ST. LOUIS, Jan 31, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --

The typical Valentine's Day usually includes a romantic dinner, sentimental cards and sweet treats. However, this year many pet lovers are taking part in a new tradition that involves the four-legged loves of their lives. According to a national Purina PetLover survey* of 1,000 U.S. pet owners, more than 60 percent plan to include their pet in their Valentine's Day celebrations. In fact, 43 percent of men said they prefer to spend the holiday with just their pet, citing that their furry companion lowers their stress. And, of the women who said they prefer celebrating Valentine's Day with their four-legged friend, 30 percent said it's because the pet is more in tune with their feelings than anyone else.



read more ...

by Karen Grigsby Bates

All Things Considered, January 28, 2008 · I first read Gone with the Wind in the summer of 1966. At the time, American cities were erupting into flames as black communities protested decades of police brutality. And the Vietnam War was becoming a national obsession.

Me, I was a 15-year-old in New Haven, Conn. My parents were still referring to themselves as Negroes, but I was already calling myself black.

And yet I was also immersed in the mid-19th century South, where another teen was railing against the preoccupation of her day. "War, war war," she'd pout. "It's positively ruined every party this spring! I'm so sick of all this talk about war I could scream!"

Scarlett O'Hara, founding mother of the Me Generation. Frankly, my dear, I found her unabashed self-interest delicious.

My own mother, though, was mystified. Why would her child, who would eventually sport a two-foot wide Afro, be so interested in a plantation belle?

Miles Away, a Kindred Spirit
She couldn't know it, but I wasn't the only black girl who was mesmerized by Scarlett. A thousand miles away, writer Pearl Cleage was growing up in a Detroit household that was Afrocentric before Afrocentric became popular. Her mother, like mine, didn't get the Scarlett attraction either.

"The idea that I could be reading this book about the lives of slave owners just kind of drove my mother crazy," Cleage remembers. "And she really kind of said to me, 'If you're going to read this book, you need to be identifying with Prissy and Mammy, not with Miss Scarlett.'

"Which of course was impossible," Cleage continues. "No little black girl on the West Side of Detroit wants to identify with people who are owned by a little white girl!"

I think Pearl Cleage and I both liked that Scarlett was feisty and stubborn. She allowed herself to be what every nice girl, from her day to ours, was told not to be: selfish. Remember when she and Rhett Butler have just married, after she's alienated some of Georgia's more genteel families with her hard-nosed business dealings? He tells her he'll spend as much as she wants on the new mansion she's planning in Atlanta.

"Oh, Rhett," she laughs. "I want everybody who's been mean to me to be pea-green with envy!"
What a brat! But you've got to love her insistence on payback — it's kind of like flipping off the Mean Girls' table in the school lunchroom.

Proto-Feminist, or Symbol of Something Uglier?
The bravery of the heroine that Margaret Mitchell originally named Pansy O'Hara — the author's publisher asked her to change the name — was enticing to many girls in the pre-feminist '60s. Back then, we were still expected to defer to boys, to look nice and stay sweet. Scarlett wasn't having it. Remember, this is a girl who killed a Yankee.

But while she might symbolize resilience for some, for others — especially for some Southern women who are black — Scarlett is something else altogether.

Novelist and Georgia native Tina McElroy Ansa says the Scarlett everyone else admires leaves her cold, because her character is rooted in an assumption of racial superiority.

"There is a possibility that people just take the best parts of her character to identify with," Ansa says. "For me, it was very difficult to take the best and let the rest ride. ... Her higher place in society meant that mine had to be lower."

As both the novel and the movie of Gone with the Wind make clear, "protecting the sanctity" of white womanhood helped lead to the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. Ansa believes there's a lot of unspoken "stuff" to work through before honest discussions about race can occur.

