{"id":2481,"date":"2020-08-28T10:48:20","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T17:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/?p=2481"},"modified":"2020-08-28T12:30:33","modified_gmt":"2020-08-28T19:30:33","slug":"covid-19-notes-4-more-day-brighteners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/?p=2481","title":{"rendered":"COVID 19 NOTES 4, MORE DAY BRIGHTENERS"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were quarantined again.\u00a0 Fortunately, Day Brightener<\/strong>s were not.\u00a0 These are some of my favorites.<\/p>\n

Forever lattes!<\/strong>\u00a0 Charlie has a new phone which means that, with the Starbucks’ mobile app he can now upload, he can always pick-up lattes, even if the governor reverts to mega closings.\u00a0 But he still won’t ask for extra hot and less foam on my order.\u00a0 He says I am a difficult person.\u00a0 It’s a mother’s gift and Charlie is a recurring Day Brightener.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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With selfie-apt phone, Charlie does exist and mom becomes background.\u00a0 Sigh.<\/p><\/div>\n

Visual sources alert!<\/strong>\u00a0 We know too little about reading maps and appreciating multi-media news stories or Ken Burns’ documentaries.\u00a0 Too few have read, and even fewer have appreciated, Edward Tufte’s books, e.g. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information<\/strong>, or my personal favorite, Errol Morris’s Believing is Seeing<\/strong>.\u00a0 Trump’s continuing show makes clear that too many people are still fooled by lies and the lying liars who tell them.\u00a0 (Remember the magic marker hurricane map episode or the COVID incidence chart in his interview with the Australian reporter?)\u00a0Visual literacy is a complex issue, sure, but two good starter-read\u00a0Day Brighteners<\/strong> in yesterday’s NYT<\/strong> explain how to ‘read’ weather maps<\/a> and how the NYT visual investigations team<\/strong> built a news story from mixed media<\/a>.\u00a0 The NYT online edition has great\u00a0maps, complex charts, and photo essays, all good information sources just waiting to become evidence in someone’s better argument.<\/p>\n

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Good ideas, good cheer!<\/strong>\u00a0 A condo-dwelling retiree, who walks, likes to garden,\u00a0 and was looking for a project, saw\u00a0 big, healthy lawns, surely just waiting to become a flower business<\/a>.\u00a0 She chose yards, interviewed owners, planted, then tended, seeds and voila! Her cut flowers for sale in two stores.\u00a0 She even had a mini-CSA of households who wanted a bouquet a week.\u00a0 Such a good idea!\u00a0 Okay, I may be drawn to her by memories of the Roseledge Books creation story which Charlie and I and Scott, my truth-in-telling rescuer, are trying to relive in a Ken Burns-ish adventure,\u00a0 which makes it a double or triple Day Brightener.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Screened window compromise<\/strong>. My floor to ceiling window may be the biggest Day Brightener<\/strong> of all, literally and figuratively.<\/p>\n

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Sunny day calls. Sheltered, in silhouette, I read and look. Hair tells all<\/p><\/div>\n

All this reading called for discipline.\u00a0 Too many comfort reads, mostly mystery series, do not a mind enliven.\u00a0 So I began, and am continuing, a schedule of reading 10 to 25 percent of a thought-provoking book interspersed with old or potentially new favorites.\u00a0 For instance, I have just finished Hope Jahren’s excellent The Story of More,<\/strong> interspersed with\u00a0 Julia Spenser-Fleming’s Hid From Our Eyes, Joe Eid’s High Five, Dervla McTiernan’s The Ruin<\/strong> (Next time, maybe I’ll try again a Tara French<\/strong> mystery.) and John Grisham’s Camino Winds.<\/strong>\u00a0 I started Scott Turow’s\u00a0 The Last Trial<\/strong>, but it was too textbook-ish.<\/p>\n

Now I am reading Bernard Bailyn’s Illuminating History<\/a>,<\/strong> a working memoir like Robert Caro’s Working<\/strong>, which I loved as a “how he did” the research for his bios of Robert Moses and now LBJ, which, so far, is 3 of 5 volumes and counting, and Robert Caro is 84 – and counting.\u00a0 I am currently interspersing with Daniel Silva’s The Order<\/strong> because I needed to remember that we are one among others in a world of gray relationships, Paul Doiron’s One Last Lie<\/strong> (Maine),\u00a0 Owen Laukkanen’s Lone Jack Trail<\/strong> (Olympic Peninsula)\u00a0 Elly Griffith’s The Lantern Men<\/strong> (academics, so maybe also Julie Schumacher’s The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls<\/strong>), and who can resist a mystery by a Literature Nobelist?\u00a0 So also included is Olga Tokarczuk Drive Your Plow Over Bones of the Dead.\u00a0<\/strong> Seven interspersers because Historian Bailyn “illuminates” seven historical documents.<\/p>\n

Charlie is threatening to dismantle my Kindle 1-click ordering.\u00a0 But he knows I would talk him to death if he did.\u00a0 Every mother has her ways.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were quarantined again.\u00a0 Fortunately, Day Brighteners were not.\u00a0 These are some of my favorites. Forever lattes!\u00a0 Charlie has a new phone which means that, with the Starbucks’ mobile app he can now upload, he can always pick-up lattes, even … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2500,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions\/2500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}