How to use this Page

What do Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Brazil, and India have in common? They have banned the use of Roundup—the most heavily applied herbicide in the United States. Why have these nations acted against what is the most heavily used herbicide in the world today? This is because of growing reports of serious illness to farmworkers and their families.

The post Potential dangers of glyphosate weed killers appeared first on OUPblog.

With elections just about a year away, Americans can expect to hear a lot about regulation during the next twelve months—most of it from Republicans and most of it scathing. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump typifies the GOP’s attitude toward regulation.

The post Clean air… hot air appeared first on OUPblog.

So I'm not there. I wish I were. Friends of the Monument worked hard and deserve this national recognition. EPA Region 9 award. Wow! (And I'm honored to be the person who nominated FOM!)






BTW, You can see the full list of 2009 EPA Region 9 award winners here.




Photo and video courtesy of Angelo O. Villagomez.

I got a phone call this morning from Wendy Chavez of the Environmental Protection Agency.

FRIENDS OF THE MONUMENT has been selected as a winner for the region 9 awards this year! YAY! She said it was a "tight" competitive process, and that more than 200 nominations (in all categories) were received and 40 winners selected. Awards ceremony will be April 16, 2009.

I received the notice because I nominated the organization for the award. You can see my earlier post about the EPA award here.

Congrats to Friends of the Monument!


And follow up on Angelo's breaking news: a link re Jane Lubchenco confirmed as new NOAA chief.

Via resourceshelf, this account of the Memorandum of Agreement that was the result of arbitration between the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 and the EPA. Please see the linked documents for information from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on why the EPAs compliance — which they termed “grudging” — was not acceptable to EPA library workers.

“Even as many collections remain in crates, EPA has decided to micromanage what is left,” [PEER Director Carol] Goldberg added, noting that the agency has still not accounted for many of the library holdings it had removed. “Professional librarians should be making these management decisions, not political appointees.”

Finding Wonderland has a great post from a. fortis about "all the memorable words and ideas and history and everything else that I encountered for the first time in kids' books and teen books."

Here's one excerpt:

"As a kid, without those kids' books I wouldn't have learned about dodecahedrons or tesseracts. Those books taught me what a veruca was, and what makes somebody a twit."

Then she asks: "What have you learned from children's books?"

The first thing that came to mind for me was infinity and the concept of time. I vividly remember coming face to face with both of these in The Phantom Tollbooth. To this day, I can't hear the word "infinity" and not think of that chapter where Milo takes the "shortcut" to the Land of Infinity and winds up climbing the same set of stairs over and over. Later, he encounters the Terrible Trivium, who gives him impossible, time-wasting tasks to do, like moving a towering pile of sand, one grain at a time, with a pair of tweezers. As this demon says: "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones, which are so difficult. You just won't have time."

I need to hear those last words of wisdom every single day.

Go on over to Finding Wonderland and tell a. fortis what you learned (the good way) from children's books.

This has turned out to be a week for working on sketches. The one above and yesterday's are for new samples. I usually don't do this much shading for a sketch, but thought it would be fun to try something different.

I'm also working on a dummy for a new story. The drawings are a bit more complicated than I expected, and so are taking longer. It's a little bit frustrating-- I feel like time is slipping past! I've been writing and revising, and once I finish the pictures it will lead to even more revising. I'm approaching this project with baby steps. Every day. It will get done.

Perhaps, she's running from time... Read the rest of this post

By Anatoly Liberman

People always try to learn the origin of things, but the world and even most human institutions arose so long ago that our reconstruction can seldom be secure. Language is also old, and we know next to nothing about the circumstances in which it arose. The age of words differs greatly: some were coined millennia ago, others are recent. (more…)

Share This

I have a love/hate relationship with time. Mostly, HATE. My least favorite thing to do as a writer is struggle with the timeline of a story. I want to cram more hours in a character's day than is possible. I want some weeks to have at least nine or ten days. And then, when I need the story to get to the Next Big Event, I want months to speed by without attracting the attention of the Time Police. Yes, I know, as Writer Goddess of the story, I can manipulate the passage of time in my own telling of it. But there are limits to what I can do. The sun must rise, for instance. (I think that's known as the Hemingway rule.) Seasons must follow each other in order. If the characters go to school, I must keep track of the days of the week, and not send them to class on a Sunday.

I would really stink at a farm story, like Charlotte's Web, which demands that the writer pay strict attention to time and season, like how many hours of daylight there are in a early winter's day, the warming and cooling of the earth, and the lifespan of a spider. How did E.B. keep up with all that?

For Letters From Rapunzel, I tried to duck the whole issue of time in my rough draft by telling myself the story should have a "once upon a time" feel to it. My editor thought NOT. She said I should consider letting the reader know at least how much time passes between each letter. As I revised along those lines, I suddenly realized that I had made a major mistake in not dealing with time.

