Thanks for your patience!

Many blogs to review of course. Should have reviews beginning tomorrow...

Back to our regularly scheduled blogging

Visiting relative  has left, traveling has done, and I'm ready to devote myself to this blog again.

So thanks for  your patience!

I crave your indulgence

My mother's sister is visiting for three days. My mom's deaf as a post, my dad can't be bothered to get out of his chair, so I will be doing the entertaining - the chauffeuring and the talking and the communicating - for the next three days. So I'll be posting back here Thursday. Thanks for your patience.

Blogging Shakespeare

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: N/A

WEB ADDRESS: http://bloggingshakespeare.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Blogging Shakespeare has many authors. Here's just the top one of the list: Paul Edmondson is General Editor of Blogging Shakespeare. He is Head of Research and Knowledge and Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is a trustee of The Rose Theatre Trust, co-series editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s Shakespeare Handbooks, and co-supervisory editor of the Penguin Shakespeare (for which he has contributed to several introductions).

He is Chair of The Hosking Houses Trust. His publications include: Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and Its Theatrical Life, and (co-authored with Stanley Wells), Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Coffee with Shakespeare. He has published on Shakespeare’s influence on the Brontës (Brontë Studies and Shakespeare Survey). He contributed an essay on the poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare for The Cambridge History of English Poetry (May, 2010), and has two essays on Harriet Walter appearing in Actors’ Shakespeare (Routledge, 2011) and The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia. He wrote the script for The Shakespeare Centre’s ‘Life, Love, and Legacy’ exhibition and co-curated ‘Shakespeare Found: A Life Portrait’. He took another B.A. in Applied Theological Studies (University of Birmingham), 2007-2010. He is a priest in The Church of England.

MY REVIEW: An excellent blog of the Bard, covering his plays and life in all its facets. The authors all write well and cover the plays and stuff in detail.

Check it out!

RECENT POSTS:
--Year of Shakespeare: Henry VI Part Three
--Year of Shakespeare: Henry VI Part Two
--Year of Shakespeare: Henry VI Part One
--Year of Shakespeare: The Tempest
--Year of Shakespeare: Richard III at the RSC
--Year of Shakespeare: Macbeth

Happy Simple Living

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Happy Simple Living

WEB ADDRESS: http://happysimpleliving.com.

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Happy Simple Living is the acclaimed blog by author Eliza Cross with ideas and inspiration about green living, homesteading, living simply, minimizing, being self-sufficient, sustainable living, saving money, living debt-free, going green, making great food, organic gardening, decluttering, getting organized - and most importantly, having fun! Sample review:
A Letter to the Meat Industry Yesterday I read an article on the PR news site Bulldog Reporter about the meat industry’s “image crisis.” From the public outcry against “pink slime,” to a recent incident of mad cow disease in a dairy cow, to the Harvard study released this spring that suggests eating meat could lead to premature death, this spring has been a PR practitioner’s nightmare.

According to the LA Times article cited in the story, “beef historian and author Maureen Ogle believes the industry should have responded by running polished advertisements featuring ranchers touting their American heritage, as well as billboards proclaiming the safety of products, and executives should have been sent to major talk shows, she said.”

As a PR professional myself, I politely beg to disagree. I don’t think the meat industry has an image crisis that calls for a more polished public relations response. The meat industry has a listening crisis. The reason the media is filled with so much negative news is because the U.S. meat industry is not hearing its customers.

We are a household that still eats meat. I try to purchase from local producers who use organic feed, let animals graze, and treat them humanely, but like most people, sometimes I’m trying to live within the budget or I’m in a hurry and I purchase supermarket meat. I find that our family is moving to an increasingly vegetarian diet for many reasons – not the least of which is our distaste for much the U.S. meat industry’s standard practices. Your feelings may be different, of course, but here’s what I wish the meat industry would hear:

