Phrase of the day

“the angry and puritanical razorback hog that is the American Internet-reading public”
*  *  *
Read more here, though about home schooling rather than hogs, in Andrew O’Hehir’s current Salon article, “Confessions of a home-schooler”.  If the names of Andrew and his wife Leslie Kauffman sound familiar to you, you may have read this New York Times [...]

There is still nothing like a Dame

From yesterday’s Guardian, “Still our sweetheart: Dame Vera Lynn tops charts”:

It was the year food rationing officially ended in the UK and Elvis began his music career that the Forces’ Sweetheart, Dame Vera Lynn, last topped the charts.
But 55 years later, at the age of 92, she has done it again, hitting No 1 in the [...]

Math milestones

As I just wrote over at Melissa Wiley’s blog, Here in the Bonny Glen, I can’t keep up with with Boing Boing no matter how hard I try, so I’m glad she picked a few to highlight, including Mark Frauenfelder’s recent brief review of the latest Clifford Pickover book, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, [...]

A peach tree grows near Brooklyn

but perhaps not for much longer.  In Friday’s New York Times, Susan Dominus writes,
Close to 40 years ago, Michael Goldstein, then a young dad, rented the top floor of a building on the corner of Broome and Mercer Streets, and plunked a sandbox and kiddie pool on the roof. Such was the humble beginning of [...]

Science for all, and all for science

I’m still catching up on my online reading, so I only just saw Bob Thompson’s especially thorough August 1 piece at Make: on choosing a microscope, along with exciting news from the Make: folks,
We’re in the process of working on a new area of Make: Online that we’re really excited about. It’s called the Make: [...]

Today

On the radio: CBC Radio’s “Sunday Edition”, finally back from a long summer holiday, featured an interview with Winifred Gallagher, author of the new Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, who writes, “Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free [...]

Going back to Mannahatta

(Stephen Chernin, Associated Press Photo)
“On a hot, fair day, the twelfth of September, 1609, Henry Hudson and a small crew of Dutch and English sailors rode the flood tide up a great estuarine river, past a long, wooded island at latitude 40° 48′ north, on the edge of the North American continent.  Locally, the island [...]

Over the past several decades, as we and then our children have been steeped in self-esteem — “good for you!” — and cocooned in bubble wrap, we have exchanged common sense and personal responsibility for entitlement and litigiousness. We are quick to condemn and take offense, confuse privileges with rights, and have abandoned civilized debate. 
So [...]

Back to school goodies

I’m slowly, very very slowly catching up with some of my blog reading (and I have to admit I’ve been choosing the blogs with less to read and more pretty things to look at, because it’s faster and I don’t get as involved).
One of my favorite design blogs is Jessica Jones’s How About Orange*, where [...]

“Sheer bloody-mindedness”

From today’s Telegraph:
Seventy years ago they rode in silence, travelling on trains from Prague not knowing if they would ever see their parents and siblings again.
None of them did.
But by virtue of the foresight, humanity and sheer bloody-mindedness of a young British stockbroking clerk called Nicholas Winton, 669 Jewish children were saved from the clutches [...]

Name change

Our rabbits mentioned in a recent post, Claudia and Verbena, will now be known instead as Claude and Verbena.
At feeding time this morning, Laura discovered a nest topped with rabbit fur, and underneath three pink babies.  Verbena had a litter shortly after arriving at our farm, but the babies didn’t survive.  So this is a [...]

32.7 in the shade

on September 3, 2009 at 2:59 p.m.
Remarkable.

Spelling and vocabulary, with Calvin & Hobbes

The boys discovered the Calvin & Hobbes books at the library earlier this summer, and their summer vacation present was a selection of titles for their own bookshelves.  Davy at eight-and-a-half has been particularly taken with the books, and I’ve found him awake in bed at 6:30 in the morning reading.  He also brings the [...]

Washington, DC sights and resources: Part 1

Before we dash off this afternoon to pick cherries (hurray!), here are some things I’ve recently discovered and what we’ve been reading and watching to prepare for our trip next month:
The National Portrait Gallery: when I was living in Washington in 1985-90, this was nowhere near as crowded as the Smithsonian museums on the Mall, [...]

Happy back-to-school season

or, yet another reason to home school.  From the what-are-these-people-thinking department (emphasis down below mine, all mine):
To mark the start of the school year, parents here [in Sedgewick, Alberta, 180 km southeast of Edmonton] say a group of new Grade 10 students were invited to a bush party, tied by their wrists to a bridge [...]

Easy homemade ice cream

Well, not technically ice cream. But a yummy summer frozen treat.
Via Instructables, here’s Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn recipe for one-ingredient ice cream.
Considering that when they were babies, my kids’ favorite dessert was “banana pudding” (a banana mashed with a fork), this should be a hit around here.
And after you make your ice cream, you can [...]