P51 cockpit; pilot's view

T his post is for blogreaders Gerald (of BaWeKo fame), Dave, Kees Kennis, Sarah & that Stinson Gal, and all those aviation fans whom I taught to fly during my 30+ years as a flying instructor (acro pilots especially).

It is a snapshot I took from this hi-res, 360° scannable, zoomable, website.
The link was sent to me by my good friend, Alaskan blogreader and DeHavilland Beaver on amphi-floats pilot Klaus Steigler, to whom many thanks :-)

The link given above seems slow to load (I have only a 2Mbit/sec DSL), but that's a HUGE Flash pic you are looking at and it is well worth waiting for.
As you look at the picture the loading continues and the photo gets better and better. Detail increases, making the 360° scan and zoom capability a great experience. Be prepared to spend at least a half-hour looking at it :-)

Instructions : Hold the left mouse button down to scroll around by moving the mouse. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and pan out. Have fun!

Comments (1) :
Sarah (UK) pointed me to this Anatomy of a Spitfire cockpit. Thanks, lass :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 28, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Prostate Cancer Age Histogram

B ack on 26th January I started telling you about my encounter with prostate cancer. Now when I was in reconvalescence I noticed that almost everyone was in my age group (67 +/- 10 years), so I collected anonymous data to see when everyone had had their operations (radical prostectomy), because you can put off treatment for quite a while if you want to. Personally I got my prostate removed as soon as possible after the diagnosis, to avoid ANY risk of the cancer spreading beyond the gland.

So here is the histogram, the vertical axis is percentage of patients, the horizontal axis shows 5-year age groups. Sample size was over 100.

I will be continuing this series of posts about prostate cancer each month.

Comments (1) :
Malcolm Colton (SF,USA) contributed "I stumbled across your web site (the Sarah Palin banned books. What a strange list. What was her rationale?) and saw your post on prostate cancer. After seeing high PSA levels, I just had a prostate biopsy which proved negative, Gott sei dank. The prostate tests have a very high rate of false positives, and are quite unreliable. You can read about it here which is a very good source for real info about medicine." Congratulations, Malcolm. Yes, the PSA test does have false positives, as I pointed out in a previous article. Testing every six months is important, mine was BPH (benign) over several years until it turned malignant.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 25, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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US Bankruptcy, state by state?

There is a very real chance that the USA goes bankrupt within a couple of years, if not on a federal level then state by state :-(

The map shown below looks at the deficit of each state as a percentage of the total budget. Green = under 10%, Yellow= 10 to 20%, Red= over 20%, Grey=no data available. These data are from the Center on Budget and Policy priorities, Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Governors Association, and the Federation of Tax Admistrators; to wit : the USA's own numbers.

There are voices (e.g. amongst the Tea Party and Reps mostly) that individual states should be allowed to go bankrupt! But remember the size of e.g. California's economy. Larger than say Greece or Portugal or Ireland, whose economies are causing the rest of the EU such problems.

If any of the states shown red above were allowed to go bankrupt there would be such a distrust in US bonds that the whole world's economies would be dragged down too! I think the Americans who have been living beyond their collective means for decades are going to have to go through a phase of SEVERE austerity which will make the recent economic crisis look like peanuts! And the US infrastructure is dilapidated already :-(

Of course, the USA has spent a billion dollars fighting unnecessary wars; withdrawal could save them lots of money right there for a start!

But instead some states are slyly changing their laws so that the state could go bankrupt. Thus would the state shed itself of its pension obligations. Similarly state employees (police, teachers etc) would be laid off. Imagine all those folks without any income! I wonder if it would incite a rebellion?

I would be interested to hear from my american readers what YOU think of the issue and what the consequences of state bankruptcies would be? Would people 'just' move to a state shown green above? Or what will happen?

Comments (2) :
My good friend and blogreader in Alaska Klaus sends three informative links :-

• 46 of 50 states could file for banktruptcy (datelined 2009),
• Will states such as California file chapter 9 ?, (recent dateline)
• Here you can see the debt of every State. (datelined October 2010)

Katie (USA) is worried that "If the price of oil & gas goes up 20% or more, we can forget an economic recovery :-(" Sell those big V8s and SUVs and buy a small hybrid like a Toyota Prius, halving your gas bill at least.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 23, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Dr. Copy and Paste :-(

Tip for budding academics² : how to write your doctoral thesis correctly.

Wrong :
Cut - Paste. Repeat.¹

Right :
Cut - Paste. Put Paste in quotation marks. Assign that quotation a footnote/endnote number, not missing any^{(not 1)}. Repeat. Assemble in a sequence giving an original conclusion. Write own introduction^{(not 1)}. Add an appendix of numbered footnotes (=literature list).

I refer you the Guttenplag Wiki. Currently they have found that over 72% of the pages in Guttenberg's doctoral thesis contain one or more plagiarisms. 72%!

Comments (2) :
Anne (UK) asks "And the consequences for him are?" AFAIK, he can be charged with Breach of Copyright (multiple counts), Perjury (for swearing an oath that it was all his own work, if he so did) and Misuse of Office (using documents prepared only for parliamentary use). Then of course, all the authors he copied could sue him in civil court for damages. The University will withdraw his doctorate, I expect, and so all the published copies of the dissertation will have to be recalled as it will no longer be a citable work. Not sure who pays for the recall. But I'm no lawyer, so I may wrong here. Cum granis salis. We shall see what happens over the coming months.
Schorsch (D) asks "Does Dr.(h.c) mean Dr.(had copied) ? & if so, what? ;-)" Something about Katherina Blum maybe?

Update 23/2/2011 20:00. The University of Bayreuth has revoked Guttenberg's doctorate, as I predicted above, setting the ball rolling.

Footnotes : 1) Baron zu Guttenberg, Doctoral Dissertation 2006, University of Bayreuth, published 2009.
2) e.g. regular visitors from the EDU sites listed at the bottom of the right sidebar.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 22, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Spam forward ;-)

B een getting a lot of 'edu'-spam recently, an example is shown below, the sort of ripoff that wants lots of money for an 'accredited' degree. 'Accredited' yeah! Worthless piece of paper, more likely.

Education - a long and difficult process that requires work and 
employment daily.How many years are you ready to spend for it? 
How much money do you have for  academic time?
Otherwise... No job, no stat us, no opportunities? 
We have SECOND WAY! Choose our company and you will see a 
great chance to get a real, actual, perspective education! 
We are here to suport you! Our best experts will choose for you 
preferred option in any area. Your second way does not require 
for-six years; you will get Diploma in 4-6 weeks!
Your second way does not require investing large amounts.
But you will get a Diploma: Bachelor, Master, PHD.
You will have great job; you will be respected & satisfied with 
life! Contact us right now and stand on your new way!
Please leave us the infarmation:
+ 1 - 646 - *** - **** 

Having no use for these kinds of edu-spam, I might just set my spam-filter to auto-forward them to the German ministry of defence, for the attention of Baron zu Guttenberg, whose need is so much greater than mine ;-) ;-) ;-)

Comments (2) :
Wendy (AUS) wrote : "Lord above! They should simply all be smacked on their bottoms for such dreadful grammar and syntax etc. Just dreadful! ; )"
Schorsch (D) relays that zu Guttenberg has asked his Uni to retract his plagiarised PhD.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 21, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Tarzan and Jane ;-)

When Jane first met Tarzan in the jungle, she was greatly attracted to his well-muscled body, and during her questions about his life, she asked him how he had sex?

'Tarzan not know sex' he replied.

Jane explained to him what sex was.

Tarzan said 'Oh ....Tarzan use knot hole in trunk of tree.'

Horrified Jane said, 'Tarzan you have it all wrong, but I will show you how to do it properly.' She took off her clothes (such as they were) and laid down.

'Here' she said, pointing to her privates, 'you must put it in here.'

Tarzan removed his loin cloth, showing Jane his considerable manhood, stepped closer to her and kicked her as hard as he could in the crotch!

Jane rolled around in agony for what seemed like an eternity.

Eventually gasping for air she screamed 'What did you do that for?'

Tarzan replied, 'Check for squirrels!' ;-)

Have a great weekend, folks!

Sent by blogreader Paul (D) to Stu Savory for February 18, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Rosy Posy, Bunga Bunga :-)

T his is the rose posy I gave my wife Cornelia on monday.

