LenEdgerly.com

Darlene yesterday finished this quilt, begun during the Fall Foliage Ramble, in time to submit it for a show that will hang in the Colorado Capitol. It's a spectacular piece that captures the colors of our two months on the road in New England, touring in the Southwind.

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Darlene and I made it home to Denver just ahead of the big snowstorm. The city is quiet and gorgeous from my window in the den, with very few vehicles or even pedestrians. We had a wonderful month in Cambridge, with many happy memories of the season.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

I created an account at PollDaddy, which enables me to offer polls on my blog. Please cast your vote!

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Here are some internet pearls I've found using StumbleUpon in the past week or so:

Wisdomquotes.com - an incredibly extensive list of quotes, by categories. From the Christmas group, I found this one from Garrison Keillor: "A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together."

The PocketMod - clever transformation of a single 8x10 piece of paper into a daily organizer.

Starbucks Drinks Simplified (Kinda) - precise descriptions of everything you can order at Starbucks.

Fine B&W photo of a train in a snowstorm.

The Age Project - people upload their photos, and you guess how old they are. One click and you find out how close you were, and they find out how old they look to lots of other people. Weird, but oddly compelling. I just posted my photo and will be interested in the results, which appear here:


Benjamin Krain Photojournalist - beautiful and arresting photos of the Katrina aftermath.

A Bandwidth Meter - shows how fast your internet connection is.

The Beauty of Mathematics - cool tricks with numbers.

Wikitravel - a wikipedia creation in which users generate travel-related content.

Google Book Search - enter a search word and find any book that contains it anywhere in its text. Incredible and almost scary. Try entering your name and see what comes up!

PODCASTS

When I searched on the tag "Podcast" I stumbled upon the following podcasts which I'm adding to my iTunes podcast directory for further exploration:

The Best of Ideas, hosted by Paul Kennedy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). So far, I have listened to the third of a three-part series on declassifying Cold War documents, which was fascinating and very well done.

Open Culture - an absolute treasure trove of podcasts, organized by categories. Just now I found one and subscribed, a feed from the Council on Foreign Relations. Others include podcasts from The Commonwealth Club Radio Program, and the Guardian Unlimited podcasts

Enough! This perhaps gives a feel for how powerful StumbleUpon is as a tool for finding new websites worth bookmarking and returning to. The installation and learning of the interface are not for the faint of heart, and I've only begun to feel comfortable with it, enough to know I will be returning often to stumble upon new delights.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

For Christmas Eve, I'm offering up this eight-minute excerpt from Bill Clinton's address to the Slate 60 gathering of philanthropists on November 13, 2006 at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. Talking about what it means to be truly free, Clinton compares Nelson Mandela with Yasser Arafat. He concludes with an assertion of the essential unity of life and his belief that we are in "the most exciting time in human history and nowhere near the worst."

Click here for a complete audio recording of Clinton's remarks, courtesy of Slate.com .

Click here for a doggone cute video podcast prepared by the White House. It features the President, Laura, and their two dogs, with a few Cabinet secretaries thrown in for good measure. (This is a reward to my mother the dog-loving Republican, for her patience in wading through all my Obama propaganda....)

Still photos from the video shoot are available here.

Monday, December 18, 2006

I've been caught in a loop for the past hour, and it's nearly midnight. The only way I can get out of it is to warn others, to post words to my blog. The site is StumbleUpon, and it quickly points you toward web sites of interest to you, one at a time, and you rate them with a thumbs up or down, so it gets smarter and smarter about what might interest you. There is some setup involved, downloading icons to your toolbar. It's amazingly cool, but NOT recommended for when you're trying to wind your mind down and get some sleep!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Click here for a 10-minute audio from Sen. Barack Obama's visit to the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. It includes an inspired intro by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Great fun, wish we'd been there.

A couple of Obama treats from Slate: John Dickerson's writerly account of the senator's visit to New Hampshire last weekend (with audio version here), and a sendup of Obama's teasing NFL promo on Monday Night Football.

