Janetnews.com Blog

This is my 3 month old Toy Poodle, Lucy.  She wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I hope each and everyone has their best year yet! My plans this year is to finish my Ph.D course work, pass my comprehensive exams in August and to start a successful dissertation in the Fall.

How do people around the world celebrate Christmas? Check out The History Channel’s World Tradition Christmas map.

World Traditions

Christmas as we know it today is a Victorian invention of the 1860s. Probably the most celebrated holiday in the world, our modern Christmas is a product of hundreds of years of both secular and religious traditions from around the globe. Click around this map to learn about traditions from different regions and, along the way, learn about the history of this most cherished of holidays.

As a teenager, I would turn on WPIX-TV in New York City to watch the Yule log burn each year… well, now, you can take that same yule log with you.

Check it out the Portable Yule Log.

The New York Times recommended this book about Elizabeth Cady Stanton…

Some Books Are Worth Giving; Some Books Are Also Worth Keeping

The first is “The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” by Vivian Gornick, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Stanton belonged to that astonishing band of 19th-century American radicals who changed the way we live - among them Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Abolitionism taught the women to fight for justice; feminism challenged the men to expand their vision of what justice means.

I love writers who treat thinking as a dynamic process. Ms. Gornick does - here, and in all her books. Imagine a photographer of the psyche. She studies her subject from all angles. Whether in close-up or on a landscape crowded with political and religious movements, she explores the public and private selves.

Need a plan before you head out the door Christmas shopping? Well, google yourself a map to make sure you know where you’re going and how to get there…

Google Unveils Tool to Map Shopping Trips

SAN FRANCISCO - Joining the herd of Web sites jostling to cash in on the holiday shopping season, online search engine leader Google Inc. is adding a tool designed to make it easier for consumers to map out their local trips to the mall.

The feature, to be unveiled Tuesday at Google’s Froogle shopping site, will pinpoint the merchants selling a specific item within a designated ZIP code. Besides displaying a map showing all the local stores carrying the merchandise, Froogle also will list price differences.

The NYTimes did a story about Black Friday web sites Supposedly it’s a big deal to “leak” the specials and circulars of upcoming after Thanksgiving sales to independent web sites like this one:

BF2005.com

Wishing you many happy returns!

The Mighty Suavecat

FoxNews.com reports…

Handful of Veterans Left Who Remember Armistice Day

No one knows exactly how many of America’s World War I veterans will celebrate Veterans Day, which marks the armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, that ended what then was considered the Great War. An estimated 2 million Americans served in Europe after the U.S. entered the war in 1917.

Today, the Veterans Affairs Department lists just eight veterans as receiving disability benefits or pension compensation from service in World War I. It says a few dozen other veterans of the war probably are alive, too, but the government does not keep a comprehensive list.

The Census Bureau stopped asking for data about those veterans years ago. Using a report of 65,000 alive in 1990 as a baseline, the VA estimates that no more than 50 remain, perhaps as few as 30.

Remember without our veterans, we would not have the freedoms that we have today. Thank you!