Amazon said that it would push a voter initiative in California that could eliminate sales tax for virtual sellers with only a modest physical presence in the state. Its move instantly escalated the company’s long-running battle with many states over collecting sales tax, taking the question directly to voters. And it has sharply intensified its dispute with physical retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Target, which have vowed to fight the measure. Some political science and business professors say the conflict could take on the polarizing nature of Proposition 13, a decades-old referendum that limited property tax increases and remains a lightning rod in the state. Political experts say Amazon’s proposed referendum is likely to gather the signatures necessary to appear on the ballot as early as next February. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/technology/amazon-takes-sales-tax-war-to-california.html?_r=1&ref=technology

The downtown Walnut Creek (CA) Library, which opened a year ago, was recently awarded the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design "gold" status. Known as LEED, this internationally recognized green building certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council endorses the library's design, construction, operations and maintenance as environmentally friendly and sustainable. The library's green elements include an Energy Star-rated roof, stormwater management, daylight harvesting control, use of recycled and regionally manufactured materials, water efficient landscaping and plumbing and a raised flooring system to provide efficient heating and cooling. A kiosk in the library details how and why the building is sustainable and environmentally friendly. http://lisnews.org/happy_first_anniversary_walnut_creek_library_energy_efficiency_winner

When I got my library card, that’s when my life began. Rita Mae Brown
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration. Andrew Carnegie
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal Dreams
http://jjbrownauthor.com/2011/06/12/public-libraries-where-life-begins-again-and-friends-live-forever/

"I was glad to think that among the last memorable beauties which had glided past us, and softened in the bright perspective, were those whose pictures, traced by no common hand, are fresh in most men's minds; not easily to grow old, or fade beneath the dust of Time: the Kaatskill Mountains, Sleepy Hollow, and the Tappaan Zee."
from Chapter 14: Return to Cincinnati. A Stage-coach Ride From That City to Columbus, and Thence to Sandusky. So, by Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara.; Chapter 15: In Canada; Toronto; Kingston; Montreal; Quebec; St. John's. In the United States Again; Lebanon; the Shaker Village; West Point. American Notes, by Charles Dickens, pp. 243-288 from JOURNAL OF A COMPULSIVE READER by Charles Matthews. See his blog at:
http://tenpagesormore.blogspot.com/2011/02/8-american-notes-by-charles-dickens-pp.html
You may want to make the tenpagesormore blog http://tenpagesormore.blogspot.com/ one of your favorites. Look at the list of authors, including John McPhee, Saul Bellow, John Milton and Herman Melville.

Between Pittsfield, Massachusetts and Salisbury, Connecticut, identified by large maples and a heap of stones lies the site of Sky Farm, now almost obliterated by forest growth. Here lived the Goodale sisters, Elaine and Dora, the "Apple Blossom Poets", whose verse was popular in the 1870s, and whose stories appeared in The Youth's Companion.
Massachusetts; a Guide to its Places and People by Federal Writers Project, 1937. p. 583 http://books.google.com/books?id=HCnn3t_nH_MC&pg=PA583&lpg=PA583&dq=%22apple+blossom+poets%22+goodale&source=bl&ots=LE-ow9qlAO&sig=q1Hg8Qhq1YY6_TJVLSt9oS3cpVY&hl=en&ei=MkMgTon8JpPqgQeZl6TkBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDgQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=%22apple%20blossom%20poets%22%20goodale&f=false

Goodale sisters Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863-1953) and Dora Read Goodale (1866-1915) were American poets and sisters, who published their first poetry as children still living at home, and were included in Edmund Clarence Stedman's classic An American Anthology (1900). Elaine Goodale taught at the Indian Department of Hampton Institute, started a day school on a Dakota reservation and became Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas by 1890. She married Dr. Charles Eastman (also known as Ohiyesa), a Santee Sioux who was the first Native American physician, and lived with him and their growing family in the West for several years. She collaborated with him extensively with writing about his childhood and Sioux culture; his nine books were popular and made him well known on a public lecture circuit. She also continued her own writing, publishing her last book of poetry in 1930, and a biography and last novel in 1935. Dora Read Goodale published a book of poetry at age 21 and continued to write. She became a teacher of art and English in Connecticut. Later she was a teacher and director of the Uplands Sanatorium in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee. She attracted positive reviews when she published her last book of poetry at age 75 in 1941, in which she combined modernist free verse with use of Appalachian dialect to express her neighbors' traditional lives.
Find a bibliography of their works at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodale_Sisters Then, you may want to borrow some of their writings at libraries through WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/