"And I think Scarlett O'Hara, iconic figure, kind of stands in the way of all that," she says.
She's right. Don't kid yourself: The specter of who owned whom, and its nasty aftereffects, will be with us for a long, long time in this country. My adult self still likes Scarlett, but I understand that Missy is part of a painful, complicated history we're still trying to work out.

And yet some aspects of Scarlett transcend race. Pearl Cleage argues, for instance, that civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, a black Mississippi sharecropper who insisted on her right to vote, is an inheritor of Scarlett's ambition.

"Fannie Lou Hamer is as much a quintessential Southern woman as Scarlett O' Hara," Cleage says, "because they both stepped forward and said 'No — I'm not going to do what you want me to do, because I'm free.' And I think that's the thing we like about Scarlett O' Hara, is she was always determined to be free."

Margaret Mitchell once said that Gone with the Wind's overriding theme could be boiled down to one word: "survival."

Love her or loathe her, Scarlett O'Hara is a survivor. She has that ability to struggle through trauma to reach tomorrow.

Which, of course, is another day.

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News reports:




Jan. 25, 2008 -- Feline defensive rage, the aggressive cat behavior that recently led to the death of a California zoo visitor by a tiger that felt threatened, is comparable to human rage, both in the way that it emerges and unleashes in the brain, suggests a new study.


Because scientists are gaining a better understanding of the mammalian brain's recipe for rage, violent behavior in humans and other mammals may one day be quelled with improved drug therapies.


For cats, such a drug could prevent the hissing, back arching, ear retraction, claw extensions and fur standing-on-end that are typical indicators of feline defensive rage. In humans, related anger reveals itself with road rage, an impulsive form of anger that involves little or no thought.


"In road rage, the person never thinks about what he is doing but just acts in the way he does because he feels that he has been threatened by someone else and the impulsive behavior represents a way by which he can protect himself from such a threat," co-author Allan Siegel told Discovery News.


"In reality, his actions are usually much more dangerous to him than to the person whom he perceived cut him off on the road," added Siegel, a professor in the Department of Neurology & Neurosciences at New Jersey Medical School in Newark.


Prior studies have suggested that anger is centered in the medial hypothalamus region of the brain, more colloquially known as the midbrain's gray matter. Siegel and his team can even artificially induce anger in cats by electrically stimulating this brain region.


The researchers suspected that certain proteins help to control the process, so after electronically creating feline defensive rage in 10 adult female cats, they introduced a protein, called an interleukin, into the anger region of the cats' brains. As predicted, it fueled the felines' rage.


Siegel explained that the protein somehow attaches to a serotonin receptor. Serotonin is a critical neurotransmitter that helps inhibit everything from sleep to vomiting to sex and hunger in humans.


For anger, the interleukin reacts with the serotonin, causing the neuron to which the serotonin is attached to discharge. Before long, many neurons in the region start to discharge at a high rate, causing the individual to fall into a rage and behave defensively.



The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
Since scientists now have a better understanding of how anger manifests in the brain, the researchers can focus on developing drugs that prevent the rage process from erupting in the first place.


Illegal drugs like cocaine, however, may stimulate the development of anger in the brain, as may alcohol. In both instances, the substances cross the blood brain barrier that normally keeps infectious and dangerous things away from the brain, but isn't impervious to all materials.
Tumors or other brain disorders affecting the hypothalamus can also lead "to spontaneous and impulsive acts of violence and rage," according to Siegel, who added that he thought "there was nothing wrong with the brain of the tiger that attacked the teenagers."


Because wild cats are very territorial, he believes the zoo tiger felt threatened and acted aggressively in response, as it would have done in the wild if faced with intruders.


Hreday Sapru, director of Neurosurgical Laboratories at the New Jersey Medical School, who did not participate in the research, agreed with the findings outlined in the new study.
Because of these determinations, Sapru agreed "there is a possibility that new targets for therapeutic management of aggressive behavior in humans can be developed."


