What happy people do

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That's according to this New York Times story. Let's hear it for church and newspapers!

Something I did not know

Harrison Ford, Al Jarreau, Spencer Tracy and Dick Bennett all are alumni of Ripon College, a school of 1,000 students in east-central Wisconsin. Just something I came across while looking up something else.

All in the family

Welcome to Mark and, belatedly, d edwards. You can see/hear the Song of the Week here, and Senior Moments (no, not that kind) here. Also now linked under Blogs of Our Aquiantance at left. Cheers.

Forty years later

Last night's enduring image will be the scene at Chicago's Grant Park awaiting Obama's arrival as president-elect. Quite the antithesis to Grant Park 40 years earlier (a moment in history caught audibly on the Chicago Transit Authority's first album*.)

And in my relatively brief lifespan, Election '08 will join these other retrospections:

'68 c'mon, I was 8
'72 huge McGovern poster hanging on my bedroom wall
'76 almost shook Carter's hand when he visited my hometown
'80 a newsroom colleague asking me if I knew Spanish because the new president would send me to Nicaragua
'84 the native son (I was in St. Paul then) loses in a landslide
'88 writing letters to editor about the environment and vigorously debating my neighbor across the yard
'92 the shroud of iraq
'96 wow -- a two-term democrat
'00 staying up til 6 a.m. watching a blur of blue and red on TV
'04 the shroud of iraq

(* Prologue, August 29 1968, is the actual recording of the Democratic Convention in Chicago: black militants exhorting demonstrators: "God Give Us the Blood to Keep Going"; march begins; police attempt to disperse marchers; chant: "The Whole World's Watching.")

The wonder of small books, part II

Knowledge for those with short attention spans (or busy lives):

Oxford University Press, eminent among the estimable houses, publishes a series of volumes called "Very Short Introductions."

The title list reads like a college catalog, without the tuition freight.

Another cudgel against illiteracy.

OUP has a great blog, too.

(See The wonder of small books, part I.)

Reaganomics runs its course

A fascinating piece on the historic meaning of yesterday's election, by Steve Berg at MinnPost.com. (He wrote a great lede, which I won't spoil here but is well worth reading here.)

Elsewhere, he writes:

"Between 1979 and 2005, the incomes of households in the bottom fifth of the population rose only 6 percent in real terms, while the incomes of those in the middle three-fifths rose by 17 to 21 percent, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

"But incomes in the upper fifth soared by 69 percent, and in the top 1 percent by a whopping 176 percent. ... Not since the 1920s had so much of the nation's income been held by such a narrow slice of its people. The trickle-down never trickled."