But in doing so, I knocked 13 Scrabble^™ tiles off the table, so now I have to rearrange them. Lessee now, we get any of :- Envied Analyst, or Navy Datelines, or Invades Neatly, or Dean's Venality, or Neatens Avidly, or Dainty Enslave, or Sanely Deviant(sic!), or even Valentine's Day :-)

P.S. The wife and I have been together since 1979 and married since 1990. Long may it continue :-)

P.P.S : "Bungabunga" is also an Indonesian word, meaning 'Flowers' {true!}. Perhaps someone should mention this to Mr.Berlusconi ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 16, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Greased Lightning :-)

In which I upgrade our PC HW :-)

Back in 2003, when Intel produced the first Centrino chip, I bought an IBM T40 notebook which served us well these past 8 years. Finally the fan failed and Lenova appear to have no replacement parts :-( Maybe they would prefer I buy a new PC :wry grin: ? And so it was time to shop around for a new notebook, not necessarily from Lenova. I chose this one for €599 from Medion, for the simple reason that it has a spare second disc slot :-)

Processor is an i3 Core, memory is 4GB, hard disc has a hefty 640GB, screen is 17 inch in 16:9 format for watching DVDs, integrated TV tuner (so what?), and an externalised USB 3.0 interface above and beyond the usual USBs 2.0.

Next step was to buy a 60 55 GB SSD (semiconductor solid state disc). This is a RAIDable Vertex 2 SSD with a SATA II interface (that will suffice now).

Voiding the warranty(?), I opened up the laptop and built the SSD into the spare disc slot, attaching it as drive C to the SATA II interface. The 640 GB hard disc was relegated to being drive F (drive D is the CD/DVD, drive E was to become a second SSD partition [for Linux, drive C got Win 7 installed]).

I installed WIN 7, the swapfile and all our regular programs afresh onto the SSD. Then I attached the 1 Terabyte external USB 2.0 disc which I use for my backups and transferred our current data to the PC's internal hard disc.

I got 99% of the stuff to work under the 64-bit Win7, except for a CanoScan N670U flatbed scanner for which I have found no 64-bit driver :-( Canon does not provide a driver, I think they would prefer I buy a new scanner (which I may just do, the N670U being half a dozen years old already).

And the result of all this work? Greased Lightning :-)

Boot up in about 12 seconds (instead of 4 minutes). Shutdown in 4 seconds (instead of 2 minutes). Average SSD seek time is 0.29 mSec as opposed to the 17.15 mSec for the 640 GB Samsung internal hard disc. Datatransfer from/to the SSD is up to 177 MB/sec !!! (the hard disc peaks at 72 MB/sec). Program loading in under a second; the only thing slowing it down now is the virus-check on every program load (this is still Windoze, remember ;-)

If you have not yet done so, get yourself an SSD for your PC! Put the OS, the swapfile, and your programs on it, leaving your data on the hard disc. The performance improvement is fantastic! Even SWMBO is happy with it;-)

Comments (1) :
Brian (UK) asks "I have an under-desk PC : would it be worth putting in a RAID-pair of SSDs (I use WIN XP SP3) ?" IMHO, definitely yes. Place two OCZ Vertex SSDs into a RAID-0 striped array, and the results are a fantastic 505 MBps read and 437 write RAID-0 bandwidth with the EVEREST benchmark, and the built-in 64MB Cache buffers permanently solve any latent 'stuttering' problem, also you get a very low 0.10 ms random access time. Remember WIN 7 does the 'trim' automatically; for XP SP3 you will need to download a special program to do the 'trim' for you. Also HDDs cost peanuts these days. Why not add another HDD for your data and put it in a RAID-1 mirror with your existing one, while you've got the case open? :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 14, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Tide comes in, tide goes out.

A short while back US wingnut broadcaster Bill O’Reilly said in TV to his rational opponent "Tide comes in, tide goes out. Sun comes up , sun goes down. You can't explain that!" My flabber was ghasted!

Actually, Mr. O’Reilly^*, I can, and it's about time you learned some elementary science too!

Taking the second sentence first "Sun comes up , sun goes down.", you just need to recognise the fact that the Earth is NOT flat. This may be new to you and fellow tea-party members ;-) To a close approximation the Earth is a ball which rotates about its own north-south axis daily, letting the sunlight light up one side (day) but not the other (night). What you see as the sun rising and setting is just the Earth rotating about its axis so that the illuminated side appears to sweep across the surface as the Earth rotates.

