The good life is largely an exchange of information and ideas. We can use this muse as a vehicle to roll out our thoughts. Feel free to continue sending me quotes, poems, Web sites and subjects of interest that you would like to share. (No forwarded mass messages please, as they may pick up viruses along the way.)

No Child Left Behind reauthorization
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/reauth/index.html

Australia has acquired exploration and drilling rights to an additional 2.5 million square kilometers of ocean shelf after a UN commission ruled that Australia's continental shelf extends farther than previously defined, the Australian government said Monday. The UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) [official website] is the body charged with administering the 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea [UN materials], under which countries have 10 years after their ratifications of that treaty to make extended continental shelf claims; Australia made its submission [materials] in 2004.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2008/04/australia-control-over-continental.php

NOAA Reports Carbon Dioxide, Methane Rise Sharply in 2007
News release: "Last year alone global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global climate change, increased by 0.6 percent, or 19 billion tons. Additionally methane rose by 27 million tons after nearly a decade with little or no increase. NOAA scientists released these and other preliminary findings today as part of an annual update to the agency’s greenhouse gas index, which tracks data from 60 sites around the world."
 The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), released April 23, 2008

Subprime mortgage and related litigation, first quarter 2008
http://s.wsj.net/media/NavSubprimeLit.pdf?mod=djemWLB&reflink=djemWLB
In the first three months of this year, 170 subprime-related lawsuits were filed in federal court (nearly half of them in New York and California), almost totaling the number filed in the second half of 2007.
WSJ Law Blog April 24, 2008

Sonnenschein Adopts Environmental Sustainability Policy
http://www.sonnenschein.com/news/2008/news24.aspx
A task force of 100 people at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP has spent several months developing a formal firm-wide policy and implementation plan. Along the way, we discovered that we’re already well along the path in some regards. For example, we’re about to move into new offices in Dallas, and our folks down there made sure the new office was LEED certified. It was the same thing with new offices under construction in Charlotte. We also found that our marketing department had already moved to soy-based ink and nearly 100% recycled paper. In our Chicago offices, with all the catering-related items we use, we’ve gone from disposables to reusables. Most of the offices have motion-detection switches, so that in our offices and common spaces, lights don’t stay on all night.
Interview excerpt from WSJ Law Blog April 24, 2008

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CategoryID=19

Metropolis in the middle
Of all American cities, Kansas City in a way is the closest to the country's heart. The geographic center of the lower 48 states lies just a little to the west, in Kansas, and the country's population center a bit to the east, in Missouri. The Kansas City metropolitan area, with some 2 million people, covers parts of both states.
Lying in a pleasant setting, amid a gently rolling wooded landscape along the Missouri River, the town has plenty of attractive parks, parkways, and boulevards. As long ago as 1947, a Kansas City residential district enraptured visiting French author André Maurois, who praised it as "a masterpiece of city planning." He wondered, "Who in Europe, or in America, for that matter, knows that Kansas City is one of the loveliest cities on earth?"
http://www.worldalmanac.com/wa-newsletter.aspx

Quote: Bread is the staff of life, and water is its elixir.

April 25 birthdays
It's the birthday of fiction writer Howard Garis, (books by this author) born in Binghamton, New York (1873). He's the creator of the pink-nosed elderly rabbit named Uncle Wiggily. He published an Uncle Wiggily story in the Newark News six days a week for thirty-seven years.
It's the birthday of the "First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald, born in Newport News, Virginia in 1918. When she was sixteen she entered a contest at the Apollo Theater, at that time no more than a hip local club in Harlem. She had a dance routine worked out and walked on stage wearing ragged clothes and men's boots, but she froze up. Later she said, "I got out there and I saw all the people and I just lost my nerve. And the man said, 'Well, you're out here, do something!' So I tried to sing." She sang a popular song called "Judy" and got such an ovation that she went on to sing "The Object of My Affection."
The Writer’s Almanac