This blog began in 2003 as Mrs. Rabbitt's Bookbag and continued as From the Library Director from 2005-2010. You can read my newspaper columns at FromtheLibraryColumn published Thursdays in the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

500 Years of Women in Art

How many can you recognize? Amazing video by Philip Scott Johnson
500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art; Music: Bach's Sarabande from Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 performed by Yo-Yo Ma. Nominated as Most Creative Video2007 YouTube Awards. Thanks for finding this on Wimp, Gerry!

Time to Catch Up On Your Reading

The New York Times has published its 100 Notable Books of 2008. Click the link for a printable list of Fiction and Poetry and Non-Fiction.  How many have you read?

Friday, November 28, 2008

$1,000,000


Want to see what a million dollars looks like in pennies? The MegaPenny Project brings it into perspective. 




Graphic, concept and website: Alan Taylor, Kokogiak.com

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Thanksgiving in America: 1950

Don't miss the plug about your free public library.

Phishing


Take this test from Sonic Wall. You might be surprised that you are not as savvy about phishing schemes as you thought you were.

You Know the Tune

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Beware the Gift (card)

Read this article before you give a gift card this year. Consumers lost $60 million to the Sharper Image bankruptcy. I myself know the pain of losing to a restaurant closing.  Three weeks after a gift certificate was purchased for our wedding, so went the value. Luckily, the restaurant reopened and accepted the gift certificate at 50% value.  
"Just this year, consumers lost about $100 million in gift cards that they could not use when major retailers went out of business."  NY TIMES
"But of the 62 percent who received gift cards in 2007, some 25 percent said they were still sitting in drawers somewhere, unredeemed. And of that 25 percent, more than half have two or more gift cards."  NY TIMES

This is an online site you might want to check out:
LeverageCard "instituted a policy allowing customers who had bought gift cards from its Web site to trade them in for another retailer’s card, said Jennifer Mathe, chief operating officer and co-founder of the year-old site." NY TIMES
"Customers must notify Leveragecard.com within 30 days of a company’s bankruptcy that they want to make the exchange and must do it within 60 days of the retailer’s filing for bankruptcy and only if the company stops selling gift cards." NY TIMES

It's a tough decision but the original green might be the way to go this year if you aren't sure of a gift to buy.  Or how about a purchased gift with the gift receipt attached.

Sunday, November 23, 2008


Looking for unusual holiday gifts that will also do 'some good?' BiddingForGood lists auction items around the country and each one benefits a good cause. There are many Massachusetts organizations with auctions online. Remember my suggestion last year with crafts, jewelry, art and etc. benefiting artists around the world. The best thing about Novica, beyond doing some good, is that the shipping rates are very low, items come quickly and most are wrapped in an usual, earthy manner. I was thrilled with everything I purchased in 2007.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

The Tube


I've mentioned TED and the BigThink lectures in previous posts.  An article in the Boston Globe Ideas section, November 2, 2008, by Eve LaPlante assigns descriptive names to video television taking over the Web.   TED is the Oprah; BigThink is the Talk Show.  Others are FORA as the Public Broadcaster, Bloggingheads as the Op/Ed and Edge as Graduate Studies.  There is big thinking and watching for the egghead, the politician, the educator or the entrepreneur in all of us.

Losing It


Next time YOU think you've had a bad day, think of astronaut spacewalker Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper.  She watched helplessly as the $100,000 toolbag she was using during a spacewalk drifted off into orbit, lost forever to NASA.  Read the Associated Press article

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Presidential Hangover

I've survived the months and the hours leading up to the Presidential Election and I'm exhausted from the nailbiting stress of the roller-coaster ride. No surprise, then, when this morning I read this site as "Helping You Navigate the Presidential Hangover."  Chuckling to myself, I realized I finally need that break from Pollster.com, CNN, Huffington Post, YouTube, FiveThirtyEight and NPR.  Here's a site to help you navigate the transition and read beyond the red and blue maps, one of the National Journal Online blogs -  Lost in Translation: Helping You Navigate the Presidential Handover.   
Another site that made me chuckle is what I at first thought was a parody .  I mean plum and prune appointments!  It's credible though and boasts the 2008 Survivor's Guide for Presidential Nominees.  I don't think Barack Obama will be calling on me (I can't seem to find any Library agencies listed) but one ne
ver knows when this guide will come in handy. 
"You're honored and flattered, of course. You may have been hoping for this call and doing everything possible to make sure it would come. Or it's possible that this summons has arrived out of the blue. Either way, there's a new president in town, and he wants you to join his management team. If you've always wanted to perform public service, this is a golden opportunity."  From the website Excellence in Transition.org.

