I guess this isn't what he'd had in mind.

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

Full New York Times story.

The 'Dumb and Dumber' side of Vermont

Rossell and Martino stood by the Little Debbie snack cakes rack near the counter and tried to figure out what to do, Martino said.
"You do it. 'No you do it,'" was how that conversation went, according to Martino.
Then the two men walked to the counter, and Rossell demanded $20, witnesses said.
Martino then reached over and pulled aside Rossell's coat, revealing the ax that Rossell was holding under his coat, Martino said.
"I said, 'Yeah, because we got this,'" Martino recalls saying as he reached over and pulled aside his friend's jacket.

The script continues here.

In which I wield a shovel

It is a fine summer day, and my neighbor sits on her porch and plays her flute. The gentle music soars and swerves down the hillside, through the sunlit air. The backyard is in bloom, and the flowers sway in the breeze. My sunhat creates a halo of shade, but I can feel the sun's warmth on my arms.

I put my foot on the edge of the shovel and drive it deeper into the earth. The small, furry body lies nearby: a groundhog, surprised on her way to the garden. I keep my eyes on the hole, and try not to think about the bloody wound under her front leg, or the gray tongue protruding between her teeth.

By the time the hole is deep enough, my neighbor has stopped playing. I hum an old Russian lullaby and drop the groundhog into the earth. It leaves a streak of blood on the shovel.

Patting the dirt back into place, I feel strangely, sadly accomplished. I have demonstrated no squeamishness or sentimentality (okay, except for the lullaby). It seems like a passage of some sort: into adulthood, into dog stewardship, into being less of a city girl. Or maybe this is the very essence of urbanity: to live and die on top of one another, to bury an animal in one's own yard rather than leaving it on a hillside for the coyotes.

I go back inside and drink a glass of water. I find Oona and stroke her ears, rub her belly. She is my dog, more than she was this morning. I have buried something that she has killed.

On waking

To spend the morning with a cup of tea at the window, quiet, is the chance to unpack the fragile things, to hold back the sodden rush of electrons: the laptop's white buzz that jams the faintly pulsing signals from the deep.

Paying attention

Before I finally decided to sell my DSLR, I spent about a month in abject denial thinking I should try to learn more about photography. I started reading Popular Photography, and came across an article about shooting macros. It suggested that you choose an area about 15 feet square, and spend an hour looking for shots. When you think you've exhausted the possibilities, try to spend another hour. And so on, the idea being to look closer and closer, from different perspectives and with different light, etc.

I feel like I'm doing this with the whole city of Montpelier. It's bigger than 15 x 15, but sometimes it seems that I've exhaustively photographed everything within reasonable walking distance from my house. When I contemplate walking across the old railroad bridge or through the bus station lot or anywhere else in town, it seems pointless: I've already seen all that stuff, and Flickr is going to evict me if I post one more picture of a rusty iron truss. But I go anyway, because there's nowhere else to go, and eventually I find something that I hadn't noticed before.

Breckwell and GE

The humidifier sits silently,
along with the pellet stove —
those breathing beasts
that pant and rumble
their way through the winter,
blocking out the television,
traffic noise, and quiet conversation.

Now they crouch beneath the window,
dusty and mute,
their grated mouths agape,
as though listening with awe
or academic concentration
to the wind in the trees
and the sound of birdsong.

Separate implies prom night

"All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come. Black members of the student council say they have asked school administrators about holding a single school-sponsored prom, but that, along with efforts to collaborate with white prom planners, has failed."

[Full NYT article]

I can't help but wonder if any of these kids danced to this song, and if so exactly how they felt about it.

To be even more thoroughly appalled, check out the interview with the mother - who is apparently a little fuzzy on certain Constitutional principles, and also on how much cleavage can reasonably be bared in a prom dress - who says that "everything is fine like it is" and "the kids are perfectly fine with it."

Except that it's not fine; it's bigoted and backward and it hurts people, some of whom are still minors. Not to mention that it's a NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT.