Lift Up Your Hearts!

We don't see robins much at all here, but when we do, they are almost always in flocks.  Having grown up with the excitement of one or two robins heralding the arrival of spring, to see a couple of dozen robins suddenly descend on our yard is always a thrill.  If these robins are working their way north, I think they're a bit premature.  But they sure had fun eating the berries off our trees.

The pictures don't do the sight justice (a video would have been better), but you can see them a little better by clicking on the images.

  

This is SO typical of our wonderfully nerdy family that I had to share Jon's birthday cake here.

The Selfless Gene:  Living with God and Darwin, by Charles Foster (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2009)

Charles Foster got one thing right:  "The biologists will think that I have oversimplified the biology....Theologians will justifiably moan that I have summarized too brutally some very big and complex ideas."  That's inevitable in a book that purports to bring sense to the evolution/creation debate, and might be forgivable for the extensive footnotes and bibliography, were the book not condescending as well.

Foster cries, "A plague on both your houses!" to young-earth creationists (a category which he unfortunately stretches to include nearly everyone with doubts about some parts of the evolutionary paradigm) and Richard Dawkins-style hyper-Darwinists, then sets forth his own solution to the problem. Unfortunately, his conclusions aren't as obvious or as logical as he would like to believe.  After several chapters that needlessly insult creationists he shifts his aim to the hyper-Darwinists, following that with chapters that must have theologians scratching their heads.  I can't decide if he's brilliant or merely heretical.

Nonetheless, The Selfless Gene is still a book worth reading.  Foster is unafraid to tackle the important and perplexing questions that most people, especially those on the extremes of this debate, would rather ignore.  And he's right that the extremes actually support and reinforce each other, increasing book sales while decreasing understanding.  Whether or not Foster's ideas are right, they are at least thought-provoking, and might break a few mental log jams.

Having made my first New Year's resolution on January 8, it is fitting that I add my second today.

At first glance, resolving to rediscover feasting sounds about as painful as resolving to read more books, but bear with me a moment.

There's a lot of wisdom in the church liturgical year, with its fasts (e.g. Advent and Lent), its feasts (the grandest of which are, of course, Christmas and Easter), and its large swaths of so-called Ordinary Time.  For most of our modern, American society, however, it is Christmas Every Day.  To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from The Incredibles, If every day is special, no day is.

The material and dietary excess to which we have pushed our festive occasions is the natural consequence of possessions and everyday meals that rival the greatest feasts of our ancestors.  In order to rediscover feasting without surfeit, we must first rediscover fasting, and more importantly, normality.  Without Ordinary Time, there can be no special times.

So, how am I going to accomplish this resolution?  I don't even know how I'm going to begin it, other than making it public as a spur to action.  Stay tuned—and feel free to share your suggestions and experiences.

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It's appropriate today, also, to look back at New Year's Resolution #1:  Read More Books, and ask, How am I doing?

Better than I ever imagined.  I've read eight books so far this year, and we're not even halfway through the second month.  I didn't keep a record last year, but as an educated guess, based on the books I reviewed, with a handful of non-reviewed books thrown in, I'd say it took me at least half of last year to get to that total.

It's true that I don't expect to be able to keep up this pace:  Two of this year's books were read during vacation time.  Vacation is more often recreation than rest, and thus not conducive to reading, but in this case I had a few days with a good bit of reading time in them.  What's more, February saw the confluence of cold, dreary, wet weather with four days of an involuntary computer fast, which made curling up next to the heater with a book, a cup of tea, and my Kevin blanket seem like a reasonable use of time.  Plus I let my Ancestry.com subscription lapse in January when they doubled the price, which had a depressing effect on time spent doing genealogy research.

Nonetheless, although those factors certainly helped, I think most important was the application of "what gets measured gets done."  More significantly, perhaps, is that what gets measured in a way visible to the public eye gets done.  I don't want it to be obvious that I'm ignoring my resolution!  But don't let that panic you; I'm not about to publish all my goals (and progress, or lack thereof) here!

The Omnivore's Dilemma:  A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (Penguin, New York, 2006)

My limited knowledge of Michael Pollan prior to devouring this book was primarily his mantra for healthy eating:  Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  There's a lot of wisdom there — not that I'm very good at following it — but that phrase itself is not found in The Omnivore's Dilemma.  It is the beginning, however, of an excellent Pollan article in the New York Times, Unhappy Meals.

