Mostly Links

Irbis has his check- up tomorrow and should be close to running free-- we hope! Despite the fact we are in the tail- end of our season's biggest snowstorm (a foot so far) spring is in the air, and in the pup- and I do mean SPRING.

So more soon-- but first a few links.

Some writing advice, much of it surprisingly good, from a diversity of writers in the Guardian. HT David Zincavage.

Also noted by David: complex structures older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. I wish I had known about these when I was in Turkey-- I was staying about 20 miles from them!

Dog ownership to be replaced by "guardianship" in Wisconsin? A real threat-- read the whole thing.

Science banned in science projects--!!. HT Chas. (Free Range Kids is a blog I will have more to say about later-- fans of Richard Louv and "Last Kid in the Woods" should check it out).

From Chas' "other blog": a funny description, re a High Country News story, of how reporters generally see various religions:

"* Jews are generally all right, particularly if they write for Tikkun magazine, but Israelis are scary.
* Christians are at best hypocrites. At worst, you can expect them to fortify themselves in rural compounds and commit incest—-and those are the Presbyterians.
* The Catholic Church, however, is easy to cover (except for the parts that are in Latin) for anyone experienced in big-city “machine” politics, such as Democrats in Chicago.
* Buddhists are all right if they are poets. Ethnic Buddhists (for example, Vietnamese) are invisible.
* Hindus, Sikhs, ethnic Taoists, etc., are generally invisible.
* Muslims must be treated carefully because they might explode.
* And Pagans? They are easy to ridicule because, after all, people like Jonathan Thompson, editor of High Country News, don’t know any."