And here is Dickerson's balanced take on what Slate impishly calls "Barackwater," a questionable home-purchase deal, with Obama himself leading the questions and saying he regrets his misjudgement. For Obama believers, it's a good story to understand, because I'm sure we will hear lots about it in the coming months.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Darlene and Claire enjoy the sun at Ocean Park, Maine, during our brief stay there earlier this week. Winter storms have filled sand in around the legs of the bench.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

1) Obama-mania, which Darlene and I are going to sample first-hand today in Manchester, N.H., where Barack will sign books at a gathering at the Frank Jones Center, a venue where all 700 available tickets were snapped up last week. We don't have tickets, but I'm as interested in the crowd as I am the almost-official candidate.

2) Hillary loves being a U.S. Senator and is damn good at it. This excellent New York magazine piece from nearly a month ago makes the case.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

My walk to Harvard Square from my parents' home offers this serene view of the Episcopal Divinity School. Cobblestones form the walkways, with grass poking between the stones. The campus is just a few houses down Brattle Street from the Longfellow House, which has a simple Christmas wreath on the front door to mark the season.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

A touching story of a young baseball fan who received a signed card back from one of his heros--15 years after the initial request. From Slate's excellent daily podcast hosted by Andy Bowers. Click here to listen.

You can read the story in Slate here.

In the December issue of the AA Grapevine is an impressive story of a marriage saved through recovery, after a year of waiting and work. I subscribe to the audio version of the Grapevine, so I was able to listen to this article while walking along Brattle Street yesterday. Further information about the Grapevine is available here. I received a prompt affirmative response when I e-mailed the magazine asking for permission to include the audio file on my blog. They did request that I include the following disclaimer:

Permission to use the AA Grapevine, Inc. copyrighted material does not in any way imply affiliation with or endorsement of any of the material contained on this website.

To listen to "Beginner's Meeting: Whose Marriage Is It Anyway?", click here.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

James survived his debut under babysitting by Darlene and me. I find myself wondering what he's thinking a lot. As he approaches ten months he takes charge of any room he's in. What a wonder.

The Longfellow House on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., took on a light dusting of snow this morning, I liked how the white and yellow suited each other in the gray light.

Monday, December 04, 2006

We dropped off Darlene's friend Tish at her son's home outside of Hartford last night. This gave us the chance to spend the night in a handsome hotel in downtown Hartford, the Goodwin. We are in a big room with slants in the ceiling and little windows peeking out from the top floor, like an attic. I had imagined looking for the home of Wallace Stevens, Hartford's famous businessman-poet, but we're having too much fun here at the hotel, reading the paper, drinking Peet's coffee, and playing ball with Claire.

The Hartford Courant this morning has a moving profile of the Worcester Wreath Co., a Maine business that each Christmas donates wreaths to decorate the graves of veterans at Arlington National Cemetery. On Dec. 10 a tractor-trailer with 5,000 wreaths will leave Harrington, Maine, accompanied by the Patriot Guard Riders motorcycle club, following Route 1 for the four-day trip to D.C. The web site for Wreaths Across America is here.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Sen. Barack Obama gave the keynote address at a conference sponsored by Sojourners magazine on June 28, 2006. He spoke about the role of religious faith in political life, and I referred to his comments in today's episode of the Audio Pod Chronicles, a review of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Click here for a 37-minute excerpt of Obama's address. The full speech and transcript are available here.

In my Obama browsing, I also came across this video of his witty appearance on Jon Stewart's The Daily show. So far, I can't find any YouTube footage of the senator's visit to The Tonight Show last night. When Jay Leno asked the inevitable question, "Are you running for president," Obama said he understood Jay's desire for the big announcement to be on his show. "Unfortunately," Obama deadpanned, "I've already committed to making it on the Food Channel."

Saturday, December 02, 2006

My mother makes her way through The Memorial Church at Harvard after attending Morning Prayers at Appleton Chapel. Yesterday I attended with her and recorded the choir singing Adante tranquillo from Sonata III, op 65 by Felix Mendelssohn. Click here to listen.

Friday, December 01, 2006