"In addition," Sapru added, "this discovery may provide a basis for future studies that will unravel the underlying mechanisms of aggression and other related behaviors in animals."

from Michael Hill, Associated Press:



Jan. 28, 2008 -- The lab rat of the future may have no whiskers and no tail -- and might not even be a rat at all.


With a European ban looming on animal testing for cosmetics, companies are giving a hard look at high-tech alternatives like the small, rectangular glass chip professor Jonathan Dordick holds up to the light in his lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.


The chip looks like a standard microscope slide, but it holds hundreds of tiny white dots loaded with human cell cultures and enzymes. It's designed to mimic human reactions to potentially toxic chemical compounds, meaning critters like rats and mice may no longer need to be on the front line of tests for new blockbuster drugs or wrinkle creams.


Dordick and fellow chemical engineering professor Douglas Clark, of the University of California, Berkeley, lead a team of researchers planning to market the chip through their company, Solidus Biosciences, by next year. Hopes are high that the chip and other "in vitro" tests -- literally, tests in glass -- will provide cheap, efficient alternatives to animal testing.


No one expects the chips to totally replace animals just yet, but their ability to flag toxins could spare animals discomfort or death.


"At the end of the day, you have fewer animals being tested," said Dordick.


Medical advances ranging from polio vaccines to artificial heart valves owe a debt to legions of lab rats, mice, rabbits, dogs monkeys and pigs. Animals -- mostly mice -- are still routinely used to test the toxicity of chemical compounds.


Animal testing also still has an essential role in making sure new pharmaceutical products are safe and effective for humans, said Taylor Bennett, senior science adviser to the National Association for Biomedical Researchers. Animal studies generally are needed before the federal Food and Drug Administration will approve clinical trials for a drug.


"The technology is not yet there to go from idea to patient application without using animals," Bennett said.


Animal testing can be slow, though, and some researchers question how well an animal's response to a chemical can predict human reactions.


In addition, the public is increasingly queasy about animal testing, especially the idea of inflicting pain for products like new lipsticks or eye shadows. The movement against animal testing has been especially strong across the Atlantic, where the European Union is set to enact its ban on animal testing for cosmetics in March 2009.


Cosmetics companies have greatly reduced animal testing, though they still may use it to test the safety of a new ingredient, said John Bailey, executive vice president of the Personal Care Products Council, an industry group.


Alternatives to animal tests include synthetic skin substitutes and computer simulations. But in vitro products show the most promise because they can are efficient, fast and easy to manipulate, said Dr. Alan Goldberg, director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University.



"There's no question that it's the strategy of the future," Goldberg said.


Bailey agrees that in vitro chips hold the most promise, but said the chips still need to be validated before companies can have more confidence in them. He noted that chips have limitations when it comes to risk assessment, such as determining if particular doses of a substance pose a cancer risk.


The product developed by Dordick and Clark consists of two glass slides. The first, called the MetaChip, has rows of little blots containing human liver enzymes. The other slide, the DataChip, contains an identical array of blots which, depending on the test, could be live human bladder, liver, kidney, heart, skin or lung cell cultures. Sandwiched together, the two chips mimic the human body's reaction to compounds.


If the cells die or stop growing, it's a sign that a toxin was present.


Troy-based Solidus has received about $3 million in federal money, including grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Dordick said a pharmaceutical company and a cosmetic company are testing the chip and they hope Solidus will have a product on the market by late 2009.


Goldberg notes that the movements toward in vitro and away from animal testing is incremental -- even optimistic assessments measure progress in decades. But he still believes there may well be a day when the lab rat becomes a thing of the past.


"At some time in the far future my suspicion is yes," he said, "because we're doing it stepwise by stepwise."

Encyclopedia Brittanica's Adovocacy for Animals reports, in it's "Books We Like" section:



101 Ways to Help Birds
by Laura Erickson


Once the bird-watching bug bites you, will be become aware of birds everywhere, and your fascination will continue to grow. When you learn about the pressures on birds from reduced habit, environmental degradation, pollution, and predators, you will want to do all you can to help birds survive and thrive. These actions can be as local as your back yard or range more broadly, affecting your buying habits and your political activities.


