Give for Tsunami Relief

Benjamin Rosenbaum compiled a valuable table of charities - with ratings and comments - to help people decide how best to direct their contributions to the many relief organizations. The comments in response to his posting provide more information about some of the listed charities and about some additional organizations.

Treading Upon Life's Banana Skins

"[A]ll the same I was exercised about the poor fish, as I am about all my pals, close or distant, who find themselves treading upon Life's banana skins." (Bertie Wooster in Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse)

I've been out of commision for several weeks because of a blood clot in my leg (below my knee, fortunately, so it was not potentially lethal). I couldn't stand sitting at the computer for very long, so I spent a lot of time listening to Christmas music on WGMS and playing games and reading E-books on my aging, dim-screened, Palm Pilot M105. I usually get my E-books in ASCII-text format from Project Gutenberg, run them through a simple program that joins the multiple lines in a paragraph into a single long line, and then convert them to Palm Doc format using Paul J. Lucas's txt2pdbdoc program. In addition to reading Dinah Maria Craik's George Eliot-esque novel, Mistress and Maid, I also downloaded and read a number of Wodehouse stories from The Russian Wodehouse Society - guaranteed to cheer the saddest soul!

Although things seem to be falling apart in the United States and elsewhere, let me reassure you that all is right with the world: (i) I downloaded and listened to "L. S. Bumblebee" by the Beatles - oops! by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore! - for the first time in twenty-some years and (ii) Horace Rumpole (via John Mortimer) finally tells the story of his grandest case, the Penge Bungalow Murders!

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as Bertie and Jeeves, respectively.