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It was great to see Norah Jones win big at the Grammys (grammies?) this past weekend.

I really loved her first CD. Just recently I had a chance to hear the legendary opera star Eileen Farrell's I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues [buy at amazon] . Without saying anything bad about Norah Jones, I have to say Wow. What a voice!

Did Albert Einstein really say, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything except for how we think?" This famous quote appeared in an introduction to the "thought for the week" on the website of Deerfield Academy (www.deerfield.edu), and I became curious about what else Einstein may have said at the time.

My first internet search yielded a slightly modified quote, albeit without source. In this version, Einstein was warning rather than merely saying:

'Einstein warned, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."'

Changing the search phrase from "splitting of the atom has changed everything" to "toward unparalleled catastrophe" turned up a context, a date, and a different but more powerful sentence than the original.

This web page of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists turned up an additional fact.

May 1946. In a fund-raising letter for the Bulletin, Einstein wrote: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

One of my favorite books has always been Writing to Learn by William Zinsser (Deerfield class of 1940), who I'm sure would be saddened to see Einstein's evocative and vigorous original thought replaced by a pallid and much shorter sentence.

Two books about the St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928 were display at the Lummis Home. I didn't give them too much thought although I looked at them briefly. I hope this isn't one of those cases of not knowing history, and then being condemned to repeat it.

I know someone who has written a novel about the St. Francis Dam Disaster! Yesterday I got email from Steve Alcorn, about his new novel, Everything In its Path, completed just in time for the 75th anniversary of the disaster. The occasion of the 75th anniversary must be why the books were on display at the Southern California Historical Society. They may still be using Windows 3.1, but when it comes to commemorating events of 75 years ago, they're right on top of things.

There's a certain type of individual who experiences true elation when a really good book on web design arrives; "Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization" by Andrew B. King is that book, and I'm that kind of individual.

I really look forward to giving this book the thorough review it deserves, but let me just say this about it right now.

• The first two chapters, devoted to why you need to speed up your web site, are utterly convincing.
• The two chapters on CSS stylesheets were VERY clear and helpful, not just on optimization, but on using CSS
• I say this, even though I didn't have time to read the CSS chapters; I just looked stuff up.
• Based on this book, I have completely redesigned this homepage in just about 90 minutes time.
• Because it is now half the size, it loads a lot faster, even though it looks basically the same.
• When I have time to be more thorough, I can speed it up even more
• I love this book!

Time is a-wasting, and the whole web needs speeding up. If you're a web designer or web developer, act immediately and order Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization [buy at amazon] . by Andrew B. King (accompanying website: websiteoptimization.com )

Last week I read the entire cover, inside outside front and back, of Alan Fletcher's unique and wonderful "Looking Sideways": It's a great cover, too. On a book about graphics, it's set entirely in text, a text which describes the book's intent to a T, and which requires you to turn the book sideways in order to read it. Brilliant!

I have been dipping into this weighty tome at random, which is no doubt how it was designed to be used. However, after reading the cover so carefully, I felt I owed it to the author to examine the book a little more systematically, and discovered by looking at the very beginning that there is a convenient list of all the quotes which appear at section beginnings, listing the kind of stuff covered in that section, complete with the page on which the quote appears. Much like a table of contents.

Imagine that!

It was not a bit tedious reading through all the quotes and thinking about them, but damned if that doesn't sound like faint praise. This book is great. I highly recommend that you trundle on over to amazon.com and look at the front and back cover of The Art of Looking Sideways [buy at amazon] . by Alan Fletcher. You actually will need to look sideways to read it online, unless you have tipped your computer monitor over on its edge, in which case you will have to look upside down. So let's just hope you haven't done that.

A short pamphlet that may be of help to the unloved, is 'Time to Tell 'Em Off', by Deanna Miller. Its subtitle: A pocket guide to overcoming peer ridicule.

Written by a woman who was bullied during middle school and high school, it might be just the thing for someone who is undergoing peer ridicule at school. Of note are the websites she lists in the back of the book:

Stop Bullying Now
teasing victims
School Bully Online
No Bully

The front of the book is filled with a no-nonsense approach to handling bullies that's a lot better than the advice I got: "Just ignore him." Guess what, moms and dads, this just doesn't work. Another piece of advice that Deanna Miller earnestly debunks is "If you respond, you'll just be drawn down to their level." She doesn't advocate violence, but a no-nonsense response. I haven't had my kids read it, but when they do, I'll let you know what they think.

In the meantime, if you know what's good for you, you'll get a copy of Time to Tell 'Em Off' [buy from Deanna Miller] . by Deanna Miller

My son exhorted me to read "Point Blank", an adventure novel about a 14-year-old boy forced to become an MI6 agent when his father is killed working for MI6.

Actually, it's the sequel to "Stormbreaker", which he also wanted me to read but which had been returned to the library. "Point Blank" is funny, filled with moments of wry wit worthy of James Bond. The adventure sequences would not be too shabby in a Bond movie either. Come to think of it, the outlandish plot is fully worthy of a James Bond adventure. Bond! Move over!

