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Today’s post comes to us from Laura, a Youth Advisory Board member who is active on Pinterest and eager to share her thoughts about why the social network has quickly taken off, especially among Millennials. She uses the site for a variety of... Read the rest of this post

We just got an eyeful of the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award nominees (and we think these awards will be harder to call than the Grammys — who will win best movie: Muppets, Smurfs, Harry Potter, or Alvin & The Chipmunks?! We’ll... Read the rest of this post

I’ve been meaning to post Korean TV (K-drama) recommendations for a while, but I haven’t quite gotten around to it. Recently, my new-ish Korean friends here in New York moved upstate and made some new friends who were looking for k-drama recommendations. My friends don’t watch much TV themselves, so I had the chance to finally make a list of some of my favorites, which of course makes a great seed for a blog post!

But I’m going to do something different. Instead of making yet another list with links, I’m going to make a Pinterest board, so I can keep adding to it when I find a new show to recommend. I’ve also started collecting some of my booklists tag into Pinterest lists, in case it’s easier for you to follow those there. Here’s my main Pinterest profile, and from there you can follow what interests you.

I watch K-dramas at both hulu.com and dramafever.com. I prefer to give you links to DramaFever, because it’s free there (some can only be seen on Hulu if you pay for Hulu Plus; I do because then I can watch them on my phone and Xbox). But Hulu is easier to pin—there is no easy image to grab on the show’s main page on DramaFever, for some reason. So, the dilemma is: pin DramaFever without an easy-t0-grab image, pin Hulu with the image but a link that not everyone can watch at, or both? I think both, for now.

The premium membership at DramaFever can be a good deal, by the way, because they are commercial-free—which Hulu isn’t, which makes no sense; if you’re paying for it, you ought to be able to watch commercial-free. Though DramaFever did just raise their rates, which means that it’s not quite such a good deal. (Last year it was only something like $49 a year, which breaks down to less than $5 per month. I think it doubled this year, but still, if you watch a lot of K-dramas, it’s worth it to be able to watch commercial free.)

At any rate, follow the links over on Pinterest for more K-dramas! And if Pinterest is not your thing, don’t worry–you don’t have to be a member to use the lists as a resource.

Originally published at Stacy Whitman's Grimoire. You can comment here or there.

Showing that he’s hip to new music trends, President Obama (released an official 2012 campaign playlist on Spotify. There’s a little something for everyone here, including some REO Speedwagon, some Arcade Fire, some Ricky Martin, and, of... Read the rest of this post

As if we need more social networks to follow, Lady Gaga (has just unveiled LittleMonsters.com her very own social site that’s all about her and her fans. If you haven’t received your invite yet, here’s a tour to fill you in on what... Read the rest of this post

Today we read a chapter from H.E. Marshall’s English Literature for Boys and Girls:

But of one of the great treasures of old Irish literature we will talk. This is the Leabhar Na h-Uidhre, or Book of the Dun Cow. It is called so because the stories in it were first written down by St. Ciaran in a book made from the skin of a favorite cow of a dun color. That book has long been lost, and this copy of it was made in the eleventh century…

In the Book of the Dun Cow, and in another old book called the Book of Leinster, there is written the great Irish legend called the Tain Bo Chuailgne  or the Cattle Raid of Cooley.

This is a very old tale of the time soon after the birth of Christ. In the book we are told how this story had been written down long, long ago in a book called the Great Book Written on Skins.

That last bit cracked us up and we had to spend a while proclaiming the title in sonorous tones.

We enjoyed the story of the Book of the Dun Cow even more than the story in the Book of the Dun Cow, if you see what I mean. Marshall drops in intriguing details and doesn’t explain them: “But a learned man carried away that book to the East.” Who? Why? Where?

We’d have liked to hear more of Mary A. Hutton’s poem, “The Tain,” of which only a snippet was included—the Brown Bull’s death:

“He lay down
Against the hill, and his great heart broke there,
And sent a stream of blood down all the slope;
And thus, when all the war and Tain had ended,
In his own land, ‘midst his own hills, he died.”

Later we decided it was time for Rilla to meet The King of Ireland’s Son, and Padraic Colum’s rollicking, lilting prose swept us off on a grand adventure. Oh, such chills when the Eagle looks at the King’s Son with the “black films of death” covering her eyes!

Hmm, this is all sounding rather gruesome, but I guess I’m just calling out the gruesome bits. We were laughing ourselves silly at certain parts of the morning’s reading. And Colum weaves in such irresistible poetry:

His hound at his heel,
His hawk on his wrist;
A brave steed to carry him whither he list,
And the green ground under him,

and

I put the fastenings on my boat
For a year and for a day,
And I went where the rowans grow,
And where the moorhens lay;

And I went over the stepping-stones
And dipped my feet in the ford,
And came at last to the Swineherd’s house,–
The Youth without a Sword.

A swallow sang upon his porch
“Glu-ee, glu-ee, glu-ee,”
“The wonder of all wandering,
The wonder of the sea;”
A swallow soon to leave ground sang
“Glu-ee, glu-ee, glu-ee.”

I’m using Pinterest to create a little scrapbook of our Ireland rabbit trail—it suddenly made sense to me last night how that’s a perfect platform for collecting all the books, pictures, and websites we tend to explore in the pursuit of a particular interest.

Here’s a clip of some Irish

Pinterest is growing rapidly and has quickly become the #5 social network (in terms of driving retail traffic, behind Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Yahoo!, and ahead of Google+. It makes sense considering the site’s large female following... Read the rest of this post

I just joined Pinterest and I had a lot of fun making a little "board" of presents for Ruby, the main character in my novel DROUGHT. Check it out; I hope you love it!

Next up: presents for Oscar. If you have ideas, leave me comments or make your own Pinterest board and let me know where it is!

A couple months ago I started seeing images that had the words “via Pinterest” on my friends’ Facebook news feeds. It took about a week ‘til my curiosity was piqued enough to find out what Pinterest was. Once I found out what it was, I requested an invite. Once I received a Pinterest account, I [...]

Black Friday’s move to midnight or earlier (may have been largely driven by Millennial shoppers, who, unlike their older peers, are quite comfortable shopping in the wee hours of the morning. With their in-store shopping out of the way,... Read the rest of this post