The illegal military dictatorship in Burma (they call themselves the rulers of Myanmar) has put Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi on trial for having a foreign visitor at her house.
The guys in this corrupt regime play dirty, and the situation is truly frustrating. You want somebody to overthrow? Forget the oil-rich countries. Start here.
Read more about Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi in the powerful novel “The Lizard Cage” by Karen Connelly. Click here for a link to my review of this unforgettable book.
OK, here it is: one of my favorite paintings. It’s “The Kiss” by Francesco Hayez. It makes a great computer wallpaper if you put a nice matching color in the background. Enjoy!
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Fox TV has picked up “Past Life” for next season.
The show is based on the themes underlying M.J. Rose’s “The Reincarnationist.:
“Past Life” follows a team of detectives who solve crimes using regression therapy and the theory of reincarnation. The project already is making offers to writers.
Wired takes a look at the new Cool-er e-reader. The article contains links to other interesting e-reader news, as well as a link to a roundup of e-reader products.
According to Time, Oprah Winfrey called James Frey awhile back to apologize for shaming him on her show, in regard to his book “A Million Little Pieces.”
I find beautiful architecture to be somewhat poetic. The Chronicle of Higher Education has published online some photos of beautiful staircases. The one above is a photo inside a Riddle Block building in Ravenna, Ohio, taken by Lisa Scalfaro of the Record-Courier.
Jon J Muth won the Children’s Choice Book Award for illustrator of the year for ZEN TIES. Woo Hoo! I love Stillwater the wise, giant panda (whom we first met in ZEN SHORTS).
Stephenie Meyer was named author of the year for Breaking Dawn.
Kindergarten to Second Grade Book of the Year: The Pigeon Wants a Puppy! written and illustrated by Mo Willems
Third Grade to Fourth Grade Book of the Year: Spooky Cemeteries by Dinah Williams
Fifth Grade to Sixth Grade Book of the Year: Thirteen by Lauren Myracle
Teen Choice Book of the Year: Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
The New York Times has introduced its newest e-reader, the TimesReader 2.0. It was built to simulate the experience of reading a newspaper. Click here for a demonstration.
OK, Twitter users — Just when you thought you had the whole thing mastered, and you were building up a network, Twitter has gone and changed the rules. Now, you won’t see the replies to your tweets from people who aren’t already on your network. Dumb.
Why were we trying to build personal networks, when they’re not going to let us build them anymore?
“… For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire. …”
“Some people believe the alternative to bad religion is secularism, but that’s wrong, too. The answer to bad religion is better religion — prophetic rather than partisan, broad and deep instead of narrow, and based on values as opposed to ideology. In America (and in most of the developing world), religion is here to stay. The question is not whether faith and spiritual values will be applied to politics, but how?”
Richard & Judy Fell from 3 Million Viewers to 8,000
Richard & Judy watched ratings plummet after they changed channels in the UK — dropping to 8,000 viewers on the digital channel Watch from an audience of 3 million during the show’s best ratings on Channel 4.
UK television hosts and literary taste-makers Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan’s Richard & Judy’s Book Club attracted 100,000 viewers during their best ratings on the digital channel, but the show will end on July 3rd.
At Bookseller, UK publishers pondered the loss of the show–which sold more than 30 million books since 2004. Here’s Wayne Brookes, publishing director at HarperFiction: “If Richard and Judy were still on Channel 4, the loss would have been greater … You needed the show on prime time Channel 4 with the books being talked up for a person sitting at home at teatime to think ‘I’ll go out and buy that tomorrow.’”
“I don’t think we tell our stories enough, and I think that it is absolutely essential that we do. … When we die, we are going to be taking with us to the grave an enormous amount of information, experience, points of view, positions, attitudes. We should leave some of those parts of ourselves behind.”
— Sidney Poitier in a 2008 interview in AARP magazine
The Friends of the Garrettsville Library will hold a book sale at the Garrettsville Branch of the Portage County District Library.
Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. May 15 and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 16. The setup and pre-sale for the members of Friends will be held from noon to 6 p.m. May 14. Membership to the Friends group may be purchased at the door.
The library is located at 10482 South St. in the Village Park. For more information, call the library at 330-527-4378 or visit www.portagelibrary.org.
Dick Meyer has come up with his own list of the best English-language novels written since 1900. I always enjoy learning what other people think are the best in any given category. But again — he left out THE GOOD EARTH. How can you leave out THE GOOD EARTH???????
“Though Craig himself has not been recovered, the amazing expert trackers of 1SRG have been able to make themselves and us certain of what has become of Craig. His trail indicates that after sustaining a leg injury, Craig fell from a very high and very dangerous cliff and there is virtually no possibility that Craig could have survived that fall. Chris will pursue what he can about getting specialists to go down into the place we know Craig is so we can bring him home, but it is very, very dangerous and we are not yet completely certain what that will require. The only relief in this news is that we do know exactly what befell Craig, and we can be fairly certain that it was very quick, and that he did not wait or wonder or suffer.”
Totally unnecessary comments from Apple’s Steve Jobs:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Peter de Jonge, longtime collaborator with James Patterson, has struck out on his own with his first solo novel, “Shadows Still Remain.” What did he learn from working with Patterson?
“What I learned from him is that you can’t be self-indulgent. Even the most literary book has to be a page turner. You’re not accomplishing anything by writing something that’s hard to read.”
Cormac McCarthy has won the biennial PEN/Saul Bellow award for lifetime achievement in American literature, which comes with a $25,000 (£16,600) prize. The author of The Road and No Country for Old Men is the second writer to be awarded the prize, which goes to “a distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature.”
A dissertation written by President Barack Obama’s mother is getting published.
Duke University Press said Monday that an edited version of Ann Dunham’s anthropological study about rural craftsmen in Indonesia is scheduled to reach stores this fall. Dunham completed the study three years before she died in 1995.
Duke marketing manager Emily Young said the foreword was written by the president’s half-sister and Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng (so-TOR’-oh ING).
“Over time, I’ve become increasingly aware that the world is divided into people who wait for others to give them permission to do the things they want to do and people who grant themselves permission. Some look inside themselves for motivation and others wait to be pushed forward by outside forces. From my experience, there’s a lot to be said for seizing opportunities instead of waiting for someone to hand them to you.”
— from “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20:
A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World”
by Tina Seelig
“I’d wager that in your own life there are events that, at the time, you thought to be major setbacks. Only later was it obvious those ’setbacks’ were really springboards for you to reach new heights. Cohosting the Emmys and, a day later, hosting the season premiere of Dancing with the Stars provided me with the palpable proof of the yin and yang of things. On Sunday there were bad ratings and bad reviews. On Monday there were good ratings and good reviews.”
Quote from “I’m Hosting as Fast as I Can!: Zen and the Art of Staying Sane in Hollywood” by Tom Bergeron
OK, Twitter users — Just when you thought you had the whole thing mastered, and you were building up a network, Twitter has gone and 
from 
Richard & Judy watched ratings plummet after they changed channels in the UK — dropping to 8,000 viewers on the digital channel Watch from an audience of 3 million during the show’s best ratings on Channel 4.
Dick Meyer has come up with 
Amazon has released its newest, larger e-reader, the Kindle DX, and Publishers Weekly has very kindly provided links to info and comments about it.