All Things Considered, March 29, 2009 · Beware on your next trip to the bookstore — zombies have invaded a classic. The living dead have come to Longbourn, the land of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Author — make that co-author — Seth Grahame-Smith altered Jane Austen's original text ever so slightly to accommodate brand new scenes of the Bennet girls forming "The Pentagram of Death" and taking on hordes of the undead, along with a ninja or two.

Grahame-Smith talks to Jacki Lyden about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.




Excerpt: 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies'

by Seth Grahame-Smith

As Mr. Darcy walked off, Elizabeth felt her blood turn cold. She had never in her life been so insulted. The warrior code demanded she avenge her honour. Elizabeth reached down to her ankle, taking care not to draw attention. There, her hand met the dagger concealed beneath her dress. She meant to follow this proud Mr. Darcy outside and open his throat.

But no sooner had she grabbed the handle of her weapon than a chorus of screams filled the assembly hall, immediately joined by the shattering of window panes. Unmentionables poured in, their movements clumsy yet swift; their burial clothing in a range of untidiness. Some wore gowns so tattered as to render them scandalous; other wore suits so filthy that one would assume they were assembled from little more than dirt and dried blood. Their flesh was in varying degrees of putrefaction; the freshly stricken were slightly green and pliant, whereas the longer dead were grey and brittle – their eyes and tongues long since turned to dust, and their lips pulled back into everlasting skeletal smiles.

A few of the guests, who had the misfortune of being too near the windows, were seized and feasted on at once. When Elizabeth stood, she saw Mrs. Long struggle to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut, and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance — Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
by Seth Grahame-Smith
Paperback, 320 pages
Quirk Books
List Price $12.95

  MSNBC.com

Willie repeatedly yelled ‘Mama, baby’ and flapped wings to alert babysitter
The Associated Press
updated 8:07 a.m. CT, Tues., March. 24, 2009

DENVER - A parrot whose cries of alarm alerted his owner when a little girl choked on her breakfast has been honored as a hero.


Willie, a Quaker parrot, has been given the local Red Cross chapter's Animal Lifesaver Award.

In November, Willie's owner, Megan Howard, was baby-sitting for a toddler. Howard left the room and the little girl, Hannah, started to choke on her breakfast.

Willie repeatedly yelled "Mama, baby" and flapped his wings, and Howard returned in time to find the girl already turning blue.

Howard saved Hannah by performing the Heimlich maneuver but said Willie "is the real hero."

"The part where she turned blue is always when my heart drops no matter how many times I've heard it," Hannah's mother, Samantha Kuusk, told KCNC-TV. "My heart drops in my stomach and I get all teary eyed."

Willie got his award during a "Breakfast of Champions" event Friday attended by Gov. Bill Ritter and Mayor John Hickenlooper.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

I don’t think I’ve read a productivity blog yet that didn’t suggest kicking the coffee habit. I’ve kicked many bad habits in the last few years, something that seemed impossibly hard at first—such as dumping dairy—but coffee is one thing that I never succeeded with. That’s probably because I never really wanted to.

While it truly is best that you cut caffeine out of your diet or curtail your consumption, for many of us it’s the one thing we’ll hold onto even when making other drastic changes in our lives. Never fear—there are still many benefits to drinking coffee, and I’ll show you how to defend your manic addiction to the world when confronted by an overzealous stampede of crusading lifehackistas!

A Reduced Risk of Disease

Have you seen all those tea advertisements that claim it’s the best source of antioxidants? Apparently, coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet. Tea comes second. Of course, that’s a statistic measured on the level of consumption rather than the quality of the source.

Antioxidants prevent and slow disease and oxidative damage. When the body uses oxygen, the process creates harmful by-products that antioxidants destroy. This reduces the risk of disease and promotes optimal health.

This is one of the few benefits of coffee not derived from its caffeine content, so if you want to avoid high blood pressure or a heart attack, you can drink decaf without losing any health points—if you have a stomach strong enough to keep it down.

