It's Banned Books Week!

Celebrate your freedom to read this week! Here's the ALA's list of the top 10 most challenged or banned books of the past year. I'm happy to report that one of them, The Kite Runner, will be part of our AP Lit curriculum this fall. Want to see where the challenges are taking place? Check out this Google Map. Here's a few more facts about BBW from the ALA:

According to the ALA there have been 3,736 challenges from 2001-2008:

• 1,225 challenges due to "sexually explicit" material
  
• 1,008 challenges due to "offensive language"
  
• 720 challenges due to material deemed "unsuited to age group"
  
• 458 challenges due to "violence"
  
• 269 challenges due to "homosexuality"
  
• 103 challenges due to "anti-family"
  
• 233 challenges due to "religious viewpoints"
  

The ALA says that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.

So long, William Safire

William Safire, one of the best NY Times op-ed writers, died today at age 79. His weekly column, "On Language", was priceless. And if you were to look in a typical English classroom, you might find a poster with a list of his rules for writers:

Remember to never split an infinitive.

A preposition is something never to end a sentence with.

The passive voice should never be used.

Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.

Don't use no double negatives.

Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.

Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.

Do not put statements in the negative form.

Verbs have to agree with their subjects.

No sentence fragments.

National Puncutation Day is this Thursday!

What?!? A day just for punctuation? It's true. And to celebrate, here's a classic clip of Victor Borge trying to explain his Phonetic Punctuation System to Dean Martin.

Why do we trust Jon Stewart and Company?

Comedians aren't just funny, they're darn smart. Smarter than your average Situation Room host, anyway. Conan's pudgy sidekick, Andy Richter, just schooled CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Celebrity JEOPARDY! Andy's winnings: $68,000; Wolf's: -$4,600.

Ernie Harwell On His Career With Tigers - ESPN VIDEO

There will never be another voice like Ernie's. God bless.

Column of the Week - David Brooks

What do Rep. Joe Wilson, Michael Jordan, and Kanye West have in common? David Brooks calls it a "High Five Mentality". Instead of the humility shown by past generations, our culture has embraced the cult of immodesty:

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.

The '59 Sound

The Gaslight Anthem with Bruce Springsteen. The former plays The Intersection October 5; The Boss hits The Palace November 13. Can't wait!

So long, Summer 2009

And don't let the door hit you on the way out. From spring-like weather to the loss of Walter Cronkite, Teddy Kennedy and Merce Cunningham, this summer was one to forget. Joe Queenan sums up summer here, and Gail Collins offers a quiz for those of you who may have missed some of the more bizarre events of the past 90 days.

The summer wasn't a total loss. I got married. Ben got his driver's permit. Emily got rid of her braces. We adopted Zeus, the wire-haired Dachshund.

Back to school tomorrow.

Life is good.

What's the fuss?

Seriously, THIS is what parents are afraid of on the first day of school? A speech encouraging students to set goals and share in the responsibility for their education? Here's a sample of tomorrow's speech:

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Looks like socialism to me.

We believe! We believe!

Today marked the first day of school for most West Michigan teachers. We were treated to this gem of a performance - how can you watch this and NOT be hyped for the new school year?