Monthly Archives: July 2016

Political cartoons & commercials

No — don’t go away!  You’re probably tired of election season already and there’s three and a half months to go. But there are political cartoons and ads online that are interesting without being annoying.   The Living Room Candidate is a free website that has videos of presidential campaign ads from 1952 – 2012. Curated by the  Museum of the Moving Image  [a topic for another day] the database of videos is searchable by election year, issue, candidate and...

Moon Day

Moon day commemorates the day a human first walked on the moon: July 20th 1969.  In 1961, in an effort to beat the Soviet Union in the space race,  President John F. Kennedy made an appeal to a special joint session of Congress, stating ” “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”  Thus began NASA’s Apollo Space Program...

Summer Reading

Need a good book to read on the beach or for your summer get-away?  Try one of these from the library’s collection: A Big Little Life: a Memoir of a Joyful Dog, by Dean Koontz  She arrived with her name, Trixie. I joked sometimes that it sounded more like a stripper than a dog. But if it sounded more like a stripper than a dog, it sounded more like an elf or a fairy than a stripper. Elves and fairies...

Fireworks & Summer: Think celebration and … safety

  There is a subset of people in this country who love to set off fireworks. (I think many live in my neighborhood.) When fireworks are mentioned, I think fun, but also safety. Reports of injuries resulting from firework accidents are still making news two days after the holiday. A quick search in PubMed reveals many articles on firework injuries. One of the more recent is a case report that includes a man in Italy who received a face and...