Results tagged “Daily Breeze” from Daily Link

With summer on the horizon, it's time to prepare that poolside or beach reading list.

Two Web sites that can give you some suggestions are Goodreads and This One Next.

Goodreads.com has a social networking feature. It lets you know what your friends are reading, have read or would like to read. It also alerts you to what are the most popular books — at least among members of Goodreads.

Currently, President Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" is being read by 2,651 members, and it's No. 10 on the reading list.

But Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" is No. 2 on the reading list, and other books in the series are Nos. 4, Number6 and Number 7. "The Host," the first book of her newest series, is No. 11.

The site also includes videos of author interviews and a database of upcoming literary events. Enter your zip code and the type of event and the results pop up in a list and on a map.

Goodreads also maintains several user groups to discuss literature by genre, geography or common interest.

The name of This One Next says it all. Type in the title and author of book and ask for suggestions. However, just a cursory check of the site found that the less popular the title, the more likely it will return an error message.

The site also will recommend CDs and videos, although its choices can seem a little odd — "The Sound of Music" draws a recommendation of "The River Wild" with Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon.

Both sites will link you to Amazon, so you can order a book, CD, DVD or an electronic download if you have a Kindle.

Last week, Chicago learned that its iconic Sears Tower -- the tallest building in the United States, is losing its name. Blair Kamin, at ChicagoTribune.com, said "The Sears name isn't just a tack-on. It stands for something.... The building's architecture reflects that past: It is strong, solid, democratic."

London-based insurer the Willis Group moved into the tower, and the investment firm that owns the skyscraper threw in a name change at no extra charge. It shall now be known as Willis Tower. Plus, Sears left the tower as its headquarters back in 1992.

The name change shows how skyscrapers stoke the imaginations and passions of both detractors and admirers. If you fall into the admirers camp, SkyscraperPage.com is for you. The site features an extensive database of building statistics and very well-drawn diagrams.

Locally, El Segundo has five buildings represented in the database. Several more near LAX are categorized within Los Angeles, which boasts 559 high-rises.

Register for the page and you can join in discussions on architecture and urbanism on the active forums.

Does the number 13 inspire a sense of dread? Do you find yourself missing work when the 13 th day of the month falls on a Friday? Seek professional help immediately.

Or, better yet, set your mind at ease by understanding the origins of Friday the 13 th, a date that was tied to ominous historical and mythological events and spawned a franchise of slasher movies. How Stuff Works explains the enduring legend of Friday the 13th. According to the article, the superstition has roots in fears of Fridays and the number 13 -- particularly in early Christian theology. One explanation: At the Last Supper, Judas, one of Jesus' 12 apostles, was the last to arrive, making him the 13th man at the party. Judas would go on to betray Jesus, who was crucified on a Friday. Earlier religious speculation posited that Friday was the day Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and when the Great Flood began.

According to Wikipedia's Friday the 13th article, the date has been considered unlucky to undertake voyages or start business ventures since the 14 th century.

The fear is widespread enough to have its own name, paraskevidekatriaphobia -- fear of Friday the 13th. It's not an official psychologically recognized disorder, but it is sure to make anyone a true stud or studette at a spelling bee.

So, what's the verdict on Friday the 13th as an unlucky day? It's all in the eye of the beholder. In the meantime, watch the "Friday the 13th" movie series on DVD.

Happy birthday to you! Now blow out the candles and make a wish.

If your wish happens to be getting more free stuff, FreeBirthdayTreats.com will make it come true.

The site was created by people interested in finding out which restaurants and other companies share in your celebration by offering gratis goodies.

The online database has categories for adults, kids and even pets.

Narrow down your search by entering the state, type of business and if you're looking for discounts, freebies or both.

You can also submit your own treats to the database or sign up for new offers to be delivered via e-mail.

Today marks the beginning of the Lenten season with Ash Wednesday. The day and the season are mostly associated with Roman Catholicism, but the tradition is also observed by denominations including, but not limited to, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians. And, according to a Salt Lake Tribune article, many Protestant denominations that had once regarded Lent as a non-Biblical ritual are increasingly incorporating Lent into their observances.

Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches also observe Lent, though their observance began two days earlier on Ash Monday.

A common thread among all denominations is a period where Christians meditate on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ across a period of 40 days. Observers make a personal sacrifice during the season, and Lent commonly involves daily fasts and abstention from meat-eating.

Catholic Online has the messages and meanings of the Roman Catholic Lenten rite.

According to the Ash Wednesday page:

•The ashes, made from the charred palms used in the prior year's Palm Sunday, are a reminder of humankind's mortality. Ashes are placed on the forehead with the reminder that "Man is dust, and unto dust you shall return."

