Charlie Wilson, the fun-loving Texas congressman whose 1980s campaign to rid Afghanistan of Soviet influence was memorably captured in a Hollywood film that bore his name, died February 10. "Good-Time Charlie" was 76.the congressman from a rural East Texas district almost single-handedly engineered a flow of federal funds to support Afghan resistance fighters against the occupying forces of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. That legacy grew more complicated as the Muslim freedom fighters that Wilson tirelessly championed evolved into the Taliban, which would ultimately give haven to Al Qaeda. Afghanistan became his passion after the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. During a fact-finding visit to Pakistan in 1982 -- and at the urging of a wealthy Houston benefactor, Joanne Herring -- he embraced the cause of the Muslim rebels he found there. Wilson later said that he was inspired by visiting child victims of Soviet bombs in Pakistani hospitals near the Afghan border. Using his seat on the powerful House Appropriations Defense subcommittee and taking advantage of the secrecy of the budgets for U.S. covert operations, Wilson -- later with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency -- funneled billions of dollars in weapons to the resistance. They included shoulder-fired Stinger missiles, which were used to shoot down Soviet helicopters. The Soviet Union ultimately abandoned Afghanistan in 1989, and Wilson was decorated by the CIA.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/la-me-charlie-wilson11-2010feb11,0,5019951.story

Outstanding Business Reference Sources: The 2009 Selection of Recent Titles
The Business of Sports. Ed. Brad R. Humphreys and Dennis R. Howard. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 3 vols.
Encyclopedia of Alternative Investments. Ed. Greg N. Gregoriou. Boca Raton, Fla.: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2008.
Encyclopedia of Business in Today’s World. Ed. Charles Wankel. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2009.
Handbook of Finance. Ed. Frank J. Fabozzi. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008. 3 vols.
See descriptions and other titles in this four-page article at: http://www.rusq.org/2010/01/03/outstanding-business-reference-sources-the-2009-selection-of-recent-titles/

Book Group Favorites
From the more than 900 people who answered this survey question, most gave multiple favorites, resulting in a list of more than 1,100 unique titles. However, some titles appeared again and again as people’s favorites:
The Kite Runner by Khaled Husseini
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Husseini
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Article discussing the ins and outs of book groups has the above list on page 3:
http://www.rusq.org/2010/01/03/book-group-therapy-a-survey-reveals-some-truths-about-why-some-book-groups-work-and-others-may-need-some-time-on-the-couch/

Hetty Green, the richest woman of her era and a pioneering value investor often goes by the title the "Witch of Wall Street". Born Henrietta Howland Robinson (November 21, 1834), she showed an early aptitude for finance. She opened her first bank account at eight and received much of her education reading the financial pages to her near-blind grandfather, discussing each stock and bond in detail. Green's father, Edward Robinson, was believed to have married her mother, the bed-ridden heiress of the Howland fortune, for the seed money needed to build up a whaling business. Robinson was a ruthless businessman and Hetty was his bookkeeper, as well as his companion, as he strolled the docks making deals. Edward Robinson kept Green from receiving her inheritance upon the death of her mother, so it was not until his death in 1864 that thirty-year-old Green received the family fortune of $7.5 million. On his deathbed, Edward Robinson told her that he had been poisoned by conspirators and warned her that they would come for her. Not surprisingly, Green came out of her childhood and early years with a certain amount of eccentricity that later events only reinforced. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financialcareers/09/hetty-green-witch-wall-street.asp

John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work. John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). He was a professor at Penn State University (1953–1965), SUNY Buffalo (1965–1973), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–1973), and Johns Hopkins University (1973–1995) before he retired in 1995. See more about him and a list of his selected works at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barth

Metafiction is fiction about fiction; or more especially a kind of fiction that openly comments on its own fictional status. In a weak sense, many modern novels about novelists having problems writing their novels may be called metafictional in so far as they discuss the nature of fiction; but the term is normally used for works that involve a significant degree of self‐consciousness about themselves as fictions, in ways that go beyond occasional apologetic addresses to the reader. The most celebrated case is Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760–7), which makes a continuous joke of its own digressive form. A notable modern example is John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), in which Fowles interrupts the narrative to explain his procedures, and offers the readeralternative endings. Perhaps the finest of modern metafictions is Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggatore (If on a winter's night atraveler, 1979), which begins ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. ee also mise‐en‐abyme, postmodernism, self‐reflexive. For a fuller account, consult Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (1984). http://www.answers.com/topic/metafiction

No-one knows for certain, but that wonderful word balderdash for “rubbish; nonsense; senseless words” may derive from the Welsh word baldorddu; certainly flummery, originally a sort of sweet food made with eggs, flour and milk but now usually having the meaning “nonsense; humbug; idle flattery”, comes from the Welsh llymru. http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/welsh.htm

balderdash senseless, stupid, or exaggerated talk or writing; nonsense.
Obsolete. a muddled mixture of liquors.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/balderdash

Waste not, want not
Save leftover sauces in freezer, adding to the container as you get more. When needed, serve on bread, noodles, rice, potatoes, or add to soups or other sauces.

Easy and good Roasted vegetables with fruit
Parboil vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips and turnips. Cutting all in like-sized pieces, add onions or leeks, pears or apples, thinly-sliced oranges or lemons, and mix with olive oil, salt and pepper. Arrange in baking pan and bake about 30 minutes at 350 degrees.