Book View CafeNews: Breaking Waves

BVC has put out Breaking Waves, an anthology of stories centering around the gulf oil spill. The idea about Breaking Waves is that any money received will be distributed passed on to charities handling the gulf spill problems.

I've read a lot of it. It's damned good. You can buy it here.

Here are the authors.




Breaking Waves

Edited by Phyllis Irene Radford & Tiffany Trent

Stories by:
Ursula K. Le Guin
David D. Levine and Andrine de la Rocha
Vonda N. McIntyre
Laura Anne Gilman
David Gessner
Tiffany Trent
James Sallis
Elaine Isaak
Brenda Cooper
David B. Coe
Deborah J. Ross, writing as Deborah Wheeler
Sandra McDonald
Dayle A. Dermatis
Judith Tarr
Rachel Carson
Camille Alexa
Mario Milosevic
M.H. Bonham
Nancy Jane Moore
Sarah Monette
Jennifer Stevenson
Randy Tatano
Pati Nagle
Lyda Morehouse

In Our Time: BBC

Check out In Our Time on the BBC. All of their material is archived on the site.

Go To MIT, Free

Only MIT is cool enough to put up its classes on line for free. See here.

Winter Preparation

Well, it's fall again. Up here in the Frozen North we have to view fall through the grim lens of impending winter.

Here's the stuff I have to get done before Columbus Day:

1. Clear out the garage for the cars
2. Set up the tractor for leaf collection
3. Use the file cabinets I bought over the summer to make a work table
4. Finish work on the overhead wood storage unit
5. Fix the piping on the heater
6. Close off the shop to the invading squirrels. (Kill them. Kill them all.)
7. Bottle the summer wine I made
8. Pull the shade cloth off the greenhouse
9. Set up the new fish pond for use
10. Fix the light over the greenhouse door
11. Finish the alcove addition to the shop
12. Move the wood and set up the wood pile canopy.
    

Columbus Day is a good stopping point for things that absolutely have to be done above freezing. Once they're done they enable work in the cold.

After Columbus Day there are a number of other jobs:

1. Clean out the gutters after the leaves and pine needles fall.
2. Repair the snow blower
3. Test out the generators-- repair if necessary

Oh, yeah. "Enjoy the fall" is in there somewhere.

More Why I Love the Internet

For all of those silly movies with silly endings: www.howitshouldhaveended.com

The Academy of Khan

Sal Khan has put out a number of educational videos for free. Bill Gates like him. (See here.)

I listened to his lecture on evolution and it's a good introduction. So it's likely worth checking out for quick informational tutorials on something you might find interesting.

Impending November Insanity

(Picture from here.)

I wonder if American elections would be less crazy if we just held them in the summer. I sometimes wonder if we all suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Probably not. We'd probably be just as crazy. Here we are two years after the 2008 election and Sarah Palin is still around, a fair amount of people think Obama's a Muslim and some nutcase (in Florida-- no surprise there) wants to have Burn a Koran Day.

I suppose that if Terry Jones thinks it's okay to burn a pile of Qurans, he would presumably think it's also alright for a Muslim to burn a pile of Bibles, right? After all, free speech is free speech? How much do you want to bet he'd give that great mantra of the offended: There ought to be a law!

As far as I'm concerned people can burn anything they want-- subject to fire codes, etc. Qurans, Bibles, Constitutions, Flags, leaves, buildings. I don't care. That's what free speech is about. I think burning pets is bad. And we fought wars over the burning of people. But paper? Doesn't bother me. Burning a book is merely symbolic of not liking something associated with the book-- in Terry Jones' case it's Muslims. He don't like 'em. And he's a camwhore so I'm not surprised he brought up the idea of burning a Quran.

Terry Jones is Florida's answer to the Fred Phelps.

Banning books-- making them inaccessible-- is a far more serious matter. You can download the Quran, Bible, etc. Unlike the Nazi book burnings, this does nothing to take the content out of circulation. It's just some jackass preacher in a podunk church in Gainesville pissing in the face of a religion he knows nothing about.

Hence, it's an empty symbolic gesture for the sole purpose of boosting the contemptible 50 member congregation church.

But, apparently, there are a lot of these gestures going around.

Acts of this kind are theater and the question for me is always who's the audience? Who's listening?

Who cares?