•The Catholic Church has a thorough code on the practices of fasting and abstinence. Fasting, or reducing the amount of food eaten during the Lenten period, must be observed by Catholics ages 18 to 59. Abstinence, or refraining from eating meat, is required of Catholics ages 14 and older on Ash Wednesday and the Fridays before Easter Sunday. The sick, pregnant and nursing women, and workers in jobs requiring strenuous manual labor are exempt from fast and abstinence.

•While Lent is a time of sacrifice, it is also a time for all observers to still carry out their obligations as students, workers and parents. So, no, vacations are not considered sacrifices.

For other questions regarding Lenten observance, Catholic Online has an FAQ page.

Daily Breeze columnist John Bogert, the sage of the South Bay, revealed a bombshell in his Jan. 8 column, "Too many are in the 'know-nothing' party." Among the startling revelations:

• The average score on a quiz administered by the American Civil Literacy Program, www.americancivicliteracy.org, was 49 percent out of a sample of a little more than 2,500 test-takers?
• This score was merely six (!) points lower than the average when said test was given to college educators -- people who had graduate- or doctorate-level scholarship in these subjects and later go on to teach this to the rest of us.
• The American Civil Literacy Program has mathematical proof verifying the Peter principle. A sample of 164 elected officials, on average, scored five points less than the general population.

Bogert, who admits to a "Jeffersonian" score when he took the test, provides a few questions to prep before taking the exam.

Now, tax your American knowledge. It's 33 multiple-choice questions and open-book, but there is the option of entering your ZIP code, income and education level.

Feel free to boast about your score in the comments.

The big day is at hand. The preparations are complete. The halls are decked, the chestnuts roasted on an open fire, the stockings stuffed, the gifts wrapped, and the eggs nogged.

Now rest, ye merry gentlemen and ladies before a computer and follow these links for some Yuletide joy.

FunTrivia, which in the title bar claims to be the "world's largest trivia and quiz site!," has a very special Christmastime quiz section. Try your hand at any of 30 quizzes that test Noel knowledge. They even track who has been naughty or nice — in this case right and wrong — and reveal how many cohorts answered the questions correctly. Good luck!

For those who wish to give their eye-hand coordination some exercise, free Web-based game repository Miniclip has a collection of games just right for the season.

These games are sure to have your bells jingling.

You should be following us on Twitter, where we are posting breaking news, links to our favorite stories and what we're covering. We're also posting from meetings and events as they happen.

Twitter is a social media microblogging platform where users keep their "followers" up-to-date with what they are doing with short posts of just 140 characters or fewer. The service launched in 2006, but it has taken off like gangbusters this year.
According to Compete.com, Twitter more than quadrupled its users from November 2007 to June 2008. There are now more than 1.2 million Tweeters.

Lest you think it's just for kids, a Time magazine article last month reports the largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds, which make up more than 25 percent of users. And the 55+ demographics are growing, too. Interestingly, more than 57 percent of Tweeters are from California.

Here's where you can find us, so you'll know when the pagination system crashes or when we get cranky phone calls or drunks barge in to city council meetings:

Editor Phillip Sanfield: www.twitter.com/editorbreeze
Managing Editor Toni Sciacqua: www.twitter.com/dailybreezeME
Assistant City Editor (and pets blogger) Josh Grossberg: www.twitter.com/dbdog
Crime Reporter Larry Altman: www.twitter.com/dbreezecrime
Courts Reporter Denise Nix: www.twitter.com/dbreezecourts
Beach Cities Reporter Andrea Woodhouse: www.twitter.com/akwoodhouse
Gardena, Lawndale, Hawthorne Reporter Sandy Mazza: www.twitter.com/dailybreezeSM
Harbor Area Reporter (and pets blogger) Donna Littlejohn: www.twitter.com/dbbark
Copy desk chief Jack Mulkey: www.twitter.com/jacko75
Features Editor Leo Smith: www.twitter.com/dailybreezearts
Prep Sports reporters Tony Ciniglio and Dave Thorpe: www.twitter.com/breezepreps
Soccer columnist Nick Green: www.twitter.com/LAsoccerblog

Last week, the Daily Breeze's Sam Gnerre went through the archives and found photographs of old supermarkets, which inspired him to compile one of his many great Top 10 lists. He found the names of grocery stores that fed many households in the South Bay.

There was a time when supermarkets had names other than Ralphs, Vons or Albertsons, and a time when shopping at Whole Foods meant a whole year's salary and not just a whole paycheck.

Want to know whatever happened to such chains as Alpha Beta, The Boys and Smith's Food King? Their histories, along with other markets throughout North America, live on in Groceteria.

The site compiles a collection of photos and "commercial archaeology" from fans of grocery stores — a most ornery bunch. It also has a message board for fans to ask questions and share their own stories.

