Arnold could not contain his happiness after spending time on this site Vacuum Kitty Productions makes art at a slow and leisurely pace. Soon, we will make Vacuum Kitty Productions' two most popular books, Television and Food, available for your reading pleasure. |
Years of anger
- I just deleted years of anger.
- All the Bush Crime Family crap
- Election stuff
- Secret police and lack of privacy and
- I don't want to remember.
- Now I just want to prosecute the bastards
- Sign the petition to get a Special Prosecutor for Bush War Crimes
.Jon Stewart
I love him. I love him. I love him. And where he goes I"ll follow. I'll follow I'll follow, well, not to Crossfire unless I can watch it on the Internet. All hail Jon Stewart and see him speak for us, the masses, on Crossfire. Wow. That was old too. I should have a separate entry from Stephen Colbert, but I'm too lazy at the moment. Right now I'm just trying to pitch all the anger towards the prior administration. More later.
I Love Al Franken! I do I do I LOVE Al Franken
Wow. This stuff was old. Right now I'm so excited to call him Senator Franken. Number 60. Except I want him to be number 59 and for them to kick out Joe Lieberman.
Al Franken and Jon Stewart together
Watch this clip of the Daily Show where Jon Stewart talks about Al Franken.
Mike Malloy (website)
- I love him too.
- Things I learned on his show
- Smedley Butler is interesting and worth learning about
- As is the Bohemian Club and Bohemian Grove (see pictures of it in this video by Alex Jones)
- I want to read It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
- You can no longer listen to Mike Malloy on Air America. He is on in San Francisco at 960 AM the Quake.
Healthy Eating
- Ban Trans Fats
- Parents Against Junk Food -- Christopher Kimball, the host of America's Test Kitchen and editor of Cooks Illustrated magazine is help leading the way for healthier food for kids and grown-ups too. I get his Email newsletter which provides healthier but tasty versions of great food, like today's included banana bread and New York Cheese Cake. These recipes are reduced fat but they demand good taste.
- I'm also a big fan of Dr. Andrew Weil who believes in integrative medicine. Integrative medicine is healing-oriented medicine that takes account of the whole person (body, mind, and spirit), including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship and makes use of all appropriate therapies, both conventional and alternative.
Study for free at MIT?
- Yup. Pretty cool huh? The drawback: no credit or access to staff. Still. MIT for Free. And it even rhymes. I don't understand how they do the music and physical education classes but all I have to do is click to find out.
Fun Stuff
- ¡Wunderbar! -- Vincent's Web site!!!
- zefrank.com
- Store Wars
- Coffee provides more antioxidants than any other food in the American diet
Keep up to date
- Rockridge Institute -- Progress Politics Think Tank, Learn how to reframe the debate!
- Crooks and Liars dot com -- Lots of interesting tidbits here, like video of many things, including the Boxer/Condi SNL skit! Check it out!
- Center for American Progress - or look at their action site for what YOU can do to advocate
- Raw Story dot com tells it like it is, according to Mike Malloy
- Alternet -- A mix of news including analysis, commentators (Will Durst, Jim Hightower, Arianna Huffington, Molly Ivins, Robert Scheer and more!) discussion groups
Wal-Mart Sucks
But I still think workers and management of Safeway and all California grocery stores have to get together to unionize Wal-Mart.
- See the Garth Brooks Cartoon at WalMartWorkersRight.com
- See the movie: The High Cost of Low Price
- Wal-Mart fights benefits disclosure in Minnesota Star Tribute 06/02/2005
- Wal-Mart's Wily Ways - AlterNet 4/13/05
- Paying the Price at Wal-Mart
- Frontline piece on Wal-Mart -- Is Wal-Mart Good for America?
- Wal-Mart Cheer
- Low Wal-Mart Wages Cost Calif. $86 Million
- Grocery store strike was really a Wal-Mart Strike
- Don't Shop at Wal-Mart
- Wal-Mart's Labor Abuse and Hidden Costs
Buying Clothes Not Made in a Sweatshop
This is something I have struggled with for years. A new documentary about a jeans factory in ChinaChina Blue will be aired on PBS
- Blood on Your Shirt - apparently so has this author
- China Blue documentary about a jeans factory in China. It will air on PBS on April 3:
- Retailer Scorecard from Co-op America -- explore the web site to find out about sweatshop free and green products
- SweatShopWatch.org
- The Union Mall - When you vote with a dollar it always gets counted. I looked at the clothing on Union Jean and Apparel company, and it's fairly priced. You don't have to pay megabucks to buy clothing that was made by union workers.
Organizations
- Operation Truth -- Hear directly from the troops
- Center for American Progress
- Action San Francisco
- MoveOn.org
- Federation of American Scientists
- Military Families Speak Out Against the War
- U.S. Labor Against War
- United for Peace and Justice
- Code Pink Site
- International Answer
- Act Against War
- United for Peace
- Veterans For Peace
- Vote to Impeach
Quotes
"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed."
--Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1790. ME 8:13
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Copyright Marcy Lyon 1996-2009
All Rights ReservedPlease email me with your favorite peace sites. Thanks!
Which is why our headquarters are in San Francisco. Okay, at first we weren't so excited about the fog, because it is dreary and cold. But after spending a weekend in the HOT sun, we have come to really appreciate it. More San Francisco sites:
- Bay Area Back Pages - This cool Web site, created by Ron Horii, tells all about the Bay Area. He has pages on different parts of California; where to go biking, hiking, camping, swimming; views and places to take kids.sf station - San Francisco's premier, progressive on-line arts and entertainment information resource. About.com's Guide to San francisco - I rely on about.com's urban legends page, which is fantastic, so this should be good as well! ZPub's San Francisco History Index - fantastic site with links to all kinds of information about Baghdad by the BayKFOG - I love it when I am coming south through Marin and the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge is covered in fog, and then I come upon the sign saying that clean up for litter is made by KFOG!
- FogFest -- Okay, it's in Pacific, but they're just down the beach from here.
Somebody must have said be fruitful and multiply because the babies just keep bouncing out. Go on, take a look.
Okay, Sammy isn't a baby anymore! If you don't believe me, go visit his web site. Don't forget to look at his birthday wish list under toys. Really, it doesn't have to be his birthday to give him toys. That's what he says anyway.
Vacuum Kitty does not provide employment for anyone, so we at VKP have to find outside jobs, and since we love the Bay Area, we will continue to work here. Check out our Bay Area Job Resources.
Reading, writing, and just holding them in our paws. This is of course why we publish. Here are some great links to all kinds of stuff:
- Bird & Beckett Books & Records -- I used to kid them about their hoakey web site, but it's no longer hoakey and jeepers, mine is! B&B is a wonderful independent book store that provides more than just reading material. If you're ever in Glen Park, check out the poetry, jazz, literary and political events. Don't miss Friday night Jazz with the Chuck Peterson Quintet.
- Powell's - my very favorite book store, though unfortunately for me it's in Portland, Oregon. This place is HUGE. They have both new and used books, and they're in order, not just piles of used books, but alphabetized and everything! I could spend hours here. The bookstore is reams better than any Web site, but they have a good Web site too. Check out their Great Deals and their top 25 novels of all time (includes the Modern Library's Top 100).
- Ayer Company Publishers California Books - Interesting collection of books about California, including many gold rush books, San Francisco, Native Americans, California government history and more. My favorite title is 920 O'Farrell Street. Update: I saw this book at the library recently, so I checked it out and read it. Way cool! I highly recommend it to all San Franciscofiles.
- iChapters.com - offers very flexible purchase options including the purchase of chapters in electronic format from college textbooks, electronic and print textbooks at discounted prices.
- Bookopoly It's the self-proclaimed best place to buy and sell books. Not an auction! Phew. This was recommended to me by a visitor to my Web site who had a good experience there.
- Nerd World: BOOKS Barnes and Noble - they have great FREE classes available. You just buy the books and hit the books.
- Bookpool.com - Discount Technical Books
- Chronicle Books - they publish really cool coffee table type books, including the recent Beatles Anthology Borders
- how could you forget Amazon.com
Here are some services that search for new and used books:
- CheapBooks - Find the best book price by searching more than 100 bookstores worldwide in just a matter of seconds. Their service is totally independent, comprehensive and fast!
- Direct Textbook - The site searches new and used bookstores showing a listing of availability and price for around 2 million books at online stores and student book exchanges.
- 21 North Main - was recommended to me by woo-kie. This site lists and directly sells inventory of over 2700 used book stores in North America. It is clean, quick and convenient.
- Advanced Book Exchange - Very cool web site that helps you find out-of-print books
- Alibris is affiliated with some 800 booksellers, and has it's own huge warehouse in Sparks, Nevada.
- Bibliocity searches 951 booksellers.
- Bibliofind searches "thousands of booksellers"
- BookFinder.com may be the best site of them all, especially since it includes Bibliofind, Bibliocity, Advanced Book Exchange, Powell's, and other book sites.
