Point #1: you must must must read Alice, I Think and Miss Smithers by Susan Juby. They are milk-thru-nose funny. They are two of the three teen books I read for my work this year that I would recommend with great enthusiasm to non-teens as well. (The third is The Canning Season.)
Point #2: Alice, the protagoniste in the aforementioned two books, is an awful lot like me at her age. Though my mom (who also liked the books) is charitable enough to say that she didn’t think so.
Point #3: Juby has an anecdote from her own life on her web site that makes me think that she and I might not be too terribly dissimilar, too.

A loyal reader, late of Iceland, recommended the book Making the Best of Basics: Family Preparedness Handbook. One of the tips the book contains is to keep grains by for sprouting for when “live foods” are at a premium in your circumstances. In the significantly older book (from 1866), The Market Assistant, comes the much more tasty-sounding tip: growing mustard greens! From page 338:
“Mustard. The leaves of the young, white, broad-leaved kind is best for a mixed salad, or to boil with meat as greens. It may be had at any time in a few days, bu being sown in a box and kept in a warm place.”

For those of you wishing you still had secret clearance, Defensetech, the blog of defense news.

I am apparently equally (un)knowledgable about Republican and Democratic minutiae. I don’t know what the resolution of their scale is, but they show me squarely in the middle of their spectrum. They give the answers and scoring, but I didn’t have the requisite ambition to find out how my several guesses affected the results.

Maybe there’s more to the story — revenge, perhaps? — or maybe Rumanian urologists don’t get enough training in leaving the frank alone while messing with the beans.

Union songs, from historical to new, from rousing to stupid!

note: One of the songs listed in the first source seems to have been rather unevenly copied. A more believable rendition is here. One might have to take this first archive with a grain of union salt.

I find it hard to take seriously any claims that we have a legitimate need to keep secret the names of everybody rounded up in the post-11 September foolishness when federal sources are falling all over themselves to reveal what seem to me to be very pertinent details about an ongoing "very sensitive" investigation.

The lovely and talented Ursula points me at Scam o Rama, where you can get the scoop on scammers and (counter-)scamming.

So there are databases of unclaimed property in every state, and that property is everything from insurance payouts to bank accounts and more. I used to think that I could be a valiant info-warrior and find money for people, but mostly people (perhaps with good reason) think you are trying to scam them. Perhaps I will post information on how to find this money along with the names of the people, in case they google themselves.

The Greyhound bus service is eliminating a bunch of stops from its routes. For people without the option to drive, this bites. As more of the population ages past the point where driving is a good idea, I hope we’ll remember why public (rather than privatized, who can trim unprofitable services) transportation is worth the cost-balancing it does between the high and low volume stops.