Grocery store fandom goes beyond Groceteria to the more photographically inclined. Flickr, the photo-sharing social network, has the group "Vintage Supermarkets, Grocery & Convenience Stores." It has a melange of old photos and present-day photos of older supermarkets extant and repurposed.

Canine owners all over the South Bay showed up in San Pedro Thursday for the audition of "Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan," but why resort to a pet shrink when you can be your own?

Reader's Digest has five tips the Dog Whisperer himself urges every canine owner to heed.

If you need to go away for a while or just want an extra helping hand, PetWatch Club can help you find someone in your area who might want to pet-sit for your canine companion or feline friend. Find others who might have advice for your problems, or alert members in the neighborhood if your pet goes missing. Enter your ZIP code and find fellow pet owners. The South Bay is well-represented in the PetWatch club database.

If you're planning a trip but don't want to keep your furry pals at home, Petswelcome.com lists more than 25,000 pet-friendly hotels, campgrounds and beaches that'll cater to your needs.

Good pet owners should always be prepared. The Department of Homeland Security advises pet owners to have emergency plans for the care of their animals.

We've saved the best for last. By far, and without irony or hyperbole, the single best source for pet news and resources is the South Bay Pets Blog. Read the items and see the videos, then bookmark it or even make it your home page.

Full disclosure: The South Bay Pets Blog is run by the Daily Breeze. That's what makes it so great.

Global positioning technology has come a long way. Prices have come way down and the technology has become more versatile than a high-tech replacement for the Thomas Guide.

Zoombak is marketing itself as a GPS device to help track lost pets. The $200 unit weighs less than 3 ounces and can be attached to a dog's or cat's collar, and the canine or feline can be tracked on the web, via Zoombak's customer service line or through text messaging on a cell phone.

Zoombak also has a unit available for GPS's most customary use, vehicle navigation and tracking. The $250 unit can be fixed inside a vehicle and portable, and can be used to track a vehicle's location and notify subscribers when it enters or leaves a user-defined "safety zone." The GPS device is promoted as a great way for parents to monitor teenagers' driving habits.

The low price and interface has attracted the attention of Martha Stewart and techno-geek sites such as Engadget and Slashdot. Early adopters have taken advantage of the compact size and cost to track other valuables besides pets and cars: An art collector places Zoombaks on expensive pieces, and a pharmaceutical uses the devices to track inventory.

Zoombak is not without its flaws. The $200-$250 price tag is for the physical unit; customers must still pay a monthly service fee to maintain coverage. Real-time cell phone tracking is not yet available. Also, the GPS technology is not yet advanced enough to receive a strong signal while indoors. This is less of a concern for vehicles, but the gadget might not work if a dog or cat happens to be inside a building.

Still, Zoombak would be a useful gadget to have for your lovable four-legged friend. Plus, the cellular-based coverage for the service shows signals to be robust throughout all but the mountainous areas of Southern California. And for other helpful products, information or pet-related chatter, visit the Daily Breeze's South Bay Pets blog and South Bay Pet Talk, which appears online and in the Breeze print edition every Tuesday.

Terry Peterson of Lomita gets his outdoor kicks riding and bouncing around on a unicycle specially designed for extreme mountain biking.

He first caught the attention of the Daily Breeze two years ago, when we wrote a cover story about him for our features section.

These days you can catch the 52-year-old Peterson on YouTube, where he has posted numerous unicycling videos under the name “UniGeezer.” (Some include footage of him as “UniKid.”)

A piano technician by trade, Peterson has put together a compilation of the videos he has made during the past two years.

The final piece of the compilation shows him jumping and clearing a set of stairs with eight steps.

See all of Peterson’s videos on YouTube.

Ever get the feeling campaign controversies are following you around?

Just days after a key Barack Obama aide resigned after her controversial comments were published by my former newspaper, The Scotsman, my current paper The Daily Breeze found itself at the center of a media maelstrom when it published racially-charged comments made by Geraldine Ferraro to our reporter, Jim Farber.

The remarks made by Ferraro, the first woman to run on a ticket for a presidential nomination, about Obama’s race have been picked up by the Daily Kos, Raw Story and The New York Times.

In a home page piece posted Monday, Slate, the online political magazine owned by The Washington Post, follows the remarks by Obama’s foreign policy adviser Samantha Powers, in which she refers to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “monster” .

Key similarity: Both, bizarrely, involve me. I woke up last Friday, clicked bleary-eyed to The Drudge Report and saw the front page of The Scotsman, on which my name has appeared, as a top link. Unsurprisingly, my eyes widened as I read on. Ditto Day 2, as the controversy reached fever pitch.

And much the same happened here. I joined The Breeze last week and, as Farber's piece with Ferraro’s comments echoed around the blogosphere -- and was picked up by the mainstream media -- a distinct sense of deja vu kicked in.