It may not surprise you to learn that no martinis are consumed, either shaken OR stirred, and the love interest (a kind of stuck-up 15-year old girl) is disposed of with a tranquilizer dart as she's about to give things away. The suspense is at times so palpable you may have to put the book down. There's a lot of shooting, but the good guys are human, using tranquilizer darts when they can. The bad guys are mean and nasty (the book opens with an assassination), but if you can take it, then I still recommend Point Blank [buy at amazon] .by Anthony Horowitz

It's longer, it's all new, it's an adventure. Here's how it begins:

"The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.... The only person left outside was a teenage boy who was lying flat on his back in a flowerbed outside number four.

Later in the novel, J.K. Rowling writes:

"Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. 'It is time,' he said 'for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.'

On June 21, the longest day of 2003 (in the northern hemisphere), everyone will be outside reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [pre-order at amazon] . by J.K. Rowling

One benefit of an large passenger vehicle? Road trips. It is hard to underestimate the educational value of a road trip when you seize the opportunity. About 12 years ago, plus five weeks, I was driving south on US 395 when I saw a roadside sign: Historical Marker.

Why did we stop? Because I know nothing, and want to learn. The surprise was that we had stumbled upon Manzanar, one of many "internment camps" where U.S. citizens of Japanese origin were sent while the details were worked out about how to re-allocate their valuable property.

That's right, property. Consider that a home near Sawtelle Boulevard in Los Angeles, where the cherry blossom photo to the right was taken, sells today for six hundred thousand dollars, while the reparations bill signed by Ronald Reagan returned a mere twenty thousand dollars to an interned individual who may have lost a home in that exact same district.

Now in the news we have something of an awkward moment for U.S. Representative from Greensboro, NC, Howard "Manzanar was a Good Thing" Coble who has made a series of idiotic remarks, in which he said the internment was actually o.k., that Roosevelt made the right decision. This is a topic I would urge you to learn more about, and take political action. CobleGate coverage continues on "isthatlegal.com", and there's a Gathering storm surrounding Coble's remarks, as well there should be. Have you been thinking that Manzanar, being located in California, the land of milk and honey, is a fine and wonderful place? If you were thinking that, you must have been smokin' medical marijuana.

Manzanar is cold, desolate and remote, except in the summer when it's hot, desolate and remote. Of the photographs I took there, one was used by a publisher of educational software to typify a stark desert area. If you want to see a striking photograph taken at Manzanar, which you will probably never forget, you need only visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art TODAY and see the Ansel Adams at 100 exhibit. He took a photograph at Manzanar, before the time of the internment camps of course. It shows a stark and endless field of gigantic rocks.

When we arrived at Manzanar, an entire camp had been built, inhabited, and then dismantled, leaving only a stone guardhouse and a brass plaque attached to a rock.

Howard Coble should apologize, and then he should step down. Even the Republicans must be able to find a better representative for the people of Greensboro, North Carolina, than Howard "Manzanar was a Good Thing" Coble.

Ian Fleming died a long time ago, can't the world get over it? Raymond Benson has assembled all the requisite elements together into the opposite of a novelization: a screenplay that was made into a book.

In Paris, Nice, Corsica and Monaco, James Bond sneaks around, plays chemin de fer, fights, eats, shoots, and leaves. Also he falls in love with the beautiful and accomplished actress/model Tylyn Mignonne, and you know what happens. Whether she lives or dies, herkos odonton, I'll never give it away.

Seven funny 007 lines liven up this fast-paced 291-pager. Never Dream of Dying [buy at amazon] . by Raymond Benson

One other thing. There's a kind of speedboat that travels over 100 miles per hour, and if you perform the maneuver just right, you can flip it and go underwater, underneath a burning oil tanker just before it blows up. How could I have forgotten that one?

Are weblogs a medium, a genre, or a tool? That's a question posed by the thoughtful and mysteriously modest "S" of "onepotmeal.com" just one day after a massive migraine struck him.

The short answer? Weblogs are a medium.

Of course most weblogs are produced using a weblog toolkit. Many weblog toolkits do quite a bit for the weblog writer. I believe this has resulted in a decline in craft. Writers rely on their toolkit and experiment less with other aspects of the weblog, such as graphics, layout, and so forth. The writing itself may have improved, especially if the weblog toolkit preserves and enhances a separate "draft" phase, as does the free weblog software RubyJournal

RubyJournal 1.0 is a weblog application, written in the (free) Ruby programming language, that uses plain text files created with any text editor for individual entries. It offers permalink page creation, support for multiple weblogs, RSS output, templates, and simple content management. RubyJournal is free for Mac OS X (as well as Unix and Windows).

Are weblogs a genre? Only time will tell. At this point I think they are neither a genre or what I recently learned was called a "non-genre", discussed in this review of the Mini-epic in Vandal Africa