Now looking at your first sentence "Tide comes in, tide goes out." I refer you to my diagram below. The Earth also rotates beneath the Moon as the Moon orbits the Earth. The water on the side of the Earth nearest to the Moon is labelled N. Because that water is nearer the moon than the centre of the Earth is, it has a stronger gravitational pull and so flows towards the moon until counteracted by Earth's gravity. This is the high tide. Over on the side farther from the moon (labelled F) the Earth's centre is nearer the moon than the water at F and so gets pulled more towards the Moon than the water at F does. So the water at F piles up into a high tide too, albeit not quite so high as the water at N. Where does the water for the high tides come from? from the positions at 90° to the high tides (top and bottom of the Earth in this sketch). These are the low tides. And because the Moon orbits around the Earth (pace lunatics) the periodicity of these tides is not exactly 24 hours. There is a similar gravitational effect from the Earth-Sun pull too, but the effect is smaller because the Sun is so much further away.

There now, Mr. O’Reilly and fellow Tea-Party ignorami, that wasn't too hard , was it ? If I can explain it to primary school children like that, there's a chance you might understand it too, brain evolution permitting ;-)

Comments (3) :
Liz (UK) flows in with "Bill O'Reilly might have said that to me and he'd have been correct. I read oceanography at Uni and one topic that I really struggled with was tides. 'All tides are waves but not all waves are tides.'"
Jake (US) asks "What effect does the sun have?" The moon and the sun orbit the Earth in almost the same planes (whence eclipses). When the sun and the moon line up (twice a month, at full and new moon), the pull on the water is larger so we get higher tides (spring tides versus neap tides).
Kathie (US) writes "I'm a librarian. Yours is the first blog I've seen that has a Dewey number! 153 is so rare, I had to look it up ;-)" Yup, over in the right sidebar, folks, below the D-List pentagram flowery/petal logo :-)

^* FWIW, O'Reilly anagrams into 'Rely Oil' which may explain some of his pro-Saudi politics ;-) Furthermore 'Sarah Palin' anagrams into 'Sharia plan' which maybe puts Palin in the same corner as Islamic terrorists!
Just sayin' ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 11, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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On-Target correlation

R ank the states of the US by gun deaths and list the percentage of gun ownership in each state too. Note the strong positive correlation. 'Nuff said^*?

Comments (2) :
Charles Pergiel (US) replies " You're confusing me with facts. I don't like that.
From Wikipedia, the source of all light and truth: 'The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides,[5] with firearms used in 16,907 suicides in the United States during 2004.' Here's a good story from the CS Monitor. One of our favorite theories at Thursday lunch is that the people who emigrate to the US are the malcontents, the troublemakers, and are more prone to violence. Mostly the government does OK, but you give a corrupt official a stick and he will beat you with it. Only solution for that is to only let them have a few specific sticks. My favorite theory is that most violence is due to the drug trade. Europe has less violence because because the mob has been in place longer, and people know not to mess with them. Here, it is still the wild West." Are you saying that people in LA are more mentally unstable than those in NY? I regard that as statistically unlikely ;-) It's more a matter of there being more guns available in LA than in NY, surely? A suggestion to check your Thursday lunch theory : compare the suicide rates between negroes (ex-slave, non-volunteer immigrant background) and those (whites?) with a volunteer immigrant background. I have no data to check that. "But there are few negro jumpers from the Golden gate bridge, and most of those were pushed" to quote one US negro comedian :wry grin: .
Kees Kennis (South Africa) takes aim with this feedback : "People kill people! South Africa is on the top of the pile in murders. But in a comparison of the number of privately owned guns in 178 countries, South Africa ranks at No. 17. In a comparison of the RATE of private gun ownership in 179 countries, South Africa ranks at No. 50 See http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/south-africa." OK.

^* : Vitriolic comments from the right wing expected :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 9, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Irak War Justification :-(

The BBC reports Donald Rumsfeld, Dubya's Minister of War, publishes his memoirs. Puke!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 8, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Bad for You, Baby :-(

W ith great sadness I relay the death of Gary Moore, one of my favourite guitarists, on sunday, aged 58. Thin Lizzy just got thinner :-(

Another of my favourite tracks, not dissimilar, is Parisienne Walkways :-

But now, for all fans of Gary Moore's blues, The Thrill is Gone :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 7, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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We Furriners

B logger Four Dinners has been having a couple of his islamophobic rants recently, presumably most of the immigrants in the area where he lives (Hades Hayes, Middlesex,UK) are mohammedan. That got me wondering about the local immigrants here (Paderborn, Germany), of whom I am one (GB expat). So I got the top 10 statistics from Paderborn city hall :-

1. 5972 Poles make up over 20% of the immigrants here.
2. 4427 Russians.
3. 4388 Turks (headscarves yes, burkas no).
4. 3130 from Kasachstan.
5. 1873 Brits (mostly squaddies at their military garrisons until 2019).
6. 1751 Italians (many pizzeria and ice-cream-parlour family businesses).
7. 1258 Serbs (Bosnia war refugees?)
8. 619 Chinese (many are students).
9. 606 Afghans (war refugees, I would think).
10. 554 Syrians (ditto?)

