(For a review of the One Piece Japanese manga series, see the One Piece post on AuntPennies.com.) In more than six dozen volumes available in the series the main characters have evolved, particularly those who started as adolescents. Unfortunately this has also added to the number of Barbie doll figures. On the positive side, Luffy…
Author: Penelope Gordon
Importing high-tech workers
Congress must reform immigration laws that send top STEM graduates to China – CSMonitor.com. 2012 September 10 print edition Rather than focusing on keeping foreign students of US STEM programs in the US post-graduation, I think that we should focus on enabling more US students to graduate from both US and foreign STEM programs and…
Children’s Classics
Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg on Project Gutenburg
Remnants
(Refer to the Writing Notes post for word usage and to Food Vocabulary for food-related words and terms. Also see Text Fragments and Famous Quotes.) “find your Prints Charming” – from a 2012 September 18 Bed Bath & Beyond email advertisement for ordering decorator fabrics online. From the Jim Butcher short story “Day Off”, “he who…
Adult Paranormal Fiction
(Also see the Paranormal Romance Novels post.) Peeves Why do sequel blurbs lead off with phrases such as “her greatest challenge yet”, “she must confront dark secrets”, or “she uncovers a dark plot that may forever change the face of Y”? Pish. I appreciate a series in which the characters – antagonists as well as…
Drought: Farmers dig deeper
Drought: Farmers dig deeper, water tables drop, competition heats up – CSMonitor.com. – 2012 August 13 print edition It’s very troubling when farmers are tapping into the water table to switch from dry-farming to irrigation in order to grow resource-intensive, annual crops such as cotton and corn.
CloudCon Security Panel
GoDaddy: Outage Caused By Network Failure, Not Anonymous Hack. Unified approach to data security. CSO = Chief Security Officer Escrow account, service support commitments – for example, for how many years is AWS committing to support its new data archive service (Glacier)? SLOs and SLAs – objectives and objectives with penalties RAS commitments – ‘5…
A Matter of Semantics
legitimate – definition of legitimate by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia The first three of seven definitions of ‘legitimate’ in the Free Online Dictionary are: 1. Being in compliance with the law; lawful: a legitimate business. 2. Being in accordance with established or accepted patterns and standards: legitimate advertising practices. 3. Based on…
Naruto
According to the covers, Naruto is “the world’s most popular manga”. A serialized manga in Shonen Jump, bound volumes are released every few months, first in Japanese and then in English (and other languages); the English version of volume 63 will be published by Viz Media 2013 Nov 5. Author Masashi Kishimoto has a team…
Adult Mystery and Suspense
Books by Patricia Cornwell Port Mortuary I hadn’t listened to (or read) a novel in the Kay Scarpetta series in some time. The detective elements and the technology was entertaining but the emoting of the main character got annoyingly overwrought. The reading by Kate Burton was quite engaging. Books by Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum Series…