I'll admit I was expecting a diatribe, a full-force blast against agri-business and the factory farm, more along the lines of what we hear from the more strident vegans and animal rights activists.  Pollan, however, is much too skilled as a journalist and writer for that.  If his journeys lead him to both Food Hell and Food Heaven, they also show him that there is no clear, simple, and easy path to salvation when it comes to eating.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is Pollan's attempt to answer some important questions about the food we eat, which I have unfairly boiled down to: Where does the food that we eat come from, and how did it get from there to us?  His quest takes him through the horrifying house of cards that is industrial farming, ranching, and food processing, a vision that will either open your eyes or make you screw them tightly shut, because most of us don't have a lot of choice when it comes, for example, to eschewing the monoculture corn that finds its way into most of what we eat and much of what we don't.  The first of the four meals in the subtitle is of McDonald's fast food, eaten with his family but hardly "shared," as they each consumed a different choice of foods, all the while driving along the highway, as many fast food meals are eaten in America today.

Skipping ahead, the fourth and final meal was as personal and local as Pollan could make it:  meat from the wild pig he shot himself, bread made with wild yeasts, produce from his garden, mushrooms gathered by his own hands, and more, all crafted into a gourmet feast that he shared at the table with friends, family, and good conversation.  With apparently honest and transparent struggles, he experiences both the attraction of vegetarianism and the joy of the hunt in preparation for what he called his Perfect Meal.  Not a meal for everyone, nor for every day, but a meal of grace, embodying the ultimate answer to his questions.

In between is Organic, what Pollan calls "pastoral food," in contrast to "industrial." This required two meals, because "organic" isn't what it used to be.  "Big organic," symbolized by the Whole Foods Market, has hit the big time.  It is proof that we do, after all, have some choice about where our food comes from.  That we can now buy organic food at Wal-Mart says a lot for the power of the consumer.  But this victory came at a price:  our 1960's-bred image of the small, family, organic farm remains only on the patently misleading pictures on the food packages.  In order to become a mass-market commodity, organic food has taken on many of the harmful practices of the industrial system, from migrant labor to "free range" chickens that never see the outdoors.  It's still a good thing — organic farming is much better for the land and produces food that is at least somewhat more nutritious — but has it lost its soul?

Joel Salatin would say it has.  The section on Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia is worth the price of the book all by itself.  This is Food Heaven on earth.  If you've seen the movie, Food, Inc., you've seen Joel and the wonder that is Polyface.  The Salatin family, beginning with Joel's parents, took an abused and exhausted plot of land and healed it ("We are in the redemption business"), turning it into a showpiece of truly sustainable agriculture.  It's all I ever dreamed of for the Ideal Farm, and more, one that produces a great deal of food while enriching, rather than depleting the land, and where the people, the animals, the plants, the smaller creatures, and the soil play out their interdependence to the advantage of all.  To add to my delight, the Salatins are also homeschoolers.

As many of us who have chosen to homeschool our children are in defending our educational way of life, Joel Salatin is perhaps a little too strident in his enthusiasm for his way of farming, not showing much concern for those of us who have no access to locally-grown food but still want to eat.  I know from experience that such is a common, though unhelpful, reaction when the rest of the world — and especially the government — seems determined to stop you from doing what you know is good, right, and healing for yourself, your family, and your community.  That is the position that small farmers are in today, much as homeschoolers were 30 years ago in the United States, and still are in many parts of the world.

Putting that defensiveness aside, however:  in all the areas in which I care so much for the local and the personal — homes, families, education, childbirth, businesses, farms, and more — no one path is right for everyone, and in diversity is our strength. 

Deciding whether [the future of food] should more closely resemble Joel's radically local vision or Whole Foods' industrial organic matters less than assuring that thriving alternatives exist; feeding the cities may require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside.  We may need a great many different alternative food chains, organic and local, biodynamic and slow, and others yet undreamed of.  As in the fields, nature provides the best model for the marketplaces, and nature never puts all her eggs in one basket.  The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock.  The important thing is that there be multiple food chains, so that when any one of them fails — when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food-borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work, when drought strikes and plagues come and soils blow away — we'll still have a way to feed ourselves.

