Suggestion Saturday: August 3, 2013

Effective immediately the comment section on each post will shut down 10 days after the original publishing date.  You now have the ability to flag inappropriate messages, and I will be manually approving comments without verified email addresses.  It will always be ok to use a pseudonym here, but this blog will no longer publish anonymous comments. 

I am happy to unlock old posts upon request.

Ok, onto the fun stuff! 

Keeping Never Good Enough at Bay. I really appreciate this blogger’s transparency. It isn’t easy to admit these types of fears, although I definitely have had them.

Are the Events of“The Labyrinth” Meant to be Sarah Dreaming, or Are They Real? This is one of the most fascinating alternative explanations for a fantasy movie I’ve ever read. What we need is a blog or website dedicated to collecting and exploring this kind of imaginative work. As much as I enjoyed watching “The Labyrinth” as a kid, I liked thinking about the dark explanation for certain scenes even more.  This link is work safe, but the rest of the site may not be.

Being Human via sjhigbee. Several days ago someone asked me what makes people human. When I tweeted a link to my answer a fascinating discussion sprung up on Twitter, and this blog post was written in response to some of the points we made.

Soap-Stealing Squirrels Cause Residents to Demand Trees Are Cut Down. No, this isn’t satire as far as I can tell. I’m quite curious to figure out what the squirrels are doing with all of that soap, though. Would anyone like to write a haiku, flash fiction, or other short creative work about why squirrels need to be so clean?

Isla – a Programming Language for Children. I’m fascinated by the idea of teaching someone how to become a programmer by making it a game. As much as programming fascinates me it has always felt like a terribly complex activity.  This site makes it seem like something I could actually do.

I Never Dreamed via jdubqca. Listen to this poem after you read it. I liked it when I read it, but I loved hearing how the author interprets the pauses between each word. Sometimes how something is said matters more than the actual words that are used.

From Surviving a For-Profit School:

I spent my first few weeks back in this hole wondering what I’d gotten myself into. They had no work for me to do, because classes had just begun. Their classes, however, were only four weeks long, so it was just a short wait. In the meantime, I was meant to train. Training included a day-long employee orientation where I was driven around the strip malls on a golf cart by a man who said I had a lovely voice and should sing. He took us by the “library,” which was a room with four metal shelves mostly stacked with DVDs. He smiled at us and said, “Who needs all those books?” I wanted to tell him that I did, but kept my mouth shut.

From Celibacy at Twenty:

But every time I went
from months of hunger to those first kisses,
soon there were the last kisses, and I
felt I stood outside of life, held
back– but no one was holding me, I was
waiting….


If our species wants to avoid extinction we must Scatter, Adapt, and Remember.

So many books about the near future are grim. Climate change and dwindling natural resources are threatening the  longterm survival of the human race, but if we learn to live within our means and figure out how to build successful colonies on other planets our species has a chance to survive for a very long time.

I loved the optimism of this book. Some of the solutions it offers are far-fetched, but I hope that we will branch out into new territories and eventually evolve into a more peaceful race. Perhaps Star Trek is in our future!

What have you been reading?

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0 Responses to Suggestion Saturday: August 3, 2013

  1. Cathryn Wellner

    So many good choices again – and not ones I’d have come across otherwise. All were very good, but my favs were the first and last. The first because we’re all on that roller coaster. Reading someone else’s experience reminds us it’s OK that we have our good days and our bad.

    I’ll look for the book. Building other colonies appeals to me less than figuring out how to live peacefully and sustainably on this one, but it sounds intriguing.

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