In 101 Ways To Help Birds Laura Erickson has written a useful and well-regarded handbook full of practical and inspiring tips. She is a bird rehabilitator from Minnesota, writer and producer of the radio program “For the Birds,” and author of books and magazine articles about birds. These, as well as her blog posts, can be sampled at her photo-rich Web site, Laura Erickson’s for the birds.

Awash in antidepressants, America is manipulated by Big Pharma and numbed out to basic, and inevitable, human pain -- or so argue critics of our serotonin nation.

read more digg story

The New York Times reports:



By OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT
SAN FRANCISCO


WITH its brass-trimmed halogen heating elements, glass globes and bamboo paddles, the new contraption that is to begin making coffee this week at the Blue Bottle Café here looks like a machine from a Jules Verne novel, a 19th-century vision of the future.


Called a siphon bar, it was imported from Japan at a total cost of more than $20,000. The cafe has the only halogen-powered model in the United States, and getting it here required years of elliptical discussions with its importer, Jay Egami of the Ueshima Coffee Company.


“If you just want equipment you’re not ready,” Mr. Egami said in an interview. But, he added, James Freeman, the owner of the cafe, is different: “He’s invested time. He’s invested interest. He is ready.”


Professionals have long been willing to pay prices in the five figures for the perfect espresso machine, but the siphon bar does not make espresso. It makes brewed coffee, as does another high-end coffee maker, the $11,000 Clover, which makes one cup at a time. Together, they signal the resurgence of brewing among the most obsessive coffee enthusiasts.


Could this be the age of brewed coffee? “We’re right there at the threshold,” said George Howell of Terroir Coffee, a retailer of roasted and green beans. “Coffee has never been a noble beverage because the means to perfectly produce it haven’t existed,” said Mr. Howell, who is also a founder of the Cup of Excellence, an annual competition that seeks to identify the best beans in each coffee-producing nation.


But, he said, with recent advances in coffee-making technology, “now you can get perfect extraction.”


Mr. Freeman is not trying to end the era of espresso. He still starts his days with a cappuccino, and his cafe serves drinks mostly from espresso machines, including a lovingly refurbished San Marco from the 1980s. But he’s excited by the possibilities of brewed coffee.


“Siphon coffee is very delicate,” he said. “It’s sweeter and juicier, and the flavors change as the temperature changes. Sometimes it has a texture so light it’s almost moussey.”


A professionwide interest in brewed coffee has driven the stealth spread of the Clover.



Introduced less than two years ago, it has become standard equipment at some of the country’s most progressive cafes, including Intelligentsia in Chicago, La Mill in Los Angeles and Caffe Vita in Seattle.


Stumptown, of Portland, Ore., recently installed four Clovers in its location in the Ace Hotel. New York City now has five of the devices, two of them at the Chelsea branch of Café Grumpy, which has used them to dispense 60,000 cups in a little over a year.


So far, the Clover is still something of a cult object, with just over 200 machines scattered around the world. But it might soon become a common sight: Starbucks has just bought two.


Designed by three Stanford graduates, it lets the user program every feature of the brewing process, including temperature, water dose and extraction time. (It even has an Ethernet connection that can feed a complete record of its configurations to a Web database.) Not only is each cup brewed to order, but the way each cup is brewed can be tailored to a particular bean — light or dark roast, acidic or sweet, and so on.


The Clover works something like an inverted French press: coffee grounds go into a brew chamber, hot water shoots in and a powerful piston slowly lifts and plunges a filter, forcing the coffee out through a nozzle in the front. The final step, when a cake of spent grounds rises majestically to the top, is so titillating to coffee fanatics that one of them posted a clip of it on YouTube.