Michael Pollan is a superb writer, making The Omnivore's Dilemma a very welcome change from much that resides between book covers these days.  I doubt I'll ever get used to seeing certain four-letter words in print, but here they are context-appropriate, and best of all, rare.  There's no need for a grandchild or nephew warning, as by the time they are old enough to read this book (or, more to the point, old enough to want to read it), they will, alas, have already seen and heard things much more shocking.

Much of the content is, in itself, more shocking than a few Anglo-Saxon words could ever be.  But far from being the jeremiad I had expected, Pollan's careful investigations and respectful reporting make The Omnivore's Dilemma a book that everyone who eats should read.

A night launch of the space shuttle is always worth waking up for, even if you have to do it two days in a row and put on a coat against the cold.

As usual, we watched the liftoff on television, then walked outside to catch the view as it rose above the horizon in the east.  We were able to see separation of the booster rockets clearly, with a little low-tech optical enhancement.  I gazed in wonder—and with no little sorrow to think that this is the last night launch, and nearly the last launch, period—until Endeavour slipped beneath the northeastern horizon, then returned inside to watch the shuttle's liberation from the external tank.  Here's the view from our front yard.  (Click to enlarge.)

It may not look like much with my little camera, but it's a thrill that never gets old. You can see much more at the NASA main site, and NASA television.

You'd think that being freed from the 9 - 5 routine, Mondays wouldn't bother me.  (What's with 9 - 5 anyway?  When I was employed I never worked that few hours in a day!)  And normally that's true.  This week was another story.

It began when the alarm went off at 4:30...a.m.  That's when I took Porter to the airport for a week out of town on business.  Still, that was only bad in hindsight; normally getting an early start imbues the day with productivity, and I was looking forward to digging right into my many awaiting projects.  I returned home, drove into the garage, walked through the door, entered my office, and turned on my computer.  Which promptly turned itself off.  Further attempts disclosed the unsettling warning, "Fan error."

So there I was, husband-cum-resident computer expert winging his way to New York City, and my computer on strike.  My barely two-year-old computer.  That is to say, the computer that was just seven weeks out of its two-year warranty.  Might as well take out the garbage.  Which I did.  And ate breakfast.  And started a wash.  Amazingly, what I did not do was panic, which was either the grace of God or denial or both.

I next began the process of setting myself up as a user on Porter's "home machine."  It's old and has very limited disk space, but I was able to get access to mail and Internet, which quelled my feelings of isolation.  I sent out e-mails warning family members that the telephone would be the best means of communication for a while.

Then the phone stopped working.

Then I went to get the laundry out of the dryer and found it still wet.  And the dryer cold.

Then I heard from Porter:  His computer had also failed.  Should I have been paying more attention to the dangers of a potential EMP attack?

Eventually cooler heads prevailed, and I concluded that, unlike all other disasters natural and man-made, this was not George W. Bush's fault.  The phone I fixed by rebooting the base.  I couldn't reboot the dryer, but we do have an excellent, honest, and dependable repairman, who worked his magic the next day, replacing the heater.  (In the meantime, I relied on my good old Japanese dryer.)  My computer had to wait till Friday, when Porter installed the new fan he had ordered during the week.  (I had earlier, with much fear and trembling, managed to take the computer apart sufficiently to blow the dust out, but that had made no difference.)  Porter's a do-it-yourself kind of guy, but this was his first attempt at laptop repair, and it was a rousing success.  He is much better than I am at not being intimidated by all the "do not attempt this repair yourself" warnings.¹  It's a good thing, too, because his next repair project will follow close on the heels of this one.  He managed to get his own (work) computer functional again, but it has been determined to have sufficient problems that he'll be getting a new "shell" into which he must transfer certain parts of his current machine.

Now we are poised to welcome another Monday, and I am once again looking forward to a productive week of work.  My projects are many and varied, but nearly all require the computer in one way or another, and so a lot of work ground to an abrupt halt at the beginning of this week.  If I'd known my computer fast would only last four days, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more.²

Sometimes the difference between a useless tool and a helpful one, or a good tool and a great one, is merely a matter of imagination.

