Saturday Review 10-4 (good buddy)

(If you got that title reference, you are officially old enough to remember the 1970's heyday of C.B. radio.)

Bulletin Board
*****Have you met my new widget over there in the sidebar? I'm participating in the 2008 DonorsChoose.Org Blogger Challenge with the Los Angeles Moms Blog! Your donation - as much or as little as you want - goes directly to support the specific classroom teacher project(s) you choose from this list. (By the way, several of them are looking for books for their classes, like this project that I donated to - and which I was notified on Friday has been fully funded!) You'll help our local public schools, and help the LA Moms Blog raise more money for this cause than all those other mom blogs - just a little friendly competition for a good cause! And after you've done that, why not search the site for a project to support in your own town, too?

*****If you'd like to help some of the children and families affected by Hurricane Ike in Texas, here's some information about Operation CRAYON.

*****I know I told y'all about this last week, but I'm on the move to end Alzheimer's - Saturday, October 18. My most recent post on the LA Moms Blog is sort of about that, but it's mostly about remembering my mom. Somewhat related: if you're an American Express cardmember, final voting for this year's Members Project is going on now, and the project Alzheimer's Disease: Early Detection Matters is guaranteed some funding - the final vote tally will determine just how much money it gets, so please vote!

*****The BBAW Directory website - a followup to Book Blogger Appreciation Week - is now up and running! Search out some new blogs, or suggest an addition to the nearly 400 blogs already listed!

*****I can finally mention what I couldn't talk about last week (for fear of jinxing it): we're moving in just over a month! The new place is just across town, but it's more spacious and in a nicer neighborhood (not next door to the train station). No, we're not buying - are you KIDDING? This is Southern California! - but I know our new landlady from my book club. Preparing for the move may cause some slowdown on the blog front for the next few weeks, but you know I can't stay gone for long.


New in Google Reader
Raising Mommy, via House of Prince
Julia's Mexico City, (indirectly) via Mar Vista Mom
Greeblemonkey, via Blog Nosh Magazine
Literarily


Random reading - the week that was
A few things left out of the parenting manual; what can happen when parents don't act like parents, a/k/a yielding to the "kindergarchy;" in celebration of a child; remembering a father

Connecting and reconnecting, or the Internet actually is good for something

I've lived in the suburbs for much of my adult life, and I've always been rather ambivalent about it, because I really want to be a city girl at heart. But I've never wanted to be one of those shiny happy rural people...

Box tops for bailouts? Financial distress and a flashback to F. Scott Fitzgerald; but it's not the end of the world. And here's an unusual suggestion for addressing it...

Should fiction writers write about politics, or technology, or basically anything that isn't fiction? (If the answer is "no," I have to wonder whether anybody should write about anything...) Also, why can't politicians always be this mature?

A classic e-mail scam gets just a bit too personal; and scammers are still using snail mail, too

With so many reasons not to love California, it's a wonder that anyone does

Did I forget the "thou shalt not share hats and get lice" commandment?

Would you prefer to keep your personal library on your personal computer (in this case, that has to be a Mac, though) instead of online? I haven't tried it, but there's some new (free!) software to do just that.

I know this is Thursday's news, but someone got hold of Sarah Palin's prep materials for the VP debate:

(Post-debate, it looks like it was a pretty effective strategy...)

Random question of the week
If you use Feedburner for your blog feed, and you track your subscribers through it, do you have any insight as to how it works with Bloglines? My Google feed stats stay fairly consistent. Bloglines is 11 one day, 16 the next, back to 11, up to 19 the day after, then back down to 11 again. I'd be really surprised if that many people are adding and dropping the feed from one day to the next, so I'd love to know what's going on here. Has anyone else noticed this with your feeds? Or should I just stop caring?


Book notes
Featuring some reviews others posted for Banned Books Week:

Natasha at Maw Books Blog talked about Go Ask Alice (another of those cautionary tales I remember from my own YA-lit-reading days), and how this "diary of a teenage drug addict" really isn't.

Just a (Reading) Fool got his Personal Banned Book Week Challenge underway with a re-reading of the genre-hopping existential classic Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and later gave in to Lois Lowry's The Giver.

Jen at Devourer of Books posted a daily "Banned Books Spotlight," and reviewed one of my all-time favorites (banned or otherwise), A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'engle

  
For the wishlist:
Who By Fire, by Diana Spechler
Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited, by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein
The Best Place to Be: A Novel in Stories, by Lesley Dormen
The Pools, by Bethan Roberts