A week after the collapse of the Twin Towers, The New Yorker ran Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” on the final page of its special 9/11 issue. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/15/030915on_onlineonly03 Written a year and a half before the attacks, the poem nevertheless quickly became the most memorable verse statement on the tragedy, and arguably the best-known poem of the last 10 years. “You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,” Zagajewski wrote. “You’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully./ You should praise the mutilated world.” “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” recalls a trip Zagajewski took with his father through Ukrainian villages in Poland forcibly abandoned in the population transfers of the post-Yalta years. “This was one of the strongest impressions I ever had,” he says. “There were these empty villages with some apple trees going wild. And I saw the villages became prey to nettles; nettles were everywhere. There were these broken houses. It became in my memory this mutilated world, these villages, and at the same time they were beautiful. It was in the summer, beautiful weather. It’s something that I reacted to, this contest between beauty and disaster.” Since the late ’80s, Zagajewski has split his time between Europe and America. These days he teaches literature at the University of Chicago. He sounds pessimistic about Europe and finds the vibrancy of American life, literary and otherwise, alluring. “I would still rather live in Europe, but I feel this lack of energy,” he says. “Here [in the U.S.] people have a fuller life, in terms of being ready to take risks. Even the fact that America is waging wars. It’s not a political [statement], but anthropologically speaking, there’s a fullness of life. In Europe you have a feeling that history is over. Europe is this wonderful museum.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/04/adam-zagajewski-the-poet-of-9-11.html

Top 100 Websites from Top Sites Blog: http://topsitesblog.com/top-100-websites/ search engines, social networks, news, sports and more A few picks from the list: online language dictionaries at: http://wordreference.com/ Findlaw at: http://www.findlaw.com/ new and used car reviews and information at: http://www.edmunds.com/
Top 100 Educational Websites from homeschool.com http://www.homeschool.com/articles/top100_2011/default.asp?Hover_NoThankYou=true
Most Popular Websites from mostpopularwebsites.net http://mostpopularwebsites.net/

Whirlwind vacation September 2-4, 2011 We started in Painesville, located about 30 miles east of downtown Cleveland, the county seat of Lake County. Painesville, like many Northeast Ohio communities, was first "settled" as part of the Connecticut Western Reserve in the early 1800s. The town, situated along the Grand River was first named Champion, the surveyor, but was later changed to Painesville, in honor of Revolutionary war hero, General Edward Paine. http://cleveland.about.com/od/lakeandashtabulacounties/p/painesville.htm
We stayed at Rider's Inn, on the National Register of Historic Places since April 23, 1973. http://www.ridersinn.com/
Joseph Rider opened Rider's Inn in 1812. During the early 1800s, Rider's Inn served as a stop for stagecoaches traveling between Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio. During the 1840s and 1850s, the tavern's owners also provided runaway slaves, who were traveling along the Underground Railroad, with a safe haven. http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=3186&nm=Riders-Inn
We drove by private liberal arts Lake Erie College, known for equine studies, and then visited wineries in Conneaut, Geneva, Madison, Thompson, Norwalk and Avon Lake.
Taking a scenic road from Cleveland, we discovered Huntington Reservation in Bay Village on the shores of Lake Erie. Picnic areas high above the beach offer visitors opportunities to enjoy the striking and ever-changing lake views. Breakwalls allow anglers to fish in Lake Erie in all seasons. The reservation is also home to three Cleveland Metroparks affiliates, Lake Erie Nature & Science Center, Huntington Playhouse and BAYarts. One of the oldest reservations in Cleveland Metroparks, it still contains many unusual botanical specimens brought here from Europe by John Huntington, the previous owner and reservation namesake. The Huntington Water Tower, a well-known landmark, was used to pump water from the lake to irrigate Mr. Huntington's fields of grapes. http://www.clemetparks.com/visit/index.asp?action=rdetails&reservations_id=1021

HIDDEN IN THE MANUSCRIPTS of early British settlers are the last surviving records of many indigenous languages. The State Library of New South Wales http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/ has launched a new project to rediscover these forgotten dialects. Of the 250 indigenous languages spoken at the time of British settlement, fewer than 20 are still in daily use. The State Library of New South Wales, in a partnership with Rio Tinto, aims to pass the rediscovered words on to Aboriginal communities, helping to reverse the current language decline. Melissa Jackson, an indigenous services librarian at the State Library, says early recordings of lost languages can be found among the journals and letters of British naval officers, missionaries and surveyors. But poring over the Library's vast collection of manuscripts is a daunting task. "The first phase of the project is discovering what language lists we hold in the Library's twelve linear kilometres of manuscripts," Melissa told Australian Geographic. "The lists can be in the form of a formal study into Aboriginal languages, or they can just be snippets of information in someone's journal." http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/a-mission-to-save-indigenous-languages.htm

Singapore-based photographer Qi Wei offers up this beautiful series of images showing "exploded flowers" -- flowers which have been carefully disassembled and then photographed in a way that honors their radial symmetry. Here's a rose, a chrysanthemum, and a sunflower. Disassembling the flowers, he writes, "lays bare the various shapes and textures of the flowers, and what is interesting to me is how much more expanded some flowers can get when they are disassembled -- the relative surface area to size of a rose is so much greater compared to a larger flower like the sunflower." You can also see the fractcal size-pattern of the petals. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2011/08/qi_weis_explode.html

See the rest at: http://fqwimages.com/2011/08/exploded-flowers-3/