Quote of the Day:
"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others."
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Song of the Day:
The Tuesdays, "It's Up To You"

Happy Birthday:
Minnie Driver
Richard Gephardt
Norman Mailer
Jackie Robinson
Nolan Ryan
Justin Timberlake

VC POSTER Jim Lindgren says the Duke women's lacrosse team should get a university service award for their support of their male counterparts. Many comments follow, pro and con.

As always, KC Johnson is a must-read this week on the Duke case.

Quote of the Day:
"The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her."
~ Coco Chanel

Song of the Day:
Elton John, "Nikita"

Happy Birthday:
Christian Bale
Dick Cheney
Phil Collins
Vanessa Redgrave
Franklin D. Roosevelt

AND SINCE I WANDERED ONTO the subject of New Yorker covers, this one has to be my all-time favorite. This would be the perfect thing for the closet area of a master bedroom. You can browse and buy all the covers here.

IN THE SLOW COOKER right now: Pork with mushrooms and rosemary. The slow cooker was a wedding present from my brother, and we are loving it. Or, more accurately: I'm loving how easy it is to produce meals with it, and my husband is loving eating said meals. I've yet to found any really appealling vegetarian recipes, but I'm sure there's something out there.

Speaking of food, I took the time yesterday to read this long piece on "nutritionism" in the NYT Magazine.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.

Bottom line: eat more fruits and vegetables and less packaged, processed stuff. And maybe more Omega-3, or maybe not -- that part kind of lost me.

ART SPIEGELMAN details how the post-9/11 New Yorker cover was conceived:

I wanted to see the emptiness, and I wanted to find the awful/awe-filled image of all that disappeared that morning. Surrealism was inadequate, and, after doing several vividly colored Magritte-like drawings, I had to turn to Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black paintings for a solution. To my everlasting admiration, Françoise [Spiegelman's wife, the magazine's cover editor] repositioned my silhouettes so that the north tower's antenna breaks the "W" of the magazine's logo.

What's on your computer screen is a very rough approximation of a cover that can really be seen only in its printed form. Greg Captain, the head of the New Yorker imaging department, helped assess the best way to print this image and took a fourteen-hour drive to our printing plant to oversee the delicate operation.

I'm not sure what the significance of the broken "W" is, but I can only assume that it was too early at that point to be a statement about the President.

Quote of the Day:
"The question isn't who's going to let me; it's who's going to stop me."
~ Ayn Rand

Song of the Day:
Linda Ronstadt, "Winter Light"

Happy Birthday:
W.C. Fields
Sara Gilbert
Heather Graham
Greg Louganis
William McKinley
Tom Selleck
Oprah Winfrey

YIKES, THAT was a longer-than-expected hiatus. Excuse-o-rama: It started with an extended work/pleasure tour in November that had me all over the east coast. By the time I got back to Birmingham in early December, work had gotten really crazy, and by the time that was over I was playing catch-up for the holidays. And then in early January something weird happened with Blogger that I was totally unmotivated to figure out how to correct (my husband just fixed it).

Anyway, I'm back. And I'll try to be better.