Things to check out

New idea -- maybe I could try to organize these clippings so that they might actually be useful to me at some point in the future.

Organize? Ha ha ha ha ha.

Well, we'll see. I'm going to keep on updating this post (or at least that's the plan), as I come across clippings that fit here. I have a LOT of clippings in the "Things that I'd like to check out some day" category. (Some of them so old that I don't know if the places they refer to even exist any more!) Maybe if the info is all in one place here, so that I know where it is, rather than on a zillion pieces of paper buried and forgotten in piles scattered all over the place, I might actually do more of this stuff:

Shopping

Fashion Bang for a Buck -- article about a thrift store called Reruns at Sixth and Howard, where everything cost a dollar. "At the $1 price, you'd expect to find nothing but bins full of crumpled and stained polyester, but the inventory is neatly sorted by type and color, arranged on hangers, and generally of decent quality. To be sure, there are jackets with shoulder pads that would make a linebacker wince and enough disco wear to outfit a "Saturday Night Fever" revival, but there are also brand names aplenty: Gap, Liz Claiborne, Calvin Klein, Ann Taylor, Leslie Fay, Old Navy. With 15,000 items, the store boasts about six racks of women's tan and khaki pants, for example."


Food

Item from a magazine about Saigon Sandwiches (560 Larkin Street). Picture of the sandwich looks good! To-go only (just two seats there).

Ten "super foods"

Apples, avocados, beans, blueberries, dark chocolate (yay!), kiwis, oats, spinach, walnuts, and yogurt.

Article with an annotated list of the foods, telling why each is so healthy, and another article with tips on how to incorporate more of the foods into one's diet, and recipes.

Also in food news, celebrity chef Joyce Goldstein has revamped the deli at the JCC. The other half of the space will become a pan-Asian restaurant.

Another batch of book review clippings

The 10 Best Books of 2005; a rave review of Music Through the Floor, a short story collection by a new writer I hadn't heard of before; a review of a novel called Home Land; an essay, Truth is Stronger Than Fiction; a review of Jesus and Yahweh by Harold Bloom, written by a former student of the author; and a review by David Leavitt of the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature. Leavitt writes:

Writers as diverse as E. Nesbit, Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl have in common a remarkable immunity to the tyrannies of so-called seriousness that too often hobble the efforts of their adult counterparts. Rereading them here, I was able to rekindle some of the undiluted joy I got out of their work when I was a child. I also remembered that literature is not, as it is sometimes regarded today, a kind of immense vitamin, good for us if difficult to get down. It must also have a wild and vital flavor - of giant peaches, green eggs and ham, the gingerbread from which witches construct their houses.

Authors of adult fiction would do well to take a (thin) page from this estimable, erudite and enjoyable anthology, which reminds us how much pleasure matters in reading, for grown-ups as well as for children.

A bunch of things from the Sunday NYT Book Review section

Review of novel Towelhead; essay on air travel; review of novel The Librarian; review, by Judith Shulevitz, of a new translation of the Torah; review of "The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams," where I had bracketed this passage: "If the sorrow and confusion and longing in a man's heart is eloquently expressed through art, I think it gives comfort and even exaltation to his audience, by making them feel less lonely."

Technicalities

The November, 2005 "Rosie's Ramblings" column from California Lawyer Magazine. Circled items: (1) Bookmark Tags Firefox extension (third paragraph) -- check out? (2) site for DVD questions (last paragraph) -- can I find answer there to whether it's possible to play DVD's in a CD-ROM player?

Getting things done

Another page torn from Newsweek (which has become a major source of paper clutter for me -- fie on the airline mileage offer that brought me a free subscription). The article is about tagging, but I had circled a paragraph about the 43 Things site, so I guess that's what had prompted me to save it.

"Think of the process as similar to that of language, which is also a self-organized process," says author and tagging proponent David Weinberger. That process is also at work on a Web site called 43 Things, where people express their goals, tag them and comment and commiserate on the goals of others. It turns out that a lot of people on the site read a book called "Getting Things Done." . . .

Gee, I really should get off my butt ...

My Cat Takes More Drugs Than I Do -- This essay from the "My Turn" reader-contribution page in Newsweek, which I clipped for its inspirational value, was written by an 87-year old man who has stayed healthy by following the standard nutrition guidelines and by exercising:

Rue Ann and I, depending on the weather, do one of the following five days a week: ride our bicycles 10 miles, walk 3 miles or climb the stairs in a 10-story building. Consistency is the key to a successful exercise program.

Wow. 87 years old and climbing ten flights of stairs!!

He started this exercise regimen when he was 50, as part of a quest to see how little he could spend on health care, and he advises people to get started when they are in the 40- to 60-year range. Ok, that means me ...

Can you make a real living in an imaginary world?

How Much for a Jetpack? -- This is an article about an online game called Second Life where players can make virtual stuff and sell it for real money. One women interviewed in the article said she was making a "high five-figure income" making "cyberclothes." I ripped the article out of Newsweek a couple of months ago, but it disappeared into clutter never-never land, and I didn't get around to checking out the Second Life site until just now when I started writing this post. Then I found out that getting past the front door will have to wait until I finally get around to getting broadband.

The front page of the site says that $205,611.48 U.S. dollars were spent there today. Could that really be true? It's intriguing, but also a little creepy in a Twilight-Zone-ish kind of way.

Cheap thrills

These two items come from the wine section of today's paper that I was just about to throw on the paper pile! I guess you could call this preemptive decluttering. The Chronicle's Top Bargain Wines of 2005 and an article about the list.

Essay about blogs

At Large in the Blogosphere by Judith Shulevitz. This was written in May 2002, when the popularity of blogs, if I recall correctly, was just taking off. I can't remember why I clipped it. Was the concept of blogs new to me then? Was there a specific blog she mentioned that I wanted to check out? Did she write something I thought especially insightful? The article does seem dated now, but this still made me laugh:

Needless to say, blogs are addictive. They are not, however, the most economical use of your time. To read blogs requires a willingness to wander from link to link in the hope that some mind-numbingly detailed dispute over, say, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Catholic Church's position on homosexuality or an Oscar nomination will resolve itself into a usable insight.

Finding this clipping also reminded me how much I enjoyed Judith Shulevitz's essays, which appeared regularly for a while on the last page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Then one day, her essays were no longer there. Was she fired? Did she retire? Were the editors restlessly seeking the latest new thing? I never did find out.

I can't bear to throw things away

I'm a pack rat, especially with clippings. I often read an article in the newspaper or in a magazine that strikes me as particularly well-written, or inspiring or otherwise useful, or that seems like something I will want to reread in the future or that I will want to have around to jog my memory. So I rip out the article or the story or the advertisement, and I throw it on a paper pile. The piles keep on growing, and the newspaper clippings turn yellow, and the piles become hideously ugly and intimidating and I rarely look through them -- and my carefully hoarded articles become almost as lost to me as if I had thrown them away in the first place.

The clutter experts would say to just throw everything away. I can't bear to do that. But it occurred to me earlier today, while I was forcing myself to go through the piles looking for something, anything, that I might be able to weed out, that since many of the clippings are of articles that are now on the internet, maybe I could turn the paper clutter into blog clutter. I could find the links, store them here, on blogspot, and then I could throw the original paper copies away. I would still be left with semi-random clutter, but at least it wouldn't be yellowing and musty-smelling! And it would be a lot more compact. The only downside I see is that I would lose some of the illustrations which sometimes accompany print articles but not their electronic counterparts.