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.