Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

In honor of the holiday, I am posting a speech that I think exemplifies the spirit of the day. It was originally given on a different national holiday, July 4, by a man who some might say had little to be thankful for. Forced into retirement by a rare and fatal disease at the age of 35, at the peak of his career, no one would have blamed Lou Gehrig for seeming angry, sad, or broken. Instead, he gave a speech so powerful, so moving, that people who know nothing about baseball remember him for his ability to see the blessings in his life, even in the face of terrible adversity.

Here is what he said on the day of his retirement, to a packed Yankee Stadium full of people there to honor him. If you feel you have nothing to be thankful for today, remember Lou Gehrig.

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

"Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.

"When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies - that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter - that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body - it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know.

"So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for."

Things I'm Thankful For

Since it's Thanksgiving Eve, and I will be on the road for the next few days, I thought I'd post now a list of things I'm thankful for this year.

Thankfulness can be tough, especially when things aren't going the way you want them to. With me, the main things I wish were different are work and money. Although I like my job, it's not in the field I went to school for, and it doesn't pay very much. It can be hard to put in perspective when you've just paid all of your bills and have $100 left that needs to cover gas and food for the next week, but although money's a big thing, it's not the only thing, and money problems are far from the worst kinds of problems one can have.

Other than the money, I realized I like pretty much everything about my life right now. My job is meaningful, creative, and it's even fun. It offers the type of work environment I didn't think actually existed. When I feel slightly under the weather, I would be more inclined to go in than stay home, because going in would make me feel better. Working at a community newspaper also gets you appreciation. Occasionally, people will give you hard time, but the kind, thoughtful emails and letters I've received outnumber the nasty ones at least five to one. So I'm definitely thankful for my job, especially at a time when so many people don't have one.

I'm also thankful for family. Family's easy to take for granted when you have a good one. They're like air: you don't really think about them until they're gone. My mother and Mr. Library Diva's father both had health scares this year, and my sister had a minor surgery over the summer, so I'm thankful that everyone is OK and is doing well, and here with me. And I'm thankful that they are such a wonderful, supportive, kind, loving family.

I'm thankful for my partner. I have a friend right now who's divorcing a terrible human being and tells stories that will make your hair curl. Whatever else happens, I know I have Mr. Library Diva to come home to, and that makes my home a safe, welcoming place. He's there whenever I need advice or have a problem or just need cheering up. He's there for the fun times, too. I'm looking forward to marrying him next year!

I'm thankful for my friends. Some, like Chris and Dan, I only get to see rarely. Others, like The Sedentary Vagabond, I get to see every day. But I appreciate your support, I appreciate you being a part of my life, and I'm thankful for your companionship and for the relationship we have, whether we talk all the time or not often at all.

I'm thankful for my cats. A co-worker interviewed second graders for her paper about things they were thankful for. Pets ranked high. One little boy said that his cats kept him from getting lonely when his brothers didn't want to play with him, and another said that his cat slept on his clothes and warmed them up for him. I definitely agree with all of that, and more. They make me laugh, they help me fall asleep at night, and home just wouldn't be the same without them.

I'm thankful that I have a decent place to live, and thankful for all of the stuff in it. I've been in this apartment for four years, and the only place that felt more like home was the house I grew up in. I got a good deal on a nice place in a nice neighborhood, with a place to garden and sit outside in the nice weather, and offstreet parking for the cars. Kids come in hordes at Halloween, everyone decorates for Christmas, and it's a place I can invite people to with pride.

I'm thankful for people who create things. Maybe blogging daily and working for the paper has given me a new appreciation of the simple fact that there are human beings behind every snarky website you snicker at, every book you read, every TV show, movie or play you watch, every exhibit you visit. Some of these people are well-known, others you'll never hear of, but they enrich our lives just the same. Thank you for the time and effort you spend to entertain others.

And I'm thankful for you, my readers. I'm never sure how many of you there are, but I appreciate everyone who comes here and checks out my blog. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Getting Romantic: a guest post by The Sedentary Vagabond

Today's post was brought to you by .The Sedentary Vagabond. I am guest posting on her blog today, too, so make sure to visit me over there!


