For those of you who are wondering, I did get in touch with the PR folks at DC and my ARC of The Plain Janes is on the way. They also added me to the mailing list for the Minx line which is great and I look forward to those books. But........this still doesn't answer the question of just why DC is slow in getting Janes out to the bloggers, reviewers and booksellers that already know and love the wonderful Cecil Castellucci. I'm trying to make some headway in that area with the DC folks - I'll keep y'all posted on what happens.

In other news, this little girl rocks! Here's my favorite quote (link via Leila):

Although she's never met her hero, Evie said she's thought a lot about something Ellis said during the controversy: "If children are tough enough to be bombed and starved, they're tough enough to read about it."

The book in question, Three Wishes: Palestinian & Israeli Children Speak is excellent. I reviewed it in my next column which is all about the nonfiction titles and I'm looking forward to seeing what other folks think of it.

Honest to God, if heads do not roll over this mess at Walter Reed then truly this country has gone to hell in a handbasket. Clearly everyone and their third cousin knew about problems there but chose to do nothing. People need to be fired, lose their commands and face some potential charges as far as I'm concerned. I'm so sick of this double talk about showing support for the troops that is clearly just that - talk. Time I think for another letter to my dear senators and congressman.

Smithsonian has an amazing piece on what scientists are doing to resurrect lost works by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. Just listen to this history:

Archimedes wrote his treatises on papyrus rolls, the originals of which have been lost. But his works were faithfully copied by generations of scribes and made the leap onto bound goatskin parchment by sometime late in the fifth century, probably in Constantinople. That city's great libraries were sacked by Crusaders in 1204, but one parchment, penned in the 900s, somehow survived and was secreted away to a Christian monastery near Bethlehem. In 1229, a Greek priest who needed parchment for a prayer book took apart the Archimedes manuscript, scraped and washed off the pages and copied liturgical text on top of Archimedes' writings in a process known as palimpsesting (from the Greek word palimpsestos, meaning "scraped again"). Horrifying as that seems now, the original text probably would not have survived had the scribe not recycled it and subsequent monks not preserved the prayer book—unaware of what lay beneath the scriptures.

These Archimedes treatises were essentially lost to history until 1906, when a Danish classics scholar, Johan Ludwig Heiberg, discovered the thousand-year-old manuscript in a library in a Greek Orthodox monastery in Constantinople. Heiberg recognized that the faint writings underneath the prayers came from the mind of Archimedes. Heiberg was allowed to photograph many of the pages, and he published scholarly articles on those writings he was able to decipher. But Heiberg couldn't read some pages, and he ignored the diagrams. Then, sometime after World War I, the palimpsest disappeared again, removed from the library under mysterious circumstances—possibly stolen from the monastery—and is believed to have been in the hands of a French family for much of the 20th century. It resurfaced again in 1998, when an anonymous private collector in the United States bought the document at auction for $2 million.

I love this kind of thing; it floors me what awesome stuff science can do and beyond that - can you believe what these rolls went through before mysteriously resurfacing? Very very cool.

I also like this quote from the article's author: I think sometimes knowledge is undervalued—often just knowing things about the world doesn't seem to be important to people.

If only we could change minds on that point - just imagine how much we could then change the world.