BY MICHAEL J. WEINGARTH

- - - -

K-K-K-K-K-KARENNNNNNNNN,

This SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY, I'd like you to have all your stuff moved OUT OUT OUT of MY MY MY APARTMENT APARTMENT APARTMENT, because I'm b-b-b-b-b-breaking up with YOU YOU YOU!!! I don't know what to say, really. I feel b-b-b-b-bad about all this, but it's like we're just not c-c-c-c-c-c-communicating like we used to.

Let's just be m-m-m-m-mature about this and try to remain friends. We should get coffee sometime, in case one of us needs some CLOSURE CLOSURE CLOSURE. I know no one PLANS PLANS PLANS for things to turn out this WAY WAY WAY.

Call me if you think this is a MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE.

Sorry,
Keith

by Linda Holmes

I learned something new while researching the new Pussycat Dolls version of "Jai Ho," the Oscar-winning song from Slumdog Millionaire.

It turns out that everybody and their three-year-old is posting YouTube videos of themselves dancing to "Jai Ho." Up there at the top is an unnamed small child getting his groove on, and believe me, there's much more.

Here's "Tyler," whose dance is more minimalist, and who -- hilariously -- covers up a mistake with a yawn:

Mick and Rachel want you to know it doesn't take much floor space to do the "Jai Ho" dance:

Computer-aged Brad Pitt in 'Benjamin Button'

You Mustn't Read This: Linda didn't much like Benjamin Button, but there are those who argue the movie's still better than the book

By Linton Weeks

The literati can't stand to hear it, but sometimes a movie is better than the book it's based on. Even when the book is pretty good: Jaws comes to mind. And, arguably, Forrest Gump.

This year theaters are teeming with movies based on books. And some reviewers who've had a look at both are saying that the movies are better.

Take The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The tale, about a man who ages in reverse, is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Having seen the movie and read the story," writes Fritz Lanham in the Houston Chronicle, "I'd say there's no comparison. As a book guy it pains me to admit it, but the movie is better. A lot better."

The film critic for the Montreal Gazette, meanwhile, avers that the movie Slumdog Millionaire is better than the Vikas Swarup book it's based on.

Read more ...

Andrew Delbanco, director of American studies at Columbia.

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 24, 2009

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.


Anthony T. Kronman in his office at Yale.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Read more...

Adam Allington, KWMU ST. LOUIS, MO (2009-02-25)

The state Department of Agriculture seized over 200 dogs from an unlicensed breeder in southwest Missouri on Wednesday.

It case marks the third incident involving Missouri puppy mills in two weeks.

The owner of the River Valley Kennel in Ozark County is alleged to have set fire to the facility after officials contacted him about not having a breeder's license.

Matt Rold of the Missouri Department of Agriculture says most of the dogs were English Springer Spaniels and German Shorthair Pointers.

"The dogs that are currently en route to the central Missouri Humane Society, some of them will go to English Springer Rescue of America as well as Mutts and stuff down toward the St. Louis area," says Rold.

The Humane Society of Missouri recently rescued more than 100 Yorkshire Terriers from a breeder in Greene County, and six days later seized 208 dogs, a domestic cat and a Bengal tiger from a facility in Seneca, Missouri.

Italian cops were called to catch a poodle that bit off the nose of it's female owner and then ran into the garden with its new snack.

Loredana Romano, 34, from Forli in northern Italy said. "My little Vale often climbed into bed with me, I don't know why she suddenly bit off my nose."

Cops chased the poodle and managed to prize the well chewed morsel from the dog's  mouth - which was reattached in hospital.

The woman has already forgiven her dog but says it will not be allowed to sleep in her bed again.

Austrian Times

By Garrison Keillor
February 3, 2009

Ten a.m. A phone call from my daughter's school, and instantly the father's mind goes to Dark Foreboding, but no — this is her teacher calling to say that the child scored 96 on the spelling test. The child's instant reward is the phone call home and the words of praise. She sits at her desk pretending not to listen, basking in the acclaim. Well done.

Having begotten a good speller is no small matter to a writer. Writing is an act of paying attention, and if you don't care about the difference between "their" and "there" or "needle" and "noodle," then I am sorry for you.

The teacher's praise of my child is a large moment in the day. I live with fear as any parent does. I know people who've gone through catastrophes — schizophrenia, the suicide of a child — the skin shrivels at the words, and so the life of a parent is one of constant wordless prayer. Today, my child scored 96 on spelling. A good day.

