As a person whose sanity requires frequent backyard forays to break up my time in front of the computer --to pull weeds, fill the birdbath, divide the hosta, or just breathe and take note of what's new outside-- I can appreciate Hannah Holmes' interest in the goings on in her own yard in Portland, Maine. I'm grateful, and a bit envious, that she committed to spending an entire year studying and consulting with experts about every aspect of the critters, flora, waterways, and even the dirt in her backyard and then writing about what she found there (but I wish there was a website to go with the book!) Her book, Suburban Safari, is fun to read, enormously descriptive, and inspiring to those of us who've been growing a Freedom Lawn for years but never knew it had a name, and wondering where the squirrels go in winter. here. A biography of her, by her publisher, Bloomsbury USA, can be found here.]]> Sally Goodrich was rightly chosen as ABC's Person of the Week in August 2005. For the past four years, since her son was killed in one of the airplanes that struck the World Trade Center towers, she has been raising money to build and run a school for girls in Surkh Abat, Afghanistan. Her response is a welcome contrast to the squabbling over money that some other victims' families appear to be consumed with, and to the blind view that violence is the best or only possible response to 9/11. In my view, Sally Goodrich is a person who was able to look at the root causes of the problems that lay behind her son's death and figure out something that she as an individual could do to mitigate those problems. I admire her for choosing a response which both blesses her and honors her son. As she says, "As time went on I realized that I had, in fact, this opportunity to use my life to continue his." here.]]> I first encountered Daniel Bergner's writing in his book, In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a description of the extremely intense and brutal conflict in Sierra Leone in the 1990's. Although he never says how long he actually spent in the country, it was long enough for Bergner to get to know and provide vivid descriptions of several people he met during the conflict: the painfully tragic victims, some of the perpetrators, an American missionary family who raised their children in Sierra Leone, an oddly philanthropic mercenary, child soldiers, a Nigerian UN peacekeeper. I find his writing captivating and honest, especially as he pondered what could possibly have caused Sierra Leoneans to take up machetes against their own countrymen, when reasons given for other conflicts in the area -- tribalism (Rwanda), nasty vestiges of colonialism (Congo), race and religion (Nigeria, Sudan) -- are not enough to explain the extreme brutality. I admire Daniel Bergner for being willing to live in and make realistic to outsiders a place as incomprehensible and dangerous as Sierra Leone. (His book is also one of the few sources on Sierra Leone which mentions the crucial role of the British in saving the UN peacekeepers and bringing an end to the conflict, which might otherwise go unnoticed.) More recently, Bergner wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine (14 Aug 2005) which looked at the growing use of private security forces (currently estimated at 25,0000) in Iraq, and at individual and alarming aspects of that presence, such as its lack of oversight and the lack of information supplied to the public about what this presence (outlawed by the Geneva Convention) is costing American taxpayers. Amazon. Bergner won the Lettre Ulysses award for Magic Soldiers. But not everyone admires this book as I did, including the author of this document (Books, pg 3). Comments on the issues raised in Bergner's New York Times article include these by John Hanchette.]]> Mike Gousie is a dork. No matter in what circumstance I saw him, he was an incredible geek. He did manage to change this XML file, though, to show that it's possible and even easy to read data into your Flash movies! Just follow the template on the Web page (link from the course Web page), and you'll be all set. Click here]]>