Grandpa, last Saturday:

     "I don't like the Tabernacle Choir anymore.  Too many flourishes."

 From an interview with Joe Queenan, author of One for the Books

Q.

One of your book’s biggest themes is the superiority of books to
 e-readers. Are you optimistic about the future of books on paper? And do 
you consider this book more of an early eulogy or a rallying cry?

A.

The book is elegiac. Books, I think, are dead. You cannot fight the zeitgeist and you cannot fight corporations. The genius of corporations is that they force you to make decisions about how you will live your life and then beguile you into thinking that it was all your choice. Compact discs are not superior to vinyl. E-readers are not superior to books. Lite beer is not the great leap forward. A society that replaces seven-tier wedding cakes with lo-fat cupcakes is a society that deserves to be put to the sword. But you can’t fight City Hall. I also believe that everything that happens to you as you grow older makes it easier to die, because the world you once lived in, and presumably loved, is gone. As I have said before, when Keith Richards goes, I’m going too. Same deal with books.

Two new T-shirt quotations:

The Hokey Pokey Clinic:  A Place to Turn Yourself Around

"Those who forget history
   are doomed to forget geography too."

"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?"
                                             -Jean-Jacques Rousseau-

At the Library

"Do you have a beauty book that tells you, like, how to get beauty?"

Not such a bad idea . . .

"Leaders from Utah County's Republican Party met with Sen. Orrin Hatch over the weekend to encourage him and Utah's other elected officials to grab hold of the third rail of politics and do something to fix it."
Billy Hesterman
Provo Daily Herald

While making fun of Mayor Bloomberg's ban on large orders of soft drinks, Jon Stewart showed a bunch of other stuff that was still legal in New York City, including a giant barbeque sandwich which he said looked like "a cow wearing a bread yarmulke."

From a new book entitled Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: False Apology Poems by Gail Carson Levine:

I have torn
down
the water
spout

which
you obsessively
wanted to climb up
and slide off forever

Forgive me
kick your habit
spin a web
catch a bug.

"I come from an academic family, and we like to think things through--then think about whether the process of thinking them through was as thorough as it could be, then write a book about it. (A book that takes twenty years.)"
Ben Ryder Howe, from My Korean Deli . . .

Favorite new Children's Book of the Week:

Give Probability a Chance

Nico: "I'm not afraid of the dark. I'm afraid of the things in the dark."