Of course, someone who feels as trapped as Rapunzel does in her tower would think about the passage of time! They would probably, in fact, obsess over it. Don't prisoners mark the days of their captivity on their cell walls? So I began adding, at the top of each letter, not only which day it was, but also which minute it was. I discovered that a letter written at 2:02 in the morning under your bedcovers with a flashlight has a completely different feel to it than one written at 3:02 in the afternoon in the boring confines of Homework Club.

I don't think authors should detail the passing of every second in their books, any more than they should dwell too much on descriptions of the weather. But this weekend, I made sure that the characters in my next book aren't showing up at school on a Saturday morning. They go to bed after enough hours have passed (if their parents make them) and if they don't, there's a mention of why not. I put a clock in their classroom, and the teacher looks at it (unhappily, I might add) and I even---this is a triple back flip---mention a time zone difference between one character and another.

What about you? Do you notice what an author does with time in her story? Or is it one of those things we writers slave over, give minutes---no, hours---no, days!---of our lives to that, when done well, is not marked by readers at all?

At first I was like, There's no way I'm doing LiveJournal or Facebook or MySpace.  They're evil time suckage, all of them.  But I sort of have to.  Because I live in the world and all. 

So I've succumbed.  I'm on Facebook.  And guess what?  Facebook is fun!  Between FunWall sketches and being green and everyone's books and music, it's just too fun.  So stop by and write on my Wall (or FunWall or Super Wall, although I wasn't sure what to do with the Advanced Wall so I removed it).

As we all know, it's entirely possible to spend your whole day on all of these sites and get absolutely zero work done.  Which is why I must learn moderation.  As in:  I can eat just one cookie.  I mean, not if they're freshly baked, but you know.  In general.  Or:  I can watch The Office without inhaling five episodes in a row.  I could maybe just watch one ep.  Or two.  Maybe.  And now I must learn this one:  I can be on all of these different sites and still get work done.  Because other people do it.  It's what they do.

Oh, and my college friend Erik Burns pointed out on my Wall that I invented the original wall.  I wrote on my wall in my college apartment (with charcoal sticks, and I sadly washed it all off when I moved).  Exhibit A:

In any given sad situation, you can choose to deal in one of two ways.  You can get all twarked up in a big ball of snit over it.  Or you can accept the things you cannot change and focus on the positive side.  Because no matter how atrocious the situation seems, there is always a positive side.  You just have to look harder to find it sometimes, is all.

Daylight hours are a huge deal for me.  They increase by about two minutes per day from the winter solstice until the summer solstice.  Lots of people don't realize that the day after summer begins, daylight hours actually start to decrease.  Sad, but true.  Less daylight hours make me feel all wilted and foggy.  In the winter, Seasonal Affective Disorder causes some people to feel depressed.  This is because the amount of light you're exposed to affects your mood and sleep patterns.  That's why SAD patients sit in front of light boxes (which emit full-spectrum white light to simulate sunlight) for a certain amount of time each day to improve their depression.  This happens in places that experience lots of rainy days, like Seattle (which would explain most of the Grey's Anatomy Season Three craziness, but that's another entry) or locations in polar regions (which experience three months of living in almost total darkness every year).  That's OD.

But that's not the point.  The point is this:  Instead of being bummed about decreasing daylight hours, I'm going to focus on sweet summer memories and palm trees.  Palm trees always make me feel peaceful.  Palm trees say, "Hi.  Why not kick back with a tall glass of watermelon juice (with those paper umbrellas sticking out of it) and enjoy this perfect 73-degree day?  More fruit salad?"  So I think of palm trees.  Like these, brought to you by the most extraordinary photographer ever, Alan Maltz.  Check out his website for many more.

Where do you get your ideas?

Lately M and I have been taking an hour each night to walk or ride bikes. It's been a while since we had enough time to do this (or since the weather has cooperated for days in a row).

I get ideas when I'm walking and biking, especially when I'm not talking.

I get ideas from looking around when I'm quiet.

Like last night:

the five dogs stuck on the other side of their electric fences (love those invisible walls...and really, thank you to the person who invented the electric fence...)

the woman raking last fall's leaves

the people who plant daffodils for the town. One wears a sun hat. The other has a bandana tied around her head. Which one is the old lady and which one is the young man?

an old couple strolling, arm and arm.

And believe it or not: another harmonica in the gutter. It's the third I have found. You think I'm supposed to listen to this??????

I found this interesting article on creativity at Time.com.

The article dates back to January 2006, but makes some wonderful points about creativity:

"... In creativity research, we refer to the three Bs—for the bathtub, the bed and the bus—places where ideas have famously and suddenly emerged. When we take time off from working on a problem, we change what we're doing and our context, and that can activate different areas of our brain. If the answer wasn't in the part of the brain we were using, it might be in another ..."

"...They have tons of ideas, many of them bad. The trick is to evaluate them and mercilessly purge the bad ones. But even bad ideas can be useful .... Sometimes you don't know which sparks are important until later, but the more ideas you have, the better ..."

Link:
"The Hidden Secrets of the Creative Mind" January 08, 2006 at Time.com