My introduction to romance novels came when I was a fifth grader smuggling them home from my tiny Christian school. (I was really sheltered, and my mom thought I was too young to read romance. Long story)

They were works by authors such as Janet Oke, full of pioneers and Amish people and very definitely PG.

My mother no longer desires or is able to control my reading habits, but I hadn’t read a true romance novel … until this week.

I love reading - it ’s my go to answer when anyone asks me what hobbies I enjoy – but I’ve mostly focused on classic fiction, biography, humor, detective fiction – pretty much everything but romance. My aunt has bookshelves upon bookshelves of romance novels though, so there must be something to them. Right?

I selected “A Scotsman in Love” as my reading choice. I’ve got some Scottish blood in me, and the cover featured a dashing Scottish gent shirtless, garbed in tartan and holding a lovely lass in his arms, so it promised the true romance novel experience.

The book was fine for its type. It was well written enough – not enough to deserve to enter the same room as “Anna Karenina,” but it was readable. The author did seem to have had her thesaurus too handy – seriously, nobody describes leaf color as “persimmon and ochre.”

Stories tend to have a certain setup: tension and resolution, but it was all too evident in this piece. And no, I don’t just mean the non-PG stuff. The main characters, a Scottish lord (of course) and a talented female painter, spend too much time unaccountably sniping at each other before the non-PG stuff begins.

Of course, the man is perfectly beautiful. Of course, the woman is unusually strong and sassy for her time. Of course they’re suddenly passionately obsessed with each other.

I don’t think this is a fault of this particular author. This is what the romance genre is. It’s about using certain common tropes to provide a predictable type of entertainment. The formula is what makes it attractive. If it wasn’t formulaic, it would be a different type of book.

I can definitely be one for predictability myself, at times. I like “cozy mysteries,” defined by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.” You can come to those sorts of stories with certain expectations and find them fulfilled. And I am perfectly fine with that.

I don’t find romance novels all that compelling. Maybe it’s an acquired habit, and I need to read another.

Do you like romance novels? What attracts you to the genre? Should I be looking for volumes without sexy Scottish men on the cover?

Also, apropos of nothing in particular, I found this sentence in the book hilarious: “He was not so much hirsute as all male.” Author, what I think you really mean is he was a hairy, hairy man.

TBRR = To Be Renewed Repeatedly?

I think I may have mentioned a few times that I have a longstanding ambition to learn more about Vikings. I'd like to say something lofty inspired it, but World of Warcraft inspired it. And it wasn't the fact that an entire 12-boss raid was lifted from Norse mythology, featuring bosses named Freya, Thorim, and Hodir, or that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion had a Norse subplot, with Skaldic warlords to defeat, and valkyries waiting to attack you everywhere. No, my honest thought was that if I read up on it, I could annoy the rest of my guild with random factoids.

Well, that subplot is over and done with (they moved on to mining Egyptian beliefs), but the desire never really went away. This summer, I checked out a book simply titled "The Vikings" by Robert Ferguson.

I didn't read it.

Then I checked it out again.

And I didn't read it.

But this time, I'm pretty determined. I'm about 20 pages into it, and it's really good. It opened with the description of an excavation of a burial ship in the 1920s. When the ship was buried, with the bodies of the two women, they chose an area with very clay-like soil, and the soil preserved the spring flowers that were growing when they dug out the pit, and the fall flowers that were there by the time they were ready to bury the boat. It was interesting reading earlier theories on conservation, as well. I'm also surprised at the paucity of primary sources, even archaeological sites, for Viking culture.

But I'm not sure I'm going to get to keep going, sadly. I checked my library account as a means of checking the author's name, and also to renew my books. It won't let me. I owe too much in fines, so it may be going back to the library tomorrow, sadly.

Hawaii and American Domination through the eyes of Sarah Vowell

I remember in eighth grade history class, Mr. Vincek warned us that we were going to be studying a sort of dark period of history during the decades following the Civil War, when America started to seize territories across the globe. I don't remember how it was explained to us, but it's a part of American history that we certainly don't like to dwell on much.

