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I wasn’t the only photographer! Eileen Flanagan book reading.

Book reading audience, Eileen Flanagan book reading.

A man who has written about and read spiritual books for decades… mentioned at the end of our hour-long conversation that most of the readers of his site and of spiritual books in general are women, yet most of the writers of such books are men. He was happy to help promote a female spiritual writer, pointing out a passage in my book about paying attention to our bodies and our dreams that he thought was a distinctly woman’s voice, though he immediately acknowledged men who have written about those topics, as well.

A guest piece in The Onion by the long-time host of Reading Rainbow:

Thank god.

After 26 long years, I can finally rest easy. Twenty-six years I spent standing in front of a camera, gritting my teeth, and shilling the latest works of every hack children’s book author imaginable. For 26 years, I’ve told kids they could open a magical door to another world just by reading a book, when the only door it ever opened for me led to a soul-sucking career in the horrifying abyss of public television.

Via DavidinIndy

tiphereth:

Now this is why the internet is saving the planet one tree at a time. Is this one of the fattest books you’ve ever seen?

Wikipedia as a real book! 5000 pages, fully printed. Articles in the book are taken from: Wikipedia’s featured articles.

Writing Cheerfully on the Web: A Quaker Blog Reader

Printed: 277 pages, 5.83” x 8.26”, perfect binding, black and white interior ink. Paperback: $19.98

Description: This book brings to print the online conversation that has been mending the historical schisms in Quakerism. The contemporary writing by 32 bloggers shatters the stereotypes of who the “real” Quakers are and points to the wholeness that is the Religious Society of Friends.

From the Publisher’s site:

For 175 years, the prevailing image of Elias Hicks has been a false one. His opponents in the Religious Society of Friends have successfully misrepresented him as denying Christ and the scriptures. In his last year of life, Hicks reluctantly penned a reply to these charges, recounting in his journal how God had ordered his life. But the published Journal was edited into a bland portrayal of one of the most dynamic figures in Quaker history. Paul Buckley has meticulously compiled a new edition of The Journal of Elias Hicks from the original manuscripts – most in Hicks’ own handwriting – that restores more than 100 pages of missing material.

Recently, however, there has been an uncomfortable sense that God is calling us to make and advocate for changes more difficult and radical than adding solar panels or a green roof…. The willingness to confront both our own failings and the ways of the prevailing culture are among the qualities that have enabled Quakers to influence history out of proportion to our numbers.

The Rocky Mountain Locust creatures make a dramatic appearance as “grasshoppers” in On the Banks of Plum Creek, the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” book that’s the boys’ current nighttime reading. Laura writes of them hatching and eating every plant bare before turning in the millions for a swarm westward—and briefly over baby Carrie!

… A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.

There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.

Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen…

The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.

Wikipedia’s story is even more amazing:

One 1874 sighting famous to entomologists recorded a swarm 198,000 square miles (513,000 km²) in estimated size—greater than the area of California. According to The Guinness Book of Records under the heading ‘greatest concentration of animals’, the swarm must have contained at least 12.5 trillion insects with a total weight of 27.5 million tons. [1] But less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct.

University of Wisconsin Biologist Charles R. Bomar has some great accounts:

The grasshoppers ate and ate; they devoured everything from barley and buckwheat to spruce and tobacco. The locusts even ate blankets that women put over the crops to protect them. A few records report the locusts eating fence posts, leather, dead animals, and sheep wool. Cannibalism was also observed. One common comment was that “grasshoppers ate everything but the mortgage”

Picture courtesy of Bugguide.net. Map from Charles R. Bomar’s page.

From a British blogger:

There’s no cosy way of saying this. David Boulton, the “humanist and Quaker” author of The Trouble with God: Building the Republic of Heaven, has written an anti-Quaker book. The Trouble with God is not a work of Quaker universalism; it’s not Quaker humanism; it’s not Quaker atheism or Quaker non-theism or Quaker agnosticism. It’s not Quaker anything. It’s anti-Quaker. It’s against any and all sorts of Quaker testimony or subdivisional -ism.

The Subscriber would respectfully invite the attention of the members of the Society of Friends to his assortment of Friends’, Miscellaneous, Juvenile, School and Blank Books.

Please let me know whether you’ve found Quaker books, pamphlets, videos, anything, from recent years, that [shed light on the reader’s situation]. Whether our motive is to make Quakers simply glow in the dark, or to one-up somebody else, internal or external, it’s all about us. If we can simply speak from where we are at this moment… that’s all I really yearn for. That’s what I want Friends to be known for.

A local client from Tabernacle NJ came to me with an interesting project. He’s owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.

The site’s on a bit of a budget so it’s a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E-Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.

Visit the site: Office Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service

Full text online and it’s a relatively short read.

How much continuity is there from this and your yearly meeting’s current book of discipline? If you gave an elevator pitch about what Quakers believe, could you find matching evidence of it in an early Faith & Practice?

A.K.A. the Deshler-Morris House, where George Washington really did sleep! From the National Park Service site:

President George Washington also briefly occupied the Deshler-Morris House, a two and a half story stuccoed stone house at 5442 Germantown Avenue. The National Park Service restored this building to the way it looked when George Washington was the occupant between 1793 and 1794. A group of dedicated volunteers provides tours of the property, while the National Park Service continues to maintain the house and grounds. Here in 1793, the executive branch of the government dealt with the problem of Edward Genet, the former French minister. He had commissioned privateers in American ports to prey on British ships along the American coast and in so doing jeopardized relations and risked war between Great Britain and the new nation. The next summer, Washington rented the house again hoping to protect his family from yellow fever, while he carried out his duties as president. The home became known as “the Summer White House.”

My mother Liz says she was given a lot of reading to prepare herself to give tours. I’m not too worried about qualifications, as we had framed pictures of Germantown on our walls growing up (she carefully cut out her favorite scenes from a neat old book and framed them herself with red felt matting!). I think the “summer White House” was actually one of the pictures on our walls!