other day. Go see her Etsy shop and all that, if you have a moment.

I need to organize and plan this whole art thing. Coordinate the marketing, if you will. In, ya know, my spare time.

Back to work. Good music today.

...the most serious fault in our zoning laws lies in the fact that they permit an entire area to be devoted to a single use.