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Happy Holidays to Everyone! And here are pictures of Nim showing off her Girl Scout sash - she is an honourary member of the Girl Scouts of North East New York, the troupe that initiated the Nim's Island patch. They sent me her official sash a couple of months ago (unfortunately I mislaid my camera battery charger for a while - it was still in the suitcase from the premiere trip!). But now that my camera is functioning again, Nim wanted to show off her sash. Her patch is on the other side of the sash, and these badges are all ones that the girls of her troupe felt that she'd earned during the course of the book. I understand that they had to prove their decisions to the leader and that it led to quite a lot of animated discussions!

And since it's Christmas, here is Bear, aged 16 1/2, dreaming of what's going to arrive under the tree. (And yes, that is his basket under the tree, and no, he doesn't like to sleep in it at night - so we finally gave in and cover the couch with old sheets at bedtime...)

So I'm sending a wish for everyone to have a Christmas, Hanukah, or whatever festival you celebrate, that's just as peaceful as Bear is here.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury depicts firemen burning books. It is what they do. In a story that is disconcerting for those of us who believe in the right of freedom to read, MSNBC reports that firefighters are being trained by Homeland Security in the USA in a test program. They are being trained to look for illegal materials and report people who may be "hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States."

While law enforcement officials have stringent rules that control their access to private property, fire fighters have access in order to make inspections for the purposes of preventing fires. The ACLU is concerned about the implications of this program with regard to first amendment issues.

According to New York City Fire Chief Salvatore Cassano, information related to terrorism has been passed on from firefighters to law enforcement since the program began three years ago.

It would be interesting to see what kind of information officials are collecting that they believe relates to terrorism and to what degree one needs to be "discontent" before one is reported to the government.

This would be great fodder for a dystopian novel. Oh, wait....

MTV Movies Blog reports that Tom Hanks is showing great interest in starring as Guy Montag, the “fireman” in Fahrenheit 451.

Of all the honors Nim's received, I think this is the one that's excited me most: the Girl Scouts of Northeast New York now have a Nim's Island patch, and the first 75 girls are already working on it. They've also invited her to be an honorary girl scout. I am so thrilled about this - I think Nim would love to be a girl scout if she lived a bit closer to other kids. I was a brownie when I was little, and it meant a lot to me. I loved working towards and getting various badges, and it seems amazing that something I've created should become a badge for other kids to work on.

Connie Thaler, the project developer for the Girl Scouts of Northeastern New York, has given me this link to the project plan for the patch. It's an excellent, thorough project touching on all sorts of areas of skill and life - have a look.

www.gsneny.org/Images/File/program/GSNENY.Nim.Information.2.pdf

Slaughterhouse-Five is now on my "must read" list for the "Banned Book Challenge." I was not that familiar with Vonnegut, other than the fact that he is almost the spitting image of a friend of mine. I am fascinated by what I have read about him and how his life inspired his writing. I like his punchy, satiric style. Check out his writing below.

I Love You, Madame Librarian by Kurt Vonnegut

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

Freedom to Read Poster 2003
Take the "Banned Book Challenge" along with the people below.









137 people, including the people listed below, have pledged to read over 1471 books in the Banned Book Challenge. (I knew the math would get me in the end.) I realized today that 22 people have set a goal of over 25 books and my Excel spreadsheet did not include the books in the total.) Thus the jump from last week's total.

Banned_for_life14, USA, 6
Katya, USA, 10
Quixotic, UK, 5
John, USA, 2
lifelongreader, UAE, 2
chica3545, USA, 3
Kayla, USA, more than 25
Dnc1ngQueen, USA, more than 25
Lauren, USA, 10

Check the comments below for titles that have been submitted. There are a number of study guides or papers prepared by Professor Paul Brians of Washington State University for two of the books being submitted as completed titles -- Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and the Dystopian Tradition and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

The Signal: News for Santa Clarita Valley has an opinion editorial that deals with a number of censorship issues in the US. The article by Willy E. Gutman is entitled "Only in America: From the Bizarre to the Absurd."

The author points out a number of situations which in his opinion reflect,

White House-led efforts to muzzle the press, stifle artistic expression and subvert free thought while stepping up its own deceitful propaganda is being daily turned up a notch with a series of seemingly isolated but intimately linked initiatives that reflect the Bush administration's obsession with controlling information - and the minds of Americans.

Sci Fi Weekly features an interview with author Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is the author of 35 books and numerous short stories, including Fahrenheit 451. At the age of 86, he is about to release his next book Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451.

...Match to Flame, will be all about my unconsciously leading the way to Fahrenheit 451, which I wrote in the autumn of 1950. I wrote it in nine days at the library of UCLA. Down in the basement, I found a typing room where I could rent a typewriter for 10 cents a half-hour. I moved in with a bag of dimes and I spent $9.80, and nine days later I finished Fahrenheit 451 in its first version, which is 25,000 words....Two years later, Ballantine Books came to me and said, "We love your story The Firemen [the original title]. If you find a new title for it and add words to it, we'll publish it." So I sat down, wrote an additional 25,000 words and changed the title from The Firemen to Fahrenheit 451.