Counter-defense: fruits and vegetables are an even denser source of antioxidants.

Increased Mental Performance

This is why we start drinking coffee in the first place, right? I started binge drinking coffee in order to stay up all night working on various projects, though it didn’t take long for coffee consumption to become a hobby in its own right.

Drinking coffee improves your concentration, alertness and staves off a tired mind. For me, work comes to a halt when I’m missing any of the above, especially concentration or alertness. Ten or twenty minutes after a cup of coffee, I can be back to work for a few more hours.

Apparently coffee improves your short term memory, which indicates that I’m not drinking nearly enough of it. Did I mention that coffee improves your short term memory?

Counter-defense: eating a diet low in meat and dairy and high in vegetables and fruit will provide increased mental performance and higher energy on a more consistent basis.

Make Shift Work Slightly More Tolerable

Shift work forces the body into strange sleeping patterns, or more accurately, a lack of a sleeping pattern. Your body relies on patterns to tune and operate the whole circadian process which tells you when you’re in need of sleep or when it’s time to be awake. Lacking a solid pattern means you’ll be pumping melatonin or adrenaline through your body at very strange times.

I know someone who took their car through a street sign (and escaped without getting caught) because of the way shift work destroys your sleeping patterns, so for these workers caffeine is not as much of a luxury - it becomes a necessary part of safely performing the work and getting there and back. Drink 200mg (two espressos) to keep yourself attentive on the job for a period of five or six hours. If you’ve got a killer twelve hour shift, throw back a few more halfway through.

Drinking 400mg of caffeine in one night isn’t the healthiest thing you could be doing, but neither is shift work.

Counter-defense: become a freelancer!

Improve Endurance and Stamina in Physical Activities

It is well known that coffee improves endurance and stamina in physical activities, especially sports. The last time I played any team sport, I could count my age on two hands. Nevertheless, a cup of coffee before the morning run makes it go that much faster and easier.

If you’re starting an exercise routine (or returning to one) and having trouble with the adaption, drinking a cup of coffee before starting may make it easy enough to get over the hump and make it a habit. If all you need is an adaptation tool you can stop drinking it once you can get through each session on your own.

Counter-defense: with stamina and endurance training, you don’t need a cup of coffee to enable your body - you can apply these traits at any time.

Improve Your Ability to Socialize

A few cups of coffee can really help the introvert or cynic to come out of the shell and enjoy social situations. Coffee houses first formed in the Middle East hundreds of years ago and became popular as social locations, a tradition that has continued to this day. It’s got to do with not only the great atmosphere, aroma and architecture of most coffee houses, but of course, the effects of caffeine kicking your mind into gear and boosting your mood.

There is evidence to show that coffee doesn’t boost your mood so much as reduce stress by eliminating the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is responsible for the frazzled, distressed feeling brought on by day-to-day stress.

This one works well for me—especially for making visits to the wife’s family much more bearable!

Counter-defense: get a life, make some friends!

Truly, there is no substitute for replacing a caffeine dependency with the optimal diet for your body and lifestyle. Drinking too much coffee can wreak havoc on your system, especially your sleep patterns and blood pressure.

The latest research shows that drinking 200mg of caffeine or more a day can double the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women. If you’re pregnant, watch your intake, or better yet, just stop consuming caffeine altogether.

That aside, coffee drinking has a far worse reputation than it deserves; the benefits are real, and in moderation, it’s actually a good idea to get some coffee in your system. Go ahead. Have a cup—you know you want to!

By Garrison Keillor
March 10, 2009

In hard times a man must consider new options, and right now I'm thinking about going on disability. I read in the Washington Post about the wonderful deals that police in Montgomery County, Md., negotiated for themselves way back when, whereby after a few years on the force if you twist your back reaching for a jelly doughnut and are no longer able to dash down dark alleys and leap picket fences while firing your revolver with deadly accuracy, you apply for disability and a committee of gentlemen who report to nobody whomsoever and whose deliberations are highly confidential award you $50,000 per year tax-free. And then, though disabled, you pass the physical and are hired as a security guard at John F. Kennedy High School, named for the man who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but on the other hand don't turn it down when it's easily available," and all this at a time when they are cutting music and art out of the schools and children must start classes at 7 a.m. due to a shortage of buses.