* We don’t want animals suffering in fetid feedlots or stuffed in crowded cages – not at any cost. We want humane treatment of animals raised for food production.
* We humans don’t want to have to forgo antibiotics when we’re sick, because of your continued overuse in the meat industry. (Factory farm animals consume 80% of all antibiotics in this country. The European Union curtailed use of routine antibiotic use on farms in 2006.)
* We don’t want you to pump these animals full of hormones like rBGH to induce quick growth. Let them grow up naturally. (The European Union, Japan, Australia and Canada have all banned the use of rBGH due to animal and human health concerns.)
* We want you to feed these animals good food that is part of their natural diet. We don’t want you to force animals that are herbivores, like cattle, to eat feed manufactured with animal by-products. * We don’t want pink slime or other cheap additives in our meat. We simply want good, top-quality meat. (Canada, the UK and European Union have banned pink slime from their meat, but here it can constitute up to a whopping 15 percent of our ground beef without any labeling. Why?)
* We want you to take the lead in good practices. We want to be proud of our United States producers and processors, and we want U.S.-raised meat to be the best in the world.

In March 2012, ground beef sales slipped to the lowest level in a decade. Consumers are clearly voting with their checkbooks, and one can only hope that the U.S. meat industry collectively decides to improve its practices, not its propaganda.

What do you think?

MY REVIEW:
This is an excellent blog, with so much info - recipes, book offers, how to go green, etc. Highly recommended.

RECENT POSTS:
--11 Easy to Grow Vegetable Seeds You Can Direct Sow Now and Enjoy an Organic Harvest this Summer
--A Letter to the Meat Industry
--How to Make a Pizza from Scratch With this Easy Homemade Pizza Recipe
--Mini Raspberry Custard Tart Recipe
--Win a Copy of a Great Book from My New Blog

_______________ Reviews published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
___________________________
Check out my kindle BOOKS!:
Whose Body, by Dorothy Sayers (the Annotated Edition)
The Coldest Equations (science fiction)
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
The Lady and the Tiger...Moth

Back to normal Sunday..

Tomorrow - I hope and pray to all the gods and in particular Om - that the guy who has been doing my sheet rock one ceiling hole every Saturday, will come here tomorrow (having missed last Saturday) finish sheet rocking the final of four holes, then adding the tape and the "mud" and the textured paint. I'm fed up with the delay - he was supposed to do it last year, for God's sake! Many reasons why I let him get away with the delay, but I want it done tomorrow becausew all my furniture and books are topsy turvy and I'm in a state where I can't accomplish anything. He's promised to be here early tomorrow - I'll believe it when I see it. But I hope it's true.

Baseball blogs

I'm not going to give individual reviews of all the baseball blogs available on Kindle - every team has at least one blog. So check them out yourself if you are a fan of the game.

Book: The Annotated Whose Body by Dorothy Sayers

Whose Body, The Annotated Edition, by Caroline Miniscule (i.e. me!)

This is just an announcement for you Dorothy Sayers fans. I'm sure you enjoy her books...but you could enjoy them more if you knew what all that French, Latin, and various 1920s references meant, eh?

Whose Body, with Lord Peter Wimsey as the amateur detective, was Dorothy Sayers first novel, published in 1923. While it is as enjoyable today as it was back in the 1920s, many of the references Sayers makes throughout the book aren't immediately clear to today's readers - especially those in the United States.

For example, at one point Wimsey says to his mother, "You're a brick." He means it as a compliment. Why? Well, way back in ancient Greece, King Lycurgus of Sparta was asked why there were no defensive walls around his city. 'There are Sparta's walls,' he replied, pointing at his soldiers, 'and every man is a brick.'"

Increase your enjoyment of Whose Body? 100-fold with this annotated edition. The annotations are placed right in the text, bolded, so that it's easy to pass over them if you're not interested in a particular entry.

Then, when you've finished the annotated edition, the book is repeated again, with no annotations, so it can be read simply. Two books for the price of one!

Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Body-Mysterious-Annotations-ebook/dp/B004PGNBMO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1307678919&sr=1-1

B&N Nook
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/whose-body-the-annotated-edition-dorothy-sayers/1031408777?ean=2940012925596&itm=9&usri=whose%2bbody

and don't forget my science fiction novel, The Coldest Equations, is also available for both the Nook and Kindle, and for only $2.99 you can't go wrong by giving it a try!

Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Equations-People-There-ebook/dp/B0052NSRKK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1307679246&sr=1-1

Nook
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coldest-equations-caroline-miniscule/1031408776?ean=2940012925589&itm=1&usri=the%2bcoldest%2bequations

The Spanish Blog - learning Spanish

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: N/A

WEB ADDRESS: http://www.thespanishblog.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Hi, my name is Laura and I am from Bilbao in northern Spain. I trained as a Spanish Language Teacher with Lacunza International House in San Sebastian and qualified in 2004. I taught Spanish at Exeter College of Further & Higher Education in England and later in an Alicante Language School after moving back to Spain. I really enjoy my job and the intricacies of the Spanish Language. I still live in Alicante and for the past five years have been teaching the Spanish Language via the internet to students from all over the world.

My main personal interests are music, photography, travelling, reading and cooking. I studied music for twelve years in Bilbao and I play the piano. I also enjoy singing and I try to sing more in English now. I really like to eat and cook new food from different countries, although I am definitely a big fan of Spanish cuisine! I also love traditional English food and believe it is underrated. I lived in England for about four years and I think that I have tried most of the traditional British dishes. My favourites are English cakes such as scones with clotted cream and flapjacks.

I have been learning English since I was twelve as it is compulsory in Spanish schools. However, when I finished my University degree and travelled to England for the first time I realised how little I actually knew. My English got better after being thrown in at the deep end and having to speak English every day at work there. Now I still speak English every day and have had a lot of practice, but I understand just how tough it can be to start learning a language. I try to apply my own experiences to my teaching and get my students speaking as much as possible as quickly as possible.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for visiting my website. I really appreciate your interest and I hope that you enjoy my daily Spanish video lessons and my complete Spanish mp3 courses. I also hope that you find my articles about “everything and anything Spanish” interesting and they motivate you to come and explore Spain. I will try to cover as wide a range of topics as possible, including Spanish food, Spanish TV, Spanish music and Spanish history. My mission is to provide the most complete, most clearly explained, best quality, best value Spanish language learning material available anywhere and to tell as many people as I can all that I can about my wonderful country.

My Review
This blog is not suitable for the Kindle, but then, it's not on the Kindle. The author writes well,and shares lots of Spanish language videos. Check it out.

RECENT POSTS:
--Spanish music with Spanish lyrics: Estopa La primavera
--Spanish groups: Estopa Hemicraneal
--How to swear in Spanish: Common Spanish swear words and insults
--Spanish group Estopa Pastillas De Freno

_______________
Reviews published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

___________________________
Check out my kindle BOOKS!:
Whose Body, by Dorothy Sayers (the Annotated Edition)
The Coldest Equations (science fiction)
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
The Lady and the Tiger...Moth

The Friends of Carlota - Spanish for Spanish as a Second Language

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: The Friends of Carlota

WEB ADDRESS: http://thefriendsofcarlota.blogspot.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION:

The purpose of this blog is two-fold - to tell an exciting story in the alternative history genre, and to teach my readers Spanish at the same time.

The story begins in English, as Carlota has a premonition in 1859 that her husband, Maximilan, will become Emperor of Mexico in 1864, and three years later be deposed and executed, while she fruitlessly tries to save him by visiting the royal houses of Europe.

When her premonition starts to come true, Carlota decides to take matters into her own hands. She will have no friends in Europe, she knows, so she must find them in the Confederate States of America, a country that she knows will be on the brink of defeat during the Civil War when her husband the Emperor will be in most need of rescue.

Carlota sends emissaries to the United States to recruit her friends - and of course since they'll be living and fighting in Mexico they will need to learn Spanish. Similarly, Carlota begins to learn Spanish as well, so that she will be better able to serve her subjects as Empress of Mexico.

MY REVIEW:
How many people try to learn Spanish but falter and forget about it, because their textbooks teach them dull and boring dialogs between people whom you wouldn't want to know in real life? In The Friends of Carlota, the reader is learning Spanish along with Carlota, and along with her minions in the United States of America who are working toward her long-range plan to save her husband.

If you are fascinated by the story of Maximilian and Carlota, or interested in alternate universe Civil War fiction, and want to learn Spanish, I think you'll enjoy this blog.

RECENT POSTS:
N/A - posts are chapters. _______________ Reviews published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. ___________________________ Check out my kindle BOOKS!: Whose Body, by Dorothy Sayers (the Annotated Edition) The Coldest Equations (science fiction) Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters The Lady and the Tiger...Moth