Merry Christmas!

Stationery card

View the entire collection of cards.

A Christmas Story

Click the link for a delightful story about giving from a modern-day Aloise Buckley-Heath.  It's like The Gift of the Magi, if O. Henry's story included giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

Touchstone Archives: The Recycled Goat

I'm still not on Facebook...

...but the kids are!  The local pizza restaurant took their picture today and put them on their page.  Go Like them, or whatever it is Facebook people do.

Journalistic Integrity

From World Magazine, 24 March 2011:

"Without question, 'I complain in the strongest possible terms,' is different from, 'I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write.'"

  --BBC director-general Mark Thompson, admitting that his network treats Christianity with less sensitivity than other religions, including Islam, in part due to threats

"The Hunger Games" and the state of literacy

The local paper ran a feature on the teen dystopia series to coincide with the release of the first movie.  The front page photo was of a twelve-year-old of indeterminate gender: messy, medium-length hair and no makeup, but its name is Jade so we'll hope it's a girl.  Jade is part of a local middle school's "Book Bites" club.  Hey, kids reading, that's good, right?  Until you get toward the end of the article and realize that all these kids with their paperbacks open in front of them aren't actually reading; they are, in fact, listening to a librarian read aloud to them.  That's right.  Twelve-year-olds with a book which is, I presume, of an age-appropriate reading level have joined a book club to have a librarian read aloud to them like they're preschoolers.

Runner-up for most depressing part of the article: A direct quote from a junior high librarian:

"When I first started teaching, we didn't have hardly any zombie books...."

Parse that, grammarians: "We didn't have hardly any." From a librarian knowing she was being quoted in the newspaper.  I would hope that back in the day the editors would have cleaned that up for her or paraphrased the information to avoid embarrassing her, but I'm guessing they didn't have a problem with the grammar themselves.  There's no [sic].

If I lived in Australia, I would so be moving now

News story

Birthday cake

Yesterday was my mom's birthday.  I made a German chocolate cake.