Good Reads Around The Web

For pondering: More Weight on Less Meat (Bittman)

"If everyone in the U.S. ate no meat or cheese just one day a week, over a year, the effect on emissions would be the equivalent of taking 7.6 million cars off the road."

For sheer laughs - not without some interesting points: In Praise of Joanne Rowling's Hermione Granger Series

"The defining hero of our age is a girl who saves the day with her egalitarianism, love of learning, hard work, and refusal to give way to peer pressure. It’s hard to think of the Hermione Granger series as anything other than flawless. And yet — as fans constantly point out — there is a very big flaw in the series. You know who I’m talking about; it’s He Who Must Not Be Named, but we spell it H-A-R-R-Y."

For some pros and cons of blogging - with a nice conclusion: Letters to the Future

"So maybe we can think of blogs—at least the good ones, and maybe even ones like these—as letters, if not to friends, to everyone, to the future: here is who we are, as it unfolded in real time; here is what we were thinking, even when it turned out to be wrong; here is how we thought about each other and about ourselves; here is what we made of our world. Sometimes it won’t be worth saving, and often it won’t be thoughtful. Some day, when they edit our lifelong blogs and put them in a volume (like, say, we do now with the letters of a famous thinker), they’ll edit out the useless pieces, fix our grammar, add clarifying footnotes about confusing allusions. It won’t be a complete, accurate, well-thought-out view of life, but it will be a pretty good picture of what it was to be us."

And for a potential danger of blogging - something I've often thought about: my sister-in-law Jenn posts a Reality Check

"The problem with blogging is that I'm not always sure that it doesn't portray some false version of me--some person that I wish I was but really am not."

In the spirit of trying to keep it real, I'll post some picture of our new house soon. Crumbling plaster, boxes everywhere, and three dirty, tousled, tired inhabitants.

If you ever doubt entropy, become a home-owner. If you're still uncertain, try maintaining two properties. I can spend two hours weeding over at House #1, and three days later I have to do it all over again! And while I spend a day tackling the endless projects of House #2, the everyday tasks of dishes, sweeping, and tidying just keep piling up.