Read the rest of the article here:

by Linda Holmes

I have a long history with romantic movies of all kinds. Goopy musicals, kicky-girl rom-coms, masterpieces of banter -- you name it, and I've probably fallen for it at one time or another. Unfortunately, the older one gets, the more some of these fall apart, and the more others don't work at all. I give you five (of many) Un-Romances. Be warned: all descriptions contain spoilers.

1. Jerry Maguire

Dec. 21, 2008(CBS) Can you imagine an orphanage that's a happy place? 60 Minutes couldn't, but then we found one. The kids don't arrive here smiling. Like orphans all over the world, they've been abandoned. They're hungry, sad and desperate. But after a few years, they're healthy, well-fed and happy.

As correspondent Bob Simon reports, this orphanage is for elephants, located outside Nairobi, Kenya. They've been orphaned because their parents - their mothers mainly - have died, or more likely, been killed in the bush.

Poachers kill large elephants for their ivory. A young elephant can only survive a day or two without milk. So, the orphanage's first job is to find the orphans, fly them to the orphanage, and, before anything else, feed them.

The principal of the orphanage, head mistress, head nurse and CEO, is Dame Daphne Sheldrick. She founded the place and has been working with elephants for 50 years.

"This is little Saguta. This is the one that was in a coma," she told Simon. "When she arrived, was on a drip for 24 hours. We never thought she'd be alive in the morning. So she's our little miracle, this one."

But Daphne's problem is that she is caring for too many miracles: poachers are killing more and more elephants for their tusks, and in the process creating more and more orphans.

There are a record number of orphans at the orphanage right now because Daphne says the sale of ivory has been legalized for the first time in ten years. A few African countries have been given the right to sell their stockpiles - more than 100 tons of tusks to China and Japan - and conservationists point out that this is yet another blow to the elephants.

Asked if she sees any correlation between the decision to auction off the ivory and the number of orphans, Daphne said, "We do. Every time ivory is auctioned legally, there's a rise in poaching. And we also see the correlation in the price that's paid to the poacher for illegal ivory."

And that price has gone up. "It's gone from 300 shillings a kilo to 5,000," she explained.

That's about $1,000 a tusk here in Kenya, where the sale of any ivory is still prohibited. Yet the number of elephants killed by poachers this year has increased by 45 percent.

Daphne says it's a scary, frightening rise.

Poachers were behind the death of one elephant whose trunk was caught in one of their snares and she had no way of feeding herself or her six-week-old baby boy. He just couldn't accept the fact that his mother was dead, so he continued trying to suckle. Eventually the keepers got him to drink their milk. They called him Shimba. He was in such bad shape that nobody thought he would survive.

But then Shimba was brought to the orphanage and things started going his way. He's 27 months old now, and he's in very good shape. He's very strong, very muscular, and his tusks are beginning to grow. He never stops eating.

In fact, that is the first love of every one of Dame Daphne's orphans - eating.

The institution has a dining area and that's not all: as 60 Minutes found out when we first dropped by three years ago, it has everything you'd want in an orphanage. There are dormitories - each orphan has a private room. There is also a communal bath and a playground. The regimen at the orphanage is anything but Dickensian. Unlike Oliver Twist, when one of these orphans asks for more, that's what he gets - more.

Ultimately, Daphne finds elephants more sympathetic than people.

Asked what the most extraordinary things is she has learned about elephants, she told Simon, "Their tremendous capacity for caring is, I think, perhaps the most amazing thing about them, even at a very, very young age. Their sort of forgiveness, unselfishness. So you know, I often say as I think I've said before, they have all the best attributes of us humans and not very many of the bad."

Just about the best people you've ever met are the gentle men who work at the orphanage. Keepers, they're called, and they have extraordinary jobs. There's one keeper per elephant. He'll spend 24 hours a day with his charge, seven days a week. A keeper feeds his elephant every three hours, day and night, just like mom would. He keeps his elephant warm, not like mom would, but with a blanket. And when it's sleep time, he beds down right next to his elephant. If he leaves, if ever so briefly, the baby wakes up and broadcasts his displeasure.

The keepers are rotated now and then so that no elephant gets too terribly attached to any one of them. At dawn, the elephants are taken from their dorms out to the bush. They hang out for awhile, play some games; soccer is a favorite.

