How rare it is to make a friend, a new friend, a real friend. In a time where people define friends as an electronic profile in a social network to which random comments get automatically directed, where the term may be the cryptogram for someone we have met on an airplane . . .
Haig Mardirosian The American Organist magazine March 2012

cryp•to•gram noun
1. a message or writing in code or cipher; cryptograph.
2. an occult symbol or representation. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cryptogram

Who wrote these words: Sing a song of seasons! Something bright in all! Send your answer to the muse.

As part of the Arizona-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its school. According to district spokesperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.” Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson’s largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies. The list of removed books includes the 20-year-old textbook “Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years,” which features an essay by Tucson author Leslie Silko. Recipient of a Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Silko has been an outspoken supporter of the ethnic studies program. Another notable text removed from Tucson’s classrooms is Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” Administrators informed Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” including the teaching of Shakespeare’s classic in Mexican-American literature courses.
http://tucsoncitizen.com/three-sonorans/2012/01/13/did-you-know-even-shakespeare-got-banned-from-tusd-with-mas-ruling/

For six weeks starting April 18, the 1,228 McDonald's restaurants across France will feature the McBaguette, with a burger made from France's famed Charolais beef. McDonald's said the burger will be topped with French-made Emmental cheese and mustard. France's national Bread Observatory, which studies and promotes bread, says the French each consume about 150 grams of it a day, or roughly 55 kilograms a year. French research center Credoc found that 98% of French people eat bread every day. In particular, they are major fans of the baguette. A recent study for the Sandwich and Snack trade fair in Paris showed that 65% of the two billion sandwiches sold each year in France are baguette-based. MARION ISSARD
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204778604577241312286387028.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

It was early February, when the 10-hour day returns here on the 44th parallel, and Barbara Damrosch could see it in the brighter green leaves of her tatsoi and spinach growing in the unheated greenhouse attached to the house she shares with her husband, Eliot Coleman, at Four Season Farm. Mr. Coleman, 73, began farming here on Cape Rosier, a rocky peninsula in Penobscot Bay, in 1968, on 60 acres of forested land he bought from Scott and Helen Nearing for $33 an acre. By then, the Nearings had fled the tourists and skiers pouring into Vermont and moved to Maine, where they built a garden walled with stone that collected heat in a climate where winter temperatures can still fall to 20 below zero. Their greenhouse, nestled against the stone wall, absorbed its stored heat at night. Such techniques, as well as a root cellar beneath the house, helped them live off the land year-round. Mr. Coleman cleared his first acre with an ax and bow-saw, built a one-room cabin for his first wife, Sue, and two daughters, and started to improve the soil with seaweed pulled from the rocks by the bay along with loads of horse manure and soiled hay. His compost piles, which are now huge rectangles walled in by bales of straw, also fed the soil. That’s how three inches of thin topsoil have grown to the foot of black gold in these intensively cropped beds. “We’re growing 35 to 40 different crops, in greenhouses and in the field, with no pesticides, because we don’t need pesticides,” Mr. Coleman said. “Basically, we have no pests.” That’s because pests attack sick plants, he said. “They’re like the wolves eating the sick caribou,” he said. “They can’t catch the healthy ones. When you grow plants correctly, insects can’t maintain a population on them.” And Four Season Farm grossed $120,000 last year from crops grown on 1.5 acres of land. ANNE RAVER Read about portable hoop houses and much more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/garden/living-off-the-land-in-maine-even-in-winter.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

STEM The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Coalition works to support STEM programs for teachers and students at the U. S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies that offer STEM related programs. The STEM Education Coalition represents all sectors of the technological workforce – from knowledge workers, to educators, to scientists, engineers, and technicians. http://www.stemedcoalition.org/

L for Library by Marie Lebert A decidedly humorous account of my professional life in Normandy and Jerusalem at the end of the twentieth century, before I discovered the internet and left for San Francisco. The first part concerns the city library in Granville, with its dust and old books, before it was transformed into a beautiful media library. The second part concerns two libraries in Jerusalem, one with its cardboard boxes and the other with its computers. This account was inspired by an older version that was published in a printed magazine. http://marielebert.blogspot.com/2012/02/lforlibrary.html

Gordon Gekko, the character played by actor Michael Douglas in the movie "Wall Street," is the New York FBI office's newest weapon in its arsenal to combat insider trading. The message from Douglas in a public service announcement unveiled Feb. 27 won't be "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." In a first for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Douglas, reprising his role in the 1987 film, will urge fund managers and Wall Street analysts to avoid taking the same route to the federal penitentiary as his character does, FBI Special Agent David Chaves said in an interview on Feb. 24. "He's talking about himself as Gordon Gekko and the role that he played and how that was fiction and this is not but about real crime on Wall Street," said Chaves, a supervisor of one of the FBI's securities and commodities fraud units in New York. Some television stations have agreed to broadcast the spot, he said. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/02/27/bloomberg_articlesM00U9K1A1I4H01-M022Y.DTL