I did make the cauliflower dish and it was YUMMY. Hope to try to start back up with wrting about at least one article a week. . .fingers crossed.

Obama Urges Faster Shift of Power in Egypt

Beyond Mubarak

Mushrooms Fill In the Blanks for the Meat-Free

Crumpets and Marmalade on Super Bowl Sunday

Once again, just read this. I am not at a point where I can express anything but hope. “‘the armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people.’ Addressing the throngs who took to the streets, he declared that the military understood ‘the legitimacy of your demands’ and ‘affirms that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody.’”

Just read it.  “We cannot be silent about what has happened. Silence is a crime. The blood of those who fell cannot be wasted.”

Two serious honorable mentions today:
Protest’s Old Guard Falls Behind the Young
Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List

U.S Approves Genetically Modified Alfalfa

Well this sucks. Take action with the Organic Trade Association. That is all I have got to say.

My first obituary to make the blog. I always read the obituaries. I find them fascinating and poetic. When I was a bookseller I had the book The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson as one of my staff picks, although it never sold nearly as well as I wanted it too.

The name Dennis Oppenheim didn’t ring any bells, but the photograph of his upside down church sculpture, titled “Device to Root Out Evil” really captured my attention. Other titles of his works, which as the obit noted were often “oddly poetic” included “A Station for Detaining and Blinding Radio-Active Horses” and “Blood Breathe.”

One of my favorite food writers at the New York Times, Mark Bittman, is ending his weekly column in the Food section after 13 years to move to the Op-Ed column to “advocate, essentially, for eaters’ rights” due to his “growing conviction that the meat-heavy American diet and our increasing dependence on prepared and processed foods is detrimental not only to our personal health but to that of the planet has had an impact on my life.” While I am excited about his reasons for moving to a more politically charged section of the paper, I will very much miss The Minimalist, a column that often inspired me to clip the recipe.

As part of his sign off, Bittman picked his top 25 recipes from The Minimalist, all of which look very tasty, but the one I am hoping to try soon is the SPAGHETTI WITH FRIED EGGS.

I have had radio on the brain lately. Between the recent outrage of the KUSF sale and my attendance to not one, but two events that were being taped for later release as podcasts (which is still radio-ish to me) I have been re-reminded of how much I love this medium.

This article was a little nugget of good news about the success of the Local Community Radio Act that was just signed by Obama. I especially enjoyed hearing about the executive director of a Louisiana station that said he once was a “corporate guy” who now believes that “bigger is not always better. . .smaller is better, because smaller means more local.”

As an former independent bookseller and alumni of the very first ABA Winter Institute (in 2006), this article on this year’s Institute and the ever precarious state of American independent booksellers was an obvious choice for the most interesting (to me) article of the day. I know that good friends of mine from Village Books in Bellingham, WA were at this year’s Institute, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were booksellers from The Booksmith, another former employer.

The article was a hodgepodge of quotes from various booksellers on the current state of the industry. One point that was made was that among book buyers who shop online, the only two choices are “Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com” and independent booksellers have to work extra hard to make shoppers aware of their online shops. If you are one of those shoppers that wants to shop local and independent and online, then I would recommend indiebound.org, the ABA’s web portal for finding web storefronts for bookstores in your own neighborhood. It isn’t a perfect interface, but it does the job most of the time.

Micheal Willrich is right, we need to change the national conversation about vaccination. I first starting hearing about the vaccine issue in 2008 via the This American Life episode “Ruining it for the Rest of Us.” While I had been vaguely aware of the issue before, since I was past vaccine age and had no children myself, it was not something that I had to deal with in my own life. Then when I moved to California and there was a massive whooping cough outbreak due to the lack of vaccinated kids it became much more real to me.

When people don’t get the basic vaccines that are needed it puts the weakest members of our population at risk. People in chemotherapy, the elderly, and the very young. Now that the much touted rigged study that associated vaccines with has been firmly debunked we need to move on to the task of not vilifying and calling stupid those who have resisted vaccination, but using education and respectful discourse to spread knowledge. Yes, vaccines are scary. Yes, some of them may not be necessary. But some of them most definitely are.