That's astute, I said.

Well, the really exciting news is that I have been actively hobbying lately, and you can read all about it here. We went camping last night at Serpent's Mounds with Britt and it was wonderful, the highlight of the evening when Stuart asked if the geese had a "no-honk guarantee". They didn't. We also went out for drink when Jennie was in town on Friday, and that was fun too. And I broke my guitar and its springs, which wasn't fun. As wasn't when the invoice for my tuition turned up in the mailbox.

But enough of that. There were newspapers to read. I enjoyed this article on what books are, and what the internet can never be. Marina Warner notes that "reading in cyberspace seems to me to make different use of cognitive faculties, unfleshing the word, and correspondingly disembodying memories." The Wedding Planner woman from The Guardian two year back is quite unhappily married. Lucky for her, Bridget Jones is back!Here, a brilliant article on the need for good editors, how editors shaped "Sons and Lovers", "The Great Gatsby" and "The Wasteland", and how perhaps creative writing programs teach writers how to edit as much as how to write, and I really appreciate that idea. In The Guardian, on the anniversary of Hiroshima. Here on Hiroshima Haiku. I also thought The Globe had some good coverage, including this piece on Canadian POWs in Japan, a story that needs telling though it would be simple for the more liberal minded of us to sweep that bit of history under the table, and keep on about ending nuclear proliferation. Lynn Crosbie here on stupid-inducing TV fandom, asking "Have we arrived at a cultural cognizance crisis, where, say, Screech's locker from Saved by the Bell is more vivid to us than the black boxes of crashed planes?" India Knight on blogging. Heather Mallick, angrily on the "invisible" gender. Which our new Governor General perhaps will aid in rectifying. Columnist Kate Taylor astutely writes, "With Jean's appointment, Martin is addressing an increasingly embarrassing discrepancy in our political leadership: Our elected representatives do not really represent us. In the current Parliament, there are 308 MPs; 65 are women -- that's only 21 per cent of the house. About 16 to 18 of those members could be considered of a visible minority -- that's less than 6 per cent of the House, while Statistics Canada's last census, in 2001, showed that 13.4 per cent of the population is visible minority. For whatever reason -- and I would suspect the fault lies with political parties' inability or unwillingness to find a more diverse group of candidates, rather than with the electors' preference for white men -- blacks, Asians and women are not adequately participating in Canadian politics. As long as that remains true, astute political appointments can be used to do something to right the balance."