It is what you think


BigThink claims this "We are what YOU think. It is a new website with a Big Mission. It's
"task is to move the discussion away from talking heads and talking points, and give it back to you. That is Big Think's mission. In practichttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife, this means that our information is truly interactive. When you log onto our site, you can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today's leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search them by question or by topic, and, best of all, respond in kind. Upload a video in which you take on Senator Ted Kennedy's views on immigration; post a slideshow of your trip to China that supports David Dollar's assertion that pollution in China is a major threat; or answer with plain old fashioned text. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or heck, throw your own question or idea into the ring."  
From the BigThink website. 

There are hundreds of experts, among them authors, actors, professors, policy advisors: Joy Behar, Oliver Sacks, Augusten Burroughs, Ted Sorensen, Alan Dershowitz, Jessamyn West, Ken Adelman, Gloria Estafan, Ken Adelman, Andre Dubus III. You can search experts or topics and watch hundreds of videos.  
Thanks to Gerry for once again finding a nugget for me and one that he knew would be perfect for my blog.

Friday, November 14, 2008

It's Easy Being Green, Kermit

From GreenLivingTips, I've found this article, Recycling By the Numbers. 

On most plastic jars, containers and other packaging of products you buy, you'll find what's generally accepted as the recycling logo with a number in the middle and letters underneath stamped into the plastic.
The recycling logo can be a little misleading - just about anything can be recycled, but sometimes not without major effort. It's a little bit like extracting oil from under the ocean bed compared to extracting oil from tar sands; none of it's really good as such, but some plastics are far, far worse than others.
The Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) implemented the system in 1988 to allow recyclers to be able to tell the different types of plastics when sorting. Basically, the numbers in the triangle indicate the grade of plastic - the resin ID code. It's now a system that's used in many different countries.
1 - PETE - Polyethylene Terephthalate
The easiest of plastics to recycle. Often used for soda bottles, water bottles and many common food packages. Is recycled into bottles and polyester fibers
2 - HDPE - High density Polyethylene
Also readily recyclable - Mostly used for packaging detergents, bleach, milk containers, hair care products and motor oil. Is recycled into more bottles or bags.
3 - PVC - Polyvinyl Chloride
This stuff is everywhere - pipes, toys, furniture, packaging - you name it. Difficult to recycle and PVC is a major environmental and health threat.
4 - LDPE Low-density Polyethylene
Used for many different kinds of wrapping, grocery bags and sandwich bags and can be recycled into more of the same.
5 - PP - Polypropylene
Clothing, bottles, tubs. Can be recycled into fibers.
6 - PS - Polystyrene
Cups, foam food trays, packing peanuts. Polysterene is a real problem as it's bulky yet very lightweight and isn't really worth recycling.
7 - Other
Could be a mixture of any and all of the above. Or plastics not readily recyclable such as polyurethane. Avoid it if you can - recyclers generally speaking don't want it.
G - GLT - Green Living Tips Logo
The Green Living Tips logo of course!.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Lifelong Learning

Free online courses in the sciences are offered by MIT, Tufts, UC Berkeley and 12 other universities.

Lessons from Wall Street

From CondeNast's Portfolio comes a must-read by Michael Lewis, The End [of Wall Street's Boom]. Excerpted from the much-longer article:
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from.
When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.  
I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual. ~Michael Lewis

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

This Day

Monday, November 10, 2008

Ever Have This Kind of Moment?

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Dawn of the Fourth Republic





artwork: Salon.com
Very interesting article in Salon by Michael Lind:
The First Republic of the United States, assembled following the American Revolution, lasted from 1788 to 1860. The Second Republic, assembled following the Civil War and Reconstruction (that is, the Second American Revolution) lasted from 1860 to 1932. And the Third American Republic, assembled during the New Deal and the civil rights eras (the Third American Revolution), lasted from 1932 until 2004.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

America Again

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Worth One Thousand Words

PatrickMoberg.com

Winner: Starbucks

I've got my free cup - go get yours.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Your Vote

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Competing Fairly


The Federal Trade Commission just launched a website for kids. It's a pretty interesting site with games that teach about supply and demand, placement marketing, brand crossover and other marketing techniques in a kid-friendly, 'Valley Girl'-accented, Mall setting - either in the West Terrace or the Food Court.
"The Federal Trade Commission is the nation's consumer protection agency and one of the government agencies responsible for keeping competition among businesses strong. Its job is to make sure companies compete fairly and don't mislead or trick people about their products and services. Three bureaus do the work of the FTC: Competition, Consumer Protection, and Economics. Several other offices help implement the mission of the bureaus."  quoted from the website.