RickMcCharles.com

Over the past few days I’ve nearly clicked through a couple of times to FanBox.com … something that looks like a new social network.

Email recommendations have come from friends.

It’s a scam.

Brian is in Education, training to be a teacher.

He disagrees that the future is dependent on technology. Especially gaming.

I’ll tell these kids to stop having so much FUN learning.

That’s from a Mashable post – 8 Ways Technology Is Improving Education

Teaching the old way in 2010 is like engaging in a basketball game, 30 players against 1 teacher. It could be that Kobe could make that an engaging class. … But there aren’t may Kobe’s teaching school.

Is it my imagination, or are roles for older women getting better?

… slightly better.

(Not counting Merle Streep. She’s her own industry.)

I just saw Julianne Moore and Annette Bening starring as a lesbian couple living in California in The Kids Are All Right. (My defense? I thought it was a documentary on The Who.)

They’re both older than me. Ancient.

Low budget indie Chloe, with Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried is the most skillful movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. A remake of the 2004 French film Nathalie, the screenplay was written with Julianne in mind. (Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, died of injuries during a ski lesson during filming, adding a poignancy to his always enigmatic performance.)

Sigourney Weaver is still killing it. Andie MacDowell never stops working.

Glenn Close, Helen Mirren, Diane Keaton. … Who else?

What ever happened to Woody Allen being the love interest of the latest starlet?

Related:

• WOMEN & HOLLYWOOD blog
• Could Betty White’s Success Help Older Women Onscreen?
• Hollywood finally abandons its prejudice against older women in romantic roles

I’m dog sitting my parent’s Pete, perhaps the eldest Jack Russell in the world.

We take two long walks a day. He likes the snow. But not the rain or cold.

Many have spent lifetimes reflecting on the Existence of God.

Of course you cannot debate the question unless you first agree on the definition of God.

Atheists conclude that there’s no evidence that “God” exists.

Believers agree, explaining that you must have “faith”.

I finally saw Bill Maher‘s movie Religulous.

Click PLAY or watch the trailer on YouTube.

According to Maher, the title of the film is a portmanteau derived from the words “religion” and “ridiculous”; the documentary examines and mocks organized religion and religious belief …

It’s worth seeing. But my first comment is that Maher’s like Jon Stewart, but not nearly so witty. Or incisive.

Organized religion is a pretty soft target. Easy to skewer. There were no revelations in the film for me. Nothing new.

Scientology and Mormonism come off worst. Evangelical Christians the most hateful.

In my opinion organized religions do more good than harm. They bring community and comfort. But at a cost. (I’m quite content not to belong to one, though. Most appealing is Buddhism, though that’s a philosophy, not a religion.)

Personally I’m agnostic. I’ve not yet seen any evidence that there’s no sentient power in the universe more advanced than man.

Some bacteria in my lower intestine might deny that I exist. It would be wrong.

This can’t be true.

… Can it?

FedEx Corp. located a missing shipment of low-level radioactive rods used by hospitals to calibrate CT scanning equipment.

A cylinder containing the rods, which had been missing since Nov. 23, was found at a FedEx facility in Knoxville, Tennessee …

Bloomberg

Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do.

This video is very hard to watch. I forced myself. As a reminder.

From Transport Accident Commission Victoria, Australia

This campaign is a chance to revisit some of the images that have been engraved on our memories, remember the many thousands of people who have been affected by road trauma and remind us all that for everyones sake; please, drive safely.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. (5min)

Thanks Brett.

I wrote this before that nation went on highest alert, the brink of war.

Let’s hope cooler heads prevail over there.

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On my recent junket to Jeju Island, Korea, I enjoyed a lot of good food.

Sadly I don’t know what most of it was. Multiple, multiple courses, most with fish or seafood.

I was told that these soups often included “whatever was leftover in the kitchen”.

I was hiking during harvest season for what we call “Mandarin oranges”.

Other big crops here include carrots and turnips.

Many of the other foreign guests left Korea saying the food was the highlight. If only I was more of a foodie.

more photos

At the Eiffel Tower.

A fellow gymnastics blogger, Blythe is teaching English in France for the second year.

this is a Facebook meme … I’ve read about 40.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. …

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Azimov version)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger … movie
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot … I read the other Middlemarch
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (in French) … only in English
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo