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Five Things Make a Post
Feb. 16th, 2013 03:10 pm1. Campaign season has opened for this year's state election, and later in the year there will be a federal election as well. This reminds me that as a citizen of cyberspace I find it much easier to stumble across information and discussions about the issues and candidate platforms of the United States than those of my own country.
Anybody have any suggestions for blogs or websites helpful to an Australian voter?
2. In an attempt to cut down the amount of processed sugar in my diet, I've started steering clear of anything where sugar is in the number-one position on the ingredients list, or number two after something dull like water, or what-the-heck-is-sugar-doing-in-this-at-all (Grain Waves crisps, I'm looking at you).
In a recent idle moment I went through a confectionery aisle reading ingredients lists; what struck me was not that everything I'd previously have eaten without a second thought had Sugar as the number-one ingredient, which I'd expected, but that in nearly all of them the number two ingredient was More Sugar.
3. The independent fresh-fruit-and-vegetables shop down the road has closed, which is saddening but not a surprise. I saw the writing on the wall when it stopped being all about fresh-fruit-and-vegetables and started experimenting with sidelines in common household items and weird American confectionery (Reese's Pieces are kind of interesting but I wouldn't want to eat them too often) and soft drinks (which I didn't go near even before the sugar restriction). I hope things go better for them in their next venture, whatever it happens to be.
4. A couple of days ago I received a large shipment of books I'd forgotten I owned; I bought them when I went to Swancon last year, couldn't fit them in my luggage, so left them with a relative until such time as somebody with luggage space happened to be heading my way. I got to be gleeful all over again about owning some of them, regarded some with puzzlement, and greeted one trilogy with "I could have sworn I'd got rid of you." (Where did I put that email asking for secondhand-book-sale donations?) So far, only one has turned out to be a duplicate of something I already owned.
5. The concept I was vaguely trying to recall a couple of posts ago, and had to let go because I couldn't remember any of the proper nouns, was action librarian Nancy Pearl's concept of Doorways to Reading, which she teaches as a tool for matching readers to books they might like. Finding out what people read (favourite author or genre) is unreliable; better to work out what people read for, what it is that draws them into a book. The four doorways identified by Pearl are Story, Character, Language, and Setting; every reader prefers some of these over the others, and a given book is unlikely to satisfy all of these to the same extent. (I myself, as I said before, am a Story and Character guy, and if those are lacking, it doesn't matter how beautiful the Language is.) (Also note how you could have four people who identified their favourite genre as, say, detective fiction, and each could be entering the genre through a different doorway and getting different things out.) An interesting addition, which I only learned about when I was looking it up again today, is that apparently the Four Doorways toolkit works just as well for recommending non-fiction.
Anybody have any suggestions for blogs or websites helpful to an Australian voter?
2. In an attempt to cut down the amount of processed sugar in my diet, I've started steering clear of anything where sugar is in the number-one position on the ingredients list, or number two after something dull like water, or what-the-heck-is-sugar-doing-in-this-at-all (Grain Waves crisps, I'm looking at you).
In a recent idle moment I went through a confectionery aisle reading ingredients lists; what struck me was not that everything I'd previously have eaten without a second thought had Sugar as the number-one ingredient, which I'd expected, but that in nearly all of them the number two ingredient was More Sugar.
3. The independent fresh-fruit-and-vegetables shop down the road has closed, which is saddening but not a surprise. I saw the writing on the wall when it stopped being all about fresh-fruit-and-vegetables and started experimenting with sidelines in common household items and weird American confectionery (Reese's Pieces are kind of interesting but I wouldn't want to eat them too often) and soft drinks (which I didn't go near even before the sugar restriction). I hope things go better for them in their next venture, whatever it happens to be.
4. A couple of days ago I received a large shipment of books I'd forgotten I owned; I bought them when I went to Swancon last year, couldn't fit them in my luggage, so left them with a relative until such time as somebody with luggage space happened to be heading my way. I got to be gleeful all over again about owning some of them, regarded some with puzzlement, and greeted one trilogy with "I could have sworn I'd got rid of you." (Where did I put that email asking for secondhand-book-sale donations?) So far, only one has turned out to be a duplicate of something I already owned.
5. The concept I was vaguely trying to recall a couple of posts ago, and had to let go because I couldn't remember any of the proper nouns, was action librarian Nancy Pearl's concept of Doorways to Reading, which she teaches as a tool for matching readers to books they might like. Finding out what people read (favourite author or genre) is unreliable; better to work out what people read for, what it is that draws them into a book. The four doorways identified by Pearl are Story, Character, Language, and Setting; every reader prefers some of these over the others, and a given book is unlikely to satisfy all of these to the same extent. (I myself, as I said before, am a Story and Character guy, and if those are lacking, it doesn't matter how beautiful the Language is.) (Also note how you could have four people who identified their favourite genre as, say, detective fiction, and each could be entering the genre through a different doorway and getting different things out.) An interesting addition, which I only learned about when I was looking it up again today, is that apparently the Four Doorways toolkit works just as well for recommending non-fiction.