- Bookprice.com is a free innovative service of finding the best price on a purchase of several books together. This service is more useful than the standard services which perform one book comparison at a time, and can save more money when buying several books together.
- CampusBooks a free comparison shopping website for textbooks. They search over two dozen bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, eCampus, half.com, textbooks.com, to find the lowest prices in textbooks and it takes only a matter of seconds.
Book Club
I love my book club, which is generously hosted by Bird & Beckett Books & Records in Glen Park. Check out this link on Glen Park too! We've read the following books in the past several years:
- The Big Sea, an Autobiography by Langston Hughes
- Snow by Orhan Pamuk
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
- In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
- Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
- History of Love by Nicole Krauss
- Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer We loved it!
- The White Album by Joan Didion
- Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
- Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
- Utopias -- Ectopia Walden Two Looking Backward Woman on the Edge of Time Islandia Herland. I read After the Deluge by Chris CarlssonA
- History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom
- The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
- A Primate's Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky Enjoyed by all!
- The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- The Book of Salt by Monique Truong
- Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks
- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
- Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
- All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki
- Peace Like a River by Leif Enger -- book club favorite
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones -- conversation generator!
- The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolfe
- Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein
- Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
- Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas
- How I learned to Cook by Margo Perin -- conversation generator!
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman -- book club favorite -- conversation generator!
- Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser -- conversation generator!
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
- How to be Good by Nick Hornby
- A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi
- Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
- When the Elephants Dance by Tess Uriza Holthe
- A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry -- book club favorite
- Himalayan Dhaba by Craig Joseph Danner
- The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter
- My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story by Latifa
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
- Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand -- See the web site for Seabiscuit
- Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
- Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt
- Empire Falls by Richard Russo
- The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
- Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
- My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain
- The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett -- book club favorite
- Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl
- Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
- An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
- The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan
- "Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" and other conversations about race by Beverly Daniel Tatum -- book club favorite -- conversation generator!
- London by Edward Rutherford
- Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
- Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
- One Thousand White Women : The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus
- The Red Tent by Anita Diamont
- Plainsong by Kent Haruf
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
- What Maisie Knew by Henry James
- Blindness by José Saramago
- House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O'Brien
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers -- loved or hated by all
- Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser - read it online
- Amsterdam by Ian McEwan -- book club favorite
- The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- Harry Potter and the Sourcer's Stone by J. K. Rowling
- Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur S. Golden
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
- Paula by Isabel Allende
- The Call of the Toad by Günter Grass
- The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendahl
- The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
- Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
- Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
- Mating by Norman Rush
- Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
- Everlasting Story of Nory by Nicholson Baker
- Widow for a Year by John Irving
- The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
- Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
- le Divorce by Diane Johnson
- Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
- The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett -- book club favorite
Did you know that I do web sites? Yes indeed! Not as much as I used to but I was the webmaster for the Pacific Exchange, fka Pacific Stock Exchange, for four years. Their web site looked better then -- not so busy, and more stately. I'm not providing a link to it because I have nothing to do with how it looks now. Well, perhaps some of the internal pages.
I also did various intranet sites, the human resources content area of the CCH web site circa 1998 and a site for Megan Levitan when she ran for supervisor in San Francisco in 2000..
Our current book and labor of love. Vacuum Kitty's Food Book
And we proudly admit it. This was our first book. And if you like TV even half as much as we do, you'll love the tv party Web site.
A friend of mine spent a year collecting answers from many people to the following question: What do you prefer, food, sex or sleep? The answer is obvious: whichever of these you get the least quantity or quality. I thought she should add bath or shower to the list. I mean, if you were in prison for five years, once you got out you wouldn't say Honey, let's go home so I can take a nap. That's when I realized that shower or bath should be added to the list. I've smelled those guys (ask me about my internship at the ACLU), and I know if I was in there, I'd want a nice long hot shower followed by a fresh supply of clean underwear when I got out.A new twist on this whole thing for those of us at VKP is that after having a baby, the most important thing is SLEEP! I was surprised at how much I think and talk about sleep and poop. Well, frankly I wasn't surprised about the poop, but the sleep. Wow! My favorite present is getting to take a two hour nap!
"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god." - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. "Die old and leave a disgusting corpse." -Me!
All contributors to Television and Food - Now you can visit two of their web sites:
Ira Levin (I don't have a good link for him yet. Let me know if you find one.)
I really need to update this section. I haven't added a new author since 1996!
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