“There is some gee-whizness to it,” said Doug Zell, a founder of Intelligentsia. “But hopefully the focus goes back to the cup of coffee.”


At the Stumptown Annex in Portland, the focus is entirely on the cup of coffee. As many as 35 different coffees are on the menu at the small cafe, and unlike the six other Stumptown locations, it doesn’t have a single espresso machine.


The Annex first brewed individual cups with cone filters, but now everything is made with a Clover. “You get more of the delicate and floral flavors, the subtle sweetness, the notes of perfume and citrus,” said Duane Sorensen, the owner of Stumptown. “The delicate, pretty, sexy flavors show in a Clover.”


“A Clover gives you greater control over the variables,” Mr. Zell said. “It’s a clean, crisp cup, and it tends to play better to coffees that are higher toned, brighter. Like the coffees of East Africa, or the more intricate coffees of the Americas.”


It is those brighter notes that excite serious coffee drinkers as they take an interest in single-origin, micro-lot and direct-trade beans — those from specific regions, even particular growers, that are prized for their distinctive characteristics.


“Steep coffee in water, and you’re going to taste gradations of flavor you’re simply not going to find in espresso,” said David Arnold, director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York. Though he is an espresso partisan, Mr. Arnold allows that brewing highlights the more subtle flavors of single-origin and micro-lot beans. “Especially if it’s roasted fresh,” he said. “The differences are astounding.”


Where the Clover is a workhorse, and its genius is in its programming, brewing coffee with a siphon bar is a fickle art and takes patience to master.


The secret is in how it’s stirred.


A siphon pot has two stacked glass globes, and works a little like a macchinetta, that stove-top gadget wrongly called an espresso maker by generations of graduate students. As water vapor forces water into the upper globe the coffee grounds are stirred by hand with a bamboo paddle. (In Japan, siphon coffee masters carve their own paddles to fit the shape of their palms.)


The goal is to create a deep whirlpool in no more than four turns without touching the glass. Posture is important. So is timing: siphon coffee has a brewing cycle of 45 to 90 seconds.


“The whirlpool, it messes with your mind,” said Mr. Freeman, the owner of the Blue Bottle. “There’s no way to rush it.”


Mr. Freeman said he practiced stirring plain water for months to develop muscle memory before he brewed his first cup of siphon coffee. Even now he starts every day with a five-minute warm-up. The evidence of good technique is in the sediment: the grounds should form a tight dome dotted with small bubbles, the sign of proper extraction.


Mr. Freeman keeps pictures of his domes on his iPhone. “It’s active, sucking out the air and foam,” he said about one of them. “I love the kinetic energy, the aliveness. That’s my best dome.”


Even if the siphon bar turns coffee making into a spectacle, the biggest difference is in the flavor it extracts from prized beans like Gololcha, a dry-processed Ethiopian with long jammy berry notes that turn floral as the coffee cools.


“It’s kaleidoscopic,” Mr. Freeman said. “It’s forcing you to pay attention to every sip, because the next one is going to be different. I feel like when we serve it we’ll have to ask people to just pour it in their cup and smell it for the first minute or so.”


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

The New York Times reports:

Petfinder.com reports:

Topping the charts as the No. 1 names for our country’s 260,000 adoptable pets on Petfinder.com in 2007 are Buddy for pooches and Smokey for felines, with traditional pet (and people) names following close behind.

Top 10 Dog Names
Buddy (712)
Max (552)
Sadie (445)
Jack (428)
Daisy (416)
Lucy (406)
Lady (385)
Charlie (382)
Rocky (369)
Duke (358)

Top 10 Cat Names
Smokey (291)
Lucy (284)

Angel (265)
Oreo (260)
Midnight (260)
Shadow (260)
Patches (256)
Princess (248)
Tigger (243)
Molly (239)

“Pet parents find special comfort and companionship in their pets that cannot compete with anything else,” said Betsy Saul, co-founder of Petfinder.com. “The name Buddy shows how dogs are truly ‘man’s best friend,’ while people also love tough, powerful names like Rocky and Duke.”

