Fun Things

I heard somewhere, recently, that the majority of NPR listeners actually lean to the right. And by that I don't mean their left legs are longer or anything, they just happen to err on the side of being slightly more conservative than the average bear. Not sure if this is true, or what it means, or why it would matter but for some reason I find it interesting. I like NPR for the human interest stories, and the exposure to all kinds of things, from art to music and literature.

I heard a fun piece this week on birds, and how to take care of the ones that inhabit your backyard (should you be lucky enough to have one). I loved all the tweeting and crunching in the background of Melissa Block's story. I have a little girl crush on Melissa Block because her voice is just so "isn't this cool and don't you just love this" infectious all the time.

I am getting a digital voice recorder for Christmas, which I am superdeduper excited about. One, it is going to really help me with a major writing project I'm (why do I want to insert the word "suffering" here???) working on. Also, I like doing interviews. I really do. I like the prep work, I like the actual face-to-face and then I love all the listening back, the editing, the piecing together and unraveling of something intelligible (hopefully) from the strands.

Anyhoo. In catching up on previous Melissa Block stories, I came across an interview she did with Maira Kalman, who is a blog writer for the New York Times, and who has just published a book based on her blogs about American history called "The Pursuit of Happiness."

Everything about Maira Kalman's work, from the word choice to the illustrations speaks to me really really loudly.

I am going to ask the Buddha to buy this book for me for Christmakuhakwansmas.

Here's the link to her awesome blog: http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Here is another blogger's post about her book (which is where I lifted the image above, thank you blogger): http://nonsuchbook.typepad.com/nonsuch_book/2010/11/and-the-pursuit-of-happiness-by-maira-kalman.html

Good stuff.