Monday mumbles

The first year of Parenting.

What others think about the US.

Reading between the lines ... historically.

Things that nom on radiation?!

Apparently this dude thinks rape can be enjoyed.

Noah... as a movie... subtitled God is PISSED.

Google supports solar.

From books to breasts

Or the lack thereof... Catcher in the Rye dropped from US school curriculum

Schools in America are to drop classic books such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye from their curriculum in favour of 'informational texts'. American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014. A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace. Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards. Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California's Invasive Plant Council. The new educational standards have the backing of the influential National Governors' Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and are being part-funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Monsanto in India.


A pale blue dot:



Detroit, then and now.

Early onset breast cancer survivors.  (NSFW) Showing the faces and bodies of those who have dealt with the disease.

Update:  Solar Electric Light Fund.

SELF's mission is to design and implement solar energy solutions to assist the 1.5 billion people living in energy poverty with their economic, educational, health care and agricultural development. Since 1990, SELF has completed projects in more than 20 countries and pioneered unique applications of solar power such as for drip irrigation in Benin, health care in Haiti, telemedicine in the Amazon rainforest, online learning in South Africa and microenterprise development in Nigeria.

A source of innocent merriment!

For those whose lives are too busy... A Book A Minute.

A town that plans to grow all its own veggies.

Exploring England.

Panda cub.

32,000-Year-Old Plant Reborn From Ancient Fruit Found In Siberian Ice

Celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

Can you tell the writer's gender when you read a novel?

Sometimes.

Books people don't want you to read.

Fascinating lists of banned books present day and 20th century. Read one today. A lot of books today being challenged are ones for children that deal with sex or question religion. But if you ever think banning anything is ok, look at the list of 100 banned/ challenged books of this last century:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Ulysses, James Joyce
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
1984, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Native Son, Richard Wright
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
Women in Love, DH Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, John Updike

How many of these books are now classics and used in schools? Imagine never being transformed by reading them (I count 19 out of the list that I've actually read, more if I include reading sections of the novel or seeing the movies.) How many have become movies that still resonate today?

Censorship of books should never happen. We don't need the thought police trying to control what we think, although I realize fear is behind the desire to burn unsettling thoughts and have myself occasionally wished to destroy something I violently disagree with. But time will blow away the chaff, expose the falsehoods and the lies; the quality and the truth will remain.

Horrible hunch for last Harry Potter

I do hope Lance Mannion is wrong:

To me, it seemed as if Rowling had lost focus and she'd lost focus because she'd lost interest.

She didn't seem to care anymore what happened to Harry in the end, so she stuck with what was happening to him in the immediate present, which turned out to be nothing but a lot of adolescent angst.

A worse sign was the way she threw away the death of one of her secondary heroes.

The big battle sequence is as confusing and cluttered and as seemingly pointless---in that neither side appears to have a strategy---as the battle between the Ewoks and the stormtroopers on Endor in Return of the Jedi, and the way Rowling handled the death of his hero was as if George Lucas had decided to kill off Han Solo but did it in a cutaway shot between the scene of Luke on the Death Star and Lando in the Millennium Falcon.

She got things back on track with the Half-Blood Prince, but that's what that book seemed to be about---regaining control and setting the stage for the final installment. There's a perfunctory quality to it, which isn't just disappointing, it's strange, considering which main character she kills off in it.

Rowling may have been saving it all up for the end, but the impression I've had for the last three books is that she's been losing more and more of her steam. And now I suspect that the final book is going to be a big letdown.