They days are pretty much the same there, but on Fridays the orphanage becomes a spa, when the keepers give the elephants a coconut oil massage.

"We can't do exactly what the mother can do but we can do something close to that," explained Edwin Lusichi, the head of the keepers. He is the chief elephant man.

"This one here is Lualeni. Lualeni is the oldest female we have, 16 months as well. The tiny one here is Makena," he told Simon. "Always want to be close with Lualeni."

"Yes. Well, they always want to be close to each other and to you, don't they? I'm afraid this interview with Edwin is getting rudely interrupted," Simon remarked.

"Yes," Lusichi replied.

"But there's really not that much to do. They may be little, they may be orphans, but trust me... they're not as little as they look. In fact, I feel like I'm in an elephant sandwich," Simon commented, standing between two elephants.

Perhaps the problem was Simon and the elephants had not been properly introduced. There's a protocol to meeting an elephant: he will offer up his trunk and he expects you to blow in it. That way, he will remember your scent forever. You will never be strangers again.

The orphanage gets distress calls from all over Kenya, from all over East Africa, that a baby elephant is on his own, often because his mother has been killed by a poacher. It is then a matter of great urgency. An orphaned elephant can only survive a few days without its mother. The baby elephant is loaded on to a plane and flown back to Daphne Sheldrick's orphanage, where he'll stay until he's strong enough to go back into the bush.

Dame Daphne has been running the orphanage for almost 30 years. She was born and raised in Kenya, and married David Sheldrick, Africa's leading crusader against poaching. When he died in 1977, she founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Daphne saw her mission as saving as many elephants as possible. But she has never permitted herself too much hope. That's because she loses half the elephants that arrive at the orphanage - some from pneumonia, some from trauma. One of the elephants probably witnessed its mother's death and remembers everything.

That's the double-edged sword of having the memory of an elephant: They never forget. "You know, he's still grieving for his elephant family, he's in shock. He's distressed," she explained.

She also said a baby elephant can actually die of grief. "They're terribly, terribly fragile. You've got to try and turn the psyche around, duplicating what that elephant would have had in an elephant family. Touching them, talking to them gently."

"In other words, love?" Simon asked.

"Tender loving care. TLC, and a lot of it," she replied.

Daphne and the keepers may run this place officially, but it's the elephants who are really in charge. For example, when a new keeper is hired, he's on probation for three months. Then, if the elephants like him, he's got a job. If not, he's out.

Asked what he tries to teach one of the elephants, head keeper Edward Lusichi said, "Well, we have to teach them not to be naughty and not to push around with the others. To obey one another, just like you have to do with children, your own children, to respect the others."

And the keepers teach the elephants how to be elephants. There are wild elephant things these kids don't know how to do, since their mother wasn't around to teach them. It's things like covering themselves in dust to prevent sunburn; the keepers do it with shovels until the elephants pick it up themselves.

The orphanage has an infirmary and the doctor had a call to make when Simon visited. One of the elephants was not doing well at all. He had been on antibiotics for two days but could barely breathe.

The elephant's room looked like an intensive care unit. The doctor, Daphne and the keepers didn't leave him for a minute. They did everything they could, but it wasn't enough. By dawn, he was dead.

"How do you manage going through this all the time?" Simon asked.

"Well, you don't have much option, do you? There's another one to look after, and then another one coming, and, you know, you just have to turn the page," Daphne replied.

"And you get attached after one..." Simon commented.

"But I'm not very good at it," she admitted.

"And you're not going to get any better, are you?" Simon asked.

"No, not after 50 years," Daphne replied.

But when she goes out to the other orphans who are doing so well, Daphne did say it brings joy to her life.

It's actually a pretty lush life for these elephants at the orphanage, but it's nothing like a wild elephant. It's not their destiny. So like any good school, this place prepares its students to leave, to get ready for life in the real world, to go back to the wild from whence they came.

Ten years ago, one young female elephant left Daphne's orphanage to go live in the wild. Her name is Mpenzi, and a couple of years ago she became pregnant and decided to go off on her own to give birth, without the protection of her extended family. That was a mistake. Before the sun could set, Mpenzi and her baby were surrounded by a pride of 16 lions.