I dislike decorative trinkets, and most especially if they must be dusted.  My mother-in-law, however, loved them, and we received many gifts that were more in line with her preferences than mine.  Thus I wasn't entirely pleased when she proudly presented me with a Charleston, South Carolina sweetgrass basket, beautiful as it was.  But inspiration hit, and instead of hanging it as a wall decoration, I put the basket on a desk in our entranceway.  Not only does it look lovely, but in an instant I solved my perennial "where are my keys?" problem!  Because the basket gets continual use, it never needs dusting, and its presence must have saved me, over the years, hours of searching time.  The right tool in the right place.

Clothes dryers are rare in Europe, Japan, and no doubt most other places in the world.  It was a bit of a shock to me, I'll admit, to find myself relying on clotheslines while visiting such highly advanced countries as Japan and Switzerland.  Growing up, my family did not get a dryer until after my brother was born — about the same time we purchased a television set — but I was seven and it didn't have much effect on me.  My mother, I'm certain, felt differently.  True, I love clotheslines and the smell of sun- and wind-dried clothing (and sheets!), and when we lived in Rochester and Boston I used them whenever I could, i.e. on warm, sunny days.  (My initial efforts in Florida were miserable failures because the high humidity made the clothes musty, and the lack of wind made them stiff.)  However, I consider the clothes dryer one of the blessings of civilization, and if you doubt me, I have just two things to say:  wet winter clothes, and diapers.

Still, somehow the very civilized Europeans and Japanese are managing without them, for which I respect them a lot, unless "managing" includes relying on paper diapers.  I suspect their laundry detergents must have fabric softeners blended into them, as the clothes, hung indoors with nary a bit of sun or breeze, are not the stiff boards I experienced here on still days.  I don't like fabric softeners, but nonetheless found inspiration to take another look at the possibilities.  Also inspiring was this very cool Japanese "clothesline" that we brought back with us after visiting the country. (Remember that clicking on the picture will show the full version.)

Initially we hung the nifty device on the back porch.  It was handy for hanging bathing suits and swim towels, but not much else, and didn't get much use.  But at one point — I forget the occasion — I moved it into our laundry room, aka garage, where I discovered that newly-laundered clothes hung there avoid the mustiness I encountered when trying to dry our laundry outside.  (Some of you may be wondering why the hot Florida does not dry clothes instantly.  It may, for all I know, but our back yard doesn't get much sun at all, and the neighbors would have something to say about a clothesline in the front.  I'm happy they're not objecting to our vegetable garden.) And the stiffness?  A few minutes tumbling in the dryer, with no heat, takes care of that.  I don't use the Japanese dryer for large loads, but running clothes need to be washed immediately, and not left to stew until we've accumulated a full load, so I was doing many small washes, which are inefficient (and expensive) to dry in the electric dryer.  For these, the Japanese dryer is the perfect solution — and now a formerly underutilized tool is a great asset.  The right tool in the right place.

So, one of those handy hook-and-clip devices is very useful — but how about two?  From our daughter and son-in-law we received a little one in the form of an octopus, very cute but too light to replace the one which I had recently moved from the back porch.  It hung around for a few months as a mere decoration until inspiration hit again.

I love to use plastic, zip-lock bags, but hate to throw them in the trash, so for years I have been washing and reusing them.  Drying was always a problem, however, and though I tried several solutions I was not completely satisfied with any of them.  Until now.  Look how perfectly the octopus hangs above the dish drainer, holding the bags in a position for maximum drainage and contact with the drying air!  Most definitely, the right tool in the right place!

In these examples I have found the right tool in something that we already had, but were not using to its best advantage.   I'm convinced, however, that there's a wider lesson here.  I'm generally a "make do," and "good enough" kind of person, which can be a good thing, but I'm learning that not only my productivity but also my enjoyment can improve greatly if I will make the effort and take the time to find the right tool.  Even if that means jettisoning something I have in favor of buying something that will work better.  But — Don Aslett's excellent advice to the contrary — maybe we shouldn't jettison things irretrievably right away.  We may have the right tool in the wrong place.

