As I was surfing around today, I chanced to discover that while I am in England next fall at a cousin’s wedding, the Fforde Ffestival will be taking place!

Clearly, wedding plans will take precedence, but if they happen to permit a little time spent being a book-geek for some of my favorite recent reads, then so much the better.

I have attended a Jasper Fforde reading before and he is absolutely hysterical. Possibly the funniest person I have ever seen in person, my friend BW aside. Funny enough that he could do stand-up, but if he did stand up he probably wouldn’t have time to sit and write, so forget that thought…

This afternoon’s headlines are full of the Iraqi story of 50 bodies being found in the Tigris. I do not have difficulty believing that. Sadly, Iraqi civilians have been dying regularly without our paying much heed.

Where I start to be suspicious is when I understood that the president of Iraq made this announcement when asked about the claim that Shias had been kidnapped last week from the town of Medain by Sunnis who demanded all Shia leave the city.

According to River in Baghdad:

Medain is a town of Sunnis and Shia who have lived together peacefully for as long as anyone can remember. The people in the town come from the local “Ashayir” or tribes. It’s one of those places where everyone knows everyone else- even if only by name or family name. The tribes who dominate the town are a combination of Sunni and Shia. Any conflicts between the townspeople are more of the tribal or family type than they are religious.

After the initial news story, the Shia residents of Medain demonstrated, saying that the rumors of kidnapping were false and that no one was missing any family members and there was no need for governmental/armed forces intervention.

Today President Talibani suprised not only reporters with this announcement, but also outgoing interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and the Defense Ministry, according to CNN. This is what makes me really suspicious. Don’t we think at least one of these two would have heard about 50 dead people floating by on one of the nation’s main rivers?

Home to a large gay population, DC has long tried to walk the fine line between being able to accomodate its residents and appeasing the federal government that oversees the running of the city. (Congress has the right to overturn DC laws when it so desires.)

It was rumored in the last few years that the District administration would be open to recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere but that it feared doing so would bring retribution from a right-wing Congress.

This article, “Married D.C. Gay Couples Can File Taxes Jointly,” would seem to indicate that the city is trying to find a quiet, back-door approach to doing so. My fingers are crossed for Edward and Richard that their filing is successful.

If this is true, it signals a sad day. Jim Jeffords cares a great deal about the environment and about education and these issues were what drove him to leave the Republican party.

While you can never expect to have a politician agree with all the time, it is a pleasure when you find one you can agree with most of the time.

Report: Jeffords Will Not Seek Reelection

This thought occurs to me periodically, but I would just like to say now, for the record, that I have the utmost respect for people who stand on their feet all day.

I did a brief stint at a bookstore after I graduated from college, which is where I first discovered that I do not enjoy standing for hours at a time.

My night volunteering at the DC Film Fest tonight reminded me.

The folks were nice who were volunteering at E Street. It was a bunch of us in our 20s and 30s and one woman in her late 60s who was very talkative.

But after working all day (at a desk, mind you), 5 hours of standing was tiring. So my hat’s off to those who do it on a regular basis.

When I’m not being me, I play the role of a health literacy educator. My job is to take the information we have on biology, diseases, and the body and to make it understandable for the general population — a translator of sorts, if you will.

So when tooday the government announced its retooled food pyramid, I was very excited. The panel that was convened to help rework the food guidelines has been notoriously prickly about this topic, and factions within the group had a hard time agreeing on how to rework the pyramid or whether to have a pyramid at all, leaving the panel several years over its original deadline for getting revised guidelines out. The only thing everyone could agree on was that people were getting fatter and something needed to change.

So they’ve changed it all right. They kept the pyramid, but they’ve now given us twelve of them.

I would give you more details about these pyramids, except that every journalist in America is currently flooding the USDA’s web site. At this point, I feel it would be faster for me to fly to Egypt and take a tour if I want to see 12 pyramids.

So check back with me later and I’ll give you more information.