The total population of Paderborn is ˜145 thousand persons of whom almost 30,000 are furriners, i.e. about 20%.

No separate count available for the Vatican hordes in the employ(?) of the RC Archbishop of Paderborn, although I had expected exactly 666 of them ;-)

Comments (1) :
Kees Kennis butted in "And maybe 333 alter boys, that is only half evil. " I'm not sure what they altEred, so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you meant altAr boys???

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 6, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Grimm Castles

T wo dozen blogreaders wrote after wednesday's comments asking to see my photos of some of the real castles in Grimm's fairy tales.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 4, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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Meme : Books Sarah Palin tried to censor :-(

When Sarah Palin was Mayor of Wasilla Alaska she tried to have (in her view immoral) books banned from the public and school libraries. This is her list - it documents her ignorance of the classics; I have underlined the ones I have read, Palin notwithstanding. Which ones have you read? Blog your own list, link back here, and mail me the URL of your post for a mention here :-)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Sex Game by Marcus Blake
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary !!!
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth

So I've read 47 books that Sarah Palin wants to suppress. I wonder how many on that list she has read herself in order to form her censoring opinion? I bet her score tends towards ZERO! I've upped my books-read from your list score to 47. So : Up yours, Sarah!

Comments (7) :
Wendy (Australia) sends her own list :- "I've read some of them(13), but not as many as you:
A Wrinkle in Time (but I can't remember it. This is a children's book?)
Brave New World
Canterbury Tales (she's fucking joking, right? This is offensive? She's mental, I trow...)
Catch 22 (great book -- I aspire to be Milo Minderbender)
Forever (absolute dross, but eeeexcelent reading if you're a 13-year-old girl)
All of the Harry Potters (nuff said)
James and the Giant Peach (wonderful)
Lord of the Flies (scary and gripping)
Of Mice and Men (moving)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (lingering...)
Silas Marner (boring as... had to read it for O Level)
The Catcher in the Rye (also read it at school. Remember really liking it but I can't remember anything really except that he had a sister called Phoebe and there was a girl in a green dress)
To Kill a Mockingbird (great. Moving)"
Another Wendy (UK, aged 9) wrote "ALL the Harry Potter books! And the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale." I live near where the Grimm Brothers did, Wendy. I'm mailing you photos of Sleeping Beauty's Castle and of Rapunzel's castle, both just 30 miles from here :-)
Kees Kennis wrote "Why are you Librul's so scared of a woman with at max 20% of your brain power ('I can see November 2012 from my house') ? I have read about 32 on the list, 28 of what you have read." I think we just dislike having known Eejits running the show, considering Dubya's record. Synchronicity leads me to point to the Mayan calendar for November 2012. Oops, my mistake, the Mayan calendar ends on Dec 21st 2012 actually.
Pierre (F) and 22 other blogreaders asked to see the castle photos too, so I'll put them up next, OK? Pierre also points out that the Mayan calendar doesn't end then, it merely rolls over. My bad.
Liz (UK) asks rhetorically "Sarah Palin tried to get those books banned? Seriously? Is the woman a complete moron?" Not sure about 'complete'.
Wehaf Urchiken tells me I may have fallen for a fake : "Snopes thinks that your list of books Sarah Palin tried to censor is bogus. Palin asked the librarian thrice whether she would ban books if asked to do so, and the librarian refused. When becoming mayor, Palin tried then to fire the librarian, but backed down after public protest. So I certainly think she may have had a list, despite Snopes 2008 opinion.
Patrick Fitzgerald wrote "Thank you, this is an excellent list. I will try to get at least a few of them read in the coming future. I notice "Of mice and Men" and "Flowers for Algernon". Both involve mentally retarded characters, could that be why she wants them out of the public library?" ;-) Duh?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on February 2, 2011 permalink Comments Email

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