This is worth watching just to hear the elk call alone–KSH.

We didn’t realize that the US was such a terrible place to live until the Sydney Morning Herald reported it this morning. According to the Economist’s 2009 liveability survey, Pittsburgh is the most liveable city in the United States of America, ranked 29th in the world.

At the top of the list? Vancouver, Vienna, Melbourne,Toronto and Perth, giving Canada and Australia two of the top five cities in the world each. Dakar (Senegal,) Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and Kathmandu (Nepal) were at the bottom of the 131 polled cities.

Read it all.

Charleston, South Carolina–This city survived the first Reconstruction era, but just barely. It will be interesting to see how it handles the second one.

Around every corner, hammers are banging and dust is flying, as stately old homes are freshened up for sale to Yankee carpetbaggers. With approximately one horse-drawn, tourist-laden carriage for every bona fide resident, the city has reduced traffic accidents to almost zero by making it impossible for any car to reach a speed of more than 8 miles per hour. For New Yorkers, Charleston presents a familiar, even consoling sight: a pendulous land mass, overlooking a harbor, with a battery at one end and solid traffic for most of its length. It almost feels like home.

The tourist rush that has transformed Charleston in the last 10 years has brought an unanticipated benefit: good restaurants. A decade ago, fine dining took place in people’s homes. Restaurants worthy of the name could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with several fingers to spare. Now, it takes both hands, and some toes as well. In fact, it would be hard to think of another American city of the same size — Charleston has a population of less than 100,000 — with a more dynamic, promising restaurant scene….

High Cotton, one of Charleston’s newest restaurants, struck me as a shining example of the new culinary wave.

Read it all. Guess where the family took Nathaniel and his girlfriend out to eat after graduation? You guessed it– High Cotton. If you are ever coming to Charleston, you must put it on the list–KSH.

They were singing without accompaniment. You know–Acapulco.

–Richard Lederer, Anguished English (New York: Doubleday, 1987), page 104

This is just wonderful–watch the whole video.

Sal Mauriello, a barber, was coming home early from work that day. He heard a woman scream and saw her point up to the window. Mauriello took off his coat and used it as a net to catch [Marvin] Goldstein in his arms.

Holy cow. Read or listen to it all.

When I was ill, my husband and I were stuck in the house for months.

But I made a complete recovery and was so happy the day he bounded into the kitchen and asked, “Would you like to go out, girl?”

“I’d love to,” I replied immediately.

We had a wonderful meal, culminating with my husband making a confession. “Remember when I suggested going out tonight?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I was talking to the dog.”

–Anita Saunders in the May, 2009, Reader’s Digest, page 133

What a heroine this lady is–watch it all.

After my four-year-old and I turned the department store upside down looking for a bathing suit for me, we finally found a black-and-white one-piece that we both liked. I tried on the suit and modeled it for her. It was a hit.

“Mommy, you look so pretty,” she squealed. “You look just like Shamu the whale.”

–Lori Rhodes in the May 2009 Reader’s Digest, page 192

I loved seeing this–watch it all.

I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.

–Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Chapter X

4. After everyone’s asleep, set all the clocks ahead one hour. Then wake everyone up (at the usual time) screaming about how they overslept, missed the bus, are going to be late for school or work, etc. As they’re all scurrying about, frantic and worried, just lie back and laugh. You stinker.

Read the whole thing.

(ACNS) ‘Continuing exaggerated weather patterns across Southern Africa are a further illustration of the urgent need to tackle global warming’ Archbishop Thabo Makgoba said on Tuesday, calling for swift and decisive global action on climate change.

Speaking in the week before the G20 summit, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town said ‘We have had enough of talking. The international community cannot continue to prevaricate while countries like ours are increasingly suffering inestimable human cost, in deaths, displacement, and the destruction of livelihoods. Northern Namibia is experiencing the worst flooding in decades, as is Southern Angola. This year has already seen serious storms, flooding and loss of life in Gauteng and Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa, as well as in Mozambique, where we are told we should expect further flooding, while other parts of the country suffer extensive drought.’

Read it all.

Thousands of shivering, tired residents got out while they could and others prayed that miles of sandbagged levees would hold Friday as the surging Red River threatened to unleash the biggest flood North Dakota’s largest city has ever seen.

The agonizing decision to stay or go came as the final hours ticked down before an expected crest Saturday evening, when the ice-laden river could climb as high as 43 feet, nearly 3 feet higher than the record set 112 years ago.

“It’s to the point now where I think we’ve done everything we can,” said resident Dave Davis, whose neighborhood was filled with backhoes and tractors building an earthen levee. “The only thing now is divine intervention.”

Read it all.

Wonderful stuff–watch it all.

I happened to catch this by accident this morning–the video is amazing.

Watch it all.

Watch it all.

A few years ago, bone fide good guy Richard Smucker (the current co-CEO of Smucker’s and a fourth generation Smucker) found a letter written by his father which sums up in practical terms what it means to appreciate and express gratitude:

–Say “thank you.”

–Listen with full attention.

–Look for the good in others.

–Have a sense of humor.

–William F. Baker and Michael O’Malley, Leading with Kindness: How Good People Consistently Get Superior Results (New York: Amacom, 2008), page 54

A thoroughly inspiring story, this man deserves a medal. Watch it all.

Astonshingly moving–I wept. Watch it all (Hat tip: SS).

Watch it all.

The Ant

The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid,
If you were full of formic acid?

–Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

Watch it all–makes the heart glad.

You really need to see this, it is simply spectacular. Watch it all.

This morning I read the obituary of an English writer I’d never heard of named Edward Upward, who died last Friday at the age of 105. (In fact, he outlived his obituarist, Alan Walker, who died in 2004.)

Ed went to Cambridge and was a friend of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood and his career seems to have wilted in the heat of their brilliance. They became famous and he got a job teaching school.

And then he joined the Communist Party, which is a heavy load of bricks to carry, and he married a hard-line Communist named Hilda, and he wrote an essay announcing that good writing could only be produced by Marxists, whereupon he suffered writer’s block for 20 years. (Talk about poetic justice.)

“The middle decades were bleak for Upward,” wrote Walker. “During a sabbatical year designed to give Upward the chance to write, he suffered a nervous breakdown.” And then when he did publish again, he had become an antique. His autobiographical trilogy, “The Spiral Ascent,” was received by critics like you’d receive a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.

And then there was the problem of walking around with the name Edward Upward.

Read it all.

The firefighter crawled on his stomach through the pitch-black apartment, the smoke so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Somewhere inside was a baby and he had to find her.

A window broke, light filled the room, and he saw her lying in her crib, dressed only in a diaper, unconscious. Soot covered her tiny nose. She wasn’t breathing and had no pulse.

He grabbed her and breathed life into her as he ran from the apartment.

A newspaper photograph captured their image – a white firefighter from South Boston with his lips pressed to the mouth of a black baby from the Roxbury public housing development – at a time when riots sparked by racial tensions were burning down American cities.

But despite this most intimate of introductions, they remained strangers. William Carroll won a commendation for the rescue, stayed on the job another 34 years, and retired. Evangeline Harper grew up, lost her family to drugs and illness, had six children of her own, and became a nursing and teaching assistant. And through it all someone would often tell her the story about the day she almost died and the man who would not let it happen. She always wanted to meet him and say thank you.

Yesterday, more than 40 years after the fire, she finally did.

Read it all and watch the video.