A Back in the Saddle Weekly Link Round-Up

 

I know last week was a bit of a cheat, so I'll try to make up for my abruptness. 

 

Denis is doing well. He's getting more and more mobile and is beginning to lend a hand with a chore or two. I've had to be careful about keeping an eye on him because I know the tendency is there for him to do too much too soon. We definitely don't want any relapses!

 

Alas and alack, our gifted prickly pear fell to the lawn maintenance crew's trimmer. I'd asked them to make sure a couple of things were taken care of, but it totally slipped my mind to tell them HANDS OFF THE CACTUS! There's a smidge of hope because they left behind a nub still planted in the ground, and that nub has been getting rained on. It could start growing all over again, and if it does, I'm going to put a protection spell over it.

 

Is JR the raccoon still stopping by? Yes, he is. He seems to have established his rounds of the neighborhood, and he stops by once a week. I always love seeing him.

 

I've been irked for quite some time about the chair of my mobility scooter. It looked like something dragged off the scrap heap. The vinyl seat started cracking shortly after I got it. Denis ordered a specially-made quilted seat cover for it. Then the back of the chair began looking like it was getting repeated goings-over with a cricket bat. The vinyl split, and although I Gorilla-taped the split to a fare-thee-well, the edges of the tape began peeling back. 

 

I didn't want to spend $500 for a replacement chair because there's nothing wrong with the chair itself; it just needed a makeover. So... I began pondering out-of-the-box solutions. I wandered down the aisles of Amazon and wound up spending a whole whopping $15 on a pair of stretchy slipcovers for two dining room chairs in the largest dimensions they came in. Instead of buying a pair the same basic black of the old seat, I chose slipcovers in a bright, bold print. My rationale? If I bought basic boring black, they wouldn't stretch enough to fit. If I bought bright and bold where everyone would see me coming from a block away, well... then they'd fit.

 

By swanny-- look how it turned out!

 

 

I think it turned out rather well, don't you? Why did I choose a bold red print? Because Ruby (that's my scooter's name) has shiny red metallic plates on her nether regions, that's why. Between the new seat cover and those red plates, she looks quite posh, even if I do say so myself.

 

Special thanks, as always to those of you who send me little messages, bookmarks, and the like. You're the best!

 

Enjoy the links!

►Books & Other Interesting Tidbits◄

• The long linguistic journey to "dagnabbit".
• Pizza Hut for dinner: An ode to the Book It program.
• How do you find good self-published books?
• The magic of cookbooks in fiction.
• How community food pantries can support readers and create new ones.
• Miss Marple is Agatha Christie's best character. A new book reminds us why.
• When is a bestseller not necessarily a bestseller?
• White, female, and high rates of mental illness: new diversity research offers a snapshot of the Australian publishing industry.

 

►Book Banning & Censorship◄

• How a far-right, Christian cellphone company "took over" four Texas school boards.
• Oklahoma’s secretary of public education wants to strip away the teaching license of a teacher in his state who connected her students with a Brooklyn Public Library program that grants access to its digital collection of banned books at no charge.
• The leader of a group targeting Polk County (Florida) school library books has asked the police to step in and take action. (Poor baby isn't getting his way...)
• Volusia County (Florida) Schools has outlined a process to vet library books and let parents choose the students' level of access. 
• The Frisco Independent School District is using the Texas Penal Code to review one million books that may be obscene. (If they really want to know what's obscene, I'd be more than happy to tell them...)
• District 99 students in Illinois are being honored for their fight to keep Gender Queer on library shelves.
• Book banning is a concerning trend in California.
• Local libraries have become a major political and cultural battleground.
• An Elko (Nevada) school district has revised its 1987 policy concerning book complaints. (They haven't had any yet, but they've seen the writing on the wall and want to be ready.)

 

►Channeling My Inner Indiana Jones◄

• A Portuguese man accidentally found an 82-foot-long dinosaur in his backyard. (How come I never find anything like that?)
• An ancient city with a massive palace has emerged from a lake in drought-stricken Iraq. 
• Can tree rings solve the mystery of a 19th-century American shipwreck? 
• Bones found in a medieval well likely belong to seventeen victims of an antisemitic massacre in Norwich, England.
• A 7,500-year-old Spanish Stonehenge has been discovered on the site of a future avocado farm. 
• A three-bladed arrowhead "last touched by Vikings" has been revealed in a melting Norwegian ice patch. 
• Archaeologists from eight countries are teaming up to explore the Skerki Banks. 
• A crumbling 11th-century church is emerging from its watery grave in drought-stricken Europe. 

 

►Channeling My Inner Elly May Clampett◄

• A recent study shows that 90% of all marine species are threatened by climate change.
• The first U.S. sighting of the massive Atlas moth has been confirmed.
• Which animal has the largest brain relative to its body size?
• Watch as a smart and courteous elephant finds a child's lost shoe and returns it to them.
• These early entries from the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards are a hoot.
• Watch a group of owls trigger a video security camera at night with their antics.
• A rattlesnake recently gave birth to twelve babies on an Arizona family's patio. (I love critters, but I'm glad this wasn't my patio...)
• Could extinct Tasmanian tigers be brought back fro the dead?

 

►The Wanderer◄

• Why do vacation spots make perfect crime settings?
• Books about the Appalachian Trail.
• The melting Greenland ice sheet will cause at least ten inches of sea-level rise.
• Nine places where you can still see wheel tracks from the Oregon Trail.

 

►Fascinating Folk◄

• The Mughal women who wouldn't stay in the harem.
• Luis Soriano had a dream, two donkeys, and a lot of books.
• Roger Federer made a promise to a young fan in 2017. He fulfilled it in the sweetest way.
• How "love commandos" help young lovers cross caste lines in modern India.
• How Eliot Ness wound up hunting a serial killer in Cleveland.
• A historian's quest to unravel the secrets of Mary Seacole, an innovative, long-overlooked Black nurse.

 

►I ♥ Lists◄

• The 80 greatest con artists in movies and TV, ranked.
• Eight non-fiction books about little-known historical events.
• The best historical fiction books you've never heard of.
• Six thrillers that changed the game.
• William Kent Krueger recommends ten mystery series.
• Non-fiction books from Indie presses that belong on your fall TBR.
• Twenty book-to-screen adaptations to look for this fall and winter.
• All 75 Stephen King books, ranked.

That's all for this week! Don't forget to stop by next Friday when I'll be sharing a freshly selected batch of links for your surfing pleasure.

Stay safe. Stay Healthy. And don't forget to curl up with a good book!