Best-Selling Books list reflects not only the blockbusters but also the rhythms of daily life. 9% of all USA Today bestsellers are diet books. Yet today the New England Journal of Medicine reports that two years after going on a diet, on average, people weigh more than when they started.
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Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Back where I come from Icy Antarctic air chills Christmas All the Time
As if torrential rain and hail were not enough to dampen the summer, erratic weather patterns yesterday swept icy cold river air over the state and even brought light snowfall.
Noah John Rondeau (1883-1967) was known as the Adirondack hermit. He lived in a wilderness area of Cold River, New York, dubbing his hermitage Cold River City (population 1) and himself as mayor. Rondeau began staying in his hermitage even over the harsh winters after 1929. He was forced to move after a 1950 storm leveled much of the forest around his hermitage. Some details about Rondeau are offered on the "Adirondack Lives" web site: http://www.adirondackhistory.org/newadklives/ and at http://www.adirondack-park.net/history/noah.john.rondeau.html). The first link has good photos. There are also two books on Rondeau: Noah John Rondeau, Adirondack Hermit by Maitland C. DeSormo and Life With Noah: Stories and Adventures of Richard Smith with Noah John Rondeau as told to William J. O’Hern.
• Adirondack hermit: Noah John Rondeau [Swim your way into my hermit-like 20% discounted pants ]
• · John Dugdale is amused by pomp, pretension and piffle in his annual awards Literary reputations on the line
• · · A Little Journal for Nearly Every Literary
• · · · Following my recent bent toward the pedantic and odd, I thought I'd share too much. Here goes: Pulling out a nosehair is one of the most bracing things I ever do.
I really should explain, because what I said isn't what I mean at all. By bracing, I don't mean 'jumping into a cold river' so much as 'brace yourself', and by 'pulling out a nosehair' I mean 'sitting there, with the end of the hair firmly pinned between my thumbnail and fingernail, all ready to pull, flesh willing, mind weak, with the neurons right on that verge of firing, asking my brain "now? now?" and hearing back "ye- I mean, just a sec, no. go. now! No. Ow! Doh." Feel free to reveal things to him that you would tell to no one else. Jozef understands. All the best secrets, here for the taking!
• · · · · We agreed too that the picking up of the fragments had been an extraordinary business; it being amazing that the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• · · · · · One of the leading intellectual voices of the late 20th Century has been silenced. Author and social critic Susan Sontag, one of the strongest voices of intellectual opposition to US policies after the September 11 attacks, has died An almost lone voice of intellectual opposition to US policies