Meanwhile, in and around Long Island, everyone who's been working on the railroad is collecting disability for paper cuts, motion sickness, acid reflux and halitosis.

The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has done zilch to secure disability protection for writers. In my line of work, disability comes down to two things: memory loss and something else, I forget what. You lose the vocabulary retrieval skills you had when you were 30 and interesting words such as "parietal lobe" and "sedimentary rocks" flocked to your brain, and now you sit inert at the laptop for a number of horrendous minutes trying to remember the word for the thing that if you picked it up and dropped it on your foot it would be very, very bad — anvil! This is a disability, and a writer should be able to receive payments, and also for the other thing, whatever it is.

When it comes to disability pensions, you ought to include congressmen, especially these remarkable Republicans who, in the midst of a serious banking crisis, are recycling Herbert Hoover and decrying socialism and paying homage to a fat sweaty guy living alone with his cat in a five-mansion compound in West Palm Beach. At the moment, he seems to be steering the Republican Party like it's his personal power boat and Mitch McConnell is the girl in the bikini on water skis.

"I am at the top of the mountain of what I do. Everybody underneath it wants what I've got," Rush said on his show the other day. "As such, they'll do what they can to take me down or to criticize me or what have you. It is beneath my dignity to be critical of those beneath me. It's just a waste of time."

For similar delusional megalomania, you have to go back to the rock stars of yesteryear, but they were 30 or so, and Rush is somewhat north of there. You have to wonder if the man doesn't need to get out of the compound more and converse with real people and not just talk to his cat. Has he ever sat at a bar and talked to other men over a beer? One of the problems with OxyContin is that it's such a lonely drug: Guys don't get together to toss back a few pills and tell jokes, so an Oxhead like Rush is missing the social skills that one might develop over beer and bourbon. At the bar, a man can rant and rave about Obama and hope he will fail, but when he stops for breath, he has to listen to someone else point out that we are in an economic crisis and the country seems to want a change of course.

But delusion is no disability in broadcasting, my friends. Au contraire, it is the very lifeblood of the trade, and so there will be no pension check for the fat man. But what about me? It's almost spring and a big winter storm is about to sweep across the tundra and here I sit trying to bring this piece of writing to a — what is the word for it? I think it starts with C. I think it's a C-word. Conniptions. Connecticut. Cougars. The U.S. Coast Guard. Sorry — I am no longer able to function as a columnist and I respectfully request that I be compensated for it.

Dog Daycare and Dog Boarding in south florida that is taken to a new level of animal love and care.

Deerfield Beach, FL, March 11, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Despite Sluggish Economy, Passionate Family of Dog-Lovers Create a Unique Canine Campus where pampered pooches flock for Doggie Daycare, Boarding and Training.

View the video blogs at www.dogstownuniversity.com to get the real picture.

What do you get when passionate dog lovers design a “home away from home” for dogs? An over-the-top doggie daycare and boarding service that combines state-of-the art high technology with the warm, personal nurturing only a “real dog person” could provide.

Mother and son Iris and Adam Feingold were so attached to their family pets they never found a boarding facility that met their stringent requirements. This year they finally decided to create their own.

“What makes Dogstown University so different from your typical daycare and boarding business is us,” explains Iris. “We created the ideal environment we knew our own dogs would love. Then we built it large enough to invite lots of other canine friends.”

“If your dog has a weight problem, we’ll provide a personal exercise routine on the treadmill,” says Adam. “Once they learn the art of treadmill walking, they really enjoy it. And I’m at their side every minute.”

Dogs with behavior problems find themselves learning to get along with the group, or they miss out on treats and activities. Behavior modification skills go a long way toward molding more cooperative personalities.