Uses for chicken wire
Replace fronts of cabinet doors with chicken wire to give a rustic look and allow airflow.
Attach chicken wire to back of freestanding open shelving units to keep contents from falling of the back.
Affix chicken wire around the base of deck or porch, burying the bottom edge a few inches below the soil to prevent animals from nesting under your house.
This Old House Magazine August 2011

Today, customers at BarnesandNoble.com snap up three digital books for every one physical book. When it reported results for its fiscal year ended April 30, the company noted that sales of digital products boosted same-store sales 0.7% for the year, more than compensating for the decline in consumer book sales. The traditional company, based at 122 Fifth Ave. near New York's Union Square, still focuses on its 705 consumer bookstores, which stock up to 200,000 titles, and its 636 college bookstores. Keeping up with rivals like Amazon in e-readers may be hard to sustain. Amazon, with market capitalization of $98 billion, recently announced plans to launch a new tablet and two updated versions of its Kindle. Barnes & Noble has a market cap of about $1 billion. But the new economics of e-book sales have grown more appealing. Under the recently adopted "agency pricing" model in which publishers set the consumer price of their digital titles and sellers get 30%, Barnes & Noble earns more money on some digital titles than on new-hardcover sales. For example, it sells the e-book edition of George R.R. Martin's best-seller "A Dance with Dragons" for $14.99, earning $4.50 a sale. Meanwhile, it sells the hardcover edition for $19.25. If it pays half the $35 list price, it would make a profit of $1.75 a title.
http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/markets/newsfeeditem.aspx?id=153856465966073

Borders Group Inc.'s imminent demise marks the first major casualty of the digital era in buying and reading books. But the store closings also will mean fewer opportunities for shoppers to wander the book aisles, a loss that will affect publishers as well as competitors and authors. The bookseller is expected to ask a bankruptcy judge July 21 to approve plans to start liquidating as soon as Friday, July 22. By the end of September, the remaining 399 stores of the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain will be shut down for good. Tom and Louis Borders started the company 40 years ago in Ann Arbor, Mich. by stocking rich assortments of books that rivals couldn't match. Now, many consumers prefer having books delivered to their doorsteps or downloading them to electronic devices by touching a screen. Amazon.com Inc., the nation's dominant online bookseller by sales, is driving those changes that felled Borders. Apple Inc. and Google Inc., too, have started selling books. Underscoring Borders's inability to adapt, the company handed its Internet operations to Amazon about a decade ago and didn't relaunch its own website until 2008. For several weeks, Borders looked like it might survive. Jahm Najafi, a vice chairman of the Phoenix Suns who runs private-equity firm Najafi Cos., had agreed last month to buy it. But Mr. Najafi's agreement didn't preclude him from later liquidating the chain. That didn't fly with creditors, who felt they could get paid more by liquidators. Borders reluctantly consented to a deal with liquidators after discussions with Mr. Najafi collapsed last week amid concerns about support from landlords and publishers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304567604576456430727129532.html

Word of the Day Refection rih-FEK-shun (noun) Refreshment of mind, spirit or body; especially, nourishment; the taking of refreshment; food and drink together; repast www.merriam-webster.com
Website of the Day The Hemingway Society www.hemingwaysociety.org
Mark writer Ernest Hemingway's birthday with this site, which serves as an excellent resource for all things Hemingway. There are an impressive number of links to articles by Hemingway, information about his books, recipes inspired by the author and more.
Number to Know 15 million: Number of copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" -- the final book in the Harry Potter series -- sold within 24 hours of it being released, according to Forbes. The book came out on this day in 2007.
This Day in History July 21, 1969: Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the moon, which took place during the Apollo 11 mission. http://www.norwichbulletin.com/news/x910602931/Morning-Minutes-July-21#axzz1Sjs6hltB

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon 42 years ago today. But what would have happened if tragedy had fallen on the Apollo 11 mission? In 1969, Richard Nixon was president and William Safire was his speechwriter. The first spacewalk was a huge deal for Nixon, who was mired in a Vietnam quagmire. In a piece he wrote for the New York Times on the 20th anniversary of the lunar landing, Safire recalled that Frank Borman, the White House liaison with the astronauts, told him that he should not just have a victory speech planned for Nixon, but something prepared if the mission didn't succeed. Frank Borman, our liaison with the astronauts, brought the image-making up short with: ''You want to be thinking of some alternative posture for the president in the event of mishaps.'' To blank looks at this technojargon, he added, ''like what to do for the widows.'' Suddenly we were faced with the dark side of the moon planning. Death, if it came, would not come in a terrible blaze of glory; the greatest danger was that the two astronauts, once on the moon, would not be able to return to the command module. See the Safire piece at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/07/neil-armstrong-and-buzz-aldrin-the-tragic-speech-nixon-was-prepared-to-give.html