Sarah Vowell touched on this towards the beginning of her book on Hawaii, "Unfamiliar Fishes." She notes that during the time was researching the book, America was preparing to go to war in Iraq. The anti-war protestors tried to argue that what we were doing was against American ideals, and that "this isn't who we are." Sarah Vowell's history of American involvement in Hawaii, as she put it, demonstrated that "from time to time, this is exactly who we are."

Her book is very short, only about 200 pages. It outlines a part of history that we generally don't learn about in school: how exactly Hawaii became part of America. She outlines the period of time when American missionaries traveled to Hawaii from New England to bring Christianity and the written word to Hawaii, and how, over time, the interests of their descendants turned more towards the worldly pursuits of sugar farming, which is what led to its being annexed. She explores how its annexation wasn't entirely on the up-and-up (it was done through a joint resolution after failing an up-or-down vote). And in the process, she notes how its culture was nearly destroyed: through the outlawing of the hula dance, the replacement of creation myths with Christian stories, the spread of disease and death of large portions of the native populace, and more.

One thing I disliked about the book was the lack of other voices besides Vowell's. It told the story primarily from the American perspective. I found the apparent passivity of the native Hawaiians baffling. I know she's writing from a historical perspective, but she included brief glimpses of a modern Hawaiian nationalist movement and a few words with experts on Hawaii's past. I would have liked to have seen more of that, but at the same time, the book opened my eyes a lot. Hawaii's story is hardly untold: Vowell included a two-page reccomended reading list of primary and secondary sources. But at the same time, it seems like it's not widely known either. I picked this book up as a Sarah Vowell book, not as a book about Hawaii, so I'm glad that she used some her her fame to shine light on this topic. If I had any myself, I'd like to think that I'd do the same sort of thing.

"Sisterhood Everlasting" and the nature of friendship

If you're an older person who enjoyed "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," your own experiences might have endowed it with a more poignant dimension. Growing up, we all had best friends that we thought would be with us our whole lives. But for the most part, at least for me, that hasn't turned out to be the case with many of them. I grew apart from my best elementary school friend by seventh grade. A close middle school friendship ended when our schedules were diametrically opposed in ninth grade. We both made new friends, and when her family moved to Georgia later that year, I didn't even hear about it. My college BFF likewise moved cross-country and, after a while, stopped contacting most of her New York State friends.

I'm fortunate to still have a few close friends from various stages in my life with me. One of them is Chris, a frequent commentor on this blog. I've also stayed in decent touch with two college friends, Dan and Melissa, but sadly, I don't get to see any of them nearly as often as I'd like to.

So with these experiences in my past, I naturally wondered how Tibby, Lena, Bridget and Carmen's friendship would fare as the girls aged, as careers, marriage, and children pulled them in different directions. Ann Brashares chose to tackle that subject in "Sisterhood Everlasting."

Of course, "everyone drifted apart" would be an extremely boring answer, as would "everyone still lives in town and is still BFFs." Their lives have changed a lot. Carmen is an actress on a show very similar to "Law and Order," and is based in New York. Bridget still never stops moving. She's still with Eric and has worked a whole series of temp jobs in San Francisco. Lena is an art professor, and that's the most interesting thing about her: she lives by herself in a one-bedroom apartment and spends her evenings renting movies, occasionally with her "sandwich artist" quasi-boyfriend.

Tibby is the conundrum. We learn early on that post-college, all of the girls shared a New York City apartment for a while. Tibby was the one to break the quartet, when she moved to Australia with Brian, who had a good opportunity with a software company there. But since then, she's sort of been...incommunicado. They will hear from her every once in a while, but don't really know what's going on. The time zone barrier keeps them from calling and finding out, and it's not like she's alarmingly silent.

Then she surprises everyone with plane tickets to Greece. She wants a full-scale reunion, in the town where Lena's grandparents lived, where she met Kostos, where the pants got lost all of those years ago. Everyone attends, but it doesn't go as planned. Three of the girls have to contend with not only a sudden loss, but with unraveling the truth behind it.