With names such as Smokey, Midnight, Angel and Princess, the top 10 cat names prove that animal lovers envision their felines as no-less-than-perfect, mysterious creatures. “People put their animals on pedestals,” Saul said. “They put as much thought into naming their pets as they would their children.”

While the most popular names for 2007 remain similar to years past, some individuals decide creativity is key when naming their animal companions. 2007’s Top 10 Most Unusual Pet Names leave some things to the imagination:

2007’s Top 10 Most Unusual Pet Names
Not Pants
Zhivago
Fat Alice
Barney Google
Cinderella Cookiedough
Ditto Dippin’ Dots
Fizzleboom
Miss booty-q
Bubba Big Foot
Partly Cloudy

from Mutts, a blog by John Woestendiek of The Baltimore Sun...

"One day the absurdity of the almost
universal human belief
in the slavery of other animals
will be palpable.
We shall then have discovered our souls
and become worthier of sharing this planet with them."

-- Martin Luther King Jr.

COLUMBIANA, Ala. - With excited barking filling the chilly morning air, about 30 dogs frolicked in outdoor pens, jumping, playing, and nipping at one another - blissfully unaware they were escaping almost certain death, thanks to newfound friends in New Hampshire....read more digg story

Check out the YouTube video above, or these still shots from the Shelby Humane Society and their Shelter Partners Program-- they're wonderful!

The Oregonian reports:

Mango survives another near-death experience, so her family takes action

Friday, January 18, 2008
KATY MULDOON The Oregonian Staff

Hard hat on, Mango's ready for anything 2008 throws at her.

The ruddy, 2-pound teacup poodle was featured in a story in The Oregonian last month after her doctor-owner saved her life with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. But just as she was recovering, the Lake Oswego pooch almost bit it again.

Mango's first near-death experience occurred on Thanksgiving. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time: in the path of a pot of stuffing accidentally knocked off the kitchen counter as

Dr. Joe Stapleton, an anesthesiologist and superior chef, prepared his family's holiday turkey.

Mango quit breathing and her heart stopped.

As his wife, Roxanne, drove to the Emergency Veterinary Clinic of Tualatin, Stapleton gave mouth-to-snout resuscitation and administered chest compressions. His quick work saved the fluffy, 1-year-old dog and made her famous:

After The Oregonian described the incident and other newspapers reprinted the story, the family heard from a Seattle TV station and producers for Jay Leno's show, interested in giving Mango a couple more licks with fame.

She almost didn't live to taste it.

On Dec. 28, Joe Stapleton got home from work and walked into the kitchen. Mango raced to greet him. Stopped short by a new gate the family had installed to keep their dogs out of the kitchen, Mango jumped.

Up, up, up she went before gravity took charge and Mango landed.

On her head.


She flopped onto her side, unconscious.

The Stapletons knew what to do. As Roxanne drove again toward the emergency veterinary clinic, Joe started CPR. About halfway to the clinic, Roxanne said, Mango came to, moaning.
She spent the night at the clinic on intravenous fluids, medicine and oxygen. By the next morning, the dog seemed to feel better and went home.

Still, she's suffered two big blows to the head -- blows that might have killed her -- and remains wobbly. Her veterinarian recommended that until she's steady on her paws, Mango should use caution.

Of course, it's tough to impress restraint on an ebullient poodle pup. So when none of her human companions are around, Mango spends her time in a soft-sided baby playpen. When the Stapletons are with her, they strap Mango into a new safety device that suits her poodle-licious style: a hot pink hard hat.


Katy Muldoon: 503-221-8526; katymuldoon@news.oregonian.com

NPR Reports:

Morning Edition, January 17, 2008 · Almost everyone has heard a story about someone famous who doesn't need much sleep: Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Thatcher, the list goes on and on.