Keeper Joseph Sauni was called to the scene and captured the events on his still camera. "Mpenzi was standing there, trying to scare off lions with her trunk. But when they came, she tried to push them on this side. Others came from the back. So, she could not do anything," he recalled.

Sauni said Mpenzi didn't have a chance. Asked what was going through his mind while this was happening, he told Simon, "That was so sad. Everybody was crying."

And there was nothing they could do to save the baby. It was a brutal lesson for Mpenzi. Nature has its own laws, and they are a long way from the sheltered world of the orphanage. But this story has a happy ending: just days before 60 Minutes arrived, Mpenzi gave birth to another little girl. The keepers have all come out to cheer her on. They named her A Sante, which in Swahili means, "thank you."

Mpenzi has learned her lesson. This time she makes sure her bundle of joy is surrounded by other members of the family. They help her up when she falls down and rescue her when she tumbles into a mud hole.

So for the moment A Sante will be safe, at least until she grows tusks.





Produced by Michael Gavshon
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Garrison Keillor
Inner Tranquility and Unread Books
January 27, 2009

It is God that has made us and not we ourselves, we are his people and the sheep of his pasture, and George W. Bush is no longer the top sheep. Altogether a cause for rejoicing as we forge ahead in the struggle to achieve inner tranquility, which for me the other morning included misplaced glasses, a madcap dash to the airport, and en route in the taxi a call from my wife saying, "You forgot your billfold." One more sheep with a thorn in his hoof.

Tranquility. A woman you barely know comes to your home with a sheaf of papers and explains what the documents are about and you don't understand a word and the papers are a blur of fine print but you sign them. For all you know, she could take them to the bank, get a hundred grand in fifties, jump in the Jaguar and be in Toronto by midnight. You trust not. You hope not.

Paranoia belongs to the fringe right and left, not to genteel burghers like you and me. We sit under our fig tree and enjoy our cheeseburger without brooding too much about toxic chemicals used by meatpackers or thought-control drugs injected into the beef. Every morning in the newspaper, some columnist cries out in alarm that yet one more disaster is creeping toward us like a cougar about to spring and chew our throats, and we read a few paragraphs and turn the page and warm up another Danish.

We are a hopeful people. I have at home a traveler's phrasebook that tells you how to say you have a toothache in French (mal de dents), German (Zahnschmerzen), Italian (mal di denti) or Spanish (dolor de muelas), which, of all my investments, was the most hopeful and most foolish. I bought it in the airport years ago, imagining that on the flight over the Atlantic, I'd pick up an active vocabulary of maybe four hundred words or so, and be able to converse with cabdrivers and hotel clerks about the weather or the arrival of trains or location of suitcases, and so forth. I had a couple of old uncles who got along with small active vocabularies, things like, "OK then," or, "Oh for goodness sake," or, "Well, you never know" — and I thought I could do the same in other languages.

The little book stayed in my suitcase. Cabdrivers in Berlin had no need of conversation with me, and I never experienced a Zahnschmerzen or mal de dents over there, and if I had, the dentist surely would've known the word "toothache." My attempt to say "mal de dents" might actually have made the French think I had a sharp pain in my left ventricle and they would've thrown me down and torn my shirt open and slapped the paddles on my chest and there I'd be with a toothache and also convulsing helplessly on the Rue de Tutti and regretting my attempt at international understanding. I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time.

The second most unused book, I suppose, is the Holy Bible, a perennial best-seller thanks to our good intentions to attend to the Word and divine the Lord's Will, which one does for a few days until you realize that you already know the Lord's Will and you would prefer not to.

After that come diet books, which are bought in vast number and perused and put away. Twenty bucks for nothing, when the secret of dieting is simply: "Eat when you're hungry." And then the spiritual books about achieving inner tranquility and "How to Achieve Orgasm in 30 Days or Less" and inspiring books of all sorts.

We are a hopeful people.

One ponders that as we see the fresh faces in Washington replace the bullheads who've been bottom-feeding for eight painful years, and one is full of hope that the replacements will do the right thing and serve the common good, but then we are the same people who planned to converse in French about toothaches, and that didn't happen either.

Meanwhile we have this classy family in the White House, overachievers but gracious about it, mischievous kids and a smart man and a woman who sometimes tosses him glances that say, "Oh just get over yourself." What their presence says about the decency and generosity of this country is huge, friends, just huge. Rejoice, America. Je suis Americain. Ich bin ein Amerikaner.