Is there a word, in any language, for "my daughter's husband's cousin's husband"?  That's what Kevin Michael Johnson is, and I'm proud to claim the family relationship, however distant and awkwardly-phrased.  Kevin is an actor, living in New York City with his lovely singer-songwriter wife, Steph Shaw.  One of his recent triumphs was in the show Wild Black Yonder, which a number of members of our family (but, alas, not I) were privileged to see at "The Kate" in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Kevin's latest venture is The Raid, a documentary about the tremendously popular online game, World of Warcraft.  Everything I know about WOW I learned form the Foxtrot comic strip...at least until I watched Kevin's promotional video.  The embedded video below is from YouTube, but the link will take you to a video on the official, more informative site, where you can also get involved in the project if it excites you.  You can also check them out on Facebook.

Mayflower:  A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (Penguin, New York, 2006)

 Whatever your preconceptions are of the Mayflower, its passengers, and the Native Americans whose lives were irrevocably altered by its arrival on their shores, Nathaniel Philbrick will change them.  From the much-sanitized stories many of us older folks learned in elementary school, to the "politically correct" versions that sneer at the Pilgrims and idealize the Indians—forget them all.  They're all partly true, but mostly false, and completely over-simplified.  Both the Pilgrims and the Natives were better, and worse; more innocent, and more Machiavellian; wiser, and more foolish; more skillful, and more inept; than our visions of them.  In short, they were all thoroughly human, and Mayflower's greatest strength lies in its ability to make these humans, European and Native American, as real to us as our next-door neighbors.

There were cultural differences, of course; perhaps as much between them and us as between the two 17^th-century peoples.  We would find both appallingly bloodthirsty,  but those were the times.  There was no one "Native" population when the Mayflower landed, but political intrigue and warring among the various tribes—as there was in Europe at the time.  Lest we expect more civility on the part of the "civilized" Europeans, the custom of posting the head of a defeated enemy on a spike for all to see was still actively practiced in Europe.

Nonetheless, the original groups involved achieved surprising success at creating a working community out of their diversity.  I used the name, "Pilgrims" to refer to the Mayflower passengers, but of course we all know that's wrong, as the original Pilgrim group (the "Saints") was forced to take on a group of "Strangers" as large as their own.  Thus their intent of transplanting their already tight-knit community to a new land was foiled from the beginning.  The Strangers for the most part did not share their religious convictions, their morals, and certainly not their goals for life in the new world.  That these conflicting populations, along with the various Native American tribes they met, managed to live together reasonably peacefully and to their mutual advantage for about 50 years, was a triumph of both diplomacy, flexibility, and hard work.  One helpful factor was that the English Saints had been living in exile in Holland for many years before embarking on their quest, and thus had some experience in encountering and adapting to another culture.

They weren't as adaptable as the Natives, who quickly saw the advantages of the new flintlock rifles while the Europeans clung stubbornly to their matchlock guns.  Still, they did better than both the merchant adventurers who settled nearby, and the Puritans who settled in Boston and spread rapidly, each of which proved to be a serious destabilizing influence.

Eventually the more-or-less peaceful co-existence fell apart.  Even in the original populations, both Pilgrim and Indian, subsequent generations seemed to have lost their forefathers' vision and strength of character.  The result was King Philips War, a social, economic, and political disaster for the victors and a catastrophe for the losers.

I found the first 3/4 of Mayflower difficult to put down, and thus read it fairly quickly, despite the density of information and the voluminous footnotes.  The remainder, which deals with King Philip's War, also went quickly, but I must admit it was because I did not give it the same attention, as it was all battles and battle strategies.  I've never made it much past the beginning of the Iliad, and didn't care for G. A. Henty's With Lee in Virginia—even though I generally like Henty's books—for the same reason.  It's not, in this case, from squeamishness:  I find it b-o-r-i-n-g, though my strategy game-playing husband and nephews might think differently.

Here's a passage that struck me.  I wonder if some future historian might write something similar about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda?

Adding to the fears and frustrations of the English was the elusiveness of the man who had started the conflict.  By November, Philip had become an almost mythic figure in the imagination of the Puritans, who saw his hand in every burning house and lifeless English body.  In the years to come, traditions sprang up in the river valley of how Philip moved from cave to cave and mountaintop to mountaintop, where he watched with satisfaction as fire and smoke arose from the towns along the blue necklace of the Connecticut.