That's what gives the book its momentum. I've essentially recounted the plot of the first 40 pages. This book is a lot sadder than I thought it would be, because it does deal with grief (and there's nothing on the jacket to suggest that). Several plot elements I found to be slightly implausible (the drop-everything-and-travel-for-no-good-reason device is still very much in force), but I liked the book regardless. People always wonder what happens to YA characters when they grow up, and it's interesting to see each of them approach 30. If you hated the Traveling Pants series, this won't redeem it, but if you enjoyed it, I think you'd like this sequel.

SOPA? Nope-a

About five minutes after the invention of the Internet, people started to use it to find ways around buying things they used to pay for. As magazines and newspapers rushed to make use of the new technology, their subscribers stopped getting their print subscriptions, or never started them in the first place. Since most of their revenue comes through advertisers, they were able to adjust well enough to view a continued online presence as a sound business strategy and a complement to their print versions.

The music and movie industries, however, were subject to more outright theft. They found themselves locked in a battle with fans, especially as the economy worsened and a $10 movie ticket represented a larger expenditure to people. They used PSAs to try to equate illegal downloading with stealing cars. They targeted a few downloaders in well-publicized cases, slapping 22-year-olds with five and six figure fines for their crimes. ANd now, they're trying to flat-out make it illegal.

Currently before Congress is the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. One clever linguistic trick politicians employ is to name a bill or law after something most people would approve of. The Clean Air Act, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind -- how could you not vote for those things? You're telling me you like dirty air, hate America, and want to see kids left in the dust? So when a bill or a law has an upbeat sound to it, be very suspicious.

Suspicion is warranted in this case. The proposed law, in its current form, would do away with the so-called "safe haven" law that prevented sites with a lot of user-genreated content from being liable for the actions of every single user. It's what allowed Craigslist to escape liability in a lawsuit on housing discrimination, and kept it from being shut down in the wake of the prostitution scandals. It's why the Chinese resellers don't take out all of Etsy. It's why this blog can continue to exist, even if the guy at the "next blog" button's entire blog consists of movies he filmed off the theater screen using his iPhone.

Even if you're not on the creation side of Internet content, (and actually, most of us are: if you sell on Ebay, have an Etsy store, sell your old furniture on Craigslist, upload photos to Flickr or have a YouTube channel for your toddler's antics, this applies to you) this bill has another creepy feature for you. According to this great explanation at CNET.com, this bill would require a sort of Internet wiretapping to make the blocks on these pirate websites work. Your internet providers would be forced to see where it is you're going online in order to keep you from getting there if there's a block on it.

The law also doesn't lay out a framework for how something comes to be blocked. This could be very, very bad. If you are of Regretsy, you will know that most people have an imperfect understanding of what copyright infringement is. The copyright laws are so ridiculously obtuse that in graduate school, I was advised as a curator to not even attempt to understand them myself, and call a lawyer whenever things weren't clear to me. But to quote "The Princess Bride," in general, it does not mean what you think it means. It's not infringing on your copyright to re-post a photo of your work that you yourself placed online, as long as you are credited. It's not infringement to link to someone else's site without their permission. It's all right to photograph anything that's not placed where the owner or creator has a reasonable expectation of privacy, so if I were to photograph everything in one of those booths at the Allentown Art Festival that hangs a homemade sign warning passerby that their beaded jewelry is intellectual property and you can't photograph it, the cops would side with me. Shit, I could even re-post the photos here!

But like I said, a lot of people don't realize that. Combine that with the abolishment of safe haven, and you've essentially got the end of user-generated sites on the Internet. Think of Etsy, for example. There are hundreds of thousands of listings at any given time. If one person is accused of violating copyright and reported for it, if I'm understanding this bill correctly, the entire site would be shut down, all transactions suspended, and they'd actively look through your online activity to do it.

This is not the way to protect the film and music industries. If you agree, tell your representatives. Visit www.house.gov and
www.senate.gov to let them know.