Hard to tell

if the latest campaign news is more embarrassing for the Conservatives, who’ve been caught plagiarizing, or for the Liberals, who’ve been caught napping — for five years.
Wait, make that skinnydipping.

Another crack at Summer

We finally finished combining late last night after a week’s delay.   And now we can make bales and haul them home in the sunshine:

And Saturday is the big Pumpkin Festival about an hour away, from which we may return with our own big pumpkin.

Banned Books Week: Day 4: Boo

A recent addition to the book challenge lists is one of the popular Ology books, Wizardology: The Book of the Secrets of Merlin by Dugald Steer.
Last year and this year, the book has been challenged at the West Haven, Connecticut, Molloy Elementary School Library “because the book exposes the children to the occult”. According [...]

A niche issue for some

If I were more of a cynic, I’d think that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s latest election promise today, a tax credit for children’s artistic activities, is aimed more at competing with the NDP’s latest election promise than at rectifying his recent anti-arts and culture words and deeds:
Speaking in Ottawa, Harper said the Conservatives would extend [...]

Banned Books Week: Day 3: Just lousy

[Tom] Joad looked at him with drooped eyes, and then he laughed. “Why, you’re the preacher. You’re the preacher. I jus’ passed a recollection about you to a guy not an hour ago.”
“I was a preacher,” said the man seriously. “Reverend Jim Casy — was a Burning Busher. Used [...]

Banned Books Week: Day 2: What big teeth you have

How could Little Red Riding Hood
Have been so very good
And still keep the wolf from the door?
Job? Father? Mother?
No! She had none.
So where in the world did the money come from?
I need to ask it:
Who filled her basket?
The story books never tell.
from the song “How Could Red Riding Hood?” by A. P. Randolph, 1925
* [...]

A better bailout, from Joe Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, in yesterday’s Nation:
A Better Bailout
… The administration attempts to assure us that they will protect the American people by insisting on buying the mortgages at the lowest price at auction. Evidently, Paulson didn’t learn the lessons of the information [...]

Banned Books Week: Day 1: Banned in Boston

From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman:
One Hour to Madness and Joy
One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I [...]

Lewd, indecent, filthy, obscene, treasonous, explicit, and injurious to public morality

Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Alfred Whitney Griswold, president [...]

In the literary kitchen

Via Nicole at Baking Bites, one of my favorite food blogs: The Romeo & Julienne cutting board, from Perpetual Kid,
I’ve also been looking for an excuse to mention these, too, from the Art Meets Matter website: “With kind permission of Penguin Books Ltd Art Meets Matter designer Tony Davis has created [...]

Poetry Friday: Apple time

This weekend we’re going to wean our calves, which means shriveled udders shortly, and make cider this weekend from all of the apples we’ve picked, which means things will certainly be flecked with pomace. So I thought a bit of Frost was in order today.
The Cow in Apple Time
by Robert Frost (1874–1963)
Something inspires the only [...]

The only thing to fear

is
Absence of Leadership
It took President Bush until Wednesday night to address the American people about the nation’s financial crisis, and pretty much all he had to offer was fear itself.
There was no acknowledgment of the shocking failure of government regulation, or that the country cannot afford more tax cuts for the very wealthy and budget-busting [...]

Brother, can you spare some thyme?

I was reading the new October issue of the prairie edition of Gardens West magazine last night and noticed just inside the front cover a publisher’s ad for a new book, Food Security for the Faint of Heart: Keeping Your Larder Full in Lean Times by Robin Wheeler (New Society Publishers, September 2008; the book [...]

Cybils 2008

I’ve been so distracted by elections north and south and the Great Depression looming that I’ve neglected the arrival for the third year of the wonderful Cybils kidlitosphere book awards. On October 1, next Wednesday, nominations open for the 2008 Cybil Awards, so start thinking of your favorite new books of the year.
The Cybils have [...]

“I’ll try to find some and I’ll bring ‘em to ya”

Ouch. And oy.
Via Mudflats — speechless and hands on face is just about right.

Economics 101

with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz* (scroll down for all of the offerings)
* the author, with Linda J. Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict

Cramming first, country second

It seems less that they want to postpone the Presidential debate than that they want to delay the Vice Presidential debate.
If one of my kids came up with this scheme, I’d ask, Are you focusing on the problem at hand or just stalling for time?
* * * *
Mommy, Mommy
Gimme a drinka [...]

The other culture war

“It has always struck me as being particularly sad that the arts have rarely occupied a central position in our political discourse. Canada is the arts. If I am sitting with a guy and he says ‘Tell me about Canada’, I am probably not going to say, we are cooking up a fabulous trade arrangement [...]

Words to the wise

“Now is the time to get out of debt.”
Charles E. Merrill, Merrill Lynch, in 1928 to friends and investors (via Time Magazine, 1966)

“Truth…

is what you get other people to believe.”
Tom Smothers at the 2008 Emmy awards, 40 years late and as timely as ever

Which reminds me…