Color Online’s Color Me Brown Book Challenge

Susan from Color Online is sponsoring a “Color Me Brown Book Challenge”: Read and review POC (people of color) books through the month of August. Color Online will have a random drawing for 3 reviewers at the end of the challenge. Drop us a link to your review to be eligible. +3 entries for any [...]

Pronunciation Guides

An updated list of guides on the Web to pronounce names and places, so you can sound more erudite to your friends: Inogolo helps you not only with names and places but also “stuff,” such as wines, dogs, chocolates, and other things you don’t really want not to talk about because you can’t pronounce it! [...]

Awards!

I was very fortunate to receive two awards recently which I haven’t actually yet managed to figure out how to get on the blog but I’m working on it! Each widget is a challenge… Notice I can’t even get the little head to go in and out of the cup. In any event, I received [...]

Free Talk Featuring Frank McCourt

Learn out Loud is offering this free audio download in honor of Frank McCourt: Frank McCourt: Teacher Man Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis, passed away a week ago at the age of 78. In this talk he treats us to stories of life as a public school teacher in this downloadable [...]

Game On Diet: Victory for the Ding Dongs!

Who would have thought, with the intense competition we faced, that the Ding Dongs, out of all the other Snack Cakes, would grab victory from the jaws, so to speak, of our competitors! Here is the winning Ding Dong team: The Ding-Dongs: Julie from Booking Mama Softdrink from Fizzy Thoughts Amy from My Friend Amy [...]

Game On Diet Report & Guide to Help Resist Emotional Eating

It’s here at last: the last day of the game! This is probably not good news for Trader Joe’s, who may see a large decline in business even if we all go on “maintenance.” How did we do? We all lost weight, have better skin (oh, you mean acne for life isn’t inevitable?), some of [...]

Sunday Salon – Review of “Hiding in the Spotlight,” by Greg Dawson

This remarkable tale of Holocaust survival is told by the son of one of the two women who are the focus of this story, Zhanna and Frina Arshanskaya. In January, 1942, the Jews of Kharkov in the Ukraine were being marched to Drobitsky Yar, one of the huge pits in which the Einsatzgruppen from Germany [...]

Review of “Benny & Shrimp,” by Katarina Mazetti

This Swedish book in translation has been wildly popular in Sweden. The Times of London calls it “a charming and funny Swedish love story, about two lonely people on the brink of middle age.” The description is not far from the mark. Thirty-four year old Desiree Wallin (“Shrimp”) is a childless widow whose husband was [...]

July 24, 1914 – Birthday of Kenneth Bancroft Clark, and The Black Doll Study

Kenneth Clark was a psychologist, educator, and social reformer who dedicated his life to the cause of racial justice. At Howard University, he led demonstrations against segregation in Washington, D.C. He also met his future wife, fellow psychology student Mamie Phipps, who became his key collaborator. They moved to New York to attend Columbia University, [...]

July 23, 1904 – Invention of the Ice Cream Cone

It is beyond me why this is not a national holiday. It was July 23, 1904, according to some accounts, when Charles E. Menches conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice-cream at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, popularly known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. Other claimants to the [...]