“The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war.”

“The University of Florida Herbarium is a unit of the Department of Natural History of the Florida Museum of Natural History. The herbarium is affiliated with the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Florida Agricultural Experiment Station, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Department of Biology and the Department of Plant Pathology. The FLAS acronym is the standard international abbreviation for the University of Florida Herbarium. It is derived from the herbarium’s early association with the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station.”

Elektra Records turns Sixty and celebrates with a great new website that is a timeline of their artists and albums. Check it out!

Most people would know that this is a phishing email but just in case you don’t. If you get this in your email Inbox, do not click on the link and type in your information. The link will take you to http://pixelflair.de/Amazon/Amazon-Login.htm and although it says Amazon, it is actually a page in a folder named Amazon on another server named pixelflair.de. My wife just got this in her email and so I thought I’d pass this along.

Just a quick post to share a gem. If you’re old enough to remember the radio shows of the 40s and 50s then this might rekindle an old love of yours. If you aren’t old enough to remember hearing them when they were originally broadcast, take a few minutes and listen to a couple of these. I have a feeling you might find a new love.

Evernote is now in open beta! No more invitations required. Tell all
your friends.

(You’ll notice that some of my posts don’t contain a whole lot of writing on my part. That’s because they contain information that I want to share but that needs no real introduction or explanation from me. I just want you to know that the resource is out there and how to get to it. These posts may include a great deal of quotes from the particular site I’m sending you to. Please notice the quotation marks, instead of trying to rewrite the same information in a different way, I’ve just included what those who most probably know more about the subject, have already written.)

The University of Florida Digital Collection (UFDC) contains a myriad of unique items that I’ve found quite interesting. The British Parliamentary Debates of 1803-1891 is one such collection.

I learned from the UFDC cover page for this collection that this particular collection is “not available online either from the official Hansard Parliamentary records for both the House of Commons and the House of Lords or from the TheyWorkForYou.com site administered by the mySociety project of the UK Citizens Online Democracy organization.”

This time frame includes such things as “the Napoleonic Wars, the Peninsular Wars, the War of 1812, British support of nationalist activities in Latin America, the Irish Potato Famine, slavery, British colonial expansion, the corn laws, and the enclosure acts, just to name a few.”

“The Debates of this period, 1803-1891, are particularly valued for their insight into British history and politics, as well as the United Kingdom’s place in European history and especially that of Ireland. But, the Debates are also highly prized for their record of the Empire’s growth and administration, including colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.”

If you are interested in world history and especially that of the British Empire, these resouces will interest you to no end. If your not actually interested in History but need a place to gather facts, it will also serve you well.

I recently found myself on a blog written by Isabella named “Change Therapy“, what a great blog!

I especially enjoyed one particular post,

“be playful? here are 7 ideas”

“i love being playful. being playful helps me to relax, to laugh with life, and to come up with new ideas. playfulness is at the heart of my creativity.”

I think as a species we take ourselves way to seriously, so being playful is very important to our mental health. Plus, it’s a good excuse to be a little silly while getting your creative juices flowing. So give Change Therapy a look see and see what you think.

How many email messages do you get a day that offer up some tidbit of information that is just too crazy or stupid to be real? Of course you read it anyway and then get ticked off at yourself because you just spent three minutes that you can never get back.

One of what seems like my most used sites these days is www.snopes.com. I get email from a diverse group of people. Some are very Internet Savvy and some not so much. I tend to get a lot of the “feel good forwards”, the “WATCH OUT FOR TOILET SPIDERS”, and of course lots of “Obama is a Muslim” emails. And that’s where Snopes comes in, their site is all about Urban Myths, kind of a Mythbusters for the Internet.

What they do is take all those emails and online myths and do the research that nobody else will bother to do. They follow up and hunt down sources to see if Obama really did look the wrong direction during the National Anthem. They talk to people who were actually there. Maybe I could do a blog about whether it’s important to face a particular direction during the National Anthem. Although, when I’ve been at sporting events and other places where the National Anthem is sung, I’ve noticed that most of the people around me tend to use that time to get their children settled and talk about what happened that day.

Okay, I digress but those are some of the reasons I will probably never run for public office.

So back to Snopes, I tend to trust them about Urban Myths more than I do random emails that nobody is really sure where they came from. So the next time you get one of those emails, head for www.snopes.com.

I’m going to try and get a little more information about this site but I wanted to get this posted fast so you could enjoy the site. This is the information that is listed on the site.

“05-06-2008 WeLoveFreeMusic.com officially opens

Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu Officially Opens SOS Records, www.WeLoveFreeMusic.com to the world. We are the first website in the world to allow you to listen to and download all of the content on this site without the provision of personal information. Come in, and Discover The Greatest Artists and Music The World Has Ever Heard.”

Starting with a very limited line-up but certainly a site that could catch on huge.

Mario Winans

Naomi Striemer