The campus took close to a year to design and build, based on the Feingold’s vision. “Even the most cautious and protective “parents,” who are reluctant to leave their pets anywhere but at home, will feel confident about DTU”, she adds. “We offer unique play group games, all-day activities and in-house training programs - all overseen by our highly capable, canine instructors.”

Mother and son explain that everyone on the DTU faculty is an enthusiastic dog lover and owner, which they say assures that every canine student is treated “like our own.” “That’s something only true dog-people can understand,” says Adam.

The Feingolds say DTU is based on the concept that dogs love to learn as well as play, so every experience on campus is both fun and educational. The instructors interact and play with the “students,” teaching social skills that will please the dogs and their “parents.”

Owners can see all the fun for themselves via the multi-camera 24-hour live streaming doggie cam. “We want you to leave with peace of mind, knowing this will be a fun and positive learning experience for your beloved pet,” adds Iris.

Once a new pet is properly tested and introduced to the others, the fun and games begin. The student, who is always grouped according to size, can enjoy the climate-controlled play areas or lounge pool-side on the custom-built doggie deck. They can test their skills on agility equipment or play a friendly game of flyball. Students also participate in supervised group play on a specially designed astro-turf for pets where ramps, tunnels and bridges create stimulation and athletic challenges.

Pets can also take advantage of an optional, carefully supervised physical education class designed to relieve stress or enhance a weight-loss program.

Scenic hand-painted murals transform the indoor, climate-controlled play rooms into lush and lovely dog-park settings. Flat screen TVs tuned to Animal Planet and soothing music add to the total doggie environment.

The 7500 square feet of indoor and outdoor classrooms are created to maximize stimulation during playtime and peaceful relaxation when it's time for a nap.

Canine daycare guests come away with a daily personal “Report Card” noting activity participation as well as behavior and socializing progress.

Felines are also welcome at DTU, where they enjoy a separate room with spacious cat condos and a large fish tank for viewing stimulation.

Behind-the-scenes technology makes the new facility even more attractive. A state-of-the-art air purification system keeps dog odors at bay while seamless impact resistant floors maximize safety and sanitation.

When asked whether the dogs are ever left alone, the Feingolds answer with a resounding No! “One of us is always there, even sleeping on-site all night,” says Adam. “That means you can sleep at night knowing your pet is getting the best care possible every day they are our guests.”

Reasonable full and half-day rates and special packages for frequent visits (some dogs spend three or four days a week in daycare while their owners are at work) make DTU affordable for short or long-term visits by day or over night.

Dogstown University serves all of South Florida and is located on South Powerline Road close to the Sample Road exit on the Turnpike in Deerfield Beach . Both Iris and Adam welcome visits to check out the facilities. For more information, visit www.dogstownuniversity.com or call 954 422-5764.

Ask about some wonderful photos – or come take them yourself!

Rosalind Sedacca: talk2roz@bellsouth.net
561 742-3537

-- And seriously, the economy could be worse verse. That's what Planet Money editor Jonathan Kern tells us, in his villanelle for the economic crisis.

Villanelle for Uncertain Times

Though banks are suffering a lack of liquidity
And teeter on the edge of nationalization,
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

Though Congress is demanding more rapidity
And tugs the strings behind the Administration,
Keep at bay financial rigidity.

The credit markets all crave liquidity
And Wall Streeters contemplate defenestration.
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

While Keynsians say the budget reeks of tepidity
And scorn what's left of privatization,
Keep at bay financial rigidity.

Zealots always demand philosophical solidity.
Hasty action always trumps contemplation.
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

Human nature involves some cupidity.
Self interest is the market's salvation.
Keep at bay financial rigidity.
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

-- Jonathan Kern

Look, the economy is bad. It's even very bad. But if you gaze across the span of history, says economist Ken Rogoff of Harvard, this particular crisis starts to seem not so unusual after all. Rogoff talks about the ideas behind his paper, "This Time Is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises."

Click to read it ...