I was reeling a bit this morning after hearing about Farrah Fawcett who was the source of my junior high and high school hair and so pretty and nice that I think we all wanted to be her. At least my childhood icon had both beauty and brains (see The Burning Bed as proof she can act). And then Michael Jackson. What the hell?! I still have Thriller on vinyl and will never give that one up. His songs are part of the soundtrack of my life. As screwed up and mixed up and downright weird as his story got, his talent was still more than most of us will ever see again.

Damn. What a day.

Please check out my One Shot SE Asia post for a comment from Alyssa Kirk at Teens Read and Write. She and her brothers have been great supporters of Guys Lit Wire and would like to participate in the One Shot but are having trouble finding YA titles for the region. They are 15, 16 and 18 and Alyssa likes urban fantasy in particular. I suggested Geoff Ryman's story "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" right off the bat but I'm sure you guys can help with some other ideas so please, comment over there or here and give this crew a hand so they can be part of the event. (These are teenagers excited about reading! It's awesome!)

The NYT had an article the other day about jobs for people who can actually work with their hands that should make everyone think twice about work and college and just what matters in this country. Here's a bit:

For these hard-to-fill jobs, there seems to be a common denominator. Employers are looking for people who have acquired an exacting skill, first through education — often just high school vocational training — and then by honing it on the job. That trajectory, requiring years, is no longer so easy in America, said Richard Sennett, a New York University sociologist.

This immediately made me think of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft which was reviewed in the NYT last month:

Many of the ideas in “Shop Class as Soulcraft” are deeply resonant. Mr. Crawford mourns that shop classes were largely eliminated from American high schools in the 1990s because they are expensive to run, and sometimes dangerous. He takes this as a symptom of a larger problem: We have, as a people, lost our fundamental manual competence. We can no longer fix our own stuff, and we are increasingly steering our kids “toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”

His book, he writes, “advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. It also explores what we might call the ethics of maintenance and repair.”

Finally, this cover just makes me happy. I love Orion, it's a consistently smart and interesting and beautiful magazine. This issue has an article on coal country by Erik Reece (who knows the subject so well), Kim Todd and The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White, her father and the battle to save the Trumpeter Swan and an excerpt from Diane Ackerman's upcoming book, Dawn Light.

I swear when I'm done reading that cover is going up on my wall - it's just too gorgeous to let go.