The truth, however, is less romantic.  Instead of being everywhere, Philip appears to have spent much of the summer and fall holed up near the modern Massachusetts-Vermont state border.  While he and his handful of poorly equipped warriors may have participated in some of the victories that season, Philip was certainly not the mastermind behind a coordinated plan of Native attack.  Indeed, there are no documented instances of his having been present at a single battle in the fall of 1675.  Instead of being heralded as a hero, Philip appears to have been resented by more than a few Indians in the Connecticut River valley.  One well-known warrior in the Hadley region even attempted to kill the Pokanoket sachem, "alleging," an Indian later recounted, "that Philip had begun a war with the English that had brought great trouble upon them."  Although unsuccessful, the assassination attempt indicated that Philip was hardly the dominant and controlling force the English claimed him to be.  Rather than looking to the Pokanoket sachem for direction, the Nipmucks and the river valley Indians, as well as the Abenakis in New Hampshire and Maine, were fighting this war on their own.

Theatre Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild (Dell, New York, 1983)

This wasn't on my reading list at this time, but the combination of (1) hearing a Teaching Company lecture about The Tempest and remembering the part it plays in this book, and (2) a dreary, chilly, rainy day in which the computer, the dryer, and the telephone all suddenly stopped working, led me to feel that what I needed was a bit of curling up by the heater with a blanket, a cup of tea, and an easy-to-read, uplifting book.

Written in 1945, Theatre Shoes is a delightful story set in World War II era England, and puts into perspective the problem of a few recalcitrant appliances.  It's a children's book, but quite suitable for adults looking for comfort.  I've said many times that you never outgrow good books.

We also have Streatfeild's Dancing Shoes and Ballet Shoes, but I think this is my favorite.  It's better written, more realistic, and less sappy than A Little Princess, but contains a similar theme of responding to bad times with good attitudes.  In this day of whining, fault-finding, and the victim mentality, such a reminder is a good encouragement.  It reminds me of a passage from Arthur Ransome's Swallowdale.  (Perhaps one of the reasons I like Theatre Shoes is that it mentions the Ransome books.)

    "They look happy enough," said Captain Flint, watching the Amazon slapping across the ripples on her way to Horseshoe Cove.

    "They aren't," said Captain John.

    "Ï know they aren't, but the next best thing to being happy is to look it."

Ah, a glass of red wine, bruschetta (made with homemade bread), and a Porter-made salad with spring greens, scallions, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and rosemary and sea salt focaccia sticks with sun-dried tomato spread, dressed with a dressing concocted from balsamic vinegar and a marvellous lemon-olive oil from Italy that was a gift from Stephan's parents.

A perfect accompaniment to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, by Peter Saccio; a Teaching Company lecture

For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, tape, mp3 downloads) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company.  Tonight we finished the last lecture of Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, a course which easily ranks as one of my favorites.

Here are the titles of the 16 lectures:

1. Shakespeare's Wavelengths
2. The Multiple Actions of A Midsummer Night's Dream
3. The Form of Shakespeare's Sonnets
4. Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets
5. Love and Artifice in Love's Labor's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing
6. As You Like It
7. The Battles of Henry VI
8. Richard III and the Renaissance
9. History and Family in Henry IV
10. Action in Hamlet
11. Coriolanus—The Hero Alone
12. Change in Antony and Cleopatra
13. The Plot of Cymbeline
14. Nature and Art in The Winter's Tale
15. Three Kinds of Tempest
16. History and Henry VIII

I find it easy to be intimidated by Shakespeare; despite the efforts of my high school teachers, the glories of the Bard didn't begin to open to me until a few months after my 50^th birthday, when I saw Kenneth Branagh's version of Henry V.

Saccio's lectures aren't this inspiring, I will admit.  But most of the plays he teaches I have never seen nor read, and every single lecture left both of us eager to experience the play, which is no small accomplishment.  I highly recommend this course.

Check out this TED lecture:  Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology, not only for what might be ahead in the world of computing (hint: the line between computing and interacting with the real world is about to get quite blurry) but also for what a brilliant mind can think of when pondering the workings of an ordinary computer mouse.  You are in a taxi on your way to the airport and want to check the status of your flight.  Who needs an iPhone?  Simply look at your boarding pass, and a tiny device attached to your body reads the information and projects back onto the card that your flight is 20 minutes delayed.  Thanks, Janet, for sharing this.

Forget whatever witty and informative post I was going to provide tonight.  Go over to The Occasional CEO and read about the latest and greatest economic forecasting tool:  Just Follow the Bones.