IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT THIS BLOG: I'm excited to report my weblog is being partially absorbed into BooksandCulture.com, as part of my new position as editorial assistant for Books&Culture magazine. That means a reduced output here, and a transfer of certain features like Places&Culture to the new digs. It will be up every Monday at B&C, and I'm eager to try out some new features, including a new twist on History&Today. I start this week with my Super Bowl diary, a sort of cultural critic's play-by-play:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030127.html

My latest Tribune article:
Former winners from the original "Star Search": Where are they now?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0301230006jan23,1,7083566.story

• My Tribune archive

Mayor Daley responds to a 3-part Tribune investigation to which I contributed, on the demolition of designated historical buildings. What specific measures will he take to address the problems the Tribune found? Said Daley: "Gee, I don't know."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/mchenry/chi-0301170280jan17,1,9100.story

• Quote of the Day
"I've gone from being the stone thrower to the glass."
Gilberto Gil, Brazil's counterculture pop star who has been appointed the country's minister of culture.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/arts/music/31GIL.html
• Number of the Day: 11
Percentage of American girls who are Girl Scouts, for a total of 2.8 million girls, a 20-year high.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/25/nyregion/25SCOU.html

• Previous Quote and Number

• Places&Culture File from

PARIS, Jan. 5 — These are dark days in the City of Light. It is a cruel trick played on those who are not forewarned. Paris is a northern city, on about the same latitude as Seattle and Vancouver. New York, by contrast, sits on a level with Madrid and Naples. So when winter comes, Paris's northern position combines with humidity, above-freezing temperatures, the absence of fierce winds and a location at the bottom of a basin to rob the city of sun and light. ... Daylight arrives well after 8 a.m. and leaves only eight hours later. Even as the days begin to grow longer now that the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, has passed, the demons of darkness linger. ... The darkness has such an effect that the French government's generous medical insurance program covers medical consultations for those who grow depressed because of the waning light of winter. The syndrome — clinically known as seasonal affective disorder, more commonly as the winter blues — affects as much as 20 percent of the population, according to studies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/06/international/europe/06PARI.html

By 10 a.m. yesterday, 18,000 shoppers had already plowed their way through the doors of the Queens Center mall to participate, by purchasing, in the year's great American spending moment. By the look and sound of things, the shoppers seemed to have come from 18,000 places, from Alexandria to Zagreb, from Quito to Katmandu. And a lot of them were not really shopping for Christmas.
Black Friday at the mall, on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst, is surely as hectic and hedonistic as it is at any other mall in the country. In fact, in terms of retail sales per square foot, the mall, an aging urban anomaly with a headache of a parking situation, is one of the busiest in the United States, doing roughly twice the business of the average American mall and drawing 21 million shoppers annually. ... But sales aside, it would be hard to find this at the Mall of America: Polish Jehovah's Witnesses; a Vietnamese Catholic shopping for Hanukkah; and a circular bench in front of J. C. Penney's that, in the span of only 20 minutes, gave respite to the rumps of shoppers from the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Japan, India, Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Thailand, Trinidad and the Bronx.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/nyregion/30JOUR.html

• Previous P&C

The promise and perils of driving via Mapquest, from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/technology/circuits/16mapp.html

Who knew? There's an organization called the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers with a website at AAML.org. It was cited in a Wall Street Journal article on the recent increase in divorce filings; although research on the divorce rate always lags a few years behind, 78 percent of AAML lawyers report an increase in case loads for last year, WSJ said.

I came across these sites while looking for Christmas movie trivia for my Dec. 20 Tribune article on Christmas sites. ESLnotes.com uses It's a Wonderful Life and other movies to teach English idioms and expressions:
http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/html/its-a-wonderful-life.html
(I recently clipped an NYT article about Seneca Falls, presumably the real-life Bedford Falls: click here)
This site culls enough stacks of TV and movie trivia from IMDB to kill four lunch breaks:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/movies/trivia-faq

Astronomers have discovered three new moons around Neptune, the BBC reported earlier this month.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2656959.stm

Speaking of space, the Chinese government reported it retrieved its robot space capsule from a space trek, and hopes to become the third country to send an astronaut into space later this year, the AP reported earlier this month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/06/international/asia/06CHIN.html

Unique New York (say that five times fast...): NY Magazine sums up the city's character in a list of phrases, along with its year-end NY awards.