Loose Leaf Notes

1. I like the title of Steven Tyler’s new book Is the Noise in My Head Bothering You?

2. Considering that Tyler lives in the same small Massachusetts town as my sister when he’s not in L.A., right near where I grew up, and considering that I once stood as close as couple of yards from him, how he’s recently been on the cover of People and Rolling Stone due to his America Idol stint, and that he was at a Red Sox game on Friday, I’ve been reading his bio online. His real name is Steven Victor Tallarico. He attended Woodstock before he was famous.

3. At Floydfest there was a food vending booth named Bearly Edibles. If you didn’t see the big bear cut-out by the booth and just heard the name, it sounds like Barely Edible, which could be a cause for pause.

4. At a recent Friday Night Jamboree in downtown Floyd there was a Beverly Hillbillies style pick-up truck with produce for sale on the back, owned by a woman named Beverly and with a sign that read “Beverly Hills.”

5. Besides a Kennedy and Steven Tyler, Marshfield is not a town of celebrities, which is why I was surprised to learn that comedian Steve Carell also lives there.

6. Inside our barber shop in Floyd hangs a picture of the barber from Andy Griffith Show whose name is Floyd.

7. I had an aunt named Alice Gertrude who went by the name Gertie and another aunt named Gertrude Alice who went by the name Alice.

8. Books with one letter missing and their descriptions result in things like: The Velveteen Rabbi, a teachers quest for love, Little Omen: A black kitten crosses your path, Laughterhouse Five, in which Billy Pilgrim lives through cheerier times and Dresden isn’t bombed, and Of Ice and Men, Steinbeck writes about climate change. More HERE.

9. So what Happened to Media Coverage of Fukushima? … ” A June 16, 2011 Al Jazeera English article titled, “Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think,” quotes a high-level former nuclear industry executive, Arnold Gunderson, who called Fukushima nothing less than “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.” Twenty nuclear cores have been exposed at Fukushima, Gunderson points out, saying that, along with the site’s many spent-fuel pools, gives Fukushima 20 times the release potential of Chernobyl … Poor mainstream media coverage of Japan’s now months-long struggle to gain control over the Fukushima disaster has deprived Americans of crucial information about the risks of nuclear power following natural disasters.”  More at CommonDreams.org HERE.

10. “The new public square: Although young people (under 30) are abandoning blogs for mobile Twitter and Facebook, there were in the spring of 2011, 159 million blogs with more than 55,000 new ones created every 24 hours. Thirty-one percent of internet users read blogs and 12 percent write them.”  Read more at Time Goes By HERE.

11. I feel like a kid. hope I can sleep. It’s the first day of school tomorrow and I’m covering this year’s kindergarten classes for the local paper.

12. Seen on my friend Coriander’s Facebook Wall: Photography is: 30% being in the right place at the right time. 60% knowing it. 10% knowing how to capture it.

13. The word golf spelled backwards is “flog,” which means to hit something with a whip or a rod.

More 13 Thursday bloggers HERE.