In our fast-paced, global society, many people consider it a big plus to need as little sleep as possible. But almost every sleep researcher will tell you that most people need at least seven hours of sleep for biological and psychological health. So there is a glaring disconnect between what the messages in our culture say about sleep and the messages we receive from scientists. read more ....

January 13, 2008
The Moral Instinct
By STEVEN PINKER
Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all. read more ...

Morning Edition, January 15, 2008 · The hard-boiled private detective was born on the pages of pulp magazines, amid beautiful dames, waiting to be saved.

Although the genre has acquired a trashy reputation, the language used to tie together the villains, heroic detectives and helpless "frails" (women) that characterize pulp fiction is worth relishing, Otto Penzler, a mystery publisher and owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, tells Renee Montagne.

"I think it was really the beginning of a different kind of writing. The kind of writing in the world of literature that everyone had been familiar with was Henry James with long sentences, long paragraphs. And then Ernest Hemingway came along and Dashiell Hammett came along and they started to write short, quick, clipped sentences that didn't require lots and lots of description. The pulps provided the perfect springboard for that literary tone".
read more digg story

I went to see "Sweeney Todd" last week and the high point was after the movie when I headed for the men's room, passing a long line of women waiting to get into the women's, and when I got inside the men's, a tall woman in a long black coat emerged from a stall and walked out. She didn't run or skulk or sneak, she simply walked purposefully out of the men's toilet, having done what she needed to do, and didn't linger to hold a press conference or wash her hands. Read more ...

Janet Maslin, Michiko Kakutani and William Grimes pick their favorite books of 2007. I bet you can find a few for yourself.

read more digg story

After 10 years of reporting on the troubles of foreign countries, NPR correspondent Eric Weiner decided to go in search of the some of the happiest places on Earth. He chronicles his quest in The Geography of Bliss.

read more digg story

Nine years ago, His Majesty the King adopted a stray female dog, and named her Khun Tongdaeng. His care for the poor canine became a model for his subjects to follow.

read more digg story

(Bangkok) The coastal resort town of Hua Hin is taking stray dogs off the streets and offering them a home under a project initiated by His Majesty the King. Mayor Siripan Kamolpramote said the Hua Hin Dog Shelter at Wat Khao Itisukato is now home to 1,800 dogs under the care of two veterinarians, two animal husbandry workers and 15 workers.

read more digg story

I love the way men crack
open when their wives leave them,
their sheaths curling back like the split
shells of roasted chestnuts, exposing
the sweet creamy meat. They call you
and unburden their hearts the way a woman
takes off her jewels, the heavy
pendant earrings, the stiff lace gown and corset,and slips into a loose kimono.
It's like you've both had a couple shots
of really good scotch and snow is falling
in the cone of light under the street lamp—
large slow flakes that float down in the amber glow.

They tell you all the pain pressed into their flat chests,
their disappointed penises, their empty hands.
As they sift through the betrayals and regrets,
their shocked realization of how hard they tried,
they way they shouldered the yoke
with such stupid good faith—
they grow younger and younger. They cry
with the unselfconciousness of children.
When they hug you, they cling.
Like someone who's needed glasses for a long time—
and finally got them-they look around
just for the pleasure of it: the detail,
the sharp edges of what the world has to offer.

And when they fall in love again, it only gets better.
Their hearts are stuffed full as éclairs
and the custard oozes out at a touch.
They love her, they love you, they love everyone.
They drag out all the musty sorrows and joys
from the basement where they've been shoved
with mitts and coin collections. They tell you
things they've never told anyone.
Fresh from loving her, they come glowingl
ike souls slipping into the bodies
of babies about to be born.

Then a year goes by. Or two.
Like broken bones, they knit back together.
They grow like grass and bushes and trees
after a forest fire, covering the seared earth.
They landscape the whole thing, plant like mad
and spend every weekend watering and weeding.

by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love, Vol. 1. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002