Key differences: Ferraro’s remarks were on the record. She did not try to retract them and she defended them Tuesday. But Powers immediately retracted her “monster” remark by adding that it was “off the record.” The Scotsman, the paper of record for my home country, published it. Cue a furious exchange on MSNBC between host Tucker Carlson and Scotsman reporter Gerri Peev on journalism ethics (unrelatedly, Carlson’s show was cancelled a day later).

That clip made the blogosphere rounds, too, but you can find more in-depth analysis of the reasons behind the decision here and here.

A week sure is a long time in journalism ....

Craig Howie

Jim Farber's article Friday previewing Geraldine Ferraro's speech at Torrance's Armstrong Theatre last weekend has set off a firestorm across the Internet's most popular political forums. The controversy is based around this quote:

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she continued. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Today, Obama's camp called on the Clinton camp to apologize and the mainstream media is all over the story.

Here's where the buzz is buzzing:

Daily Kos

Raw Story

ABC's Political Punch

The New York Times

Here's Ferraro on a You Tube video with John Gibson on Feb. 27, which is the same day our reporter interviewed her:

How many times have you gone to movies and wound up covering your kids’ eyes and ears — or your own — at the sex, violence and language found in what you thought was a family film?

Next time, go to Kids-in-Mind before you plunk down money for the tickets. In addition to a 1-10 scale for sex, violence and profanity, there’s a detailed summary of any questionable content.

TravelPod sponsors a great site for helping your kids with their geography homework and testing how much you remember from your own school days.

And after you figure out that your fifth-grader knows more than you do, you can explore the rest of the site, including the travel journals written by bloggers as they tour exotic locales around the world, and a game testing your knowledge of famous city and landmark locations.

We in the South Bay love our weekend breakfasts, don't we? And we have lots of options for greasy, healthy or somewhere-in-between breakfast. But if you don't have time to wait in line or have a sit-down, leisurely breakfast, there's always the Batter Blaster. That's right, it's pancakes in a can. And it's organic.

Nobody at the Breeze has tried it -- or admitted to trying it -- but before you turn your nose up, as we reflexively did, check out Keith Bussell's blog, where he reviewed the Batter Blaster -- and liked it!

Bussell says:

It’s real pancake batter–in a can. It’s not a simulation or an approximation. The resulting pancakes and waffles are light and tasty, and the only cleanup (besides the cooking implement) is rinsing off the tip of the can.

Batter Blaster provides a zip code search on its site for product availability, and several outlets in the South Bay carry the aerosol flapjacks. Check your local Albertsons, Bristol Farms, Costco, Kmart or Smart & Final.

Wild about wildflowers?

The combination of winter rains and warm weather conspire for what may be Southern California’s most vibrant spring blooms in many years, according to an LA.Com story by Breeze staff writer Jim Farber.

Want to see them?

Try George F Canyon's nature trail on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

If you want to re-create the wildflower experience in your own backyard, try this list of native plants of the Peninsula that are suitable for gardening.

If you want to get out of the South Bay, spring grasses, flowers and trees are sprouting on the Santa Monica Mountains. Annuals are in bloom at the Joshua Tree National Park in Twentynine Palms, near Palm Springs.

In Los Angeles County, the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve outside Lancaster is predicting an abundant blossom of the state flower, known by its scientific name as Eschscholzia californica.

For the specifics on visiting the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, consult our Ask Us column from Feb. 12.

For links to other wildflower destinations in addition to Antelope Valley, visit the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants. It includes links to more than 90 wildflower locations, an extensive catalog of native plants and the California Wildflower Hotline, which information about what's blooming where, updated weekly .

Kite fliers take to the skies — well, at least the kites do, anyway — at the Redondo Beach pier Sunday. The pier hosts the 34th annual Festival of the Kite, a free event taking place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Kite-flying experts show off their stuff for prizes and audience delight. Kites are also on sale at Sunday’s event. Non-kite activities include a hot-dog-eating competition and music provided by a band from Bishop Montgomery High in Torrance.

Redondo Beach’s Sunshine Kite Company sponsors the festival.

Trust us, you want to avoid making dumb moves on an Internet forum. Here is a video that shows what we mean.

Dailybreeze.com's reader forums are quite popular, but we do get plenty of complaints about racist, vulgar and otherwise offensive posts. We even hear about just-plain-irritating ones, like in the video.

Recently, forum participants have been complaining about "trolls," people who post numerous long-winded off-topic treatises on just about every forum all day long. So, the readers rebelled. They created their own forum called "Take back our message boards from the nutty trolls !!!", to air their frustrations over unrelentiing ranters. They pleaded with us to give them the boot. We did.

What can we say? Watch the video.